The grey light flashed and I counted to twenty and then it went dark. Leaving the car, I breathed deeply to calm my sparking nerves. The scene inside the shed would be familiar, I knew, but that didn’t make it any more palatable.
In the years before leaving home, Toby had used our father’s device regularly. Some days he was the golden hero of my early youth, and other days he appeared crazy, eyes wild and mouth shimmering with spittle as he recounted one moral outrage or another. On those days, he went to the shed and wired himself to the apparatus, as if it were a meditative aid. He marched through the broiling gut of hell all the while insisting he was fine in the fire. I’m getting better. Really I am. I begged him to stop. My mother never said a word. My father never looked so proud.
It’s easy to blame the old man, but he thought he was helping. In college, I did some research of my own, investigating accepted “cures” of the day, and I found a number of references to electro-shock and aversion therapy. I’m sure this was the kind of information he came across during his trip to Dallas. His life was machines, and each part had to work in a particular way to keep the machine running. It would never occur to him that he didn’t understand a part or its function. Its value. My father wasn’t a villain; he was just a hick who wanted to save his son from a lifetime of sadness and shame — the only future he could imagine for a broken part in the social machine.
At the door to the shed, I lifted my fist and knocked. The gray light poured from beneath the door and then went out. When my second rap went unanswered, I pushed open the door. Toby lay on the cot. He was dead. He’d been gone for a while, maybe since hanging up after leaving me his last message.
The sight of him coiled in my throat along with the odors of urine, burned skin, and singed hair. Deep lines carved in around his mouth and brow; he hadn’t even bothered inserting the bit between his teeth. His eyes had poached in the sockets; blood and viscous tears clotted at this temples. He appeared to be smiling, but I had to believe it was the strained rictus of his final shock.
For a moment, I thought I could see the golden boy beneath the layers of weight and folds of skin, but it was only my mind playing tricks, an evanescent denial with no more weight than projected light. I choked on a sob and fought an urge to race to the cot, but a loud voice in the back of my head, reason or dread, warned me away from the coursing voltage. Instead of running to Toby’s side, I crossed the shed to disconnect the machine.
As I had done on the first night I’d witnessed my father’s therapy, I leaned over the rheostat to reach the wall plug. Toby had turned the rheostat to full power. The white dash on the black dial pointed at a peeling corner of tape and the letter E in the word Danger, written in red ink. The ink had faded.
The light went out and then returned with a shoosh and a click. A deadly hum filled the room. Foolishly, I glanced back at the screen. The image projected there froze me. It was of Toby and our father. The man, younger than I ever remembered him being, stood on a tractor in the parking lot of the John Deere facility. In one hand he held a rag and in the other he held a monstrous wrench. With one foot on the running board and the other on the tractor seat, he looked like a big game hunter, gloating over the carcass of an unfortunate trophy. Toby as a toddler stood on the pavement grinning up at his daddy, clapping his tiny hands together in a display of ecstatic joy.
MAJORLENA
Jane Jakeman
She scared the hell out of me.
We never did find out where she came from, before she found us.
After the explosions, three of us scrambled out, away from the road, over the ridge. There was a rocky overhang on the other side. I had the map they’d showed us still in my head. We were bang in the middle of real thick hostiles territory, like jelly in a doughnut.
“Fuck it, man, we stay right here,” hissed Leroy.
“You ain’t in charge,” said Schulz.
“We stay on the ridge,” I said.
The explosion had taken out the lead trucks. If we hadn’t been straggling, we’d have been gone as well.
There was no movement on the road except for flames. Then came black smoke and a stink. Strange, I knew what it was right away. Like in my mom’s kitchen when she made us taffy, stirring away in a boiling-hot saucepan.
“Man comin’ up!” shouted Leroy. Then he added, “Jeez, maybe it’s a female!”
A helmet outlined above the ridge, then a small figure, hands high, coming up slowly in regulation desert boots, skidding on the sand and shale. People think the Iraqi desert is smooth sand like the beach, but there’s places where it’s all little stones slipping under your feet. When I think of Major Lena now, and I try not to do that, it’s what I remember: the air full of black smouldering stuff and the smell of burning sugar.
We hadn’t thought anyone else was alive, but she came from the direction of the road. She was dead cautious, waited, lay on the ground, let Schulz take her rifle and fumble all over her.
“Clean!” he shouted.
She had dog-tags, ID, but it was her voice, more than anything, that was ranking US female military. Though, like I said, we never did find out exactly where she was from. She had a kit-bag and Schulz pushed his hand in it.
“No weapons here,” he said.
This was just after dawn and we was stuck there in the desert. Go back down onto the road — no way! A beat-up old wagon came along the road as we were sitting under that ridge; it was full of rag-heads, their rifles all sticking out at odd angles. They didn’t spot us. We might have taken them, four of us now, all armed. But something a damned sight more powerful had taken out the trucks — a rocket-launcher, maybe — and whoever fired that might still be around.
This bunch nudged through the smouldering debris with their rifles. It looked like the metal was still too hot to touch — one of them put a hand to a door and drew it back like he’d been scorched. They didn’t hang around.
We took a good look at ourselves. Two privates, Leroy and Schulz. Me, the sergeant. And the woman, Major Lena. I guess she had a surname but I don’t remember one. Whenever I think of her, which is as little as possible, it’s all run together like it was one name — Majorlena. Sounds like a fancy name someone might give a girl. Anyway, that’s what we called her. “Yes, Majorlena! Sure, Majorlena! Show us your boobs, Majorlena!”
No, not that. We’d never have dared.
“I’m taking charge here, Sergeant,” she said in that voice, slow scraping on steel, flashing her white teeth (that’s another reason we was sure she was genuine US of A) but not in any real smile.
She had brown eyes, huge, but not pretty.
“Yes, sir!” I said.
“We’ll assess the situation.”
We assessed.
Stuck in the middle of a fucking desert surrounded by terrorists, that was our situation.
And no food or water.
Choppers circled above the roadkill like great buzzing flies, and I said, “Sir, we could spread out our shirts or wave something at them.”
“Yeah, they’re bound to see us,” said Leroy. “They’re real low.”
He ran to the top of the ridge of rock, pulled his shirt off and waved it. There was a burst of machine-gun fire. They had lousy aim. Leroy came running back and we all crowded under the overhang.