Dear Mr. President Read online

  Our platoon leader, Riggins, said, “Charge. Charge. Charge.” Still dazed, I leapt out one of the personnel hatches, and we fanned out and hit the sand in a prone position, sighting in on the Iraqis firing from the windows of the police post up on the ridge. I clicked my M-16 on burst and blindly let the sparks fly. I couldn’t see shit. There was a bright flash in one of the windows on the third floor of the police post, and an RPG rocket zoomed into our Bradley, blowing a charred hole in the side of it, and Fark popped out of the gunner’s hatch and scrambled back to fuel and logistics in the rear. Bobby D. was the first one up, and he sprinted forward and stumbled over a trip wire and was suddenly blown thirty feet upward with his legs pumping the air beneath him as if he was on an exercise bike. Screaming Iraqis came charging out of some scrub brush off to the right. A bullet blew by my ear. I saw Trigger and Boogaloo drop dead without a peep. Everyone scattering everywhere at once. There was a high-pitched whine, and Riggins, who was basically right next to me, went up in a ball of flames. We had to cross the highway and get to the police building on the other side. People were saying, “Go. Go.” I let out a bloodcurdling yell and scurried through the smoke and up the ridge.

  On my way up I sprinted across that godforsaken Highway of Death and landed facefirst in a deep ditch on the other side, and when I glanced up there were two Iraqi soldiers perched on their rucksacks, in the middle of eating their breakfast by a Sterno fire. Except suddenly a pair of boots stepped into my line of sight, and then the snubbed snout of a .45 pistol was squashing my nose flat to my face. My eyes, focused on the tip of the pistol, crossed. I was gasping for air, and the sounds of the battle seemed a million miles away. A thick Arabian-English voice, presumably belonging to Boots, said, “Well well well. What do we have here? Looks like this little birdy flew too far from his nest. Have you come on behalf of America to do some more of your Nation Building? No, you have come to negotiate the price of oil, I suppose? Do you know the price of oil, Mr. America?”

  I rolled and swung the blade of my K-bar into the side of Boots’s right knee, and his pistol jerked down and went off. I saw his left boot toe explode in a gush of flesh and blood, and he screamed. I was already on my feet and I hurled a smoke grenade toward the other two soldiers, who were scrambling for cover. I leapt up on the sandy wall of the ditch, climbing higher and higher. Boots was hopping around on one foot, shouting and shooting bullets into the air, one of which nicked my foothold. I landed on the back of one of the soldiers and planted my teeth in his right ear. He said, “Arrrghhhh.” Then he stumbled backward and my head smashed against something and my vision was lit up with stars and I fell off him, taking the ear with me. In a daze, I got to one knee.

  I spit the ear out of my mouth and it sailed across the camp like a tiny frisbee. I glanced at my hand and saw the pistol in it. I must have grabbed it from Ear Man’s belt when I fell off. So I stayed on that one knee and blew all three of those bastards away. I put a round in each of their chests. It was too easy. I said, “That’s the price of oil, cocksucker,” and then flew up out of the ditch and onto the police post.

  Gloria was rubbing my kneecaps and shinbones now. “Gloria? Remember what I told you,” I said. “I’m trying to forget everything that happened to me in Saudi. You promised you wouldn’t bring it up again.”

  But Gloria wouldn’t let it go. She exploded. “You can’t pretend like that ball didn’t come through this window. Everybody in the neighborhood already knows. The word’s out, Larry.”

  I suddenly got the feeling that Gloria had been running her mouth.

  I sighed again. “Can you just hold me?” I asked her.

  The expression on her face changed instantly. She melted.

  “Sure, baby,” she whispered.

  And then she put her arms around me and started to cuddle. But before I knew what was going on, she had mounted me and we were suddenly making love. She was really working herself into a frenzy, bouncing up and down with her back arched, and her hands were grabbing the skin on my chest hard, and it seemed as if she had no idea that I was even there, except I guess I was wrong because right before she came Gloria threw back her head and her red hair exploded behind her and she gasped, “Oh G.I., G.I.”

  The next day was Saturday. And, like we did every Saturday afternoon, Gloria and I sauntered down to the antique store.

  “How much for that?” I said.

  The wall-eyed guy manning the jewelry case grinned and said, “A special deal today for the bald gentleman,” and then he winked at Gloria. What I bought from this man was a sterling silver ring, on which was mounted a dancing ballerina in a tutu. The ballerina had her arms up in a diamond over her head, and it was gorgeous. On Gloria’s finger, it practically came to life.

  “For my ballerina,” I said, as I slipped the ring on.

  Gloria did an awkward curtsy.

  She said, “I was really good, you know.”

  “You still are,” I said. “Let’s see something.”

  So Gloria started leaping around the store. She was humming under her breath, turning and twirling, and a couple customers stopped to watch. She was even humming a couple lines from The Wizard’s Pond, and that is when I noticed the beads of sweat pop out on her forehead. She was totally focused, fueled on by her will, her spirit, her passion. The wall-eyed guy said, “Boy. Will you look at that.” Then she twisted her ankle and fell on her butt, and for a second, I thought she was going to cry, but instead she started laughing, so I ran over and fell on top of her, and then we were both laughing.

  Five minutes later when I couldn’t get up off the ground I wasn’t laughing.

  “These crappy bones are going to be the death of me,” I said. “I can’t move. Christ. Fuck this.”

  “What? Like you’re not some kind of badass warrior? Please,” said Gloria, reaching to help me up. “We’ll find a cure for this. You’re too much of a man to let this get you down.”

  Then: “Come on, let’s get some milk. You’ll walk it off.”

  And for the rest of that sun-splashed afternoon, we strolled arm in arm, battered but proud. Then, before I knew it, the sun had dropped and the moon was up, and Gloria and I were standing on the stoop in front of her building.

  We had just finished a passionate kiss, and I said, “Well, baby?”

  She giggled. “Do you want to come up and make me your prisoner of war? I think I’ve got some rope.”

  I put my arms around her. “Gloria, look. I really enjoy making love to you. But I want you to understand that I respect you as a woman. Tonight though, I just want to get some rest, okay?” And then I gave her a long, slow, gentle kiss, and I turned and strolled off into the night air, leaving her in a state that I could only imagine as breathless.

  I passed a street clown and dropped a dollar in his hat.

  As I came up my street, I suddenly stopped whistling. Because about twenty feet away, I saw Fear Me and his crew in front of my building, laughing and hooting and dancing around. When I got a little closer I saw Mrs. Tunolli in the middle of them, and they were dangling her mail up where she couldn’t reach it from the wheelchair, and she was turning and turning and saying “Shame on you” and “Where are your mothers?”

  The simple fact of the matter is that war makes people commit horrible acts. And it is hard to get into Heaven when you have committed horrible acts, so ever since the war I have been practicing getting into Heaven through visualization, because if you see something first, envision it happening in your mind ahead of time, there is a lot better chance that it will happen in reality. This is something my marksman instructor, Sergeant Barrow, taught me in boot camp, out on the firing range in Fort Leonard Wood. It was regal to march out to the range in your shooting jacket, singing old army songs as the sun rose over the hills and broke like an egg yolk: the righteous cadence of our boots on the tarmac, the deep soulful chorus of our voices, the sense that these were ancient songs, ancient rituals. I could feel then, just as I did when I lay in bed at li
ghts out and listened to “Taps,” the ghosts of past American wars, the great wars and astounding sacrifice of our fathers and grandfathers. Then it was time to pop off our M-16s at the human-shaped targets, all of us lying in the prone position along the shooting line, and the instructors pacing back and forth among us in safari hats. These guys were wizards, and behaved with class and reserve, as if their dedication to the accuracy of the round would guide them in all things of life, and it was Sergeant Barrow who taught me to actually see the round ripping a hole in the bull’s-eye before I squeezed the trigger, and it worked. I shot expert on qualifying day.

  So before I go to bed each night, I visualize myself ascending from earth and passing through the Golden Gates. I see myself as a perfectly round ball, with no bones, a flesh bag. I have gigantic, white-feathered wings on my back that are pumping the air. Strangely, I always have a beak instead of a mouth, and since I do not have any bones, the beak slides around all over my body. But the beak does not keep me from talking. I talk with the beak. I talk to Heaven’s Doorman with my beak.

  As I hover there in front of the Golden Gates, I say, “Come on. Give a guy a break. I’m sorry for what happened at Al Mutlaa Ridge, it was my duty, and truly I didn’t want to kill those guys. I was scared. I did what I thought I had to do, and besides, back then I wasn’t even sure that God existed. But now I’m sure. Isn’t that some sort of redemption? The fact that now I am absolutely certain? So what do you say? Let me in there. Listen to me. You don’t understand. I absolutely have to get in there.” And then, in the visualization, the Doorman says, “Of course, Larry. I know you have a good heart, and that sometimes things slip out of control. Life’s been hard enough as it is. Go ahead. Get on in there.”

  But then other times, and this is not intentional, because it feels as if I lose control of my mind when this happens, the Doorman frowns, and says, “What do you take me for? Larry, you’ve got to pay for killing those Iraqi soldiers. Truth be told, they weren’t even going to hurt you; they were just having fun, and now their children are fatherless. You’re a murderer, plain and simple. Don’t try to get out of it, the rules are the rules, and I can’t make an exception for you, because if I do that, then I’ll have to start making exceptions for everyone. You know, you’re not the first person to try and pull this stunt. It wasn’t that long ago that Hitler was up here saying the exact same thing, and so I’ll tell you the same thing I told him. The standard is there for a reason. It’s part of the system, and the system works. Otherwise, next thing you know everyone will be getting in, and then after that what’s the point in even having a Heaven?,” and with that the Doorman quickly claps his hands three times and my wings suddenly disappear and I begin to fall.

  So one of the thugs, this long, brown, greasy-haired guy in a hockey jersey that said EAT MY PUCK, slapped Mrs. Tunolli across the face, and her dentures popped out of her mouth. Her mouth instantly collapsed, and Eat My Puck said, “Jesus, lady. God, you’re ugly.”

  And you have to give Mrs. Tunolli some credit here, because she reached in her bra and whipped out a mace canister and shot a jet stream into Eat My Puck’s eyes. She said, “Make mat, mou monumamitch.” The thug crumpled to his knees and said, “Ohmygod. I can’t see. I can’t see.” One of the other guys started laughing and said, “I guess she showed you.”

  Fear Me cuffed the laugher on the head and said, “Shut up, you idiot.” Everything got quiet. “Now listen here, you bitch,” he said, turning on Mrs. Tunolli, and he pushed the wheelchair over sideways with the sole of his shoe so that Mrs. Tunolli spilled out of the chair and onto the ground. “Time to say good night.” Fear Me reached to pull something out of his belt, and I caught a glimpse of something silver. And that is where I stepped in.

  “Hi guys. Anybody here thirsty?”

  They just looked at me like what the hell.

  Then I smashed the milk carton I had been holding into Eat My Puck’s mouth, and white exploded everywhere. He tried to yell, but he sounded confused. Fear Me and the others started to close in on me and I knew I was done for. Fear Me actually said, “You’re a dead man.”

  I heard the sound of a screeching whistle pierce the night. Shhhhrt-shhhhrt-shhhhrt. There was a flashlight beam dancing around, and I glanced up and spotted two cops running at us, and one of them was squawking into his walkie-talkie. “Code Four. Code Four. We’ve got a Code Four on Dean Street.”

  Fear Me said, “Five-O.”

  The thugs evaporated.

  I took that as my cue. I ran.

  I ran all the way to Gloria’s place and collapsed on her doorstep, panting. Gloria opened the door and gasped, “Larry. What’s amatter? What happened?” I told her how Fear Me had been hanging around in front of my building, waiting for me.

  “Jesus,” she said. “Oh God, baby, are you okay? Here, let’s get you cleaned up.”

  I spent most of that night lying next to Gloria, staring at the ceiling, burning a hole in it, letting my mind turn the options over and over. Then around three, I shook Gloria and said, “I have an idea. Let’s get the hell out of Brooklyn. Let’s go somewhere new and start all over.”

  Gloria sat up in bed and scratched her head. “What are you talking about?” She yawned.

  I could feel the moon outside the window smiling in on me.

  “To Montana,” I said. I explained to her that I had an old army buddy, Fletcher, who worked as a guide on a ranch up there. He took city people on horse rides through the mountains. Right before we shipped out of Saudi, Fletcher told me I could show up there any time, that he would get me work. I told Gloria about the beautiful ranch on the mountain we would live on, with the river that ran right through it, and how we could take the bus and be there in two days. “Just imagine,” I said. By the time I finished she was beaming.

  “Yeah,” she said, and broke into a grin. “Yeah. Okay. Let’s do it.” We talked, hatching out our new plan. Gloria would go to work in the morning, for her last shift, which went until 11:00, collect her check, and then we would meet at the train station at 12:00. The next morning when we stepped out the front door of her building the birds were singing. “All right, sweets,” she said, and patted my butt, “I’ll see you at twelve on the nose.”

  The minute I got back to my place I knew something had gone wrong again. The door was slightly open, and I pushed through and stopped and gasped. All the windows were smashed out and there were basketballs scattered all over the floor. A cardinal had gotten inside my place, and when it saw me it started to fly up, banged its head into the ceiling, and then fell to the floor. It did this over and over and over. Then as I started to pick something up I saw it. Written on the wall in red ink was this: IF YOU WANT YOUR KITTY COME AND GET IT. My mind started to race through the possibilities. Whiskers hanging from a rope with a broken neck. Whiskers floating facedown in the bathtub. I rushed around the apartment in a panic. Each time I flung open a cabinet my heart was full of hope, but Whiskers was nowhere to be found. Whiskers was gone. And that is when I went into full combat mode. I donned my desert cammie fatigues. I quickly painted my face with war paint. I hooked a grenade to my belt.

  The first thing I noticed when I stepped out on the street was that the sun looked like a bright wet marble up in the sky, and the second thing I noticed was that I was having trouble walking. My Gulf War Syndrome was really acting up. It was all I could do to get my knees to bend, and I knew I looked like a robot. I checked my watch: 10:27. Farther down the street I could see Fear Me and his crew shooting hoops on the court, and I set off. As I got closer, I saw Fear Me go up and dunk the ball so hard the backboard rattled. There were high fives everywhere. Then I was standing at the edge of the court. Fear Me looked up, and his face fell into a grin. He said, “Looky what we have here.”

  They all looked up. “Hey,” said Eat My Puck, joining in. “It’s G.I. Joe.”

  I heard Mrs. Tunolli’s voice. “Get out of here. Save yourself. Go get the police.”

  I turned toward the
voice and saw Mrs. Tunolli. She was buried up to her neck in the sandbox. Off to the right of her were the monkey bars. She was a talking head.

  “Oh nooo,” Fear Me said, with scorn. “Don’t leave, G.I. Joe. Silly boy. It’s time for a rematch.” He hurled the ball at me as if it had been shot out of a cannon. At the last second, I raised my hands to my chest and caught it calmly, as if to say, You are going to have to do a whole lot better than that if you want to live another day. But the second I felt the ball in my hands, my stomach dropped out on the court, and all the colors of the world began bleeding together. This was no basketball. It was Whiskers. Dead Whiskers in my hands. His limbs were gone. Patches of fur were missing. He smelled burnt. But there was his face, it was undeniable, and his one good green eye was still open, glazed over, looking up at me, as if to say, Where were you, partner?

  “He he he,” said Fear Me. “Meooow.”

  That is when I heard it: a long, sorrowful cry coming from very, very far away. It was some kind of horrible, piercing animal sound of agony. I looked up at the sky, and in that moment I realized the voice was my own.

  Fear Me stepped up waving a sawed-off screwdriver, like a flag, and he said, “Come here, bitch,” and then he danced in and expertly nicked my right cheek with it. I felt the teardrop of blood rise up on my face. He said, “Game over, soldier boy. Now your punk ass is going to pay.”

  The world was a merry-go-round.

  I reached down deep into my madness. I was back at Mutlaa Ridge, the heat, the sand, the dizziness of death everywhere. I could hear Riggins saying, “Charge. Charge.” I kicked Fear Me in the nuts and judo-flipped him on the ground. I leapt on top of him and punched him, cracked his jaw. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a cop car pull up and two cops leap out and start bounding toward us. I glanced at my watch: 11:02. If I started running right now, I could probably get away and still meet Gloria in time.

  I spotted Whiskers at the free throw line, and without giving it another thought I brought down my fist for the deathblow. In that second, Fear Me reached up in a quick snake move and yanked the pin out of the grenade on my belt. Then his eyes slanted in a smile and the next thing I knew my ears filled with the loudest noise I have ever heard, and I was suddenly being lifted up by a hot wave of air, up, up, and away from the earth and straight toward the clouds. Ahead in the distance, I could see the Doorman waving furiously, as if to say, “Okay, Larry. Okay, hurry, hurry. Come on, come on.”