Bleed American

    This wasn't how it was supposed to happen.  There was supposed to be more to it than this.  He hadn't even managed to fire a shot or go down in a blaze of gunfire and glory.  It was too quick, far too quick.  Just a spike of pressure punching his chest and then he was against a wall, bleeding.  This wasn't at all how it was supposed to go.

      He groaned in pain as his senses returned to him.  Several pieces of shrapnel had penetrated his flak jacket.  Each breath elicited a sharp stabbing pain.  He had to take several quick and shallow gulps of air, followed by a deep breath to keep from passing out.  Going unconscious would be the death of him, he was sure of that.  The men who set off the bomb would come for him and kill him as he lay helpless.  He couldn't let that happen.  That was not how he was supposed to die.

      None of his buddies would be there to remember him.  What remained of his friends were scattered around the burning carapace of a Humvee.  Only his sergeant had managed to survive the initial blast.  He had dragged himself clear of the vehicle and expired beside a burning tire.  His face was a mixture of dark red and charcoal peeling skin.  The hair was singed away; the eyes were clenched shut.  A grimace of pain split through his blackened features, cut by his perfectly white teeth.  From above the blue sky peered benevolently down at the scorched victim, who smiled eternally back.

      The Soldier always thought he would die before his sergeant would.  The Sergeant was like the alpha wolf of the pack and he took care of his people.  When the unit first came under attack during their original deployment, the Soldier became cut off from the rest of his squad and it was the Sergeant who went through enemy fire to wrangle his dumbstruck private back to safety.

      The Sergeant kept tabs on all his men like a father on his children.  He affectionately referred to them as, "his kids."  The Soldier wasn't exactly family in his unit though.  He was the quiet guy, who would have rather read a book or watched cartoons in Arabic on the squad's highly prized eight inch television.  Otherwise he spent his hours cleaning his weapon and whiling away the time just laying back on his cot and thinking.  The rest of the guys under the Sergeant's purview tried to bribe him into joining them for a beer or two after their daily patrols finished, but he always refused.  Only the Sergeant could ever manage to coax him out.

      "He's a loner," the squad sometimes said about him.  "He'll probably go psycho on us one day and get us all killed." He never let on that he heard them talk about him like that, even though the Sergeant laughed and agreed with them.  

      He wanted to be the martyr that didn't scream, that nobody knew until he was gone in one blinding flash.  He wished that he could have saved them all and given his own life.  Then they would remember him; they would tell his story to anyone who would give them the time to listen.  They would chat somebody's ear off about how he took five bullets in the chest, or how he dove onto a grenade, just to save them.  Then they would tell everyone how they never knew him that well, how he was just the quiet kid who just took it all on the chin.

      Nobody was going to tell the story about how he was walking back from taking a piss on the side of the road, when a bomb exploded beneath his Humvee.

      A small white cat shaded in dirt and grime casually inspected the explosion as though nothing had happened.  Its little head bobbed up and down over the corpse of the Sergeant, sniffed at him and reeled back at the odor of burned skin, then trotted idly away from the body.

      The Soldier used to own a cat like that.  He wondered drunkenly what she was doing at that moment, while her master bled out on a street on the opposite side of the world.  An image of the white and brown speckled feline crawled into his mind.  He imagined her perched over his fish tank with one daintily outstretched paw, waiting patiently for the right moment to strike at his ancient goldfish.

      If the cat had not managed to snatch the fish already then the both of them were temporarily housed at his neighbor's apartment.  Just before he left for boot camp he gave them to her.  She was obscenely excited when he did, for she had never owned any pets before.  When he dropped them off she hugged him and kissed him quickly on the cheek, asking for letters and emails.  The thought had occurred to him to do so, but he didn't really like her all that much.  She drank too much, played her music too loud, and had noisy sex on Sundays.

      He was still a virgin, technically.  The whore from his leave didn't really count, not to him anyway.  Instead he just considered it a practice round for the day when he really was going to become a man.  Until then he played everything off as though he was an old campaigner.  When his Sergeant asked him how she was, he only replied, "I've had better." He doubted that the Sergeant believed it.

      Once he did have a chance for love and he knew it too.  Cupid practically gave him the girl of his dreams on a silver platter and garnished her with beauty and wit.  Her name was Emily.  She went to school with him from kindergarten all the way through high school.  They came from opposite ends of the spectrum, him being the city kid, her being a country girl.  Neither of them had much in common, save they were both quiet and passive.

      Her face was something of a blur to him at that moment; all he could remember was her blonde hair.  She kept it long, never any shorter than the small of her back.  During class, whenever she was bored, she put it into magnificent braids that took half the period to complete.  She would first undo the braid she already had in and comb it out with her delicate, pale fingers – sometimes she had a brush.  Once it was straightened to her liking, she pulled it all over her shoulder and began to weave it together, starting at the top and working her way down.  When she finished, she would fiddle with the end for a while and then take it all apart and start over again.  Her hair always reminded him of French bread when she put it together; the way the thick braids were so tightly woven together.

      The first time he drew any attention from her was at their school's autumn festival, in second grade.  It was mostly just a get together for the older kids and parents, while the younger children got to romp around the unguarded hallways and eat cake.  It was later in the night, as people were starting to go home.  He and a friend were playing a demented form of poker with coins and most of a deck beneath the folded up lunch tables in the cafeteria.  The soft radiance of music that wafted down the hall from the gym, where everyone else was, and the slick noise the cards made against one another, were interrupted by a mild cough and a tap on his shoulder.  It was one of Emily's friends.  The name escaped him now, but he remembered that she got pregnant in tenth grade from the snotty little kid he was playing cards with then.

      "Emily wants to dance with you," she said to him, all the while looking over his shoulder.  Emily stood in the unlit doorway to the cafeteria keeping her gray eyes everywhere but on him.  He tried to catch them but she shot them to the floor whenever he glanced at her.  Only for a brief moment, with her mouth in a half smile, showing off a pair of missing teeth, did she lock eyes with him.  Butterflies whisked their way into his stomach and tickled his insides with their feathery wings at that moment.  Then he was reminded of his companion, who was starting to sort through his hand.

      "No," he said to her friend after the short deliberation.

      "Why not?"

      "I don't want to," he made a visible effort to return to the card game.  His friend was meanwhile grinning sheepishly and doing his best not to burst out laughing at his mischievous thieving.

      Emily's friend persisted.  She sighed heavily, rolled her eyes, and tapped him on the shoulder once more.  He made a laborious turn from the card game as though it pained him each time to rip himself away from it.

      "She really wants to dance with you."

      "No," he said again glancing across the room at Emily's shy form.  The smile faded from her lips.  Her friend snapped her fingers rudely in his face.

      "I'll dance with him if you do," she pointed at his friend, who was now in the process of stealing some of the coins the two had been betting with.  Again he refused.  She rolled her eyes and mumbled something about boys being completely immature, then left with Emily in tow.

      Emily's friend managed to get a dance with his friend by the end of the night anyway.  She even kissed him firmly on the lips before they parted company.

      "She tried to lick me or something," he protested afterward at a sleepover with a mouthful of toothpaste, much to the delight of the other boys that heard the story.

      That was that.  He banished himself from the only girl he ever really decided to like, not once, but three times.  It only made it worse that it didn't seem to faze her that much.  Apart from a single night of sadness inflicted by his rejections, she never pined for his affection thereafter.  She never fell in with a bad crowd without him at her side, she never turned to drugs, she just went her way and he went his.  They flirted a little when they were seniors in high school.  By then he was too shy to make anything out of it anyway.  The last time he saw her was his high school graduation.

      Blood started to soak into the hard packed soil at the base of the wall where his back was propped.  It ran down him in tiny rivulets from the exit wound near his spine, from his burst eardrums, from his nose, and from his eyes.  His left eyelid was swollen shut and his right eye was beginning to lose its vision.  Red blood and spittle mingled in the gap between his lip and gums, spilling onto his chin.  Each breath he took gurgled like he was slowly sipping the last of the soda from the bottom of a glass.  The pain from his wounds was beginning to be masked by shock.  He wondered if perhaps he might be able to crawl to safety.

      During his basic training, a motivational speaker came to visit the beleaguered recruits and give them a pep talk.  He was a major who fought in Vietnam.  The story was that he got caught in an ambush one day and he got hit with shrapnel from a grenade.  The explosion temporarily blinded him and he got separated from his men.

      "I was stranded," he said to them from behind his wooden podium, "I was under fire, and there was sure as hell no help coming.  You know, just when I thought things couldn't get worse, they did.  I was trying to crawl away when I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my back.  Turns out that was exactly what it was too, some Vietcong put a knife right between my backbone and my kidney.  Didn't manage to finish the job though. " This elicited a few grins from the crowd and even from the major.

      "So there I was, outskirts of some village whose name I could hardly pronounce, bleeding like a son of a gun, and blind.  I thought I was done for, and I'll tell you kids right now, the thought of dying there didn't sit well with me.  That was when my training kicked in," he pointed with a beefy, gnarled forefinger to the cadre of drill instructors standing near the back of the auditorium. "These boys and girls are tough, and you might hate them now, but they've already saved your life.  That training you go through from sun up to sundown every day, it will save you, and that's all there is to it." Everyone in the audience burst into applause for the instructors when he said that.  Whether or not it was tacitly compulsory the Soldier was not quite sure of.

      "So I did what my instructors taught me to do.  I treated the wound, applied pressure to it, and stopped the bleeding.  Fortunately I had been wounded near the road, so I knew which direction our rendezvous point had been.  Even though I was tired, and I was hurting, there was one thing above all that kept me going besides my training, and that was the thought of my wife back home.  We got married just before I left and I was determined not to leave her a widow.  So I dragged myself four clicks to our picket line without letting her out of my mind.  That was all the motivation I needed.  Sometimes that's all you need: a good woman, or man for you ladies out there, to bring you home." Everyone in the audience nodded in agreement save the Soldier.

      The Major was taken to a hospital after he was recovered by his men, where he was operated on for several hours.  His knife wound was badly infected and he was forced to stay in bed for months just to fight the illness away.

      "Only my desire to see her beautiful face again brought me through those days," he said. "Lying in bed and sweating and in pain, she was my opiate, my anesthesia." At that moment he wiped away a tear.  He had to visibly control himself on the podium to tell about how they had met when he landed.  He walked off the cargo plane, and she ran to him across the tarmac and practically tackled him on the pavement and smothered him with kisses.

      The Soldier was not like the Major though.  He was an unmarried private, and he could barely move his arms, let alone drag himself anywhere.  He didn't have just one puncture wound to contend with, he had nearly ten.  Focusing his sight was becoming difficult.  His feet had gone numb and the trunk of his body was starting to get chilly, even in the afternoon heat.  The dirt beneath him had turned to a vivid, dark purple.

      His parents would hear about this; he had included them on the next of kin form he had to fill out before he enlisted.  When he put their phone number onto the dotted line he realized that he hadn't called them in over a year.  He also realized that really care to either.  What was back at home was something that used to be his mother, and his tired father.  About the only decent memories he had of them were of the wilderness trails from around their home.  He constantly dragged his mother or father into the forest to go exploring, for his brothers and sisters were gone away to college by that time.  The next youngest sibling to him graduated high school the year he was born.

      It was in that forest that his mother had her stroke.  He had gone on ahead into a stand of pine trees to investigate some curious noises.  Plodding through the light undergrowth he was intent on discovering just what it was.  Much to his delight, it was something furry.  The source was a brown critter, with a large body, small head and stubbed tail.  At the time he suspected it to be a badger, though he had never actually seen a badger before in his life.  Regardless of that fact he dubbed it his favorite animal.

      It was digging into a rotten log in search of grubs or perhaps just to sharpen its claws.  The creature was so enraptured by this log that it had hardly heard the approach of the wild young boy behind it.  Even as he managed to get close enough to touch it, the animal paid him no heed.  Just as he reached his hand out to stroke the furry pelt, the creature caught sight of the irreverent child.  It flew off in the direction of his mother.  He charged after it.

      At first he thought the supposed badger only knocked her over.  She was sprawled out onto the dirt path as though something had hit her dead in the chest.  He went to her side and offered to help her up, all the while apologizing for the critter's behavior.

      "Sorry, mom," he said, "I just wanted to touch it, I didn't think it would run this way." She didn't respond to his words.  Tentatively he shook her; this yielded no results.  Seeing that the situation was more dire than he had thought, he decided to take drastic measures.  Licking his lips with apprehension he tried to revive her like he had seen in the movies, with a quick slap across the face.  When he did, her eyes popped suddenly open and he nearly fell over himself with surprise.

      Even though her eyes were open, she still did not respond.  She just stared up at the sky, jaw slack and body limp.  It was then that he decided to run for help.

      His father, who used to work at a hardware store as a salesman, called an ambulance and fled to where she lay.  By the time any help arrived though, the damage had been done.  The right side of her body was paralyzed.

      His brothers and sisters came to visit him and his dad a few weeks later.  None of them really mentioned anything about their mother, who refused to come out of her room.  Instead they just tried to carry on like everything was normal.  The closest they ever got to broaching the topic of their invalid parent was when the eldest son, who was nearly forty, asked their father about money.

      "Dad, if you need help with the bills," he mumbled over a plate of mashed potatoes and roast beef.  His father just put a hand on his son's but didn't say a word.  In the silence at the table, the Soldier had been certain he could hear everyone's heart beating out of rhythm with one another.  When the lack of conversation became too much for the children and their father to handle, they began again with their small talk.  The second youngest brother said he missed the old place, the eldest started talking about his business ventures, all the while the quiet boy, the youngest of them all, slipped spoonful after spoonful of mashed potatoes into his mouth.

      After the visit, the house phone rang often with all the kids checking up on their mother.  Eventually, as their lives got busier and work held them up, their calls became fewer and farther between.  By the time of the Soldier's ninth birthday a few months later, the only communication his parents ever got was from the oldest, who always sent them a monthly check in a green envelope.

      He wanted to be the one to tell them he wasn't coming home.  It wasn't fair that his father would get a letter in the mail with an official army return address stamped in the upper left hand corner.  He wouldn't have to read it, he would just know, and he would put that piece of mail in his pocket, and walk back into the house.  Not a word would be said.

      A few Arab men emerged from behind cover.  They glanced nervously about, wondering if perhaps there were more bombs, or nervous militiamen waiting with fingers edged over triggers.  One of them rounded the Humvee chassis and spied the wounded soldier against the wall.  He called to the rest of the men who had come out.  They hurried around the wreckage to get a look at him.  For a moment they all just stood still and looked at the crumpled form with wide eyes.

      Finally the man who had spotted him came to his side.  He removed the dirt smudged shirt he wore and placed it over a grievous looking shoulder wound, where the flack jacket did not cover.  The soldier tried to push him away with what remained of his strength.  All he could muster was a nudge, enough to bring the man's attention to him.  He began asking questions in Arabic but he could neither hear nor understand a word he had to say.

      "I'm already dead," the Soldier mumbled through his numb lips.  He coughed out a little blood.  A few moments later the rhythm of his heart choked.  His lungs took in one last breath, then heaved it abruptly out.