T. Parker - Full Measure

By late afternoon the day was cool so they got to drinking again. They built a fire with wood they’d bought and found some sticks to cook the hot dogs on. They talked about the war and the women they’d fucked since coming home but mostly the war. Patrick said nothing about Iris Cash because he hadn’t even kissed her and he didn’t like that word applied to her, even though he’d do that with Iris in a heartbeat. And he suspected that his friends were mostly just talk anyway.

“Well, how about the hottie that was with your family back there, Pat?” asked Messina.

“She’s just a friend.”

This brought chortles and around went the bottle again, each man in turn upending it. “To friends, then,” said Bostik. “To fuckin’ Myers, man.”

“And fuckin’ Zane,” said Salimony. He had a nervous leg that bounced whenever he sat and even now in the sand it twitched rhythmically. Salimony balanced the bourbon bottle on his knee and watched the liquid slosh. “I wish he could have made the party today. I loved that dog.”

“I read this made-up fiction book once,” said Patrick, “that said heaven is a big barn where you get to live forever with all your dogs and every woman you ever had.”

“It’d just be one fucked-up brawl,” said Bostik.

“Yeah,” said Salimony. “Like when we grappled Sergeant Pendejo. And then, goddamn, two days later he’s at the cooker yelling for us to come and get a burrito and the sniper hits him right between the eyes! I mean the spatula’s still in his hands and his brains are actually on the wall! On it! Oh, man!”

“So here’s a toast to Sergeant Pendejo,” said Messina. “He was an asshole but he was our asshole.”

“To our asshole!” they called out.

And so it went past dark and into the night until they saw headlights down by the waterline bouncing toward them. What with the wild up and down of the lights and the liquor swirling through him Patrick saw an entire enemy convoy but it turned out to be only two jeeps. The jeeps stopped and the headlights seared into them and four MPs got out and came to them. “Drunk Marines,” said one of them.

“Says who?” demanded Bostik.

“You guys going to be cool? Because if not, we’re getting out the batons right now.”

“We’re cool,” said Patrick.

“Look how fuckin’ cool we are,” said Messina.

“All right. Get out your IDs, you drunk jarheads.”

“Excuse me but we’re United States Marines,” said Bostik. “And we served in Helmand and we don’t take one drop a shit from boot POG rent-a-cop cherries like you.” Patrick watched him take a swig of the second bottle of tequila, then hurl it at the lead MP.

The bottle missed badly but smashed the left headlight of the front jeep. Patrick saw the glittering shower of glass and light, then the fight was on. He was drunk and stupid and slow against the sober MPs with their truncheons. The first time he went down he thought he’d just stay down, but he could hear Bostik moaning and Salimony cursing and a baton landing hard, so he stood up and surged forth. Bostik was swinging into the blows and Salimony advancing on his attacker with a bottle he held by the neck, and Messina was besieged from two sides. Patrick whirled, realizing too late that the fourth MP could only be behind him.

He woke up on a concrete slab with a thin mattress on it and a scratchy olive green blanket bunched up under him. There was an unexplained and weird tightness to the back of his head. He sat up then eased himself back down, so great was his headache.

“You may as well stay up,” said Bostik. “They’re letting us out at o-six hundred.”

Patrick looked at his watch but it was gone. “What is all this?”

“This is morning,” said Salimony. “Before was beach. Drinking. Fight. Hospital. Brig. You got ten stitches in the back of your head. They’re not going to charge us because they beat the shit out of us so bad.”

“That seems fair,” said Patrick. He sat back up and reached a hand toward the agony. He felt gauze and tape and shaven scalp. He heard a steel door open and shut, then the sound of footsteps coming toward their tank.

With an iron headache and occasionally blurred vision, Patrick worked a full day on the groves. His father and brother offered him the easier tasks, but Patrick worked even harder than usual. It was the Marine thing to do. He was black and dripping sweat after an hour and his scalp burned along the stitches. He guzzled water to help his brain fire right. The three men finished off the irrigation repair and half of the remaining trunk painting. But there was a heavy quiet among them as they rode back to the house in Archie’s work truck, because Escondido Farm Credit Bank had refused to loan on the replacement trees.

Patrick skipped cocktails with his family, cleaned up and was waiting for Iris Cash in the Village View lobby at sunset. He walked her to his truck. Her face with the sunlight on it was lovely. His head ached all the way down to his toenails. He told Iris he dinged himself roughhousing with buddies the night before. “I apologize for ditching you yesterday.”

“That memorial was one of the most emotional moments of my life,” said Iris. “And you were the only person there I knew, and I’ve known you for less than a week. It was just really, really... I’m not sure what it was, Patrick. I can’t describe it. I’m writing a series about it for the paper. Trying to find words.”

“I never expected anything like that. Even when I enlisted for infantry I never thought it would include such a thing. A ceremony for the mangled and dead and all their families.”

Iris considered a long moment before speaking. “You must be terribly proud and terribly sad.”

“Those words are good, Iris. And really, I’m sorry about leaving you there with my family and just running off.”

“I’ve been reading about soldiers coming home.”

“I’m a Marine, not a soldier.”

“I didn’t know there was a distinction. But I do know from my reading that after deployment, Marines really need their friends.”

“I know I need to move on, get out of Afghanistan.”

They came to the truck and Patrick held open the door for her. She put her soft fingers on his freshly shaven cheek and turned his head to one side for a better look at the wound. “Roughhousing with buddies? You’ve got stitches, Pat!”

“It was purely foolish.”

He handed her up to the cab and watched her as she swung in. They set out for La Jolla. Patrick could smell Iris’s scent and he felt like he was gliding down I-15 on it. Iris talked of the Marines of the Three-Five she’d seen at Pendleton, and how she’d like to talk to every one of them and put it all in a book. She said it would be fiction and Patrick wondered why you’d make things up about a war that was actual. You couldn’t make it any truer than it was. Iris said she talked to some of the Gold Star families and absolutely refused to cry, even if they did, because she felt superfluous and trivial in their presence.

She told him the Village View was going to run her story on the discovery of the arson evidence front page, and Fallbrook Fire might even give them a photo of it to accompany the article. The point of the whole thing was to get people involved, maybe find a witness, or someone who had overheard someone saying suspicious things.

She said this DHS arson specialist, Knechtl, was a very intense man who wouldn’t say much about his investigation. He wore a dark suit and had a pale complexion and a big forehead and a small mustache. He looked more like an undertaker than a special agent of the DHS, in her opinion. Knechtl said that he’d questioned several persons of interest but he wouldn’t say who, or where they lived, or if there were any leads. He addressed the whole Village View staff, then asked each of them to list three local people they thought might set a fire like this. He passed one sheet of blank white paper and one pencil to each person in the room, then asked them to meditate for one full minute before answering. About one minute into the silence Iris had peeked and caught Knechtl checking his wristwatch. She’d left her sheet blank, as had her editor, who was sitting on one side of her, and the art director, sitting on the other. She did note two people writing away, voluminously, it looked, arms around their papers for privacy.