Full Measure

Chapter twenty-five

Saturday night Iris threw a dinner party for two of her girlfriends and Patrick, Salimony, and Messina. Arriving before the other guests, Patrick saw the spit-shine that Iris had put on her bungalow. There were fresh-cut flowers, music from the stereo in the living room, and many candles. The candles were electric and for amusement Iris kept dimming them and turning them on and off with the remotes. She wore a periwinkle blue dress and flat sandals with rhinestones on them. She seemed happy and nervous. She was leaving early the next day for her yearly fall trip back to Kenton to see family and friends and Patrick saw how important to her this party was.

“I’ll help out all I can,” he said. “I brought wine and beer. The guys are easy.”

“I hope it’s all okay. I made enchiladas and salad and dessert. If you can just talk to everybody and maybe change up the music that would be great. Oh, and make margaritas out back. Do they smoke?”

“They do whatever you order them to. They’re Marines.”

“They’ll love Nat and Mary Ann.” Iris smiled quickly and dimmed the candles. “I’m going to miss you, Pat.”

“It’ll be good seeing your family.”

“I’m really looking forward to later tonight.” Patrick blushed.

Her friends arrived together, bearing more wine, flowers, and food. Patrick helped them unload and shook their offered hands. Natalie was a tall Latina, Mary Ann petite and blond. They worked with Iris at the Village View — Natalie as a photographer and Mary Ann in display advertising. Natalie was pretty and full-bodied, and her jeans and blouse made no apologies for this. Mary Ann wore a red cowgirl shirt and a denim skirt, and one side of her hair was held back with a comb while the other fell free to her shoulder. Patrick watched the three friends converge midkitchen to view, touch, and converse with one another in the way that women do. They forgot he was there or acted like he wasn’t, but either way, he enjoyed being there.

Salimony and Messina came together too, close-shaven, scrubbed clean, and bearing twelve-packs of premium beer. Salimony was tall, and though bone-thin in Sangin, had filled out some. His trousers and shirt looked new. Messina was a short knot of muscles, proud in a tight black T-shirt and Harley boots. Patrick introduced them to Natalie and Mary Ann, and short Messina kissed the back of tall Natalie’s hand, making all three women laugh, which made Messina blush and smile and punch Salimony in the gut, but not hard.

In the backyard they drank and ate guacamole made from Fallbrook avocados. Patrick noted the small labels identifying the fruit as that of Manos del Sol, “Hands of the Sun,” which happened to be Lew Boardman’s ranch, and bordered the Norris Brothers’ groves on one side. Patrick wondered again why Boardman had stayed lucky through drought, frost, and fire, while the Norris Brothers had suffered mightily. In Sangin he’d decided that God was luck and this seemed as good an explanation as any. Iris had a light hand with the spices and the guacamole was excellent. Patrick made margaritas and manned the music. He followed the recipe on the mix bottle and tried to play upbeat songs. Iris had added more small twinkling lights to the big magnolia tree. The evening sky was a gray blanket drawn down over the orange ball of sun. Salimony and Messina moved one of the picnic benches end to end with the other and the six of them sat across to watch the sunset. Natalie fixed her camera to a tripod and set the timer and got a shot of all of them lined up with the last of the sun on their faces. The men stole glances at one another because this time of the evening was special at FOB Inkerman just before patrol. They’d smoke and crack dark jokes and say awful things about one another’s mothers and sisters and girlfriends. But never about the wives, never the wives, because they all knew the high odds of their marriages being destroyed by the war, the high odds of their wives no longer being able to live with them after deployment, the reasonable odds that, even as they smoked and joked and waited to go kill or be killed, their wives back home were being talked up by a man, some guy with a good haircut and kind eyes and a few bucks in the bank. So you only joked about that at your own peril. Then, as soon as the light was gone, they’d set out, the enemy less able to shoot them. And they fell into that jagged mix of hypervigilance and grinding patience that it took to be up all night, moving quietly along the rat lines, looking for the best cover in which to hide and fire, knowing they had to get the job done and get back before the sun rose again or the Talibs would cut you to ribbons from the rocky hillsides before you could make Inkerman.

“How about a toast to the United States Marine Corps?” asked Iris.

“How about to the three prettiest girls in California?” asked Salimony. He smiled broadly and his nervous leg bounced up and down like it wanted attention.

They raised their sloshing margarita glasses to the sunset and drank and Patrick heard the French door to the house open behind them and a woman’s laughter.

He was surprised to see the two men stepping out to the patio. They were Marines he recognized from Pendleton. Not Dark Horses. A woman walked along between them, arm in arm with each. Patrick looked to Iris, who was more than surprised. She rose as if to confront them but Messina jumped up and said he’d invited them — sorry he forgot to say something but these are great men with nothing to do tonight! Patrick saw Iris try to hide the disappointment. The men and woman ambled across the yard toward them and Patrick noted that they were drunk. Messina introduced them as Grier and Marcos and told Patrick to whip them up some drinks. “And who the heck are you?” Messina asked the woman.

“I’m the stripper!”

Christ, thought Patrick. Iris looked at him very doubtfully.

“Not really.” She giggled. “Just Mindy.”

Iris’s dining room table only sat six so Patrick brought in chairs and the crashers got corners and plates on their laps. Everyone drank at speed except for Natalie, who was sober three years. Messina watched her intently. Patrick kept an eye on the interlopers and kept getting up to fetch and pour more wine. He’d learned to twist the bottle at the end of the pour to keep it from dripping. He felt grown-up. The table talk was spirited and from the bleachers the three crashers offered a chorus of drunken but good-natured commentary. When Grier leaned back he nudged the framed aerial photograph of the Cash family farm with the back of his head and it fell off the wall but he hung it back up, undamaged, with exaggerated care. In the kitchen Patrick helped Iris get the trays ready. “That dumbbell Messina,” she whispered. “How could he do this?”

“I’ll get rid of them if you want.”

“We can’t be rude, Pat.”

“Yes, we can. This is your dinner, Iris.”

“Then I’m sure not going to let them ruin it.”

“I have bad feelings about this.”

“I won’t cave in to negative thinking.”

Patrick ignored his anger. Back in the dining room he poured the red wine and Marcos held out his empty margarita glass and offered a glassy grin. Patrick didn’t serve him. Finally seated, Iris asked Mary Ann if she’d like to say a prayer and everyone around the table joined hands. It was brief and heartfelt. In the silence after “amen” Grier burped and Mindy shushed him.

“You three,” said Patrick. “If you can’t behave yourselves, you’ll have to leave.”

“Says Colonel Patrick Norris of the Three-Five!” said Grier. He was a big man, heavier and older than Patrick.

“We’re not so bad are we?” asked Marcos.

“Patrick is right,” said Mindy. “So we’re going to behave starting right now.”

“Man,” said Salimony, “these enchiladas are good.”

They passed the dishes and the food dwindled quickly. Messina handed a bottle of white wine back to Mindy and she poured some into her margarita, her little finger raised preciously, then set the empty bottle on the floor.

“Mind if I turn up the music?” asked Grier.

“No, thank you,” said Iris. “I’d like to hear the conversation.”

“In that case I’ll tell you what I did today,” said Messina. “I worked my butt off training my replacements. See, I’m twenty-six years old next month and the Corps doesn’t need me anymore. Not when they got eighteen-year-old cherries to do what I did. They don’t want third-tour men. We’re washed up and too expensive and even the brass thinks we’re too crazy to fight anymore. Plus, it’s all winding down.”

“Maybe it’s time you left the Corps anyway,” said Natalie.

“I don’t want to leave the Corps,” said Messina. “Alls I’m good at is fighting. I can’t exactly get a job as a sniper, can I?”

“In the French Foreign Legion you can,” said Salimony.

“Ain’t fighting for no Frenchmen,” said Messina. “So, Natalie — pretty, genius Natalie. Did I embarrass you when I kissed your hand upon our recent introduction?”

“I’ve never had a man do that.”

“Oh, boy,” said Messina. “I could say something on that subject, but I won’t. Anyway, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

“Why thank you!”

“I just want it to be on the record.”

There was scattered laughter to this, but underneath it the silence was uneasy. At one quiet moment Patrick was aware of several glasses being lifted at once. He went into the living room and forwarded the music player to a peppier song. When he sat down he saw that Iris had gathered herself — shoulders in, forearms on the table, hands steadying the base of her wineglass. Her smile was fraudulent.

The men talked about who was short and who might re-up. Patrick and Grier were already out of the Corps for good. Grier had a part-time job as a night watchman at Qualcomm headquarters, said he mostly read between rounds, boring as hell but perfect after Helmand. He offered flamboyant descriptions of combat violence for which he kept apologizing to the women, and Patrick quickly deduced that Grier was just a Bagram jarhead stationed north of Kabul in the biggest American base in-country. Which, in spite of his gory posturing, made Grier just a Fobbit — a Forward Operating Base Marine — who’d never seen combat, fired a gun, and probably never been outside the wire. Patrick had learned that the more emotional and detailed the description of combat action, the greater the chance it was mostly, if not totally, secondhand. He stared off through the living room and the French doors to the night.

The women listened and asked questions. Salimony told a carefully edited story of the Labrador, Zane, saving a life. Patrick talked about crazy Reichart collecting gigantic spiders in empty ammo boxes, naming them and trying to feed them MRE leftovers. To Patrick this didn’t seem like terrific table talk, but Iris and her friends were plainly interested in their lives in Sangin. They started out curious about everyday things: was it hard to live on one hot meal a day and one shower a week? With all those spiders around, how did you sleep? What was worse, the heat or the cold? Then their questions got harder and came faster: Was it hard knowing that the Taliban would murder and maim villagers they suspected of collusion? Was it true that Afghani women could be stoned to death for conversing with anyone in the Coalition military? Why all the amputations? Was it strange to protect fields of poppies instead of destroying them, as the military had done in the past? What could be done about the “insiders”? Was trust even possible anymore?

“If you chicks are so interested, why didn’t you sign up and go?” asked Grier.

“Natalie and I talked about covering the war for the Village View,” said Iris. “But they had no budget for it.”

“You’d need a whole budget just for your hair and makeup,” said Marcos. “You didn’t really want to go. You wanted to stay here and decorate your little play house.”

“You don’t know one thing about what she wanted,” said Patrick.

“You only think you do.”

“I saw some of the press corps babes,” said Messina. “There was some stone-ass hotties. I saw one do fifty-one push-ups.”

“Any more tequila out there?” asked Mindy. She lurched up and knocked over the empty wine bottle beside her chair. It rolled and echoed brightly, dribbling the last of the wine, but she was oblivious to it and walked in short, weaving steps toward the patio. She wore high wedge heels and it looked as if she might tip over.

Grier rose to pick up the bottle but hit the Cash farm photograph with his head again, and again it slid down the wall and hit the floor. “You ought hang this thing higher, Iris.”

“There’s one above it and I like it there,” she said sharply.

Grier tried to hang the photo but he missed the hook and it hit the floor for the third time in half an hour, and the frame broke into two L-shaped pieces. He picked them up and sat back down and held them back together. “I can glue it.”

Mindy wobbled back in from the patio with the tequila bottle in her hand. “Do you ever think that we were all put here to learn certain lessons?”

“Sure,” said Marcos, “the lesson a Marine learns in California is he isn’t going to get a date with any of the really hot babes. They’re already hooked up with lawyers, actors, and tech nerds. All the jarheads get are leftover idiots like you.”

“Fuck you,” said Mindy.

“But that’s not true,” said Salimony. “Just having dinner at this table is a good thing for us. Look around you, Marcos. You should be thankful to be alive and not blown to smithereens.”

“Marcos is right,” said Grier. “Bitches like these aren’t going to roll out the welcome mat for me. Patrick, I think you must have drugged Iris here. At the very least.”

Patrick stood. “Time for you Marines to hit the road.”

Grier stood too. “Sir, yes sir, General Pat.”

Marcos said: “You don’t get it, do you? After tonight, you guys won’t see any of these high-end cunts again.”

Messina threw back his chair, wheeled, and hit Marcos in the nose with a terrific cracking sound. Iris screamed, “Stop!” Marcos charged through the blow, stomped on Messina’s foot, then raked his fingers across Messina’s eyes. Patrick and Grier met each other halfway around the table and locked up. Grier, heavier, bulled Patrick back into the china cabinet, which shattered as if hit by a grenade. Patrick felt the frame collapse under his weight, the shards of glass spraying against his neck and rattling down, heard the woeful explosions of plates and bowls on the hardwood floor. He gave in to his anger. He flew into Grier’s slower, drunker body, throwing kicks and punches that landed and landed again. Blood flew. Salimony and Messina pummeled Marcos into the living room, knocking an heirloom mirror to the floor with an explosion of glass. Iris and Mary Ann fell on top of Mindy, who screamed nonsense and flailed away with a table knife in one hand and a napkin in the other. Grier swiped the blood from his face and smiled, then shot in low to grapple Patrick, but Patrick caught him with a knee square to the forehead and elbow-piled him to the floor. Grier dropped to his hands and knees on a bed of broken glass. Patrick lifted one of the heavy oak chairs and crushed the man flat with it. Then he registered motion on his left: Natalie snapping action shots.

Oh, Jesus, he thought.

Iris and Mary Ann had Mindy pinned to the floor and she was sobbing.

Patrick ran into the living room. The TV had fallen from its stand and burst. Glass vases and cut flowers littered the floor and several of Iris’s new electric candles bravely continued to beam in the wet debris. Salimony and Messina had Marcos backed into a bookcase, blows and books and photographs and knickknacks all raining down on him. Patrick shouldered in, kicked Marcos squarely in the groin, and showered him with his fists and elbows. When Marcos fell, the three men dragged him, groaning, outside to the porch, then down the steps and dropped him into the planter. Iris and her two friends lugged unstruggling Mindy down the porch steps, her wedge shoes clunking down each craftsman plank, then launched her on to the grass. “Get out of here and don’t ever come back!” Iris screamed. Her face was a grimace and her fury sent a sobering jolt through Patrick. What should he have done? “And you bastards get out of here too and don’t you ever come back. And you, Patrick, Patrick Norris? You never come back here again or I’ll call the cops and file charges. I swear to God I will!”

Patrick watched Natalie and Mary Ann squeeze through the front door and into the house. Iris gave him one last furious look before she slammed the door and drove the deadbolt home.

Grier had pulled Marcos to his feet and they staggered toward a white Camaro parked at the curb.

“Sorry, Pat,” said Salimony. His new shirt was torn and splattered with blood.

“Yeah, Pat, sorry,” said Messina, who had bloodshot eyes and a jaggedly split lip. “We gotta help fix it. We gotta.”

“You heard her,” said Patrick. “Get the hell out of here. Go.”

Patrick waited until the Camaro and Messina’s Mustang had both disappeared down the hill. He listened for sirens and was surprised to hear only silence. Neighbors left, right, and across the street stood on their lit porches and neat lawns, looking at him, their voices riding softly on the damp night air.

He strode back onto the porch and knocked on Iris’s front door, then knocked again harder. Natalie called through the wood, “You better go, Pat. You better go like now.”