Luke
There are three kinds of pain. There’s physical pain, handed to you in gasping, sharp doses. No rhythm to it. Just mad stabbing when the whim hits, like a steel rod into the flesh of a peach. That’s the kind of pain I felt in flashes on the trip to Munich, watching the shadows of paramedics cross the cabin lights.
When Frankie and I had stepped out from behind the jeep, the pain had announced itself, bloody and throbbing. The bullets had pummeled my knee and upper shin until it was a useless sack, but the pain shoved me forward, pushing me to hold the gun tighter, stand straighter with the leg that was left.
“They’re picking us off from the northwest hill,” Clark had said between rounds.
It’d been so quiet. Wind had whipped the NATO flag on the hood.
“Let’s get back in and get a better position.”
“We can’t,” Clark said. “Probably mines ahead.”
Everyone was breathing hard. In sync, in harmony, even then. My socks were wet, sticky, squishing in my boots. I shouldn’t have looked down. Someone’s boots had fallen off their feet, splattered red. Two other pairs of boots, on a pair of bodies on the ground, faces obstructed.
They had started shooting again.
Then there was the ache that had smothered me when I woke up in the hallway of Brooke Medical Center back in America. It covered me like a blanket, lulling me to sleep, calling me to some higher purpose, whispering in a sweet voice, You don’t have to worry anymore, your job is to suffer, and that’s it. Don’t get up, don’t fight, all you have to do is bear it.
I’d heard deep Texas accents answering phones. I’d looked at the hand holding the bars of my gurney. Each nail was painted with a tiny Santa Claus.
Between the physical pain and the ache, or on top of them, or all around them, is the third kind. I suppose you’d call it emotional or mental pain, but that would imply it was knowable, that it could be labeled and stored somewhere in the brain, and you’d just keep on living.
No. Every thought, from my arm itches to what am I going to do now? was suspended on hooks over a dark sea. There was what was happening, then it got snagged on what happened.
What was happening: Thirty steel pins in my leg the previous afternoon. An indefinite stay. A view of the parking lot.
What happened: That morning Gomez showed the British officers that they were cleaning dishes wrong. They ended up squirting one another with bottles of soap.
I might walk, I might not. Two more people in scrubs had looked over the doctor’s clipboard when he said that yesterday, then to my leg, then back to the clipboard.
Our room with the crummy wood paneling, shaving mirror standing on the green table, the exposed pipes, blankets folded in the corner where we’d left them, would be empty.
Frankie was gone.
An army nurse in Germany had told me he was gone. There was a knock on the door frame.
Rooster was gone, too. The volleyball team would have to find new players.
The door was always open here. Just in case.
Ahmad, the eight-year-old who loved to serve and dive after wild hits, would be asking where we were today.
“Private Morrow?”
I turned my head on the pillow. A gray-haired man stood in the doorway. “Yes, sir.”
“Lieutenant Colonel Ray Yarvis, Medical Service Corps. Welcome to Brooke.”
I brought a stiff arm up to salute. He returned it. “Every new intake gets assigned a social worker, and I’m your guy.”
He sat, bending over a paunch, and took in the damage. He had deep lines around his mouth and eyes, which were a silvery, pool-water blue. He had a two-packs-a-day voice, just like the guy who ran the lotto booth at Mort’s, the corner shop in Buda. He was the first person here to look me in the eye.
“I do this job because I’ve been where you are. Served two tours in Vietnam, now walking on a titanium foot.” He pointed to his left shin. “Anything you feel you can’t ask your doctors, you tell me. You pissed at the army? You tell me. I’m your buffer.”
I tried to bring some moisture to my mouth. “Did they tell you if I’m going to walk again?”
“I think you are.”
