Love Makers, Heart Breakers

An Iraq war veteran encounters an old flame.

He ran into his old flame in a drugstore parking lot. “Holly,” he said, surprised.

“I thought that was you, Sam.” Her voice reflected her smile.

A light snowstorm swirled around them as they hugged. ”Do you live out this way now?” he asked. The last he had heard she was married, living out on the east coast somewhere.

“No, no” she said, “I’m just in town for a wedding.” Snowflakes were catching in her hair, which looked more brunette and less redhead than he remembered. Maybe she colored it now. His own black hair was already getting some flecks of gray at the temples. Prematurely, he thought, making an inside joke with himself.

They decided to go into the coffee shop next to the CVS and catch up.

They were greeted inside with warm air and the aroma of hazelnut. Bing Crosby was softly crooning White Christmas over the ceiling speakers. White mini-lights adorned the walls and a small, over-decorated Christmas tree stood in the far corner.

They ordered their drinks at the counter and chatted a little awkwardly about nothing while waiting; the weather, how soon it gets dark. They stood nearly eye to eye. At five-ten he wasn’t that tall for a guy, but at five-nine she was tall for a girl. Woman now, he corrected himself. Though she still had the same willowy figure he remembered. And the same soft, unlined face. She still looked twenty-three.

His black coffee in a cardboard cup came first and he staked out a small round table by the front window. She soon joined him, carrying a steaming ceramic cup on a saucer. “Raspberry tea,” she said with a smile, her eyes even greener than he remembered. It was her drink when they were together.

“So tell me what you’ve been up to,” she said, settling in. Snowflakes melted on the big window, blurring the cars in the slushy parking lot.

“Work, sleep, eat,” he said. “I’m a VP now.”

“Oh, you’re law abiding?”

He smiled. When they had first met he had a lot of pent up anger, which sometimes got him into trouble. Girls saw him as a bad boy back then.

She reminded him how they had had to cancel their third date because he had gotten into a bar fight earlier that day and had been hauled away by the Cuyahoga County police.

“I thought you had stood me up,” she said. “Do you remember what you said when you finally called? When I asked you what happened?”

The memory caused him to smile sheepishly even after all these years. He nodded yes. “I told you that I had spent the night in a gated community."

They laughed. Her laughter still had that light, bell-tinkling quality.

“Last I heard, you were out on the east coast,” he said. He’d already noticed her rings. The diamond looked like it would have to be weighed on a truck scale.

“We still are,” she said. “Vermont. We love to ski.” She rummaged through her purse and brought out pictures of her family: ruggedly handsome husband David, and two boys and a girl. She told a little, funny story with each of the kids pictures.

She blew on her tea, then took a sip. “How about you? Are you married?”

“Used to be,” he said.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said.

“She died,” he said. “Drunk driver.”

She inhaled sharply. “Oh my God.”

He didn’t mention that his wife had been the drunk.

She reached out and put her hand on top of his. The heat from her touch rocketed him back to another time and another place. Back to when they had just become a couple. One night, in bed, he had told her he had gotten this letter inviting him to Washington, D.C., for a thing; asked her if she would go with him. What kind of thing, she had asked.

It was a presentation thing. At the White House. He was being awarded a medal.

She was excited, then immediately suspicious. She had known him only a short time, and what she did know was that he was a warehouse manager for a logistics company in Mansfield, Ohio. Realistically, not a likely candidate to receive an invitation to the White House.

He explained. The medal was coming years after the fact. From stuff that happened in Iraq. He didn’t want to go into it more than that.

But just that little amount of talk had been enough to give him a bad night, something that he thought he was long past. In the nightmare the two Humvees were upside down, smoldering hulks in the road. The three-hundred pound bulk of Sargent Vickers lay in the dirt near him, his head turned to look at Sam, his eyes blinking. Sam felt the rest of the squadron scattered in the road around him, but he couldn’t see any of them. Next, in the way that dreams work, he was suddenly right up against Vickers, using his body as a shield, his M-16 lying across Vickers’ stomach, sighting through one of those illegal Jesus scopes to focus in on a flowing white dishdashah half a click away, pulling the trigger, and as he did Vickers’ body was hit and he jerked and moaned a little and said, ‘Sam, it hurts,’ and every time Sam would fire Vickers would get shot again.

In the middle of the night she had wrapped her arms around his sleeping, slow-motion flailing body. He woke drenched in sweat, his hands trembling, his voice high-pitched from fear. She calmed him; touched him, whispered in his ear, kissed him. Eventually he slept again.

He had worn a black tux with a black bowtie. She had worn a pale teal gown that emphasized her eyes. The White House protocol officer met them when they arrived and went over the order of events, walked them into the room, went over the seating arrangements, introduced them around. Holly had been radiant, a beacon of beauty in the solemn room with its formal setting. The men paid as much attention to her as to him. More, maybe.

The ceremony was brief, possibly because President Bush was busy that day. After some words the President lowered the five-pronged medal over Sam’s head from behind and fastened the clasp. They took some pictures afterward, then the President was gone and it was over.

That evening there was a smaller, informal get-together just for marine personnel. A few people went up to the podium and said nice things about him, and then he was asked to say a few words. Normally, that would have given him the nervous jitters, but he’d had just the right amount of alcohol to stay calm. Relaxed, even.

“Sometimes when I’m out having a couple beers with civilians,” he had said from the podium, “and they ask me what it was like over there, getting shot and all, I tell them by the time I got shot the fourth time I was starting to get pretty annoyed.” He looked around the room. Some chuckles. A few smiles here and there.

“But I never tell them the truth. First, because they don’t really want to hear it, and second, because, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson, they can’t handle the truth.” The tinkling of silverware and glasses began to diminish.

“But I can tell you all.  You marines.” He looked out over them into the silence. “I can tell you.” He wondered briefly what he was doing. He had never talked about this to anybody. And there were spouses in the room. And his new girlfriend. He suddenly realized he must be drunk. But he couldn’t stop himself.

“This is what I remember. I remember being in a fog. A fog of confusion wrapped in this eerie horror-movie silence because my eardrums had been blown out from the explosion. It was like actually being in one of those old silent films instead of just watching it from a chair or something, an old silent, black and white war movie where I would keep going out onto that road and pulling one guy after another into this ditch, and each time I did I got silently shot again. By the time I got Sargent Vickers into the ditch I just had one arm and one leg that was still semi-working.” He lowered his head, took a breath, then looked up again and continued. “I saw drops of blood falling from my face and thought I must have got hit there, but realized it was just tears running through all the blood. And then when I wanted to lay down and sleep more than anything I had to gather up everybody’s clips. Switch my M16 to automatic. So I could spray rounds everywhere.” He was starting to slur his words a little. “You marines know this, know it takes about three seconds to go through a magazine on full automatic. That’s what I had to start doing ‘cause the Abibs were closin’ in.”

He saw some of the brass squirm when he used the slur. Ah-beebs. He didn’t care. He was missing a lung, a spleen, and about four feet of intestine from that war; that goddam worthless war that changed nothing.

Until just this minute he didn’t realize how much he hated everything about it; the godforsaken country, the enemy, the people, the smells, the goddam heat, the sand, the roaming dogs, the backwards laws, the lack of alcohol, the lack of women. Everything. Everything about that a*s-backwards country he hated. And he was not ashamed to hate it, not ashamed to be racist. He’d earned the right. When one of these brass dickheads decided to donate four feet of intestine to the cause then they could sit at their goddam table in the Watergate and frown at him. Until then they could go straight to hell. Which, if he remembered correctly, was about two clicks outside of Fallujah.

Someone led him back to his table, sat him back down next to Holly.

And now, like déjà vu, here he was sitting with her again, at another round table in this coffee shop in Mansfield.

Not long after that trip to D.C. they had broken up. He suspected she had decided not to hitch her wagon to such a psychically-damaged star. He couldn’t blame her for that. But maybe if he had tried a little harder…

They attempted to talk about old friends, what was going on with them now, but they really hadn’t gone out together long enough to remember each others' friends. Then he could see she was preparing to leave, looking at her watch, gathering her coat. He didn’t want her to go.

“So,” she said, rising, “I hope the rest of your life goes well, Sam.”

“You, too,” he said.

They hugged. She didn’t offer him a phone number. A quick peck on his cheek and she was gone.

He didn’t even remember the drive home, his mind replaying each minute in the café. Back in his kitchen he reached up into the cupboard and brought down the Maker’s Mark and bitters. He noted the irony as Auld Lang Syne came on the stereo. He thin-sliced an orange, added some sugar to the glass and mixed up an old fashioned. He didn’t have a cherry, so he’d have to live without.

Wasn’t that just the story of his life.