Repo Men (13 page)

Without waiting, I snatched the tuna sandwich from her plate, ate it while maintaining perfect eye contact, and didn’t flinch a bit when she slapped me, full bore, across the face. That’s how our life together began: something stolen, someone slapped.

Perhaps I should have taken it as a sign.

Most nights I’d come home at two, three in the morning, and she’d be up, sitting cross-legged in the middle of our bed, a grotesque four-poster that she’d so kindly brought into the relationship, like her lamps and her armoire and her little soap holders with the brass feet. My life was never
my
life with Mary-Ellen, at least not in the way I ever expected it to be, but I was willing to take a backseat to antiquities in order to make my second marriage work better than my first.

The fights didn’t begin automatically. By the time I arrived at the front door, wiped out from a hard night, I wanted one of two things: sleep or sex. Sometimes both, sometimes in varying order. Mary-Ellen, for all of her professed dislike of my career, wanted to ask questions.

“Who was he?” she’d ask. “Where’d he live? What organ was it? Did he struggle? Did you cry?”

She always asked this last one, and I always answered it in the negative. I think she was hoping one day that I’d slip, that I’d admit to breaking down in a sobbing jag, and that she could use it as a lever to pry me away from the Union. Never happened, of course, but she kept right on with it every night.

And with every question she asked, the quieter I would become, until she was raging against me with all of her strength, and I was sitting back in my easy chair, eyes closed, legs pulled against my chest in that familiar, comforting way. Anyone walked by, they would have thought Mary-Ellen was screaming at a corpse.

Again, perhaps this was something of a sign.

The neighborhood children are playing in the street below once again, jumping rope and singing songs. This time, the tune and the words are different:

There are no old men anymore
, I want to yell down to them. Old men went out with cardiac disease and paper straws. And even if there were an old man to be found, no chance he’d have his original knees.

I don’t know a single person who’s died of old age, unless you count living long enough to be killed as dying of old age. My father had a fatal brain aneurysm the second year I was in the military, and Mom did her thing eight years later, still a young woman, only one too frightened to go on living all by herself. Wonder where I get it from.

Harold Hennenson sure wouldn’t make it to his geriatric years; neither would that kid with the spitballs. Ejected himself right into the roof of the tank, the other soldiers in his machine said, just latched himself into the control chair, pulled one lever too many, and a second later wound up with ground beef from the neck up. The smoke I smelled came from the explosive charge that propelled the chair upward at over a hundred miles an hour. Of course, he didn’t go anywhere close to a hundred miles; three feet did the trick.

After the military service, we were given four hours’ mourning time, during which most of us sat in our control chairs and stared into space, trying to figure out which lever the idiot had pulled and promising ourselves that we would never, ever, do something as god-awfully stupid as that. Chaplain came down to see us, to console us in our time of grief, see if we wanted to ride with him back to the chapel for long-term counseling, but we all humored the guy and shooed him away. Nice enough fellow, but there’s not a lot of use for consolation in the armed forces. When we joined up, each and every one of us knew that there was a chance we’d die during our service, and the loss of a private none of us knew all that well—and a moronic one at that—didn’t have the platoon all choked up.

I like to think that if I were the one who’d ejected myself into the great beyond, the chaplain would have had his hands full with despondent friends who needed his company and guidance for weeks on end, but I know deep down that Father McGuigan was taking that long trip back up the coast all alone one way or the other.

The whole incident is pretty similar to how Greg Kashekian, the Persian from across the street, met his own Muslim maker, or so the story goes. Great bit for the gossipmongers, but as I heard it from Sergeant Ignakowski, and I’ve never had any reason to doubt a single thing Tig ever told me, I feel I can repeat the tale here with confidence:

We were already out in Africa, and our first day—one of our only days, it turned out—of real combat had passed us by. On our side, we had six wounded and two dead, compared to a wholesale slaughter of the enemy, which sustained massive casualties the likes of which I’d previously seen only on television history specials.

Jake and I were personally responsibly for at least eighty-two casualties on the other side. I know this because Jake chose to let loose with a holler and a whoop with each kill, marking off a tick on the inside wall of the tank with a permanent marker he’d purchased in Italy for this very purpose. Our teamwork was impeccable; I drove, he shot, and in this way, we made our mark upon the desert.

By the next morning, the battle was over. We were elated. And, soon enough, drunk. Tig wasn’t a fan of excessive inebriation, but he understood that his soldiers needed to work out their issues in different ways, and he was more than happy to let us get as boiled as cabbages while he sat back and sipped on a water bottle.

Harold, who was only forty-two days away from his own death but didn’t know it, was more animated than I’d ever seen him before; he’d been tank commander that day, riding hard at the point of our vanguard, manning the scopes and leading us across the dunes. Harold was the first to notice the odd ticks on the horizon, and by the time the rest of the tanks had made their way to the top of the dune, the boy from the Bronx and his crew had taken out two enemy battalions with a pair of guided missiles and were well on their way to another hundred or so confirmed kills.

We cheered; we toasted; we sang songs about our virtues and virility. We were Vikings, and we’d pillaged and plundered with the best of them.

Tig left the tent to take a leak. I followed along.

“Pretty fucking sweet,” I remember saying. The desert sands shifted beneath my feet as I urinated; it was either the wind or the whiskey.

“We had a good day,” Tig said, slapping me on the back.

“Got a whole mess of ’em, didn’t we? Two fifty-eight confirmed.”

“Forget the numbers. You woke up this morning, and you’re going to sleep tonight. In my book, that’s a good day.”

In recent months, I have adopted Tig’s philosophy.

Somehow, the conversation got around to hometowns and the like, and when I told Tig where I was from, his eyes narrowed into little slits. Right away, I could tell he knew the place, which was odd, because even folks in the little cities three or four towns over hadn’t heard of it.

“You know a Kashekian?” said Tig.

“Greg, Tilly, yeah, I know ’em.”

And that’s when he told me the story of how the dumb sod really died:

Greg Kashekian entered the military not much different than he left high school. He was still an arrogant bastard, but now he had a gun and a uniform and a new way in which to flaunt his size and strength. Like me, he joined the Marines, and like me, he was a whiz at that concussion test. Big skulls and small brains were common on our block; perhaps there was something in the water.

Tig said that from the first day, Greg had already charmed the rest of his platoon with his meager wit and bulging muscles. They were suddenly his best buddies, eager to listen to his stories of games he’d won and girls he’d bedded, and Tig had a rough time trying to get their minds off of football and women and back to the task at hand. Like me, Tig took an instant dislike to my neighbor, though he was still duty-bound to treat him just like the rest of the knobs.

The Persian also proved to be a whiz as a tank gunner, able to lock in and identify targets at incredible distances. By the time they’d finished training, Greg Kashekian had some of the highest marks ever given to a Marine private on that particular machine, and was recommended for a corporal position, to be awarded once he returned from his first stint in Africa.

If I remember correctly, his mother received the post-humous promotion certificate along with his ashes.

“Africa was quieter then,” Tig told me that night. “They hadn’t started in with the biologicals, and we hadn’t yet firebombed the veldt. Nairobi was still stable. We hadn’t seen any real combat yet, so most of it was maneuvers, some light recon missions. Tanks crawled over the desert, but weapons were kept locked down, and for two weeks, we didn’t have a single casualty.

“Eighteenth day out there, we hadn’t caught the slightest glimpse of the enemy, and everyone was getting restless. Some friend of a friend of one of the supply sergeants had snuck in a big load of nudie mags and Kashekian thought he was Santa Claus, buying up a whole stack and handing ’em out to his friends.

“Middle of the night, we called a readiness drill, and the platoon jumped outta their bunks and into the tanks, ready to crawl fast over the sand into a recon base we’d set up about twenty clicks south of camp. I hooked onto a halftrack and paced the group from the side, watching the drill and taking notes for the com officers who’d ordered the exercise.

“We’re halfway there when I hear this charge go off and I look up to see a trail of ejection jets slicing into the air—a control chair flying up out of a nearby tank. I watched that thing leap up, hang in the air for a fraction of a second, and then start to plummet back to the hard sand below, dropping like a sparrow killed mid-flight. The goddamned parachute didn’t open.

“I burned that halftrack fast as I could, racing over to the jumbled mess of metal on the ground, the whole way thinking about the tank and the ejection seats and the mechanical failures. It was gonna be weeks of inquisitions and testimony. Paperwork up my ass.

“But when I got there, I found that goddamned Kashekian, broken and bloody, still propped up in the mangled control chair, pants around his ankles, skivvies ’round his knees, one hand clutched around a copy of
Hootenanny Hooter Review
and the other ’round his johnson. He mighta been dead, but he sure looked happy.”

Moral of the story: Growing hair on your palms could be the least of your worries.

The unofficial inquest determined that Greg Kashekian—homecoming king, illegitimate dad, patriotic American—had been using his hands when he should have been sitting on them, and that an errant tug had sent him hurtling skyward to his doom. The official inquest, on the other hand, labeled the death as accidental operator failure and informed all interested parties that the military would be looking into the problem. It would be bad press to let the folks at home know that their rock-hard fighting force was just that, so the matter was resolved and hushed up nice and quick.

I can’t say I mourned for Greg Kashekian, but I did not rejoice in his death or manner of demise. To do so would have been to disrespect all members of the armed forces, and despite my feelings toward the individual, I won’t knock all jarheads just to gloat at one Persian getting his comeuppance.

I will admit to visiting his grave upon returning from Africa and, upon finding that someone else had placed a jar of Vaseline and a copy of
Hootenanny Hooter Review
atop his headstone, wishing like hell that I’d been the one to do it.

Speaking of reading material, I was able to pinch a few books out of the library this morning which might help me on my quest to hunt down the hotel’s other resident.
Trapping and Survival
, by James McQuarry, had a nice ring to it when I grabbed it off the stacks, particularly because the title combines the two concepts that currently comprise my entire lifestyle. Unfortunately, this early-twentieth-century tome has more to do with recipes for squirrel casserole than it does my current situation; at the very least, it might make for a nice starter in case I should ever choose to light a fire.

I’ve also got a copy of
The Adventures of Swiss Family Robinson
, this more for pleasure reading than any hints it might afford, though I seem to remember a part from my school days in which

Incredible. Amazing. And incredible again.

An hour ago, as I was typing that last section about Swiss Family Robinson, the remote motion sensor in my back pocket began to vibrate. At first I spun around, thinking some critter had squirmed inside Tyler Street and was preparing to feast on my rump, but quickly I remembered what that buzzing meant. I leaped to my feet and into the hallway, grabbing my Mauser for long-range protection and the garrote for hand-to-hand combat.

Launching myself up the stairs as quickly as I could without making too much excess noise, I ran through the floors, devouring three, four steps at a time. By the time I reached the penthouse, I was panting hard—these last few months have taken their toll on what was once a Swiss watch of a cardiovascular system—but my precision heart was still functioning just as the brochures promised it would. I entered the top-floor hallway and grabbed the doorknob of the penthouse suite, aware that on the other side could be anything ranging from a dormouse to a rifle to a platoon of Credit Union Bio-Repo men waiting to tie me down, tear out my heart, and send me packing to a local pauper’s grave. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure anymore if I’d really felt the buzzing in my pocket or if it had been my imagination.