Dig a Sheet-rag a Hole.
Training with dead men sucks. Louis lost his arm in a factory and can’t do a
pushup, while Carlos won’t stop vomiting up his last meal, an infected
cheeseburger that killed him. Ronnie
burned to death after he dumped half a can of kerosene on his outdoor grill.
I train hard. Run, climb,
read. I get high marks on the tests. The ones around me, the living ones, they do
the same. We want to graduate boot camp on top. But the dead guys, the ghosts, we feel they
slow us down. The officers call them
sheet-rags, like, hey, ghost, where’s your rag costume?
Sergeant
Miller says the army is an equal opportunity employer. Discrimination against the dead is
unlawful. But we know how he really feels. He has no use for dead men in the squad.
On the second week we practice different field
positions at the shooting range. I’m stationed next to Jose. He’s missing his left eye.
“Someone
shoot it out?” I ask.
“No,” he
says. “I was home for college break and mowing
the lawn for my dad. The blade kicked
back a small rock. I didn’t blink in
time.”
“It killed
you?”
“No, that
was next year. Drunk driver.”
“I’m
sorry.”
“Don’t be,”
he says and smiles. Jose is upbeat,
unlike the others. Like Thom. Thom died
of lung cancer at forty-three and won’t stop talking about it, how unfair it
all is, which is true. It’s just we
don’t want to hear it all the time. It’s
depressing.
“At least
you can do things as a ghost,” I once told him.
“Not everyone is so lucky.”
“If I could
be so lucky to just rest,” he said.
“Instead I have to pretend to be alive.”
Jose struggles
with marksmanship, not a surprise. After
an hour of practice Miller tells us to clear our rifles.
Jose tries to release the magazine.
“Check the
catch button,” I tell him.
His rifle
fires down the line and strikes Ronnie in the gut. Ronnie drops his weapon and rolls over
moaning. The dirt sticks to his still-burnt skin. There is no blood. The trainees around him,
the living ones, start laughing.
“Who the hell
just fired?” Miller says.
His face is deep red like he might
re-kill a man. All the rifles are
cleared except Jose’s. Miller snatches
it from him.
“You lose
your brain through that miserable hole in your face? Goddamn.. You’re lucky you shot a sheet-rag instead of a
real, living, breathing human being, someone who would actually be of use to
his country.”
Jose lowers
his eye. Miller dismisses us. Ronnie’s dead friends help him to the
infirmary.
Nobody sees
Jose leave that night. It’s something the
dead can do that we can’t, just leave, and in this way, nobody really has
authority over them. More than anything,
I think that’s what scares us most.
I don’t sleep that night. I think about my dad and brother, if their
ghosts are out there and what they’re doing.
Driving around, looking for a drink, maybe. I wonder if he blames my dad for it all. Then I smell smoke. Thom is smoking a cigarette in the bunk below
me.
I crook my
head down to look at him.
“Why are
you here?” I ask.
He shrugs.
“I’m not
trying to be mean. I want to know.
What’s in it for you?”
“Discipline,”
he says.
“Yeah?”
“ I smoked
and drank ‘til the day I died. I never
had much discipline. Had even less after
cancer.”
“What about
the others?”
“I don’t
know. Stability, maybe, routine. A lot of us don’t know what’s next, why we’re
this way while the others get to rest.
I guess soldiering makes sense. You?”
“The same,
maybe. I don’t know,” but I did know.
Thom holds out
a cigarette and match.
“Screw it,”
I say.
I light it, inhale hard. The heat purrs in my throat, and I hold it in
there and forget everything I want or worry about, family, love, violence, boredom,
liquor, just the nicotine is enough.
The lights
flick on. We crush our cigarettes and
stuff them under the mattresses. Sergeant
Miller enters. Everyone snaps out of bed to salute him.
Miller is
in full uniform. I wonder if he also never sleeps. He stops at Thom’s bed.
“Smoke?” he
asks.
“Smoke,
sir?”
“Smoke. I
can smell it,” he says.
“It was me,
sir” I say.
I reach
under the mattress and pull the butt out.
“It’s a bad
habit, sir,” I say.
“Covering
up for a sheet-rag, eh? Get dressed and
meet me out front. Both of you.”
We follow Miller
behind the shooting range where a jeep is parked in the rough bluegrass, its
headlights illuminating a dead man sitting on a bucket. It’s Ronnie.
There are two shovels next to him. Ronnie is smiling and rubbing his belly-wound
like he’s got a baby in the bullet hole.
“Ronnie here feels like that bullet
did it for him,” Miller says. “That he’s
now ready to rest. Says he just wanted
to die with honor, not be killed by a damn Coleman Grill.”
Ronnie smiles at us. He looks like shit.
Miller points
to the shovels.
“Six by six
by two should be big enough.”
“Why can’t
he dig the hole, sir?” Thom asks.
“Does he
look like he can dig his own damn grave?
The man wants to rest for eternity, and you want him to dig his way
there in his last hour? Christ, Thom, he’s hardly got any skin. Have some
heart.”
We
stand back-to-back and start digging, the living and dead watching from each
side. Miller lights a cigarette. He gives one to Ronnie. They both smoke, keep smoking for hours while
we dig, until we’re three feet deep, dirty, sweating, until we can’t remember
who’s who, who’s dead, who’s alive, who has authority over who. Who we’re digging this hole for, but still, we
keep digging.
