Chapter Five
Zack
That night, I ate a delicious dinner of turkey sausage, steamed vegetables, brown rice, buttered toast, and egg whites, topped off with a banana and a couple glasses of orange juice. The entire mess hall was buzzing with talk of the new reporter. The arguments of the last few days were forgotten as we discussed our initial impressions.
“Am I the only one who thought that girl was strangely hot?” asked Carson, tossing back a protein supplement. There was a murmur of “nos” accompanied by several shaken heads. “Fuck, if all big city reporters were like that, I’d have gone into journalism.”
“Language,” said Chuck, who had an aversion to cursing.
Carson glared at him in annoyance. “What did you think, Chuck? You’re bound to have an opinion. Is she hotter than your wife?”
“Nobody’s hotter than my wife,” said Chuck tersely, taking a sip of his juice. Several of the guys laughed.
Down at the far end of the table, Bernie’s eyes gleamed. There had been a fresh glow about him ever since the reporter’s arrival. “I’d love to bend her over a bed and show her how a real man does it,” he said, smacking his lips. “I bet all her past boyfriends have been limp-wrested vegans and small-dicked Bernie bros. Art school rejects squatting in abandoned warehouses on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, building bonfires out of old office paper.”
“Hey, some of us voted for Bernie,” said Chuck, his eyes twinkling. When the rest of the platoon looked at him in alarm, he added, “I’m not saying who. But some of us.”
“Better him than the alternative is all I’m sayin’,” said Carson.
But our Bernie wasn’t done discussing his new favorite subject. “I wonder what she looks like under those bulky shorts and camo vests,” he said with a faraway look in his eyes. “She was standing right in front of me while she and the sergeant talked, and I got a pretty good look at her. She’s way more slender than she looked. I’d reckon she doesn’t weigh more than about a hundred pounds.”
“And not much taller than my mom,” said Carson.
“Carson, don’t bring your mom into this,” said Chuck.
“She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, is what I mean. Maybe not even that. What do you think, Zack?”
I knew he would never let it go if I failed to have an opinion on this most critical of subjects. “I just want to see her standing naked in front of a window,” I said dryly, “clutching an eggplant to her bare chest.”
Carson wasn’t the smartest guy, but he could always tell when he was being made fun of. “No, for real, though,” he said with a hint of impatience.
“She’s very petite. I’d be curious to see what she looks like with her clothes off. If she’s that slender, she probably doesn’t have huge boobs, but I’ve been surprised before.”
There was a slight pause during which everyone seemed to be pondering my past sexual exploits. I had warned Carson not to tell anyone the story of my airport encounter, so of course it was all over base by the end of our first day back.
“Well, I don’t think it would much matter in her case,” said Bernie. “If she’s a reporter, she’ll be in her mid- to late twenties, but she doesn’t look a day over sixteen. And I bet she’s dynamite in bed.”
“Bernie, I look forward to reading the love manifesto you will inevitably have smuggled out of prison,” said Chuck. Everyone laughed except Bernie.
Right as dinner was ending, the sergeant ordered us back to our rooms to check our gear. This was one of my least favorite parts of the job; I would sooner be shot at than have to comb through my equipment to make sure it was all in order.
As I sat there at the foot of my bed holding my hydration bladder in one hand, Carson strode up and slung his backpack down on the floor next to me.
“You never did tell me what you really thought of that girl,” he said softly as he pulled out his hunting knife and turned it over in his hands.
“I told you I thought she was petite,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but that’s just a fact. I still don’t know how you, Zack Savery, feel about this gorgeous woman. You managed to tell me everything but that.”
I shrugged. “I mean, she was a cute woman. I guess I’ve always had a thing for blondes. The woman I was dating while on leave had the prettiest long blonde hair, but she wasn’t all that bright. She was like a walking stereotype.”
“Well, I guess that’s to be expected when you’re dating a public school teacher in a rural town,” said Carson. “They say you only go into teaching if you’ve failed at everything else in life.”
“Fair enough, yeah.” I reached into my bag and pulled out my watch, making sure it was set to the right time. “This woman is bound to be a step up in that respect. Investigative reporting isn’t a job for idiots.”
“I didn’t know a woman’s brains meant so much to you,” said Carson. “The way you went after that bimbo in the airport, I figured one pussy is as good as another.”
“On balance, I think intelligence makes a woman way hotter,” I replied. “There’s something a little bit sexy about a gal who can yell Shakespeare in bed.”
Carson raised his brows in surprise. “Hold on,” he said slowly, “this is really interesting to me. So, and I’mma need your honest opinion here, if you were given the choice between a woman with brains but no boobs, or a woman with boobs but no brains, which one would you pick?”
“Am I ever going to be in a situation where I have to make this choice?” I asked.
“It could very well happen!” cried Carson. “Say you go back to Dallas and there are two girls hanging on you. One of ‘em is a bimbo, but she’s foxy as hell. The other girl, she’s—you know, kinda ugly. But she’ll sit there and talk to you for an hour about, I don’t know, the Great Fire of London.”
I smiled, beginning to feel mischievous. “How ugly are we talking?”
“However you define ugly,” said Carson. “Scrawny, yellow teeth, no boobs, not much of an ass.”
“I think I’d pass on the yellow teeth. If she found her way to a dentist, then we might talk.”
“Oh, so now we see what’s important,” said Carson loudly, addressing the whole room. “Old Zeke here doesn’t care if a girl’s got huge boobs, as long as her teeth are clean.”
“Clean teeth are important.” At this point, I was mostly trolling him. “What, did you think I nailed that chick at the airport because of her boobs?”
Carson goggled at me. “So much to unpack in that statement. Did you really bang her?”
I shrugged, struggling hard not to smile. “We got pretty close. Another ten minutes, and it would have gotten to that point, I’m sure. She was ready.”
Carson shook his head and muttered a word that sounded suspiciously like, “Fucker.”
But at that moment, we were both startled by a tremendous banging in the hallway and a volley of curse words. It sounded like someone was slamming a locker—hard—over and over again.
“What in the hell?” muttered Carson, getting up and walking to the door with his knife in hand. The rest of us set down our bags and followed.
I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when I looked through the door. Bernie stood at the end of the hall, his face strained and sweaty. He was slamming his fists into the lockers, hitting them so hard and with such frequency that the metal was beginning to bend under the onslaught.
Chuck brushed past us and ran down the hall toward him. “Bernie!” he yelled. “What are you doing, man?”
Bernie lowered his fists, having only belatedly realized that the rest of us were gawking at him in fear and surprise. “I can’t do this anymore!” he said angrily, punching the locker one last time for good measure.
“What, you mean the training?” Carson balked. “Are you quitting?”
Chuck raised a hand to silence him. Carson swore under his breath; he had always resented Chuck’s air of being older and smarter than the rest of us.
“No, not the service,” said Bernie, his shoulders slumped in defeat. “Life. I’m no good at it.”
“Well, none of us are great at it,” said Chuck warily. “But that’s no reason to go and do something drastic.”
“You think I enjoy being lectured by you?!” Bernie shouted. He looked insane, and for the first time I began to fear for his safety. “You’ve got a wife and a kid. You’re happily married, and you’re probably the smartest person in our platoon. I’ve seen you take a gun apart and put it back together in less than a minute. You’re the best swimmer, the best climber, the best sniper, the best blah, blah, blah. Whatever. If you wanted the girls, you could have them. I suppose the fact that you don’t want them is another point in your favor.”
“Bernie, man, we all have longings,” said Chuck, raising both hands in the air. “Whatever this is about, however it started—”
“I’ll tell you how it started,” said Bernie. He pointed a finger into the air, and I could see his hands were shaking. “It started when that—woman—showed up this afternoon. God, she’s got to be the prettiest girl I’ve seen in ages. And I just got to thinking, what would it be like to bed someone like her? Just for a single night, even. But of course, when I made the mistake of sharing how I felt at dinner, every single one of you mocked me. ‘That idiot Bernie thinks he has a chance with a lady! Bernie has a crush on a girl, so he’ll probably end up in prison!’ Hilarious!”
Chuck lowered his hands, looking simultaneously confused and full of pity.
“Not one of you,” said Bernie, “stood up and said, ‘You know what? Bernie’s not a great guy, and yeah, he’s kind of dorky and awkward-looking, but he could totally bang a girl if he wanted to.’ The thought never even crossed your mind because it’s already a given that our new friend will end up in Carson’s bed, or Jake’s, or Zack’s. Hell, she could end up in Chuck’s bed if he made the effort. But the one thing that will never happen, because it could never, ever happen, is that she might choose to sleep with me. No, not Bernie. Awkward, repulsive, nerdy, woman-repelling, hunchbacked Bernie!”
This was such an astonishing outpouring of resentment and fury that for a long time after it ended, we stood there in silence. No one seemed to know how to respond, not even Chuck. Carson looked completely dumbfounded, while Jake sighed and shook his head, his eyes misting over.
“First, I want to get one thing straight here,” said Chuck, raising his voice slightly. “Not you or me or Jake or Zack or anybody is going to be sleeping with this reporter? Is that clear?”
The rest of us nodded with varying degrees of hesitation.
“Second,” he went on, “you have probably the thinnest skin of any man I’ve ever met. Every day, me and Zack and the rest of the guys rag on each other, and no one complains about it. That’s because we understand that we’re joking. As I recall, you’ve said some pretty demeaning things about me and Carson, but you don’t hear me whining about it. You need to man up and learn how to take a joke.”
“It’s different with y’all,” said Bernie. He was resting his head against the locker with his eyes closed. “When you joke with them, you do it in good fun. You don’t laugh with me , you laugh at me.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” said Chuck coolly. “You can work that out with your therapist. For now, I want you to promise me that you aren’t going to try to hit on this woman.”
“Why, because you think I’m a creep?”
“No,” said Chuck, beginning to sound angry. “Because it’s unprofessional, and we could all get in trouble.”
“I don’t see you asking the rest of the boys not to hit on her.”
Chuck wrung his hands in exasperation. The longer this conversation went on, the more it strained his patience. Turning to the six of us gathered in the doorway, he said, “Boys, will each of you promise not to hit on, harass, or bang the hot reporter?”
“Promise,” we said dully. I couldn’t help noticing that Carson had crossed his fingers as he said it.
Chuck turned back to Bernie. “So there you go. Now you have nothing to complain about—and, more importantly, nothing to whine about. Not you or anyone else is gonna be in that woman’s bed. She’s here to do a job, and we’re here to do ours.”
Bernie went on leaning against the locker in silence. It seemed like he was beginning to wish Chuck would just go away. Personally, I thought Chuck had handled the situation about as well as he could have: Bernie had been a drag on the platoon since the day he arrived, and none of us really knew how to deal with it.
“God, I hate that fucker sometimes,” Carson muttered as we returned to our bags looking shaken and exhausted.
“Which one?” asked Jake, rolling up his canvas tent. “Chuck or Bernie?”
“You know which one. One of these days, he’s just going to snap and murder us all in our sleep.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “Someday after we’ve all gone home, we’ll turn on the news to see him shooting up a Wal-Mart.”
“Or being handcuffed for buying a thousand pounds of fertilizer,” said Carson.
“Yeah, or kidnapping the president’s wife.” Each of us went around the room and offered our own, increasingly lurid suggestions. I think we were all pretty frightened after that performance in the hallway, and it was a relief to be able to joke about it. Although, I thought with an uneasy feeling as I clambered into my bed, I hadn’t really meant it as a joke. And I wasn’t sure the others had, either.