Uniforms

I sleep with veterans.

Those people who say women like a man in uniform have it backward. I don't give two shits about the uniform. I want what's underneath. I want to search their bodies, to find the tattoos of dead buddies' names, the tiny fragments of shrapnel underneath the skin, the knotted scar tissue they say is dead. When I'm touching those bodies I feel like I'm closer to the center, closer to the edge of life and death, and not just some redneck girl from a place where the old people still believe in patriotism.

I know I'm ignorant about the world. I read a lot as a child, but I've lived in Montana my whole life and never left, apart from a few trips to Seattle and Spokane. I know I don't know the world. But the veterans do. Even if they can't talk about it very well, their bodies have known the world. Sometimes, when I'm running my hands over scarred tissue, I can imagine the world out there—the sand, the blinding blue of the sky, the ancient buildings, the terror. It makes me feel more alive.

I pick them up at bars, usually the one where I work. Military dating sites aren't for me. The men on those sites all wear their uniforms in their profile pics and are still in some honorduty-valor-USA mind fuck. The women are more straightforward than me—"uniforms are sexy," they write on their profiles. Or they want the Zac Efron version of the story: Some guy who comes home, helps with the dog kennel, and miraculously deals with his ptsd and all that. I know it never works out that way.

I pick them up at bars, except the vfw. In that bar, the stories they tell are rutted like well-traveled dirt roads. vfw stories have been told for too long. The stories in that bar make perfect sense—they are either absurd and funny in a terrible way or they are about heroism. Those hero stories don't interest me. They aren't real like scars are real.

I usually don't hear the real stories until we make it to bed. Sometimes not until the morning after when we are lying there, made vulnerable by the morning light. Sometimes the veterans' stories don't make sense or they are fragments of bigger stories. They have to be extracted little by little, with patience and compassion, and that's what's special about them. I have a gift for extracting these stories.

Veterans are easy clientele to pick out in a bar, especially if you've been a cocktail waitress for long enough. And it's Montana, where I swear a quarter of the population has served in the military. I talk to them while they are sitting at the bar. Or, sometimes, after my shift, I make sure I am sitting alone at the end of the bar with a serious-looking drink that I'm really only sipping. They seem to often be alone too.

I remember the first time it happened well. He came in alone and ordered prime rib. He sat in a corner with his back to the wall, eyes on the door. When I brought him the steak, he finished it off quickly, almost greedily, hunched over his meal. He was stocky, thick, sturdy. I wanted to know what his body looked like without the obstruction of the flannel shirt and jeans he wore.

"Are you just passing through?" I asked.

"Kind of," he said. "I'm waiting to get my gi Bill and am scoping out places to live near the college. I like to fish."

There's a university and a bigger town thirty minutes away, but my town has a pristine river and better fishing. More weirdos too.

"Oh really?" I said. "My high school boyfriend was in the Marine Corps. He used to take me fishing."

I didn't drop the information about Charles on purpose. I was just making conversation. But afterward, I saw it opened...