Rogenna Brewer - Mitzi's Marine

“Danny,” Mitzi called as he reached the door. “See you tonight?”

“Of course.” Without hesitation he stepped back in to give her a quick kiss before heading out again.

Relieved, Mitzi sank to her seat. Wrapping her hands around the warm paper cup, she stared out the glass front at the slushy, snow-covered street and hoped she hadn’t sounded desperate.

Dan had been stopping by on his way to school every morning for weeks. He’d flirted his way to a first date. Then last night she’d taken him to the Broadway Bar & Bowl, where he’d met her father and where she’d laughed for the first time in a long time.

She was ready to date again.

Dan felt safe.

Why did Calhoun have to show up now? And why did she feel this sudden urgency to prove she’d moved on?

Had she moved on?

Just let me know when you’re ready to Photoshop him out of the picture.

It had been taken in Kuwait, on one of those rare occasions when the three of them had been in the same place at the same time.

Her brother, Fred Jr.—Freddie to his friends—had joined the Navy right out of high school. Bruce had been born to be a Marine. After joining the Corps, he’d been one of a select group of eighty-six Marines, including five Navy hospital corpsmen serving with the Marine Corps, to train with and integrate into the Navy SEAL teams.

She’d become a rescue swimmer because she couldn’t follow them into the SEAL program. But her job gave her an all-access pass into their world.

The guys had just flown in from an op. She had an arm around each of them. Laughing.

Freddie to her right, Bruce to her left and on her left ring finger a sparkling-new diamond ring she was showing off for the camera.

She’d just completed a SAR, search and rescue drill, and earned some well-deserved shore leave when Bruce had hopped out of that helo in the background and walked straight up to her. Without a word they’d kissed and wound up in a dark corner of a military hangar.

Half dressed.

Her back against the wall. Him inside her.

Afterward he’d produced a ring from out of nowhere. She’d socked him in the arm. A gal didn’t want to be proposed to while zipping up her flight suit after a quickie.

He’d followed her outside. Got down on bended knee, in front of no less than a hundred witnesses.

“It’s about damn time.” Freddie had been the first to congratulate them. He’d handed his camera phone to someone and the three of them posed for that picture. Later she and Bruce headed to Dubai for three days and two nights of R & R to celebrate.

Those were the last happy days of her life.

She couldn’t just Photoshop Bruce out of the picture without also erasing every memory, good and bad, she was ever going to have of her brother. But Freddie had been the glue that held the three of them together.

Without him something was missing.

IT WAS A GOOD THING he really didn’t need a haircut. There weren’t that many good old-fashioned barber shops around anymore, unless you knew where to look. The one he remembered was long gone.

Bruce stood on the corner of Broadway and Hampden, trying to reorient himself by reading the marquee above the Army & Navy Surplus Store. The sign boasted of David Spade buying a jean jacket for a recent Saturday Night Live appearance. There was a time when nothing in this town changed except that sign.

Now it all looked different.

Broadway for a few blocks in either direction made up the main drag. One-and two-story turn-of-the-century brick buildings fought for attention among the ongoing revitalization of the area. To the north was Denver and to the south, the tech centers and sprawling suburbs. Both threatened to swallow Englewood whole.

“You Mitzi’s Marine?”

Bruce realized he’d been standing, lost in his thoughts, in the middle of the sidewalk, and he started to move closer to the intersection.

“Hey, I’m talking to you,” a wheelchair-bound man insisted, wheeling after him. “You hear me? Or that grenade take out your hearing, too?”

“I heard you,” Bruce answered, not bothering to hide his irritation. He didn’t make eye contact, either. He’d spotted the beggar from across the street.

“Hallelujah—he’s not deaf, just a dumb-ass Marine. Knock on wood.”

Bruce sidestepped the wheelie’s attempt to knock on his prosthetic leg. Which was not made of wood.

“I knew you was a gimp a mile down the road,” the old-timer boasted.

Bruce bristled at the use of the term gimp. He took pride in being able to walk without a limp. Stairs used to give him away. But with the aid of modern technology and practice—months and months of practice—he’d perfected his stride. As an above-the-knee amputee, he’d had to relearn to walk using his hips to propel himself forward, rather than his legs.

“Pride goeth before a fall, spitshine,” the old-timer said. “Least, that’s what they tell me down at the Salvation Army.”

The light on the corner flashed Walk and Bruce hurried across the street, with the wheelie keeping pace. “Spare change for a fellow Marine down on his luck?”

If he’d been wearing a different uniform, Bruce had no doubt the old-timer would have been Army, Navy, Air Force or whatever branch of service suited his purpose.

Marines did not beg on street corners. At least not those with a shred of self-respect.

“You know that homeless-vet act went out with the seventies.”

“Been on these streets since Nam,” the so-called vet insisted.

“I don’t doubt it,” Bruce said, picking up his pace.

“You think you’re better than me, son? You and me, we ain’t so different.”

Bruce stopped in his tracks. “First of all, I’m not your son,” he said, turning on the old man. But that meant he had to look at him, really look at him.

Greasy shoulder-length comb-over. A patch over his right eye. And a weathered face as wrinkled as one of Aunt Dottie’s dried-apple dolls. He smelled like the bottom of a cider barrel. Piss and vinegar. But a strong wind would blow the old fart away, he was so thin.

The vet’s military field jacket was tattered and worn, but offered some protection against the slushy gray November morning. More disturbing was the prosthetic leg sticking foot-up out of the junk packed on the back of the wheelchair.

The old-timer was missing his right leg from above the knee down—a mirror-image injury to Bruce’s own missing left leg. A RAK, right-leg-above-the-knee amputee. And a LAK, left-leg-above-the-knee amputee.

Bruce felt the familiar sinking sensation in his gut as he dug out his wallet. He’d been in prime physical condition before being cut down. He could have gone soft in the hospital, let the pain and the loss drive him to suicide like Stuart, or to bitterness like Hatch.

But he hadn’t. He hadn’t because there was nothing more important than getting back to his unit.

Unit, Corps, God and country.

Every Marine knew the order of things.

It was the one thing that kept him going.

But this guy…this guy was right out of Bruce’s waking nightmare. He had to have been young once. One quirk of fate and thirty years from now Bruce could be an old wheelie on a street corner, trying to live off a substandard disability check and begging for change.

“Here.” He shoved a dollar bill at the guy. Feeling the urge to put as much distance as possible between him and the wheelie, he continued up the block.

“A buck?” The next light turned green as he reached the corner, and the wheelchair-bound vet followed Bruce into another crosswalk. He wasn’t using his hands to operate the chair. He kept pace by scooting along with his single foot, maneuvering from one dip in the curb to the other. “Do you have any idea how much public transportation costs these days? How am I supposed to get to the VA on a buck?”