Homecoming

FICTION

She had a laugh like an old brokedown car—the staccato of an engine that wouldn’t start. It made me want to take the plastic knife off my paper plate and push it into my eardrums. Instead, I stared at her teeth and smiled.

“We just got a new car,” she said to anyone that would listen, in between big smacks of gum. “Stevie picked it up for my birthday. Ain’t that right Stevie?”

From over by the smoking grill, in a cluster of three men talking about sports scores and performance reports, Steve raised a plastic-cupped salute.

My wife appeared like a wisp and squeezed my shoulder, not without affection. I tried to make my smile more believable.

“It’s way too fancy for me,” the woman with the machine gun laugh said. She let out another three-round burst. I gripped the arms of my chair until the hard white plastic bit into my fingertips. “Brand new. Off the lot. All the bells and whistles,” she offered when I failed to urge her for any details.

“Well, that sounds lovely,” my wife said in a voice that still sounded like Mississippi even after twelve years and four duty stations. “Doesn’t it Jack?”

“Yeah… real fancy,” I said.

I had been back stateside for less than two weeks and was still coming down from deployment. In culture shock after returning to my own country, go figure. Everything was different. My home had become a foreign land to me and it was tearing itself to bits. I looked at the neighbors, littering my backyard like strangers, holding disposable paper plates and red plastic cups.

“Good to have you back,” a man said from behind me. He clapped his hand on my shoulder and electricity shot through my body like a car alarm. I pulled away from him.

“Sorry, Jack,” he said, both hands raised in a universal don’t-want-any-trouble sign. Several people nearby stopped talking and looked over at us. My wife appeared at my side.

“Jack,” she said quietly, placing a hand on my chest. “Should we get some air?”

We were already outside. I nodded.

“Be back in two shakes,” she said to the guests and everyone went back to their conversations.

As she led me by the hand into and through our little house, I breathed like they had taught me—two breaths in, one breath out. It almost always worked, temporarily, but it never fixed the problem.

Fixed implied something was broken.

Two breaths in—one breath out.

Fixed implied that I was broken.

Two breaths—one breath.

Maybe it wasn’t me though. Maybe it was here that was broken, and being away had finally given me the ability to see it.

Two—one.

That wouldn’t account for the meltdowns at places like Costco though, or pulling that guy out of his car after he whipped around my family in the parking lot.

“Jack, Hunny, you doing alright?” my wife said, once we were alone on the front porch.

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t mean anything… he didn’t know…” she said.

“Yeah, I know. He’s a good guy. He can’t know that I have the startle response of one of those fainting goats these days.”

She laughed weakly.

“It’s just… different… everything is different,” I said.

“They said it’ll take some time for you to acclimate again—to get reaccustomed. Just like last time…”

She looked strained and tired, pulled in too many directions with too many concerns, like most military wives. By God, she was beautiful though, like an oak tree—something solid. I looked at her and let out a long breath.

“That’s just it,” I said. “I’m not sure I want to get used to it again. I don’t want to fit into to…” I waved my hands at the little suburban neighborhood we had bought into, “…this.”

The house had been perfect when we moved in. With my last reenlistment bonus, we had finally been able to afford the type of place we had always wanted. It was her dream home. At one time, it had been mine too. That was before I came back to see America with new eyes—the people that lived in it.

I still don’t see how it could have changed so much in nine months, yet here we were. Privilege divorced from gratitude and reattached to guilt. Tolerance became unacceptable, and advocacy was a requirement. Everyone was either an adversary or an ally, with nothing in between.

Meanwhile, idiots like me traveled the world doing bad things to bad people—ridding countries of the type of men that make sure little girls don’t learn to read by stoning them to death. Losing friends for strangers and coming back home to watch people tear down flags and topple monuments.

People thank you for your service and companies still offer discounts, but people don’t go to war to be mislabeled heroes or given ten percent off major appliances. They go to war because others need help, and home is worth protecting—its people are worth protecting.

“This place isn’t worth protecting,” I said quietly to myself. My wife wiped at my face, at tears I hadn’t known were falling, and pressed her forehead to mine.

“Jack Allen Wagner,” she said, the steel of her voice wrapped in velvet. “You don’t go to those places for BOGO culture or cowards that hide behind ideas. You go because that’s what good men do. You go to show our sons that sometimes evil people do evil…shit…”

That got my attention. My wife swore less than a Gideon Bible. A smirk cracked its way across my stone face.

“…until good men kick in their door and jerk a knot in their rear end.” She was breathing heavily, the look in her eye not unlike the men I traveled the world with.

I smiled—deeply—proudly—all teeth and crinkled eyes, like a boy that had just caught a frog in a creek following a stick-gun fight with his friends—back when the stakes were lower but there was a lot more worth fighting for.

“There you are,” she said, stealthily wiping a rogue tear from her cheek. “There you are, you big lug.” She grabbed me by both of my ears and kissed me fully like I was a mirage she was afraid would disappear at any moment. “I knew you were still in there somewhere.”

We sat down on the little white bench, both her hands wrapped around one of mine. She rested her head on my shoulder.

“This country might not be good enough to warrant people like you—not right now, anyhow—but I have hope that it will again. Someday soon.”

I looked at her in disbelief, in awe of the one thing that I couldn’t seem to muster: hope.

“How?” I asked. “Everyone is either so concerned with stuff, with getting theirs—whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean—or they’re at each other’s necks trying to compete for who has it worse. Show me where it’s more fair. Put a pin in a map and let’s go have a look. I’ve been to so many places—so many places—and I haven’t seen a single one of them that has it figured out better, but we can’t see it for our own greed and envy. The whole damned thing is like… It’s like Sodom and Gomorrah all over again.”

My wife’s eyes shone wetly and she squeezed them shut.

“And what if there were just ten righteous men, Jack?” she said.

I didn’t consider myself a believer—not anymore—not yet—but I knew the stories well.

“For the sake of ten, He will not destroy it,” I recited in a whisper.

She nodded. “I think you can find nine more.”

I let out a breath that I felt like I had been holding since stepping onto a homebound C-130. As far gone as America was—greedy, resentful, dishonest, and ungrateful—worse had been brought back from the brink of destruction time and time again. For the first time since stepping off that plane, I felt a glimmer of hope, delivered on the wings of a five-foot-four angel—that only cussed on occasion.