Here's Chapter Two.
680 Virginia Avenue - 11:00 A.M.
Silas shed his uniform before breakfast in favor of heavy work boots and drab bluish pants, the loose fitting, wrinkle resistant kind designed to survive small children and nuclear warfare. Jamila's scarf was wrapped around his neck under a charcoal, hooded jacket thus breaking up an outfit that might otherwise look torn from a Dickies catalog. After long deployments, he always found it better to ease back into clothing that wasn't cut from the same length of fabric nor meant to camouflage its wearer. Idiosyncratic rituals 101. The diner's door dinged closed behind him.
"Let me get the keys," he said to Dean going around to the driver's side. He caught the Hawaiian hula girl by her plastic grass skirt, slipped behind the wheel and backed out of the parking lot with no trouble getting back into New York driving mode. "A radio that sings!" Delight crept into his voice. He turned up the volume and let the ominous build up for the fourth verse of White Rabbit fill the air.
The way back was short at less than five miles and quick several hours removed from people scrambling to get to work or school or the gym. Chris looked around bewildered by suburbia. The lay-out wasn't all that different from some of the neighborhoods he'd cleared in Iraq. He could feel Dean's eyes boring into the side of his head and he wondered if perhaps he hadn't been as inconspicuous as he first thought in making sure the shadow around the corner of that one house was had really been a shrub and that soccer ball on the gutter was just a soccer ball. Dean looked away recognizing his own behavior six months earlier, flipped the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and dipped lower in the passenger's seat as the car nosed into the driveway.
Vivian was waiting for them, sitting on the curb with a very large coffee mug in her hand. She'd since ruined her outfit's feminine look by adding an unflattering goose down parka and rubber galoshes to her sundress but with three vodka tonics in her bloodstream –she liked them heavy on the vodka and very, very easy on the tonic, girly was the last thing on her mind. She trudged through the grass oblivious to the sprinklers or the inherent danger of sneaking up on wired men who found neck snapping an easy task.
"I need an answer right now." Then hem of Vivian's coat encroached on Silas' personal space. She didn't bother to bring him up to speed on the conversation that had already played out in her head choosing instead to focus on the frayed curl floating in her drink.
"Are you drunk Vivian?" Dean pulled hear arm spilling some of the vodka in the mug. It was cheap and smelled like it.
"I am 29," she continued still sober enough to lie about her age. "I can't keep waiting for you to propose unless to me Christopher you can question my answer."
"Come on, let's go inside." Chris took the mug from her hand. Vivian followed sheepishly and Dean, resigned, started toward the garage to procure his car washing paraphernalia while the issue of the disgruntled drunk was resolved safely out of earshot.
Vivian sank into a kitchen chair with a sigh. She tugged at her galoshes and gave up, choosing to work on the bulky coat instead. Chris moved along the counter looking for filters and clean mugs in a kitchen organized by a man so that location and common sense were not two concepts folded into the scheme. He stopped the search, washed the filter sitting in the coffeemaker, poured new grounds and refilled the water tank. Steam crackled as the coffee brewed but he waited for Vivian to finish the first third of her cup until he took the second chair.
"I'm sorry I yelled at you earlier."
"It's okay."
"No. It isn't."
"I didn't want it to be this way but I need to know if you are ever going to marry me Christopher. We have been going back and forth for over fifteen years and you keep leaving and coming back and leaving again and I don't think that's fair. I can't be 29 forever." Vivian had not meant to crack a joke and Chris had the good sense not to laugh.
"Viv, you were married when I left."
"Yeah but I divorced Jimmy. I told you in my letter! He was nothing. It's always been you baby." Her voice was gooey honey. She covered his hands with hers. Chris pulled them free and stirred his coffee.
"I don't…" She cut in before he could confess his lax reading habits when her name was on the envelope.
"But I read you letter baby, the one you sent me in March!" Vivian reached for the parka in the floor and dived in looking for pockets. She emerged holding a folded sheet of notebook paper covered in manly chicken scratch. "I cried when I read the part about us being together like the ducks." She pushed the evidence to his side. Exhibit number one. Chris paled. Being together like the ducks?
"Vi, I meant, that was about a documentary on wild ducks. PBS sent a bunch of movies last year and one of them was about the ducks but that's it; just the ducks. I didn't have anything to talk about so I thought maybe you'd wanna know about the ducks." Her nails bent in half without breaking as she gripped her mug tighter. "They're really cool," Chris added "you know the ones with the green heads are all males. The females are brown." He stopped himself.
"I thought you were using a metaphor. I showed my sister and she laughed at me but I didn't care because I thought you were…"
"I'm sorry."
"I just want you to give me a chance Chris. A real chance you know not just ten minutes before you have to run back to whatever dump the Army decides they have to send you."
"Viv, I wasn't… I've slept with other women and…"
"Did you keep pictures of all of them?" She interrupted. The cynicism in her voice was a departure on the earlier honey. She put Jamila's crumpled picture, ripped in half almost edge to edge, on the table next to the letter. "That's a hajji," she seethed. The military slang for Iraqi locals was corrosive in her mouth. "An Arab," she went on splitting Arab into a two syllable word. A-rab.
"Where did you get that?" The edge in his voice matched the Vivian's coldness.
"Dean gave me spares last year," she replied jingling the keys, "for emergencies."
"Her name is Jamila and she hasn't been to Mecca so no, she's not a hajji," he said taking the keys she put on the table. Vivian's nostrils flared. He hadn't even tried to deny it.
"It's okay. It's okay." She got up for more coffee. "You are a man. You have needs. We can work this out. Those women didn't mean anything to you right? Right?" He looked away, not interested in explaining what if anything he'd felt with Sophie or Jamila or the meaning to any of it in his mind.
"You don't find it strange that we've known each other since we were little and it's never worked out? Are you okay with that?" He asked. He wanted to slap her when she answered sweetly changing from Venus to Medusa and back faster than he could blink.
"But it's always been with your bags packed! It's going to be different this time. You'll have a real job in Anthony's store in Kansas and I can teach anywhere in the country. Baby, I was looking at real estate in Topeka and you can buy a house just like this one or even better for less than $150,000. If you sell this place to those people from Manhattan that offered a half mil, that's over $350,000 dollars. Can you imagine all the things we could do with that much money?"
Chris pushed the table so hard the chair opposite his fell backwards, slammed against the door and bounced back two feet. Vivian backed into the counter enthralled by the way he leapt to his feet to stand inches from her face. His features turned hard, his anger visible in the veins bulging under the skin. To Vivian, the moment proved cathartic. All the unladylike resentment she'd been trying to control surged forth like pea soup from Linda Blair's mouth.
"You renewed your contract didn't you baby?" She taunted. "You are not even man enough to break-up with me. You just keep reenlisting hoping I give up don't you?" Silas made his hands into fists and pumped them open then closed trying to get a grip on rage that would kill her if it went unchecked.
He drew in a shallow, raspy breath. Vivian laughed. She continued laughing even as one of his hands covered the bottom half of her face hard enough to mash her lips against her teeth. She tasted blood in her mouth and a little high-pitched voice in her head began grasping through the layers of bitterness and alcohol trying to tell her she should be scared. The little voice wasn't loud enough. As soon as the pressure of his hand loosened she started laughing and taunting him again. Chris tried to shake the images in his head, the loud, sick wheezing coming from Moffet's headless corpse as it went on trying to scream for half a minute until it, no, he died, the very sound of an RPG round piercing the chopper in al-Hudaba; Captain Harms.
He felt the hot, antsy tingling of blood under his skin spreading down the back of his neck to his arms and legs. Jerusalem's death played back in his head like gruesome news bulletin scattered with Vivian's mocking laughter. He stepped back in a dizzy haze as he relived the moment for the hundredth time; praying he could forget the way Jerusalem's skin stuck to his uniform when she reached for his hand and her cries as Lieutenants Berro and Glass sliced open her arms to reduce the pressure on her arteries before what little morphine she'd been given had a chance to kick in.
That wasn't real?
"You're not going to hit me Chrissy?" Vivian shoved him hard enough to bruise, wanting a reaction, regardless of how bad for her health it might be. He didn't disappoint.
Her head thudded in response, against the cabinet doors where he pinned her by the throat. The tips of her toes scrambled for something more than the air beneath them. He looked up at her bared teeth outlined in blood from the cut in the inside of her lips so that the lower canines appeared much longer. The effect wasn't flattering; it reminded him of hyenas at feeding time in the Bronx Zoo.
"You can't get away from the tree can you? What's wrong baby? You can't handle the truth?" The jumbled moan that escaped Silas' throat was fuel for Vivian.
After fifteen years of playing nice, she was too dumb with fury to realize how close she'd come to a sordid little headline in the Herald about death by strangulation, and in her prime, tsk, tsk what a shame. After being second fiddle to every assignment, every deployment, to everyone and their dog, she wanted blood and again, she was left staring at the back of his head as he walked away. She ran to the door.
"Don't walk away from me you fucking bastard. Jimmy was three marriages that ended to be with you!" She yelled. "After fifteen fucking years you can't think of anything better to talk to me about than some fucking dumb ass ducks? You are worse than your daddy. At least he fought in Nam; you haven't even been to a real war!"
Unlike the front door, the kitchen's opened out and far from fizzing Vivian's tirade became louder as Chris got further away. In the back porch, concealed by the door Dean put out his cigarette on an ashtray in the windowsill. His eyes stopped on the sticker in one of the glass panes, a Vietnam War service ribbon alongside a decal with the familiar black and white outline of a man's profile that honored those taken as prisoners or missing in action. He remembered the night it went up in 1988, when Christopher Silas Senior was indefinitely committed for treatment by the state of New York.
Dean shook his head. He kicked the door closed on Vivian's face and listened for her startled protest, galoshes skidding on linoleum then the clunky, flat thud of her butt hitting the floor.
"Viv, has anyone ever told you how fucking ignorant you sound when you say Nam like you were there?"
Phew. I had a really hard time with this chapter because as it usually goes, that brilliant idea that sounded so great has so many holes on paper that Swiss cheese looked baby's butt smooth by comparison. Someone reassure me with or without a lollipop please. You know, I think the root of all this has to do with the fact that my mom never let me have a puppy when I was small and so I had to walk my cousin instead. You mean you don't see the parallels. Phooey.
Oh yeah and that was a shout out to my keychain. She wiggles her hips and everything!
Thy Author.