Page 4 of Road Refugees

“Ah,” I said, breathing out the flaming fumes. “What’s wrong, Slappy?”

Oh, I fucking knew what was wrong. Memories were returning to him.

“Chloe,” he squeaked. We’d been going over and over what had happened to Slappy and his wife. Slappy was my buddy in arms. Guys still active at Fort Carson often came to my condo. We’d laugh about our nightmares, about drinking too much, how no one could drive under an overpass without changing lanes. I never said no to any buddies, no matter how late it was or how heavily I wanted to drink myself into a stupor. “Come on over,” was my motto.

If you’re a leader in a combat zone, you’re faithful to your men and women. When my tour was done, I still felt obliged to my brothers in arms. Because without them, you’re dead. And being discharged, you’re abandoning them. That’s why I stayed in way longer than I should have.

I put a hand on his shoulder. “I know, buddy. I know.”

Now thoroughly anguished, he yanked the bottle from me. “Why, buddy, why? Why did the fucking army leave us in the lurch? I can never go back to Fort Carson!”

I tried to recall the reassuring words I’d given him before. “I’m pissed at the army too, man. They don’t help you handle the pain they inflict. Remember how undermanned and unequipped we were in-country? They didn’t care.”

Slappy shoved my shoulder with his palm, and I staggered a step. “Yeah, but no abortion? Seriously? We knew our child was fatally deformed months ago. And yet no abortion?”

“That’s their fucking conservative rule,” I said.

Slappy gulped too much rum and choked. It came out his nose as he coughed. I relieved him of the bottle and refilled my glass. I said, “I imagined at first I didn’t believe in the fucking army anymore. Not really. I do believe. We were just being sent to an undermanned and ridiculously planned war. You know what we’ve got? We’ve got fucking PTSD!”

Slappy gripped my shoulder and jiggled me so stridently the rum sloshed over the edge of the glass and splashed my boot. “No shit we’ve got PTSD! We’ve got PTSD coming out our fucking ears!” Smashing his skull between his palms, he went to a window, but didn’t raise the blinds. “I’m a fucking blackened searing screaming carcass of a man because of what they put us through! Nobody thought Eve would live past a week, that’s how deformed we knew she was from the beginning.”

“Yet she lived eight weeks,” I said, trying to remember if that was a good or bad thing. No, it was a bad thing. Slappy was my best buddy. I should’ve known that.

But I’d forgotten, and Slappy turned on me. Roaring, he lurched toward me, hands in the shape of my neck. “We had to live with that thing for eight weeks!”

I checked Slappy’s attack with my left forearm. He tried to redirect with his free arm, but I wrenched it with both fists, giving him a snakebite. Walking his forearm round to his right side, I used a wrist lock to twist it into the small of his back and slide it up his spine.

At least, I think I did. I remember hearing and feeling the crunch of his ulna bone in my fists. I must’ve blacked out for a few seconds because I don’t remember shoving his head down to his knees and yelling, “Eat shit and die, motherfucker!” He told me I said that, much later.

The next move would’ve been to smash his face into the carpet and knee him between the shoulder blades, but thank God I stopped just short of that.

Slappy hadn’t laid a finger on me.

Yet perhaps I’d just broken his arm.

“Captain Spiro!” he choked.

Releasing him, I exhaled mightily. His coming at me like that was so unexpected, but my reaction was probably overkill.

Smearing my face with my palm, I opened one of the blinds. Whoa. I couldn’t handle the glaring scene presented to me. I had to step away. Slappy lay face down as though abandoning his push-ups, hand resting on his hip, limp. I reached down to him.

“Come on, buddy. Sorry about that. Let’s forget all about that.”

Like doing an Upward Dog, Slappy raised his torso. “What just happened?”

I didn’t want to remind him. About Chloe, Eve, and the army screwing him over. I knew from what little I’d read that PTSD makes a person mentally unable to evolve past his trauma. I’d moved ten miles from Fort Carson into a mountainside condo, but I still had a Captain Morgan in my hand and a case of beer cooling in the fridge.

Lifting him by his good arm, I said, “Hey, let’s go down the street for some more rum.”

“Sounds outstanding.”

Slappy and I had served together during the Raqqa Offensive in Syria. After my accident, I’d stayed on to help build the base in Dei rez-Zor. Slappy and I went outside the wire a lot on various missions that no one else wanted. He had a dull sort of senseless spunk which made him the perfect partner. As I dragged myself, ligaments and tendons screaming, through each day, I felt I was working for the men under me, keeping both Syrians and Americans alive. After six tours of duty I had only a commitment to my platoon, and a nation that deployed me. After the attempted assassination, I became nuttier than a port-a-potty at a peanut festival. It became too close for comfort.

I took my cane and a cowboy hat, shrugging into a leather jacket to cover the drunken military tattoo on my bicep. Slappy walked slowly to accommodate me as I cripped along. A guy I recognized as a neighbor said hi to me on the sidewalk, but I said nothing back. I found out later everyone in our condo association was sort of afraid of me.

As we moved toward the business district, Slappy said, “Guess who I ran into? Crybaby.”

I smiled a crooked smile, damaged nerves at birth numbing the left side of my mouth. Girls used to say they liked it. Who knew? “Crybaby! Tommy Dick Sands.”