You Are The One

53 You Are The One Scott D. Pomfret You’re the one that won’t tell. You’ll pull on your boots and button your chin strap. You’ll salute and say, sir yes sir. Thirty hours later, you’ll be racing across baked desert in a retrofitted Humvee surrounded by sixty million people who hate you, and then you’ll start to re-learn what it means to be sorry. “I’ve got no choice,” you said. “My nation needs me. This is what soldiers do.” No choice? Bullshit. Let me draw you a roadmap, sweetheart. There’s your commanding officer. (Let’s call him West Point.) There is West Point’s office. There is his Odyssey minivan parked outside. There on the office wall are photos of West Point’s blond-haired, blueeyed , cookie-cutter, mass-produced children die-cast in some Shanghai sweatshop. Knock on his open door. Enter when bidden. Salute. Then announce (repeat after me), “Sir, I am a cocksucking homosexual faggot. Sir.” Eight simple words. The path to happiness was never so easy. The Commander in Chief himself—that bastard Yale-based so-called Texan with a voice like a high wind through telephone wire—would want you to stay home. “This some kind of joke?” “Tulsa’s not Tikrit,” my business partner Sonja said. She flourished the Request For Proposal (RFP) for the Base Beautiful Project (BBP) at Camp Fuck-Me-Hard. “No reason a military base can’t look like the Daughters of the American Revolution Semiannual Flower Show.” I figured we had as much chance of landing the winning bid as I had of bedding down Marky Mark in the Calvin Klein underwear days. RFP, BBP, STD, whatever. No doubt West Point and the rest of the commanders at Camp Fuck-Me-Hard would be more security conscious than to award a landscaping contract to a firm owned by an uppity 54 Ecotone: reimagining place homosexual and a woman whose armpits hadn’t seen the working end of a razor since the Gulf War. But praise the Lord for minority preferences. Thanks to Sonja’s presumptive womanhood, Camp Fuck-Me-Hard is now our firm’s biggest client. Talk about Base Beautiful: three days a week, we rake leaves, plant shrubs, mulch the beds, and spell out “Welcome” in pink and white geraniums by the camp gate. I stick out like a sore thumb. It must be the Capri pants, the straw sunhat, and the man-bag slung over my shoulder. The grunts are always joking that the pansies planted around the chow hall aren’t the only ones on the base. But that’s how we met. Fifteen months ago, you saw me on your very first day back from your second tour. Remember? You were coming out of chow with a handful of your men. You had a blouse full of colored pins, a ramrod spine, and a voice made hoarse from barking orders. You were a barrel-chested, square-jawed, upright monster who could bench press me twenty-five times and not break a sweat. I was taking a break from whacking weeds. I was cursing Sonja for ever having gotten us into the Base Beautiful Project. I was cursing God for sending down this hundred-five-degree heat. Then our eyes met and the clock in my heart gave an extra tick. You seemed as big as a mountain, an enduring idea. I jotted my cell phone number on a packet of matches. I swore I would reform all my bad habits and go to church Sundays if only you asked for it. You said, “Catch you later, assholes.” Your men said, “Sir, fuck you, sir,” and grinned. I sipped from the strawberry mojito I had mixed in my thermos and rolled my eyes and prayed aloud for the good Lord to save me from their preposterous shows of schoolyard masculinity. “Hey there,” you said. “Hello, handsome.” I rattled the ice cubes in my thermos as if they were dice in a cup. “Saw you workin’ the flower beds.” “You should see me in my own bed.” Your men laughed and slapped each other’s backs. One...