Page 15 - WTPVolI Vol.#4

around her balding head, her lips thin and gray as newspaper, the skin hanging loose off her hairless arms. At least she wasn’t as sad or angry then. You re- member her smiling painfully at you, scooting over on the couch to make a small cove for you to lie against her belly, resting her weightless arm across your shoulder as the two of you watched TV.
“Don’t fuck up, spider legs,” she says.
You knew your mother was dying before you knew what dying was. Your father told you. “Mom is dying,” he said, tears leaking silently out of his eyes. To you, dying was a word that meant everything that was wrong with the world.
After Kelly is gone, you pour all your attention into the drills. You run faster, pump heavier, shoot straighter. You study hard and it pays off: your instructor recom- mends you for intelligence analysis. When your father arrives at the end of the training to watch you receive your badge, you tell him you’re deploying to South Korea at the end of the month to work with a team of intelligence specialists. He smiles proudly and pats you on the shoulder, then removes a pack of cigarettes from the back pocket of his jeans.
In basic training outside Omaha, you bunk above a black girl named Kelly. Kelly is nineteen. She’s from New Orleans, but grew up in Houston thanks to Hur- ricane Katrina. In high school, she played every sport: softball, basketball, soccer, volleyball. She was on the swim team too until they kicked her off for punching another swimmer in the nose. You like Kelly because Kelly likes you. She calls you spider legs because you run fast for a short, skinny, white girl.
“That’s my girl,” he says, fingers crinkling the plastic wrapper.
Kelly is the opposite of you: she is loud, funny, strong, clever. The two of you sit next to each other in the mess hall and she tells stories that make the other recruits laugh. You sit quietly, smiling to yourself, sharing an occasional sideways glance and wink with Kelly. At night, Kelly tells you stories about growing up in Houston’s Third Ward, about sleeping on the floor with her kid sister in case bullets flew through the windows, about the crack house down the street and the prostitutes lying slumped against rusty trashcans.
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Kelly has a plan. She’s going to becoming an Air Force pilot and make enough money to send her sister to medical school. “If I don’t, who will?” Kelly whispers into the dark.
Your intelligence team is seven other Air Force guys on their second, third, and fourth tours of duty, and you. On the first day, one of the guys, Steve, stands an inch from your face and says, “How’d they let you through tech school?” You think about Kelly, punch- ing a girl in the nose. You say, “You do your job, I’ll do mine.” If you can do your job, you can stay here. Stay- ing here is the goal.
“Why did you enlist?” she asks you. You lick your lips. They taste like steel.
In a windowless building, under dim fluorescent lights, you stare at grainy black-and-white photo- graphs of North Korea, searching for anything. “There,” you say, focusing on a greyish square, and you’re cor- rect. The commanding officer, Lieutenant Reyes, claps you on the shoulder. “Well done.”
“I like shooting,” you say. “My dad took me to the gun range a lot when I was a kid.”
“We never did shit like that,” says Kelly. “Go to a gun range—fuck. Cops would be suspicious.”
When another recruit makes a wisecrack about you and Kelly being lesbos, Kelly shoves the recruit into
a wall and the recruit sprains her wrist. A panel of military training instructors transfer Kelly to another unit, threatening discharge if she acts out again. Be- fore Kelly leaves, she grabs you by the shoulders and glares at you fiercely.
Lieutenant Reyes invites the team to Thanksgiving dinner. Instead of turkey, he grills hamburgers and hot dogs on the back porch of his apartment. You bring the only dish you know how to make: homemade maca-
Before the deployment, you text Kelly, but Kelly never responds. Later, you find out from another enlisted woman that Kelly was discharged for fighting over a spot in line for the shower.
“They didn’t give her a second chance,” the woman says. “You can’t blame them.”
Outside Seoul, you live in a dank barracks that smells like kimchee. When you open your wardrobe to re- trieve your black combat boots, cockroaches scuttle across the tile floor. Your father mails you a birthday card with a sparkly pink cake on the cover, and you tape it to the ceiling above your bed. You know noth- ing about South Korea, and you never expected it to be so cold.
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