Page 69 of Until Joy

Graham was somehow able to lift out of the recliner with me in his arms.

He turned around and set me back down in the chair.

“I’ll be right back.”

I nodded again. Before I knew it, he came out of the kitchen with a bottle of water and a plastic shopping bag, then he went down the hallway and came back with a roll of toilet paper. I looked up at him and gave him a soggy grin.

He shrugged. “I figure it was better than paper towels.”

I giggled. It felt good. “You thought right.” I blew my nose and threw the tissue into the plastic bag. Then I drank down half the bottle of water.

“How are you feeling?”

“Kind of embarrassed.”

Graham crouched down in front of me and snorted. “Liking pineapple on your pizza, now that you should be embarrassed about. This shit? No way.”

“I don’t know, Wallace. Wiping snot on your shirt is pretty damned embarrassing…” I took another look at the big wet mark on his t-shirt.

“Well, I can sure as hell top that. For a while, my nickname during training was ‘Crack Operator’.”

I was confused. “Wasn’t that a good thing?” I asked.

“It could have been. But not in my case.”

“Why not?”

He sat down on the arm of the chair and put his arm around me. “Believe it or not, back in my younger days, I was kind of competitive.”

This time I was the one who snorted. “Really? Are you trying to tell me you aren’t anymore?”

“Hush up. This is my story. No smart-ass comments allowed.”

“Anyway, back in California, I was making my best time ever on the SEAL Team’s obstacle course. I had a real shot at beating my classmate, Steve Lotts, and I was giving it all I could. The thing that normally got me was the Slide for Life obstacle. It came near the end of the O-Course, but this time I literally breezed through it. I got up to the platform and slid down the rope, smooth as silk. It burned a little, but it didn’t matter, I knew I was going to beat Lotts’ time.” Graham looked down at me, and I snuggled close. He gave a weary sigh.

“Then what happened?”

“Since everybody in my class knew I was gunning for Steve, most of them were watching. I got to the next obstacle, which was the Rope Swing. My hands were fatigued, so my grip wasn’t the best, but I made it. When I was running for the Incline Wall, I realized that the guys in my class were laughing. But I tuned them out. I needed to focus. The second to the last obstacle was a bitch and a half. It’s called the Spider Wall. You have to grip small sections of wood that are spread far apart and get to the end. I lunged for the last wooden grip and swung my leg around. That’s when I felt it.” He paused.

“Felt what?” I prompted.

“The California beach breeze, flowing across my junk.”

“What? What are you talking about?” I knew my eyes were wide as saucers. I couldn’t help it.

Graham, slid his hand over his face, then shook his head. He continued. “I found out later from one of my classmates that while I was on the ‘Slide for Life’, my fatigues had torn open at the crotch. It was only a little tear, but as I’d continued through the course, the tear got bigger and bigger. Thank God the Navy insisted you wear underwear, otherwise I would have been dangling in the breeze.”

I laughed so hard I started to choke. “That didn’t really happen, did it?” I wheezed out my question.

“Oh yeah, it did. But even though I realized my pants were split open, there was no way I was going to let that stop me from finishing the course. I had to end with the Vaults obstacle and then do fifty pushups. By the time I was done, it wasn’t just my classmates who were watching. I had two more classes who were checking me out and four senior chiefs. It was miserable.”

“What’s a senior chief?”

“You know what a drill sergeant is, don’t you?”

“Yep.”

“That’s what a senior chief is, only ten times worse,” Graham said.