Max Collins - Quarry's ex

“Marry me,” I said, when we’d finished, but still inside her.

“Oh yes,” she said breathlessly. “Oh, Jack- yes. ”

So I’d married her.

From Vietnam, I wrote her love letters on a daily basis for a while, and she did the same with me, until my world got darker and it was all I could do to maybe write once a week and then once a month crawl out of that hole into temporary sunshine to say something to the girl waiting for me, the girl who was the only reason not to give in to despair and either walk into a bullet or go AWOL and maybe get sent stateside to the brig or better yet frag a moronic officer and get sent home to a firing squad or just stick around and maybe join the hardcore Corps who were slamming heroin to escape for now or maybe for good. Me, who didn’t even accept a toke when a doobie was passed, suddenly I was thinking heroin was an option.

Finally I had stopped feeling, which when they made me a sniper was a necessity. If you viewed your target as a flesh-and-blood human, you might upset your balance. You had to understand, in war, that if you weren’t manning the gun shooting this poor bastard, somebody else would be there with a finger on the trigger. So what was the difference? In war, all soldiers are dead men. Sooner you get that, the better off you are. Thinking of yourself as alive only put you at risk-you could get killed that way.

We all knew: You are dead until you are sent home, at which time you will maybe get to be alive again.

I came home a day early. The letters from Joni had become more and more sporadic, just as had mine, but hers were at least loving and encouraging whereas mine were frankly terse and straining to be something akin to pleasant, since hopeful was out of the question. By the end of my tour, I had probably killed thirty men. And I was fine with that. Because I hadn’t really killed them, had I? The war designated them dead long before I came on the scene.

Anyway, I showed up in La Mirada at the little white stucco house (no picket fence) on La Flor Drive. I sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if that side door had been locked (the front was). I felt odd, because I’d been away going on two years and was not the same guy, even if I was back in civvies; but the sunshine and the smell of flowers did make me feel alive. Not a walking dead man. Which was nice.

Anyway, I went in to surprise Joni, just sort of crept in, sneaky bastard, not yelling her name or any honey-I’mhome shit. I wanted to enter a room and she would be sitting in a comfy chair listening to our song (“No Fair at All”) or maybe at the kitchen table writing me a loving letter, or possibly taking a bubble bath, and in all those instances, her big brown eyes would get even bigger and she would beam and be in my arms and, before you know it, I’d be in her. You think a lot about such things when you are overseas and a walking dead man.

I know you’re way ahead of me. You wouldn’t have bothered looking in every other room first, before trying the bedroom. And maybe I knew before I opened that door. Hell, I did know. The sounds of heavy breathing and bed springs provided a little clue.

She was facing me with big brown eyes, all right, and they did get bigger, though since she was on all fours on the bed, getting it from behind, I’d have to say it’s surprising her eyes had the capacity to get bigger. Maybe he wasn’t in her backdoor. Maybe it was just rear entry. That’s a detail I didn’t explore.

I didn’t know the guy. He had what we call a farmer’s tan back in Ohio, although the paleness of his flesh was blocked out by a lot of hair. Real hairy-chested bastard, about thirty-five I’d say-really old, I thought at the time, old enough to be her father. Now I know my math was way off, but that’s one of the things that popped into my head.

If I’d had a gun on me, I’d have killed them both. In that position, one bullet could have done the trick-a shot through her open mouth could have penetrated his chest, too, and it would have been your classic two-birds-with-one-stone parlay.

“ Jack! ” she said.

I said nothing.

Also, the guy said nothing-he just looked confused and irritated, pausing in his pumping, his hands on the bikini-white of her ass. I would have preferred that he look embarrassed or maybe scared. I couldn’t even be sure he knew who I was. I mean, we’d never met. And I didn’t see my picture on her bedside table.

I just turned and got out of there. She was screaming my name but not following me or anything. Far as I know his dick was still in her when I slammed the door and shut off the sound.

This was in the afternoon, and I didn’t call her that night. Actually, I never called her at all. I knew of a girlfriend of hers, who had kind of liked me when Joni and I had been dating, and from her I found out the guy’s name was Williams (I’ve forgotten his first name) and that he worked as a mechanic at a garage a couple blocks from Joni’s house. A house I had mistakenly thought of as “our” house.

When I’d shown up unannounced and a day early, the only car in Joni’s drive had been her Marlin. So I figured the guy must have walked over from work, or maybe got picked up by her, but anyway it struck me as odd that a mechanic wouldn’t drive his own goddamn car over when he dropped by to fuck my wife.

I decided to discuss this, and other topics, with him the next day. I felt I’d cooled down enough to have a nice rational conversation with the guy. Explain that I was Joni’s husband, back from Nam, and that I understood people had needs and I was going to try to work things out with her, and would appreciate it if he would back off. In my defense, while I thought I was rational, I was really in a sleep-deprived state-I’d slept not at all on the plane home, and had spent all last night wide awake in my motel room, killing her a dozen ways but finally deciding to be an adult about this.

Why the mechanic’s car hadn’t been at Joni’s became immediately apparent when I went to his crummy little house and found him on his back under a sporty vehicle that most of his money probably went into, jacked up with its back wheels off. His “baby.” Working on its rear end. Kind of like he’d been working on my wife’s rear end.

He looked up at me from under there, upper lip curling in contempt- now he knew who I was. Apparently Joni had got around to filling him in.

Before I could say a word, he said, “I got nothing to say to you, bunghole.”

“Fine,” I said.

And kicked out the fucking jack.

So that got me arrested. A couple of things saved my ass.

For one, my actions had clearly not been premeditated-I made this point in a perhaps not subtle way, telling the cops at the scene, “If I’d planned to kill the prick, I’d have brought a gun along.”

For another, a bunch of things soon emerged about Joni that I hadn’t known. Turned out I was her third husband. And not just any kind of third husband-her third serviceman-serving-in-Vietnam husband.

Remember that pause when she was telling me how she’d never seen the California tourist spots till… I came along? Two of “me” had come along before I had.

When she said she’d left home and made something of herself, it hadn’t been by going to work-it had been by marrying naive young schmucks like me who were about to go over to Vietnam and get dead. She was no polygamist, understand-she married us one at a time, and had been twice a widow.

She got all the military bennies, including insurance and Christ knows what-but enough to buy a Marlin and a nice little house in La Mirada, even before yours truly had come along to sign over my pitiful paychecks to her.

Only, I’d double-crossed her-I lived. If you called this living.