Hold It 'Til It Hurts Read online

  At dawn he tiptoed down the hall, skulking like a thief returning to the scene of the crime as he put the envelope back on the table. His mother was already up having coffee and cinnamon toast, the pack on the floor next to her chair like a faithful dog awaiting a treat. At her insistence, You’re too thin, he joined her. The warm bread was sweet and crunchy, the hot and gooey raisins nearly liquid. Pointing to the butter, she said, “Don’t eat your bread dry.” He took another bite. She pushed the butter at him until he accepted. She added, “You need to get out.”

  Her travel ensemble now included a tawny hunting vest with white piping around the armholes and flannel edges on the pockets, which were plentiful. It had more pouches and compartments than a photographer’s vest. It resembled the overpriced travel gear virgin reporters wore to Afghanistan, equipment they ditched when the leather piping snagged on a door or a fancy buckle wouldn’t close. It was a special breed of merchandise designed for people whose lives didn’t depend on their equipment but who wanted to believe that it did. The more they paid, the safer they felt. She looked exactly like one of those women she called beltway bimbos when they dressed for a weekend camping trip, but he wouldn’t be the one to tell her.

  “I know you aren’t ready, but I’m here whenever you want to talk,” she said between bites of toast.

  The truth was that he was and he did. He had a lot to say, starting with that day in Goddamnistan when Troy said, “I should have come alone,” but how to begin? He attributed his cloudy head to the funeral but the truth was he’d felt the same way for quite some time. In fact, he couldn’t remember feeling otherwise. He had the constant feeling that he had forgotten to do something important, and it kept him up at night when what he most wanted, and what he’d obsessed over for months, was to come home and sleep and fuck and fuck and sleep and sleep.

  Janice was the only person he’d ever talked to about these feelings. Achilles had never told anyone in his unit, or anyone he didn’t grow up with, that he and Troy were adopted. He wasn’t ashamed, not at all. No. But after being told he talked white, it was unthinkable to provide the firing squad yet another clip.

  One afternoon, a week after his brother left, Achilles went out to the Rockville quarry with Janice. They’d been sleeping together off and on since tenth grade, even during her married spells, which she was presently between. Janice was an average girl, the kind Merriweather would’ve said was a keeper because she wasn’t so hot that everyone was after her, but she wasn’t ugly, and best of all, she knew exactly where she fit into the scheme of things, so she appreciated any positive attention and didn’t expect to be wined and dined. As Merriweather put it, a busted ride knew not to expect high octane. Before meeting Merriweather, Achilles had never thought of her like that, but in retrospect, maybe Merri was right. He’d heard of other guys slapping Janice around, but she’d never mentioned anything to Achilles and he never saw any bruises. Considering that she was full of vitriol for all three ex-husbands, it was a minor miracle that he’d managed to stay friendly with her. He attributed it to honesty—he’d always been clear about not wanting a relationship, so they’d developed one. Though he didn’t ask her to, she’d written while he was away. And though he’d never thanked her, he appreciated it very much.

  The quarry was their safe place. Awe-inspiring. The sheer, staggered walls a giant’s coliseum and, at the same time, evidence of what man could do. As teenagers, they’d watched the rock being toted out; now they watched the procession of trucks bringing dirt in, filling the quarry so it could be built on. A billboard at the entrance advertised more of the expensive subdivisions that had been built over the last several years, hemming them in.

  “You know they were going to have a parade for you? The marching band, fire trucks, everything. A real hero’s welcome.”

  A parade for Troy was what it would have been, another award for stupidity. Achilles sighed, but nothing could dampen his excitement about seeing Janice again.

  High school was four years past, but she looked better than ever. Her brown hair, once stringy, was cut into a bouncy bob with gold highlights. Her lips were fuller, and her face permanently flushed, like she’d just finished running or fucking. They sat at the edge of the quarry, opposite the truck entrance, Achilles stealing glances at her profile and taking in all the details: the thick eyelashes and red nails, the hearts and dolphins, the straight teeth and slender toes. When had he last studied a woman at such leisure? Occasionally she leaned forward to toss a pebble or a crab apple over the edge, and her hair would slip down, revealing her ear, or he’d catch a whiff of her perfume. She moved freely, her tattoos iridescent in the sunlight, like she was trying to draw attention to herself. Meanwhile, Achilles sat still for long stretches; being shot at taught self-control.

  “So it’s on you again,” said Janice. She was talking about Troy.

  Achilles nodded. Janice was also the only person he’d told about Troy’s reckless behavior in Afghanistan, the only one who knew that some nights he had to stop himself from looking at Troy’s bed to make sure his uniform and helmet weren’t neatly stacked on top. “It’s doubly fucked up because now that he’s gone, I can’t leave.”

  “She can take care of herself.”

  “It wouldn’t be right for her to be alone. She’s never been alone.”

  Janice frowned briefly, as if she knew something he didn’t, while she rubbed his forearm with the back of her hand, eventually moving up to his bicep. She’d always liked his arms. He buttoned his sweater up to the neck. Seventy-eight degrees was now chilly.

  They sat listening to the quarry trucks: the gasping brakes, the hissing pneumatics, the growl of the engines and gnashing of transmissions alternating as if engaged in conversation. Dump trucks streaming in and out like ants, each bearing a perfect mountain of dirt. Beeping echoed across the quarry as they backed up to the ledge and tilted their beds, offering their cargo to the sky. A stone or two would trickle off the dirt mound, next a minor cascade, then a slice would slip right off and rain down, and then, for a long moment, nothing happened. The mountain of dirt was suspended there in the tilted bed, defying gravity, like it was waiting for the Road Runner to pass and the Coyote to show up and without warning, the whole hogpile would give way, the dirt fanning out like a waterfall returning home. When the bed was loaded high enough, for a split second, one long lick of earth stretched all the way from the truck to the ground some three stories below.

  It was a moment that made him yearn for childhood, for a time when he thought he had a choice between being the Road Runner or the Coyote, a time when he believed life was chock full of opportunities to start over. Not for his father, who swam in this same quarry as a child, who later came to this same quarry with the girlfriend who would become Achilles’s mother. Had they sat under this tree, on the rocky ground, occasionally shifting their weight to brush away pebbles? At twenty-two, Achilles’s age, his father had proposed to his mother. She had been the same age when she accepted.

  Unexpected pockets of silence bubbled up through the clamoring waves below them, moments the whole convoy shifted gears at once, and they could momentarily hear the bees, or the wind leaning on the crab apple tree behind them, or Janice snapping her toes or, for Achilles, his own breathing and his heart, thumping away like a chopper.

  “Hear that?” asked Janice in the sudden silence. She blushed, laughing awkwardly like someone who had just realized her slip was caught in her underwear.

  Achilles nodded, and on the next silence he was ready, reaching for her hair with one hand while slipping the other behind her knee. She turned to face him, and delivered his first kiss in almost twelve months, her lips soft and silky, the chalky taste of lipstick making him inhale as sharply as he had at fifteen. He was just as nervous. In the past year he’d had sex only twice, and each time through a sheet, or it might as well have been because the women would either raise or lower their dresses, but never both. He’d regressed in Goddamnistan; even a shadow of cleav
age had sparked conversation—symmetrical mountain peaks or two potatoes at the bottom of cotton sack or a pillow with a crease in the middle provoked a giggle fit.

  He rolled on top of Janice as they wrestled out of their clothes. After the cool grass her breasts were hot, nipples rising to meet his fingers. He fished a condom out of his pocket, tore the edge of the packet off with his teeth, and handed it to her. She usually put the condom on, which was a source of much laughter and embarrassment in tenth grade. She tossed it aside. “Don’t need that anymore.”

  Achilles didn’t understand.

  “I’m pregnant. Dale.”

  “How do you mean?” asked Achilles. Janice and Dale had married in eleventh grade and divorced the month after graduation. Dale kissing her hearts! Dale had a fucking stutter.

  “No, this is good. I can’t get pregnant again.”

  Achilles rolled onto his side.

  “Come on Keelies. Don’t be mad. Are you mad?” Janice tried to turn his face toward her, but he shrugged her off. “I didn’t know if you were ever coming back. Don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not … mad.” He wasn’t, not really. It was just that pregnancy was so permanent. Now she’d always have a connection to Dale that would be stronger than her connection to him. Everything would be different, even her pussy.

  “C’mon.” Her breasts swayed gently as she leaned over and grabbed his cock. “Moping isn’t sexy in a man.”

  It was his first time without a condom, a new experience, like they’d somehow been joined beyond the body. Afterwards Achilles turned away, a knot tightening in his stomach when he realized Dale had done this first. “Did the condom break?”

  She straddled him, her bemused expression melting as the implication dawned on her. “Oh Keelies.”

  When Janice reached for his hand, he pushed her away, and she settled down behind him, spooning. The clouds were clumped together in the east, like someone had swept them into the corner. Above him, against the bright sky, the silhouette of a hundred little crab apples, small as cherries. His mother used to put peanut butter on celery and dot it with raisins. They’d pretend it was a flute, unless their father was around. It then became a knife or a sword. He thought of the strange, spicy foods his mother was cooking now. She said she wanted to eat what her sons had eaten, so he didn’t see the point in telling her they’d often eaten standard fare like spaghetti and beans-n-franks. He thought of the mail stacked on the table, the boxes in her bedroom, Troy’s envelope, the surprising appearance of a preacher at the funeral service, and the church programs piling up in his mother’s car. “Bingo!” she said whenever he asked about them. Whether that meant she was only going to church for the game, he didn’t know, didn’t want to ask, and felt embarrassed by his reluctance to push the topic. Did she think she was connecting to his father through prayer? She’d always seemed too lively for church and they’d never gone to services, so the idea spooked him. He thought of Teddy Ruxpin, his brother’s now-silent emissary, and of Stuttering Dale. Good for Dale. Achilles didn’t want a kid anyway, especially not with Janice. Every guy in town would tell it, “I could’ve been your daddy.”

  But none of that would have really mattered, because Achilles and his son would have known the truth: they belonged to each other, permanently, undeniably. The quarry fell silent and Janice reached for his hand again. He let her take it.

  Several days later, Achilles answered an out-of-area call on his cell phone hoping it would be his brother. Instead he heard Kyle Wages say, “I just saw Troy.”

  “Where is he?” asked Achilles.

  “I was on the bus, and he was gone by the time I got off and ran back.” Wages paused. “Where are you now?”

  “Where’d you see him?”

  “A church,” said Wages.

  “A church?”

  “They were handing out food.”

  Achilles was puzzled but exhilarated, and started packing before he hung up. He accepted the sighting as gospel. He, Troy, Merriweather, Jackson, and Wages had spent two tours together in deserts and mountains, parting only to piss, and often not even then. After some hesitation he decided to bring the blue envelope, a vial his mother had filled with his father’s ashes, and the small swatch of Jackson’s uniform that had come off in his hand that day. Everything clicked into place as he packed his rucksack. Obviously Troy was looking for his birth parents. Why else would he be in New Orleans in a food line?

  His mother insisted on walking him out to his car, where she gave him a small box the size of an eyeglass case and told him to wait to open it. She offered her usual advice and extracted the usual promises, lingering at the car instead of walking back to the house and waving from the porch. He remembered that his father would usually walk her back.

  “It’s not like I’m shipping out.”

  “I know. That’s not what I’m thinking about. I’m remembering the first day you went to school, and how you were ready to go even then. Not Troy. When his time came, he cried like … well, like Troy. He always whined a lot, not like you. You were always ready to go.”

  “I’ll leave the envelope here.”

  She shook her hands emphatically, waving the suggestion off. “No! No! No! That’s not it. It’s your right to take that. You have to live for the future, not for the past. And so you need to know that your father hadn’t lived here for almost a year. He moved out last May, two days before my birthday.” She paused as if to let that sink in. “Oh, you better believe we argued about it. But I finally won. He packed up his old duffle. I asked him to think of it as a gift to me. But none of it had anything to do with you or your brother.”

  “You were getting divorced?”

  “We hadn’t decided,” she said. “We were going to take this trip, then see.”

  “Why tell me now?”

  “So that you know no one’s perfect, and you know that nothing that happened is your fault.”

  “Like what?”

  “None of it. I just want you to be you. Not your father, not your brother, not worrying about taking care of anyone but yourself.”

  Achilles was stunned. They’d called together, and even sent a photo of themselves gardening together, and when he’d last been home less than a year before, his father had been painting the house. The thought that they’d put on a show for him stung.

  One hand on her arm and the other on her backpack, he walked his mother back to the porch, still cluttered with trash bags stuffed with decorations, and gave her another hug, slipping his hands under the ever-present burden. He respected her determination, but something still bothered him. Later he realized that she was doing some kind of penance. In the army, they ran with packs for conditioning and punishment, but unlike his mother, they unsaddled themselves at every available opportunity.

  He patted the pack. She squeezed his hand one last time. “You don’t have to do this.”

  But oh how he wanted to do it, to get out of that bedroom, that house, that town, to have a mission again. The route out of town scaled the eastern hills, offering a view of the valley and the endless identical carport subdivisions built during his early childhood, and outside of that, the ring of two-car garage developments from his teens, and outside of that, the mini-mansions that appeared while he was on active duty. From most angles, the roads resembled a random sprinkling of commas and parentheses. His favorite view was from the zenith, where he could see how the highway carved a semicircle, and that highway, taken together with all the looping and whirling roads inside that half-moon, resembled a sketch of the brain. When he was a kid he told himself the design was intentional, and he took comfort in a grand designer.

  He’d promised his mother that he’d be careful, drive no more than nine miles over the speed limit, stop when tired (and let her know where), avoid sleeping in deserted rest areas, wouldn’t eat much fast food, and was doing this because he wanted to. He’d sworn that he was. He did want to. What other choice did he have? On his eighth birthday he’d been promised a b
ig surprise, expected a golden Labrador retriever, and received a brother. His mother said, “You’ll never be alone.” His father said, “Don’t need blood to be brothers.”

  CHAPTER 2

  THE WINDOWS WERE UP, UNLIKE ALL THOSE HOURS WITH GUN BARRELS resting on the doorframes. Troy had grown increasingly sullen the closer they came to home, his face set in the scowl he usually only wore after losing—a game, a bet, a race, a woman. He perked up when a dump truck with DC plates cut them off, snapping, “Rock’em sock’em, two-o-clock!” laying on the horn and swerving across three lanes onto the rough while Achilles barked, “Got it!” as he planted both feet on the floorboard, pressing his back into the seat to steady his aim while reaching for the weapon he didn’t have. Achilles had expected that sooner or later they’d get zulu-foxtrot. It was the kind of shit they saw in old movies, salty vets tensing up if someone so much as snapped. They’d laughed off their Deer Hunter moment, each claiming the other would play Christopher Walken’s character, and Troy went right back to sulking as if drunk, his head lolling back and his words garbled like he was forcing them out to keep from choking on them.

  For the last few months everybody had talked about nothing but home, until the final weeks, when no one mentioned home at all, but Achilles knew they thought about it. Everyone wore a faraway look—not the kind that settled over them like a shroud after the first firefight, not the triumphant glare that was a shield, not the inward gaze they wore after Jackson died, when they avoided each others’ eyes for the ride home, as Troy now seemed to be doing. It was another look, like quiet embarrassment, like they were each watching a film no one else could see, some romantic comedy they were forced to endure but ended up secretly enjoying. It was then that they redoubled the promise to stay in touch, start a Myspace page, have an annual reunion. Achilles knew the desperate promises wouldn’t hold, not with everyone already retreating into the past. Merriweather stopped playing rap, opting again for the gospel that had shaken their tent the first few weeks. Wages started writing Bethany more, scribbling every night by the glow of his flashlight, or clicking away on his laptop, depending on how the day had gone. “Some shit’s just easier to type.” Troy had found a battered Kama Sutra in a raid and immediately loaned it out, because it was “too much like window-shopping.” He reclaimed the book not long before they left, openly studying it at dusk and dawn, reading and rereading like it was a newspaper and he had to catch up with the rest of the world.