War Stories

Héctor came back from the war to drink, and to give the ghost of Davy away.

"I should re-up," he said, more than once. "I've got a couple tours left in me. Hell, I spent so much time in Afghanistan I barely got to see Iraq. It's just, you know. The alcohol is shit. No wonder those fucking ragheads can't handle their problems. I couldn't do it either, if I had to drink that."

April brought him another Coors. Héctor had picked a campus bar, full of drunk college kids in ironic T-shirts and expensive tennis shoes. Their noise and closeness made April feel tight and old.

"I skinned a rat alive once," said Héctor. "Did I tell you that story?"

"No," April lied. "Let me finish this and get another beer."

She came back with her drink and sat across from him, sick to her stomach. Maybe it was the loud music, or the yelling, or the cheap beer, or the plastic cups. The rat story wasn't one of the ones with a funny ending.

"So Rodriquez had this rat," Héctor began. "Have I told you about Rodriquez? He was the fat weirdo who was always writing porno stories and reading them out loud."

"Yeah," said April. Sweat stuck her bangs to her forehead. "I remember him."

"So this rat just lived in the tent with us, but Rodriquez gave it food and shit, so it got pretty friendly. He could hold it. It got fat, too. Anyway, this one day, Nunamaker—did I tell you about Nunamaker?"

"Yeah. The guy who went to Catholic school."

"All boys Catholic school. Maybe that was why he was such a fag. Anyway, it turned into this big fight, because some of the guys liked Rodriquez and his stupid rat, and some of them didn't. I was just sitting there laughing, and Nunamaker was chasing the rat, and guys were trying to stop him like a goddamn cartoon. So this rat eventually gets stomped on, right next to my bunk. I picked it up to throw it away or whatever, but the little fucker was still alive. I took it outside, and parts of the inside were on the outside, and all of a sudden I wondered what the whole inside looked like. You know, without the skin?"

Héctor was yelling now, over the music. April wished he would go quiet again, into that tone that was bewildered and ashamed.

"So I skinned off a little bit, and, you know what? It was pretty easy. So then I did the rest, and eventually the rat stopped squeaking, and then it was less bad. It was just so small, though."

April braced herself for the ending.

"Sometimes…" Héctor took a long pull of beer. "Sometimes, when I look at people, I wonder how they would look without their skin. Not so much with men, though. That's kind of gay."

Héctor stared at her, and she wondered what he expected. She didn't want to know whether he'd pictured her without skin.

"Isn't Rodriquez the one who wrote poetry?" she asked instead.

"Yeah." Héctor sounded surprised. "He did. He wrote porn and poetry that were the opposites of each other. I mean, we gave him a lot of shit about both, but I think I liked the poetry better."

April remembered Rodriquez's poetry better than almost anything else from Héctor's rare missives from Afghanistan.

I wanted to write you a poem myself, he wrote. But there is no fucking thing worth writing poetry about out here. I don't know how Rodriquez does it.

The attached page, pulled out of a spiral-bound notebook, wasn't love poetry. As far as April could tell, the part in English was about getting drunk in a town called Los Lunas and riding ATVs around in the desert with friends. That was how Rodriquez had done it, she'd wanted to explain at the time. Writing about where he wanted to be instead of where he was...