Cherry

by Nico Walker

I walk to the counter, with the gun down now so it’s pointed at the floor. There’s no sense in making a big deal out of this. One thing about holding up banks is you’re mostly robbing women, so you don’t ever want to be rude.

So Emily’d do shit like walk an extra half mile in the fucking rain on account of Marc’s sold popcorn and diet soda a few cents cheaper than Russo’s did. She was doing shit like that while I was off doing whatever I wanted because I was a soft kid and my parents gave me everything I needed. And I could make up for whatever I didn’t need by selling drugs to the kids at school. Which was an easy thing to do. Emily half-thought I was a dirtbag, but then she was kind of into that so it was okay.

Can you look back to when you met the one you loved the most and remember exactly how it was? Not as in where you were or what she was wearing or what you ate for lunch that day, but rather as in what it was you saw in her that made you say, Yes, this is what I came here for. I could say some dumb shit, but I really don’t know. I liked the way she cussed. She cussed with great beauty. And her body. She was the best fuck. She really fucked you, or she really let you fuck her. She didn’t hold back. She always gave you everything and she wasn’t ever fake about it.

Anyway. The waiter told me how he was fucking Gabriella. Gabriella was 21. She had a pretty face and she was stacked. She always wore fuck-me shoes, rain or shine. She seemed nice enough, but the waiter didn’t give a shit one way or another. “She’s dumb as a rock,” he said. I couldn’t see how it mattered. “She likes getting that ass stretched out, though,” he said. “And she buys me clothes.”

I’D MEANT to drop out of school, but I took a 5mg Klonopin and drank half a 40 of Olde English and blacked out at the art museum. So I fucked off the deadline for dropping classes and I ended up having to fail out.

BY MAY I had moved out of my parents’ house and gone to live in a duplex on Murray Hill with my friend Roy and his cousin Joe and whoever else happened to be there (primarily James Lightfoot). Roy was a big Irish kid, and he wore the same fucked-up sport coat every day and drank 40s and rolled cigarettes with pipe tobacco. Joe was a pretty little wop. He couldn’t not get laid all the time. It was really something. He was adopted; that’s how he was Roy’s cousin. He was the toughest one of the three of us. He was tough as shit. We used to beat the shit out of each other to prove how tough we were, so that’s how we knew.

And now I was enlisting in the Army because I’d been saying I would. So we thought we were hot shit. It was Tuesday night.

I said I had to go take a piss. So I did. I punched the bathroom mirror on accident when I was washing my hands. The mirror fell off the wall and took the sink with it. I didn’t stay. It had been a tremendous fucking crash and I needed to warn my friends. The barmaid was making for the wreckage. “We gotta go,” I said. “I mean like we gotta go right fuckin now.” The barmaid was cussing in the bathroom and we said goodbye to the Knight of Columbus. He said not to worry about the barmaid. “That whore has had two abortions,” he said.

We didn’t have far to run to get home, and we had a fistfight in the driveway till one of the neighbors said he’d come down and shoot us if we didn’t be quiet and go to bed. So we went inside. I called Emily. I wanted her to tell me I was good, maybe thank me or something. But she had her mind made up to give me grief, and I shook my head because I didn’t understand. I said, “Dearest, I told you before that I was gonna do this and you didn’t say anything then.” She said, “That’s because I thought you were full of shit, baby.”

I WENT and saw my parents the following evening. They were doing alright. They thought the shit with the Army was dumb, but they were doing alright. They’d just bought a house, a nice house with plenty of room. I wanted nothing to do with it.

My dad said, “Are you sure there isn’t anything else that you would rather do?” I said I didn’t know what else there was to do. My mom said, “I don’t see why you don’t wish to continue with your studies.” I said, “What studies? I failed out of school eight months ago.”

They packed us into cattle cars and we rode up the hill to boot camp. — IT WAS a lot of yelling. They called us names like High Speed and Dick With Ears. Our hands were dick skinners. Our mouths were cock holsters. Our enemy was Haji. Our friends were battle buddies. It was real trashy. There were girls in our company. They couldn’t do the exercises. We carried their equipment for them. It was a hassle. There were dudes who were fucked up too, but nothing like the girls.

It was two years since we had met. We were older now; we both had money saved and we had our jobs and we were very much on our own. She’d be 21 in a month. We were so sure that we had grown up. We would get married before I went to Iraq. She brought it up this time. She said it made practical sense. If we were married I’d get paid more and she could be on my health insurance. And I’d get to marry Emily. “But we’re going to get divorced,” she said. I said that was fine. I said, “We’ll get divorced if that’s what you want.”

A lot of Internet pornography went around the FOB. The biggest file had been passed down to us from the Mississippi Rifles, who had inherited it from the Marines, who had inherited it from the 10th Mountain Division, who had inherited it from whomever. We watched the Fuck Van a lot. The Fuck Van was the last thing we needed to see. The way the Fuck Van worked was the Fuck Van would cruise around looking for young women to video getting fucked in the Fuck Van. Several bros would ride in the Fuck Van and they’d be on the lookout. Then one bro would go “look!” and he’d point out a young woman walking down the side of the road and maybe she’d have a bag of groceries or something like that. It would always begin innocently enough. The bros would call out to the young woman and offer her a ride. At first she’d be reluctant to accept the ride because the Fuck Van was a panel van and she associated this type of van with rapists and laborers and these were strange bros. But the bros would overcome her misgivings with their bro charms and she’d inevitably accept the ride. Once they got her in the Fuck Van the bros would make fun of the young woman and call her stupid so as to make her feel insecure about herself and they’d ask her questions that got rather personal and after a few minutes they’d ask her to take off her shirt.

He jabbed the boy three times hard in the ribs with the butt end of the asp. The boy’s father, the mother, the two girls: not one of them so much as blinked. He said, “Is there anything you want to tell me?” He hit the boy some more. The boy took it quietly. His legs buckled but the sergeant had him by the neck. No one said anything. The sergeant hit the kid some more. He had his mind made up to hit the kid for a while, so he did. And it was meaningless because we were looking for some dead men. They’d died and gone to the Internet. That’s where people go when they die these days. At least when they die like that. I walked out of the house and I ran into Lieutenant Evans. I said, “You probably shouldn’t go in there, sir.” He said, “Why not?” I said, “One of the Airborne guys is beating up a kid.” He said, “Oh.”

You could get narcotics from the right interpreter. But then you might have a stroke or fall out of a fucking guard tower or something else infamous. And you didn’t want that. So what you did was you’d have it sent in from the World. The mail people X-rayed the mail and they had drug dogs for it too. But it wasn’t that serious. You could get a little weed in. You could get a little powder. Prescription drugs were wide open (within reason). If you could get somebody to mail it, and if they showed a little restraint, you were good. Of course it wasn’t every day you got such a care package. So what ended up happening was you’d form little cliques, three or four like-minded individuals getting weed or pills or liquor or whatever sent in from the World. Liquor usually came in mouthwash bottles. Little bits of weed came in all kinds of ways.

So Lessing and I were pissed off when we came back in, but then there was a package from Roy and there were these fucking brownies with an ounce of weed baked in them, and the fucking Winstons….It was just what the doctor had ordered. Lessing and I got high as shit. These were some fucking brownies. They tasted like straight weed: you could hardly taste anything else, just weed and a hint of chocolate. We got shitfaced on these fucking things. If we’d have had to deal with anybody but Borges or Burnes that afternoon we’d have been fucked. Anybody else probably would have sent us to fucking Leavenworth, or shot us on the spot, a summary execution, to make an example of us. It was that serious. We were so high.

Probably I was kicking some doors in somewhere. Nothing dramatic or whatever. Just doors. I’d kicked a hundred doors in. More like two hundred doors. Nothing ever came of it. Not once. And I didn’t get killed.

By the time it was fall you could tell we were all a little off. In that state none of us could have passed in polite society; those of us who’d been kicking in doors and tearing houses up and shooting people, we were psychotic. And we were ready for it to end. There was nothing interesting about it anymore. There was nothing. We had wasted our time. We had lost. People kept dying: in ones and twos, no heroes, no battles. Nothing. We were just the help, glorified scarecrows; just there to look busy, up the road and down the road, expensive as fuck, dumber than shit.

There were rumors of death: the occasional murders, the horrifying endings. Someone from Bravo Company: the medic quit, said he couldn’t face going out anymore. One of EOD’s people: there was a second IED under the first one. Gone. Etc. Etc. We set up a patrol base. Haji knocked it down with a car bomb. More women got shot to death: a woman holding a baby, a pregnant woman. At least it was fall. We had arrived in fall, so there was that point of reference. We were getting close. Really a year is nothing. It takes that long to learn to be any good in the field, and then once you know what you’re doing, you’re on your way out.

There was always a fuckload of mice running around the building, so they had plenty to work with, and they made I don’t know how many of these mice snuff films. They thought they were clever, and they might tell you about how in one of them they drowned a mouse or how in another one they dismembered a mouse and cut the mouse’s head off with a cigar cutter or how in another one, their masterpiece, they crucified a mouse on Popsicle sticks and disemboweled the crucified mouse while it was on the cross. Haussmann didn’t know what to do. He kept trying to get moved to another room, but he couldn’t get moved. “It isn’t fair,” he said.

This was an easy casualty. The casualty had a face. He wasn’t burned up. He didn’t bleed out internally. He’d be alright. He’d get a Purple Heart and the Purple Heart would get him laid a few more times than he would have otherwise and he didn’t even have to get hurt that bad. The thing about Purple Hearts is you can’t get hurt too bad. You get hurt too bad and girls won’t fuck you no matter how many Purple Hearts you have.

We were going out that night, a squad worth of guys from Third Platoon, led by Evans. It was supposed to be our last patrol of the tour, and the roster was a mix and match of shitbags and fat guys. I couldn’t imagine us being effective.

OUR LAST night on the FOB, some of us got together and passed around some cans of duster. We huffed duster till Sergeant Bautista lost touch with his central nervous system. He swayed back and forth like a blind piano player. A stream of drool ran from Bautista’s lip and pooled in his lap. We said, “Oh, shit. Look at that.” We asked was he alright. After a minute he said he was alright. Then we huffed one last can of duster. And it was alright, like we were kids.

And I guess I’d been born that way too and it was only a coincidence that I had been to a war and the war probably hadn’t had much to do at all with my being fucked in the head.

Emily and I had each shot a 20mg of Oxy earlier in the morning, but that’d only keep us well for a few hours. A 20 could take you there if you had no real habit but it counted for next to nothing when you were as accustomed to things as Emily and I were. That was how dope had worked on us. It had got so we were wasting our time if we weren’t putting at least $45 in our veins, and even then it was just a little moment till we were sick all over again.

I had the money. It was Pell Grant money. I counted it out. Big counted out the pills. Big always had a fuckload of pills on him. He was an LPN and he bought pills from old people. Once I asked him how he knew which old people would sell him their pills. He said it was simple—you asked the poor ones.

“Fucking goddamn!” she said. “A hundred and eighty dollars?” I said it wasn’t like I’d done it on purpose. “I know but, baby, you have to see why I’m upset. I’ve been here working, taking care of the plants, making your cocksucking dinner, and I need to write a paper while you’re out playing the big shot and losing our goddamn money!” “Did you say ‘big shot’? What the fuck is this? Are you a fucking idiot? Is this nineteen fucking seventy? You think I like this shit? You think I like dragging my fucking dead ass all over town and dealing with these fucks?” “Baby, I’m serious. We’re spending over a thousand dollars on dope, every week. We can’t do that. It’s unsustainable. It’s insane.” “Okay. So file that under No Fucking Shit.

What am I supposed to do about it? Can I just quit? What about you? Do you think you can quit? If you can, let me know, and we’ll quit right now. Won’t that be nice? Let’s quit right now.” “You fucking asshole.” She started to cry. “Goddamnit. You’re crying.” “Fuck you, you motherfucking asshole. This is serious and all you are is a motherfucking asshole.” “Goddamn fucking shit….Would you please calm down….Look….Shit….Please stop crying. I love you.” “Don’t you understand that we’re completely fucked?” “I understand. Believe me, I understand. I really do. And you’re right. And I’m sorry. I feel it too. It’s just we’re so fucked and I don’t know how we’re gonna get out from under this thing so all I can do is try and hold things together the way they are.

THE PROBLEM with Emily and me was we were killing one another. Apart we probably could have managed, but the two of us together was a form of suicide. It took teamwork to get your life fucked up so bad. But we couldn’t let go.

School started in fall and I would go to class as much as I could because I had to and I had some luck with that. Emily always had to stay at school all day because she taught a remedial writing class for the undergraduates in addition to going to her own classes and her last class didn’t get over with until eight at night on Tuesday and Thursday. So I spent much of the days at home alone and not doing the things I was supposed to be doing. I’d get so depressed I couldn’t move. Emily would get to telling me I was a worthless fuck. And she was a cunt for that; but she had her reasons, I guess. All the same I didn’t like it and it didn’t help me.

Getting rid of the money wasn’t going to be a problem. Our rent was past due and we owed eleven hundred dollars. Eleven plus the seventeen hundred. Plus the five hundred I owed Pistol and the five hundred I owed Black. That was thirty-eight right there. That left just thirty-five and that would be gone in three weeks. I slept well for the first time since I couldn’t remember.

I had a theory. My theory was that I was a piece of shit and deserved it when bad things happened to me. Was I bitter? A little, of course.

Funny thing about guns. If you’re known to rob things people will just give you guns. It’s kind of like sponsoring missionaries.