Dear Mr. President Read online

  “Stay cool,” said P-Girl. “Easy, T. He’s just a kid.”

  Jesus went, “Yeah, he’s just repeating something he’s heard.”

  “Sheet,” said the Arab kid. “I know yu weetbacks swim into America an suck de tit uf tax-payin citisens. Don’t tell me wut the fuk I no, azzhol.”

  P-Girl crouched down and spoke gently to the boy, slowing her speech. “H-o-w d-o y-o-u s-p-e-a-k E-n-g-l-i-s-h s-o w-e-l-l?”

  I sneered at P-Girl: “Why don’t you try to control this situation?”

  Keeping her eyes on the kid, she said, “Yeah, right, just like you did with Sandra. Why don’t you give me a lesson in control, Frank.” P-Girl’s potshot was a swift kick in the nuts, and my mind, suddenly slick with the pain of memory, shot out into the wide, pitiless sky above.

  QUELLING THE HUMAN ANTHEM OF SORROW

  Sandra, my ex-fiancée, was a flirty night-shift waitress at Maybelle’s on the outskirts of Fayetteville when I met her, and I ordered the Country Breakfast. Sandra was also, I found out later, a nymphomaniac, or, excuse me, I should say an R.N., that was her little joke: a Recovering Nymphomaniac. By the time I found out about Sandra’s condition she’d already moved in. I woke up one night and she was crying big silent tears at the ceiling, and when I asked her what’s wrong, she said she’d never been this happy and she was scared she was going to mess it up. That’s when she told me about her sexual impulses and her sordid past, including her stepfather, Ralph, a cheerful country-club golf pro in Georgia who used to make her lie down naked in the backyard so he could tee off her nipples because he said it helped his game. I said, Go see a psychologist, I’m here for you. The psychologist she ended up with was a mustached man named Kevin, a Cornell graduate who specialized in something called poststructural psychology. Kevin suggested that Sandra start dancing at Brad’s Wet & Wild Babes as a method of boosting her self-esteem. He emphasized the word method.

  A SECOND LANGUAGE CAN ENSURE PROFITABILITY WITHIN OUR NEW GLOBAL VILLAGE

  The Arab kid got real nasty. He demanded that P-Girl stick a veil over her face pronto, and P-Girl said she didn’t believe in Allah but that she very much respected the kid’s belief system.

  The Arab kid said, “No Allah. Yu butt ugly.”

  Thrash went, “Watch your suckhole,” and drilled the Arab kid in the shin. The kid crumpled, and then Thrash, leaning down with the 9mm against the kid’s temple, started to squeeze the trigger.

  The kid blurted out, “Coca-Cola Culture Vulture Exchange Program.” He said he did his seventh and eighth grades in Des Moines, Iowa. “That’s how cum I speek E-n-g-l-i-s-h s-o w-e-e-l-l.” He winced and got to his feet and pointed with conviction at Jesus. “I no ask agin. Whut’s thees fuckin spick doin on mah dad’s fahm?”

  I could not take any more. I shoved Thrash out of the way and got right up in that Arab kid’s face and growled, “I think the word you’re looking for is Mexican American.”

  WHAT I LEARNED IN THE ARMY

  I do not like to hurt people, but I cannot tolerate a bigot. One of the things I love about the army is that it is color blind. Before the army, back at my high school, St. Albans in D.C., I went through some “adjustment problems,” and I am sure not proud of this but I accidentally fell in with a couple of friendly white supremacists from my trigonometry class. Jason sucked milk through his nose with a crazy straw and Eric had the wheels, and each day after school we would cruise over to Eric’s house and watch Swedish, plot-driven porn. Then one afternoon, Jason said, “Yo, check this shit out. It’s dope,” and popped in this artful video montage of Hitler giving an impassioned lecture at an elegant university podium. We did not understand exactly what he was saying, but it boiled down to Hitler’s convincing manner of beautifully bending language with authority. So the next afternoon we started a secret society called White Reign, complete with ironic manifesto, but a week later Eric’s mom got canned and so we renamed ourselves Junior Business Maestros and, after commandeering the requisite faculty signatures for a charter from the student government, we started holding meetings in the chemistry lab after school, toting our books around in faux alligator-skin briefcases and sporting these vintage Eagle Scout rings we’d gotten dirt cheap in a pawnshop downtown. Right next to the crackhouse where they busted Marion Barry.

  Today, though, some of my best friends are African American and Mexican American and Native American. That is what the army taught me, and these days I am racked with personal guilt for the way America has treated minorities, and when the ATM machine asks if I want instructions in English or Spanish, I pick Spanish, even though I do not understand a lick of it. Just my little way of saying yes to diversity. So when I hear a racist shooting off his mouth, something inside of me boils over and I go ballistic: I become an animal.

  That is how I explain what happened next, with that Arab kid who kept using the word spick. It was that Arab kid using the S-word that made me grab his turban and sling him facefirst in the dirt.

  THE FIRST SHOT RANG OUT, LIKE A CHURCH BELL

  There was a loud snort, and I glanced back and spotted one of those gigantic pigs lumbering to its feet and starting to trot in our direction. Jesus chuckled, and said, “Whoa, Frank. Looks like you pissed somebody off.”

  I turned to Jesus with a grin.

  That pig smashed into the side of my knees, and I toppled over. Through blurred vision I glimpsed the pig snorting like it was going to charge again. The Arab kid cried, “No. No.” I whisked the pig’s snout off with my knife and a tinkle of blood sputtered from its face, and then clack—Jesus shot it in the head with his Beretta.

  P-Girl said, “Goddammit. Leave the kid alone. This is seriously fucked up.”

  Jesus cried, “Oh shit,” pointing behind me with his smoking gun.

  I spun and spotted a Bedouin in a brown cloak with his musket sighted on me. The first shot rang out, like a church bell, and wheat cinders exploded to our left. A piff of smoke came up off the Bedouin’s rifle tip. There was an ominous rustle and thirty Bedouins stepped forward out of the wheat, all training rifles on us. There were more piffs. We beat it out of there, with the Bedouins hot on our tail.

  THE BURGEONING EPIDEMIC OF TERRORISM AMONGST THE NATIVE-ARABIANS

  We crashed into a ditch and set up our rifles facing out. Some of the Bedouins were scattering and trying to circle around us on all fours. We’d been caught with our pants down, and now all our gear and radios were back at the shack. Without communication, exfiltration was a no-go. I flipped up my telescopic sight and saw a gang of kamikaze Bedouins streaming toward us with their rifles blazing. Thrash and P-Girl and Jesus were dropping targets with lead, very methodical. Enemy fire ripped the air around my head and the ditch was choked with smoke. I polished off my last magazine. P-Girl yelled, “Fuck,” and spiked her M-16 in the dirt. One of the Bedouins geronimoed into our hole, and Jesus whirled and stabbed him in the neck.

  A LIFE WITHOUT FREEDOM IS NOT WORTH LIVING

  “Grenades,” said Thrash. We each kept a grenade in our cargo pocket so that we could step out of this world on our own terms. We glanced at one another and pinched the pins on our grenades, opening the door to eternity. There was so much smoke, and I felt my head spiral up into the air, and suddenly the screaming seemed very far away, and I thought for a second that I was already dead. I said a jumbled, silent, nondenominational prayer, trying to cover all my bases.

  The scream of a train’s whistle ripped my prayer to shreds. I opened my eyes and saw an old train trudging down the tracks, headed south. Without a word, we scrambled to stick the pins back in the grenades.

  Thrash whispered in a frantic voice, “I threw my pin away.” I glanced up and saw Thrash clutching the grenade with this helpless look on his face. He had once shown me a picture of himself as a boy in private and his mouth was hanging wide open. “But I wasn’t retarded,” he said. He just had underdeveloped jaw muscles that cost a fortune in physical therapy to correct. And I could not help but notice that Thrash,
squatting there with the hissing grenade, had his mouth hanging wide open.

  INDIVIDUAL SACRIFICE FOR THE GOOD OF THE PEOPLE

  Thrash leapt from the ditch and erupted in midair, spraying the charging Bedouins with blood and chunks of flesh. Thrash’s right hand, violently emancipated from the rest of his body, shot out and slapped one of the charging Bedouins in the face. The Bedouin bent over and vomited. Several charging Bedouins were blown backward up off their sandaled feet. We raced along the train. P-Girl and Jesus hopped into a boxcar. It was a lumber shipment: there were stacks of boards and wood in the car. The first time I leapt for the open door of the boxcar, I miscalculated and cracked my jaw and bounced off into the dirt, but then instantly scrambled up and raced and dove with everything I had into the open door.

  EXPANDING THE DEFINITION OF THE TERM HUMAN SHIELD

  The day after Sandra’s therapist, Kevin, told Sandra to start stripping for her self-esteem, she went down to Brad’s for an audition. Sandra has a body like you would not believe: big, round breasts, perfect quarter-size nipples that you could gouge an eye out on, and down below—I cannot even talk about down below. Shaved, completely. Brad hired her on the spot, and by the next week she had bought, because of her R.N. joke, a skimpy nurse’s outfit and come up with this routine. She did things to herself with a stethoscope. I remember one day Thrash sidled up to me while we were practicing land navigation, and said, “Whoa. Do you know about Sandra? I saw her last night at Brad’s. Man, I felt guilty being there. I had to leave.” I could not tell him why she was there, that it was part of her therapy, so I lied and said we had some bad credit debt, and that it was good money.

  JESUS ON THE SUBJECT OF BOOKS

  Jesus said we had to sneak back to the village and try to recover the gear, or our asses would be in a sling. So at dusk we hopped off the train and flew up the highway. At about 0200 we elected to rack out for a couple hours before the big raid, but first we built a little fire and sat around it in a circle.

  “Thrash was a good guy.” P-Girl seemed really upset. “I just can’t forget the look on his face.”

  “He definitely looked surprised,” I said.

  “You’re an idiot, Frank,” said P-Girl. She winked. “But you’re not all bad.”

  A little while later my eyelids started to droop, and I heard P-Girl ask Jesus what it was like to have his name. “I’ve always wanted to ask,” she said.

  Jesus said, “You want to hear something funny. I don’t believe.”

  P-Girl said what about the Bible, what about Mary and Gabriel and all that. Because she said she probably believed.

  Jesus snorted, and said the Bible was just a crucifiction, with a C. “Just a story to keep the majority in check. It’s a conduct code. Either that, or it’s really just the all-time greatest what-to-name-your-baby book,” he said, and I drifted off to the sound of his chuckling.

  And I was jerked awake by his shout for help.

  P-Girl and I sat up in our hooch, and we instantly scrambled out to where the fire was still smoldering. Jesus, who was supposed to be standing watch, was nowhere around. There were a few drops of blood in the sand, and some drag marks that disappeared after a couple of feet. We bounded out into the night and the waves of dunes stretched forever, and there was no wind, and the sound of our boots pounding on the sand was muted, like we were on the moon.

  PROGRESSIVE THINKING CAN BE DANGEROUS DURING WARTIME

  P-Girl and I ran further out into the desert, looking for Jesus, until she abruptly stopped and panted, “Wait. I hear something.” She bent over, hands on knees.

  A low moan zoomed out from behind this giant dune.

  P-Girl locked her eyes on mine, and said, “Stay here.” Then she slid to the ground and low-crawled toward the dune, and I watched the soles of her boots disappear over the peak. “Why should I stay here,” I whispered to myself, just as P-Girl started screaming.

  “Oh God. No. Holy Christ. Good God, no.”

  I rushed up the dune but stopped short at the top of it. The Arab kid had slumped Jesus’s lifeless body up against a tiny one-foot makeshift cross he had constructed with slats of wood I recognized from the train. Jesus looked like he was kicked back in a La-Z-Boy chair, and there was a silver hammer and nails in the sand. The kid looked up at P-Girl and shouted, “Eye for eye. Eye for eye.” I wanted to puke with grief, and my mind flashed to Jesus’s parents back in Puerto Vallarta, the picture they kept of Jesus in uniform by their hammock, their humble pueblo, the roosters out back crowing defiantly against their poverty. And it was not as if this was a crime of passion—the hammer and nails and wood: this was premeditated. P-Girl screamed and rushed down and grabbed the hammer and went to work on the Arab kid with it. The last thing I heard the Arab kid shout was, “I’m doing you fava. You said you beleeved. Have mercy.”

  She gave him what he wanted.

  Those Were Your Words Not Mine

  REWARD

  I am blind, which is the reason I, Valerie Hackett, am having to offer this reward, and because I am blind I cannot see the keys as I type this, so please forgive me if there are any mistakes. Three weeks ago, my nineteen-year-old son, Chad Hackett, a Navy SEAL, was killed in combat over in Desert Storm. The way I found out about this was two government men came to my room and notified me of Chad’s death, while I lay here in bed.

  The details of Chad’s death are puzzling. According to the government men, Chad’s SEAL team, stationed at Ras al Mishab, Saudi Arabia, was involved in some operation that tricked the Iraqis into believing thousands of American soldiers were storming the Kuwaiti beach of Mina Saud. Tragically, Chad’s team was spotted by Iraqi defenders set in along the berm of the beach, and since they had already buried the explosives in the sand, the other SEALs hopped in their Zodiacs and paddled out. Chad, however, according to the two men, charged the Iraqi machine-gun nest. Now this is the strange part: Chad was carrying something called a Koch MP-5 machine gun, and yet he never fired a single shot as he ran at the Iraqi soldiers, who cut him down in midsprint. No one is really sure why Chad charged the Iraqis, but everyone agrees that it was very brave. The two government men said Chad was brave and courageous.

  The two government men also handed over Chad’s personal belongings, which they found on his body after it was recovered by his fellow SEALs. There was not much, his dog tags, an I.D. card, and a letter, which apparently was sealed in a Ziploc baggie, strapped inside his wet suit, so I assume this letter must be important. The strange thing is I asked my nurse to read me the letter, then my friends, and then my family, but all of them, after glancing at the letter, refused to read it to me. The only person who did actually “read” the letter to me was my sister Rhonda, but I could tell by the singsongy voice she used and the way she kept clearing her throat that she was not really reading the letter. She was making it up. Rhonda has always been a liar.

  So whoever is reading this, someone who lives here with me in the Recovery Ward and who has come into my room and is right now reading this reward note posted on the wall next to my bed, I say this to you: I am willing to pay $300 to the first person who will read this letter to me. The letter itself is taped on the wall below the reward note, so please, do a kind deed for an old blind woman, and help put her heart at ease, and make $300 in the process.

  THE LETTER FOUND IN MY SON CHAD’S WET SUIT

  Dear Chad,

  Hi love. I was so excited to get your letter today that when I snatched it out of the mailbox and saw who it was from I sprinted all the way back in the house and into my room and I called Jeannette, Pam, Megan, Uncle Stan and Aunt Judy, Mom and Dad at work, and Grandma and Grandpa Pollard in Seattle to tell them not to call me or to bother me for the next hour because I was going to be extremely busy reading this letter that I just received from Ras al Mishab, Saudi Arabia, from my dear sweet Navy SEAL, who is right now getting ready to storm the beach off the coast of Kuwait.

  Then I yanked down the blinds and bolted my door and took off al
l my clothes (Remember when you called from the Naval Amphibious Base the night before you got shipped over to Saudi and you made me promise I would read all your letters naked? You said it would be more fun to write them because you’d know that I would be naked when I read them? Well, I kept my promise.) and crawled under the sheets and cuddled up with Mr. Snuggles (By the way, Rags bit a hole in Mr. Snuggles and now some of his stuffing’s coming out. Can you believe it? I had to hit Rags with my belt. Bad Rags. Poor Mr. Snuggles.) and had just finished the “Dear Montana” of your letter when there was suddenly a loud banging at the front door.

  I was like, Who can that be.

  So I leapt out of bed and wrapped a towel around me and flew all the way through the living room and then I threw open the door and you’ll never in a million years guess who it was. It was Kurt Donovan. Can you believe Kurt Donovan just showed up at my door out of the blue like that? I thought this was so completely weird because I know that Kurt started pre-med at Berkeley this year and I remember right before you shipped out you told me that when you got out of Desert Storm the first thing you were going to do was go straight up to Berkeley and kick Kurt Donovan’s ass.

  I distinctly remember you said you were going to tie Kurt Donovan to a tree out in the woods with some special SEAL rope and break all his teeth out one by one and then you were going to cut off his feet and then stab him in the spine so his legs were paralyzed, but first, you said, before you did all that, you were going to “straight-up kick his ass.” Do you remember? You said this to me three months ago before you shipped off to BASIC UNDERWATER DEMOLITION/SEAL TRAINING in Coronado and you knew that when you were done with that and you were officially a SEAL they were going to ship you over to Saudi because that’s what your navy personnel detailer told you when he offered you the chance to go to BUDS.

  Then after you said what you were going to do to Kurt Donovan you threw yourself on the ground and started doing one-armed push-ups and each time you came up you shouted, “You want some of this, you son of a bitch?” And then the next day at the bus station right before you were going to board the bus for the Warfare Center up in Coronado I asked you if you were nervous about starting BUDS because I know I would be and you said, “We’ll see how Kurt Donovan likes scooting around Berkeley in a wheelchair. I bet the girls in Berkeley won’t like Mr. Genius Pre-med Kurt Donovan so much when they see him scooting around town in a wheelchair. You want to bet? I’ll betcha. This will be Kurt Donovan.” Then you got down in a squat position and moved your arms back and forth just the way you figured Kurt Donovan would move his arms when he was in a wheelchair.