Authors: Mary Wallace
A waiter tapped the old man’s shoulder and led
him and his wife and the compliant dog to a nearby table where his wife could
comfortably dine.
The waiter
returned and motioned to Eddie to follow him to a table in the center of the
room.
She was surprised at Eddie’s frantic head
shaking, rejecting the table.
“Sorry, sir, we’ve only got the one table
available.”
The waiter didn’t
understand Eddie’s reticence.
“On the side, we have to be on the perimeter.”
The waiter nodded, eyeing Eddie more
carefully.
There was an elevated
sense of alarm, Celeste could feel it.
“I’ll get that corner table cleared for you,
if you want,” the waiter said, motioning to a table cocked sideways from a back
wall.
“That’s great,” Eddie’s voice calmed and he
put his hand on the small of Celeste’s back and held it there until they were
free to sit down.
“You are such a gentleman,” Celeste said.
“Not so much,” he said.
Celeste thought of her own acts of kindness
towards the old lady across the hall in the rooming house within which she’d
been raised.
Sometimes, you act
before you think, because the vulnerable can’t or won’t ask for help.
“How many tours did you do in Iraq?”
His face clouded over but he answered with a
quiet pride.
“Four.
I was in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
She didn’t know what to say, she’d never
spoken with a soldier before and knew nothing of wartime.
“Do you ever have nightmares,” she
asked, remembering a magazine story about soldiers coming home unable to
process their experiences.
He shook his head but didn’t answer with
words.
“You,” he said, “let’s talk about you.
Detroit born and raised?”
“Yes,” Celeste beamed.
“How about you?”
“Kind of.
Township kid, myself.
Moved once or twice.
How
about you?”
“I lived with my mom in an old boarding house
out by Wayne State.
A few years
after she died, I moved into my own apartment.
They ripped the old boarding house down six months after I
moved out, all the old tenants had died and the owner couldn’t pay his mortgage
so he brought in a back hoe and a tractor and all three floors collapsed after just
three pushes.
Made me wonder how
it had stood for so long, but I think its rickety walls wanted to stand tall as
long as the old people were alive.
It didn’t have any attraction to new tenants, though.
No granite countertops, no double pane
windows you find in newer buildings.
The only people who loved it as it was were the old folks who couldn’t
afford and honestly couldn’t care less about the shiny amenities in new
units.
I inherited that,” she
said.
“I dream about an older
cottage, peaked roof over an old painted door, corbels, gables.”
“Sounds like you want to live in the South,”
Eddie said.
“Those houses all fit
your bill.”
“My buddy Frank and I have a crazy escape
dream,” she said, watching a sudden change in Eddie’s attentiveness.
Frank’s name, a man’s name, set Eddie
on alert, she noticed, delighting her.
A quiet expression of interest.
“If Detroit shuts down, which it never will,”
she said, breathless with sureness, “we talk about moving to the Carolinas,
getting farmland by the ocean.
It’s funny to talk with Frank about it, because I’ve never grown so much
as a little green houseplant.
I
have a brown thumb, I’m sure.”
“You’re involved with someone?” Eddie asked,
sitting bolt upright.
“Heck no,” she said.
“Frank is my work buddy.
We have no interest in each other, but he’s my closest
friend here.
Everyone else in our
office has been furloughed and it’s down to just us and a rotating temp
worker.”
“Just to clarity, then,” Eddie said, his hands
clasped on the table, “you are single, not involved with anyone.”
“Of course,” she said, her brow furrowing at
his directness.
“Not involved with
anyone.
You can meet Frank, he’s
really funny.
But I haven’t dated
anyone in months.”
She pushed a
stray hair off her cheek.
“What
about you?
Seeing anyone?
Married?”
He cringed, then shook his head.
“Nope.
Never married.
Not seeing anyone.”
“This feels so stilted,” she said, smiling at
the strangeness of mapping out their dating statuses.
“In the military, I did tactical work.
It’s what I do best.
I analyze places or relationships very
quickly and I have to plot how to get through them with as little loss as
possible.”
He looked around the
restaurant and said quietly, “ten tables, 30 chairs, 26 people, 2 exits, 4
windows and a skylight.
So poorly
set up that if a bomb went off, only a dozen could get out smoothly, those
people at the 4-tops along the side wall.”
She looked at the diners at the three tables
he pointed towards, then at the other tables around them.
“Two service tables set up to help the busboys
actually impede traffic, so those four 2-tops would be cut off from what looks
like an easy exit.
And I bet you
$100, none of those people have thought even once about their egress from this
place.”
Celeste looked at the diners at the smaller
tables, including the old couple, the wife in the wheelchair haplessly unaware
of Eddie’s analysis.
“Nothing is
going to happen here,” she shooed the air with her hands.
“I’m impressed but you can let down
your guard here.”
His face fell, but he shook his head.
He leaned over his plate, coming close
to her.
“Do you know the one thing
that quadruples your survival rate on an airplane going down, in a mountain
lion attack, or a small building bombing?”
His voice was on edge.
“No,” she said.
As much as he was agitated, there was a slim vein of sorrow
in his demeanor and she found herself looking into his eyes.
What was his truth?
How had he survived four tours in war
zones?
“Attention to detail.
When you walk on a plane or into a
room, note all the exits, note the obstacles, note the people around you.
Know what part of town you’re in,
notice the hills around you if you are hiking.
If you operate from knowledge, then you stand a great chance
of being the one that comes home alive.”
She nodded and softly said, “You came home
alive.”
His eyes wavered, his mouth shook for an
instant before he fought it back under control.
For a split second, she thought he might cry but then he sat
upright, his emotions shrouded.
“Yes,” he said abruptly.
They sat silently for a few minutes.
She could feel the confusion in his
posture.
There was a military
bearing that spoke wordlessly of competence, courage.
But under that cloak, there were the sorrows of a man who
had seen or done things that were unimaginable to her.
What was the cost of the expertise, the
ability to count exits?
“Well, I’m
happy that you’re here.”
“Me too,” he replied.
He took her hands into his.
“I feel safe,” she said, “knowing that you’ve
got those… skills,” she stumbled, choosing her words carefully.
“Combat is a tough thing to shrug off,” he
said.
“But I did those tours so
someday I could sit in peace at a place like this with a pretty gal like
you.”
He winked at her and she
couldn’t help it, she blushed at his intent stare.
“I’m not a real sitter, though,” he said.
“I’m not comfortable unless I’m moving.
So we can go running along the
waterfront, or I’d love to take you scuba diving.
Are you certified?”
“This is Detroit,” she laughed.
“Why would I get certified?
It’s not the tropics, the water’s cold
here!”
“I’ll take you to Lake St. Clair.”
She shivered unexpectedly.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Their dog is almost as old as they
are,” she pointed back at the elderly couple, changing the subject.
“I know.
Who is helping who there?”
Eddie’s face softened.
“I never wanted a dog, but that one is
cute.”
“The old man needs the dog,” Eddie said.
“He’s got vision problems.
I don’t know how he juggles the chair,
the dog and seeing for himself but he’s out on a date with his wife, so more
power to him, I guess.”
“You ever want a dog?”
Celeste wondered if Eddie’s hard edges
might be blunted by the adulation of a reserved dog like the Labrador, who now
tucked itself under the table, out of the way.
“I never had a dog here in Detroit, but we had
one in Al Anbar,” he said quietly.
“We?” she asked.
“My platoon.
In camp, we took in a dust-colored puppy, fed him from our
own MREs.
The flop eared mutt took
turns sleeping in bunks with whoever was most homesick or had nightmares,”
Eddie said tentatively.
He placed
his order after she did, and then continued, “We came back from a two-day
patrol and I fell onto my bunk, waking up to my face being cleaned by the
scratchy licks of the little puppy.
It was easier to roll off my sleeping pad and head to the
showers to wash the pup’s squirmy body and short furry legs, he made it easier
to reconnect with being back in camp.
I made it halfway through my first deployment praying that the dog would
be alive when I returned from patrols, because sometimes the guys I went out
with weren’t.”
“Oh my,” Celeste said quietly.
“We named him Scrub.
He fit into the back pocket of our knapsacks when we first
found him, but we couldn’t risk him barking as we headed out.
So we’d leave him by the tent and find
him there when we’d return, even if it was days later.”
“That’s so sweet,” Celeste nodded.
“Iraqis don’t treat the wild dogs like pets,
we discovered, so we had the advantage in keeping him in camp.
You’d tap him on his nose when he’d
whimper, to calm him down.
And I’m
pretty sure that the attention of so many tired soldiers soothed Scrub because
he’d just romp around, he didn’t bark.”
“Did anyone bring him home?” she asked, not
realizing the danger of her question until it was out of her mouth.
He shook his head.
She waited in silence, in case he wanted to talk
about what had happened to the pup.
“The only time Scrub barked,” Eddie remembered,
“it was the black of night, and this deep husky growl woke us up, then he bayed
like crazy, and the platoon jumped out of bed and we were able to fight off a
raggedy group of villagers who were sneaking on a hillside outside our camp to
lay IEDs, land mine things.”
He put his hands under the table onto his
knees.
“They took Scrub out the
next night.
They must have had
infrared and been looking for him.
He was such a good little guy.
Just a couple of pops and we were all out of our tents with our guns,
blasting into the hills.
They
killed Scrub to stop him from protecting us, to mess with our minds.”
“That must have been horrible!”
She could see a crack in his hard
fought reserve.
“Scrub’s death destroyed a kid from Wisconsin
who’d been lost almost from the day he arrived in country.
He rocked back and forth for days after
the truck dropped him off to us.
Walked patrol and then he’d rock himself to sleep.
Rocking, eating, rocking.
After a bad day on patrol, Scrub put
his head on the corporal’s lap and just lay there.
The rocking would slow down and even the cheesehead would
scoop Scrub up and hug him for a while.
It killed a part of each of us to find Scrub that night with one clean
shot through his head, long distance execution style.”