Warbigbang - to a place inside where there is joy - part 3

[eudaimon]

He opens his eyes and he's in Iraq again. It's not unfamiliar. It's sad that he feels at home here; he feels more settled in his skin in this place. He knows what job he has to do. In a rational part of his mind, he's aware that he's not really here, knows that he's somewhere else, sated and sleeping in Nate's arms. This is not a rational thing though. He accepts his lack of MOPP suit; he accepts a t-shirt stencilled 'FICK'; he accepts the fragrant cool of the early evening.

He accepts.

Brad bends to unlace his combat boots. They rested in this wadi. Rudy made coffee. He remember sleeping in the sun for a couple of hours. Amid the chaos, a little piece of quiet.

Birds in the trees. The muted hum of insects. People think that Iraq is all desert but that's not true. Parts of it remember how to be a garden.

He leaves his boots lying on their side in the grass.

He becomes aware of her all of a sudden; he hadn't seen her before, bent low over her knees in the long grass. There's something about her that reminds him of his sister. When he was a kid, it bothered him for about five minutes that his sister favoured their mother where he never could. This woman is dark eyed and dark haired, not so much beautiful as remarkable. There is something utterly remarkable about her, but quietly so, and she sits there with her chin resting on one knee. Her uniform looks crisp and white against the faded palette of the desert.

“Hello, Marine,” she says and she looks at him and smiles.
“Ma'am,” he says, sinking down to sit beside her.
“I was just looking for the ocean,” she says, biting the inside of her lip. “There's never any ocean anymore. So I try and picture it, and you know what? Turns out that's a goddamn trial when it's not right there in front of ya.”

Brad grew up next to the ocean, learned to surf before he learned to ride a bike, but even he knows that going looking for the ocean in the desert is a sure road to disappointment.

He pauses.

“What're we doing here?” he asks her. She looks at him, dark eyes shrewd and sure.

“Waiting,” she says. “Well, I am. You're just visiting.”
“...Waiting for what?”

She tilts her head. A smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. He feels measured. When she's done, he feels lacking.

“How much do you know about Heaven, Marine?”
“Brad,” he says, gently. “My name is Brad.
“Okay,” she says, flashing a truer smile than before and he's pretty sure that he falls a little bit in love with her, like Beth and Sharahah before her, and he has to wonder where all of these remarkable women were, when his heart was still his own to lose.

She offers him her hand and he takes it.

“Good to meet you, Brad. Lena Basilone.” The name is familiar. He hopes that there isn't a Marine alive who wouldn't recognise the name; he's cynical enough to know that that is not the case. “Welcome to Fiddler's Green.”

The 'heaven' question suddenly makes more sense. It's another thing that not every Marine would know, but something that Brad knows, all the same. Fiddler's Green is the end, a far green end, beyond a wide ocean. Marines make do but, eventually, like all sailors and every fucker else given to the sea, they eventually find their reward.

“It looks like Iraq,” he says, dumbly.

She nods.

“Because it's you,” she says. “It always looks like California to me.”
“But no ocean.”

Her mouth purses. She shakes her head.

“Not without him,” she says.
They sit in silence for a while.

He frowns and turns to look at her. She has her eyes closed and the wind is stirring the loose curls of her hair around her face. He never saw weather like he saw in Iraq: the way the wind would blow in from the desert so suddenly, the sand scraping all of the sense out of everything. Here, there is nothing but a breeze stirring Lena's hair and the collar of her uniform.

“It's been a long time since that war ended,” he says.

She nods, smooths her hair back from her face. There's a gold wedding band on her finger.

“I can wait,” she says. “I could wait forever for him.”
“And you're sure he's coming?”

She nods.

“Oh, yeah,” she says, still nodding. “I'll wait and, eventually, he'll come walking around the bend and the ocean'll be right there behind him. And all of that waiting will be worth it.”

Brad understands completely.

“There's a firebase in Helmand Province called Fiddler's Green,” he says, and he shifts his weight, digging a tin of Copenhagen out of his pocket. In the end, he doesn't dip. He turns the tin over and over between his fingers and Lena reaches out, taking it out of his hands and opening it. She sniffs it. Her black eyelashes flutter.

“I never wanted another man again,” she says, and she smiles. Brad finds himself smiling in return. When he tilts his head, he can hear fiddle music, reminiscent of those nights that he and Nate sat in Irish bars and it felt like, yes, this could actually be his life.

Lena stands up. In the way of dreams, her white uniform changes, slips into polka dots and a flared hem. She brushes her fingers through black curls and holds out both her hands to him.

“Come here and dance with me, Marine.”

Brad has never been a good dancer; it makes him awkward and self-conscious. It's one of the only times when he ever truly feels his height. He sits in the sand, looking up at Sergeant Lena Basilone and it occurs to him say no, I'll wait this one out but then he realises two things: that it's hard to say 'no' to the truly remarkable ones, the roaring girls, and that you shouldn't ever look a gift-horse in the mouth.

He pushes to his feet, and takes Lena by the hands.

It's not really dancing, what they end up doing. They mostly stand together, her hands on his shoulders, her arms around his waist. Her head rests against his chest. What Brad knows about this woman is this: that she returned ten thousand dollars and refused a government burial plot in Arlington; that she knew a man for seven months, renounced all claim on his memory, loved him for her entire life. It's not really dancing, but it's enough.

“Tell me I'm not crazy,” she says, muffled against his shoulder.
“You're not crazy,” he tells her. “I'd have waited too.”

And always the fiddle music and a beat that they can't quite follow.

In the end, they part and Lena stretches up onto her tiptoes to kiss Brad's cheek.

“What rank?” she asks him.
“Captain. Technically.”

That smile again. She raises one eyebrow.

“Worth it?”

Brad nods, not even a flicker of a doubt in his heart.

“Absolutely.”

This time, she kisses him on the mouth. A sweet kiss, but yielding and chaste. A goodbye kiss. A fare you well though we'll never meet again sort of kiss.

“Be good,” she tells him and then turns and walks away, the desert breeze ruffling her skirt out from her thighs. Brad watches her go and then he turns and walks back to the grassy wadi. He lies down and closes his eyes. The sun shines down on him and it's easy to forget that Iraq is supposed to be mostly desert.

The last thing he wonders if why you never remember when you fall asleep in dreams?
And fare you well, Sergeant. Fare you well.

*
He opens his eyes in time to watch Nate pad across the bedroom naked and slip back into bed. There's a slight chill clinging to his skin and Brad wraps himself around him, chasing it away.

Nate turns his head, presses his nose into the pillow and stifling a yawn.

“How long are you here?” he asks, and Brad knows that he knows already, knows that there's a datebook somewhere with his trip neatly pencilled in, but he's in love with this man, so he humours him.

“Seventy-two hours and the rest of tonight,” he says.
He lifts his head enough to watch Nate smile, already drifting back to sleep.

“We're not getting out of bed at all tomorrow,” he says, stifling another yawn. “Except to answer the door to the pizza guy.”

Brad presses a kiss behind his ear.

“Whatever you say,” he tells him. There's a moment when there's no sound in the room but the two of them breathing. “Nate?”

“Hmmm?”
“I'd wait for you forever,” he tells him. No response except for the soft rise and fall of Nate's breathing. Brad files it away.

Sleep eludes him. On Nate's side of the bed, there's a collection of poetry by Constantine Cavafy, columns of text, original and translation. The Greek looks so foreign to Brad that he can barely comprehend that it must be language. He turns to the page that Nate marked with a folded corner.

When you set sail for Ithaca,
wish for the road to be long,
full of adventures, full of knowledge

it strikes a chord. He lies down beside Nate again, the book against his hip and it's like he can see the whole journey and all the journeys to come spread out ahead of him, criss-crossing America like veins and maybe the war will end soon and maybe it won't, but the truth is that he'll wait forever and that Odysseus journeyed for fifteen years and that there is no limit on how far Brad Colbert can go.

He lies in Nate's bed and listens to his lover breathing and the beginning of birdsong in the trees in the street outside.