Land Nav
The first honest conversation I ever had with Tanner happened on the side of a mountain at oh-dark-thirty with a busted flashlight, looking for a point that turned out to be two hundred meters from where we thought it was, and I think about it more than I think about almost anything.
Night land nav is its own kind of lonely even with a partner. They drop you at a start point with a map and a compass and a list of grid coordinates, and you shoot your azimuth and count your pace and walk off into the dark to find an orange-and-white marker nailed to a stake, and then the next one, and the next, against a clock, and if you’re off by a couple degrees over a long enough distance you end up nowhere, on the wrong hill, burning time you don’t have. Tanner and I were good at it together. He had the better pace count and I had the better head for the map, and we’d worked out a rhythm where I navigated and he counted and we’d find them, one after another, while half the platoon got lost in the rocks.
That night we’d found four and we were hunting the fifth and we had gotten turned around, off behind a ridge where the lights of the cantonment area didn’t reach, real dark, the kind you don’t get where there are towns. We sat down on a rock to re-shoot the azimuth and check the map under a red lens, and Tanner’s flashlight died, and we sat there a minute in the dark waiting for our eyes, and it was the quiet you only get out there, no trucks, no sergeants, no forty other guys, only the wind and the two of us and a sky with more stars in it than I’d ever seen in my life in Illinois.
And he asked me the real question. Not Mandy, not home, not why I waited. He laid it down careful in the dark, real quiet, not his usual run-on.
“You ever feel like you came in here to get away from something?”
And I sat there with my heart going because it was so close to the true thing, closer than anybody had come, and I could have given him the safe answer, the short version, and I almost did. But it was dark, and we were behind a ridge where nobody could see us, and there’s something about real dark and being tired down to the bone that gets the truth up out of you whether you want it or not.
“Yeah,” I said. Just yeah.
And he was quiet a second.
“Me too,” he said, and didn’t say from what, and didn’t ask me from what.
And we sat there on that rock in the dark with our two yeahs hanging in the air between us, and it was the most naked I’d been with another person in years and we hadn’t touched and we hadn’t said a single thing that could end us.
Then I found the fifth point off the back of the ridge, plotted it again clean and shot a new azimuth, and we got up and counted our pace into the dark and found it, the marker on its stake, right where the math said it’d be, and we punched our card and walked back in toward the lights, and somewhere in the dark on the way Tanner’s shoulder came up against mine and stayed there a half-step longer than the walking needed, and I let it, and neither of us said anything, and I knew, the way you know weather coming, that the wall was already gone and I’d been standing in the open for a while without admitting it.
Fire Guard
They put us on fire guard together, which felt at the time like the Army doing me a favor and was really the Army handing me the rope.
Fire guard is the overnight watch. The barracks always has somebody awake, walking the hallway, checking the rooms, making sure nobody burns the place down or walks off in the night, and they run it in shifts, two soldiers at a time, an hour or two each, the whole platoon cycling through so everybody loses the same sleep. They posted the roster on the wall and Tanner and I had the same shift, 0200 to 0400, the dead middle of the night, the worst shift, the one where your body doesn’t know what it’s for. The two of us, awake, in a dark hallway, with forty guys asleep in the rooms on either side and nobody else up in the whole building.
There’s a particular tired that lives at three in the morning on fire guard, a floaty scraped-out tired where the building ticks and settles around you and the whole world shrinks down to one dark hallway and whatever’s in it. We kept awake on coffee out of the big steel urn in the dayroom, the bad Army coffee, bitter and stewed down to tar, and we’d walk the hall slow past the rows of open doorways with the index card slid in the slot beside each one for the two names inside, and just inside every doorway the platoon would be dead asleep, forty guys breathing in the dark, and it would be only us, awake, in the one lit place in the building. There is no privacy in the Army except the kind the middle of the night hands you by accident. And that summer the middle of the night handed us a lot of it.
The first hour we walked the hall and checked the fire extinguishers and didn’t say much, both of us stupid with sleep. Then we ended up sitting on the floor at the end of the hall by the latrine, backs against the cold cinderblock, shoulders together because it was cold and because we always ended up with our shoulders together by then, and we talked low so we wouldn’t wake anybody, and the talking-low did the thing the dark on the mountain had done, turned everything we said into something said closer than it was. He told me real things. About his daddy, who hit. About why twenty wasn’t too young to leave, in his house. I told him a couple real things back, careful ones, the edges of true. And the longer we sat there the more I was aware of every place we touched, shoulder to shoulder, knee falling against knee, the warmth of him down the whole side of me in that cold hallway, and I knew he was aware of it too, because the talking had gone quiet and slow and kept stopping, and in the stops you could hear both of us breathing.
And then he stopped talking in the middle of something and turned his head and looked at me, close, in the dark, and I looked back, and there was a long second where the whole rest of my life was balanced on a wire, and I thought about Cole and the word on his paperwork and the regulation and the forty guys asleep ten feet away, and then I thought about nothing at all, which is the only way these things ever actually happen, and I leaned the last two inches and kissed him.
He kissed me back. That’s the part I still can’t get over, all these years on. There was no second of him deciding whether to. He kissed me back like he’d been waiting on me to get there, his hand coming up to the side of my neck, and for about ten seconds the Army and the regulation and Cole and the whole brown state of Oklahoma fell off the edge of the earth and there was just Tanner’s mouth on mine in a dark hallway, warm, certain, tasting like the cheap coffee we’d been keeping ourselves awake with. Then a floorboard creaked somewhere down the hall, just the building settling, but it could’ve been anything, it could’ve been the end of everything, and we came apart fast and sat there with our hearts slamming, a foot of cold air between us where there hadn’t been any, listening, and nothing happened, nobody came out, and after a minute Tanner let out a long shaky breath and laughed, almost silent, and bumped his shoulder back against mine, and I sat in that hallway at three in the morning more scared and more alive than I’d ever been in my life, and didn’t say a word, because there weren’t any words that wouldn’t end us, and because I didn’t trust mine not to say the thing you can never take back.
Smoke and Mirrors
We didn’t talk about it. There was no talking about it. The next morning the lights came on at 0500 and we were back to being battles in front of forty guys and a couple of sergeants, and the genius and the horror of the closet is that you get very, very good at acting like nothing happened, even to the one person it happened with.
But it had happened, and we both knew it had, and now there was a second conversation running under the first one all day long, in the field, in formation, in the chow line, a thing that lived in how long we’d hold a look before one of us broke it, in him finding reasons to put a hand on my shoulder, on my back, steering me, the kind of contact two guys could do in plain sight that meant nothing to anybody watching and everything to us. Tanner turned out to be braver than me, or maybe just younger, less scared, not carrying a Cole around in his chest. He pushed. Little things. A knee against mine at chow held too long. His voice dropping when it was just us. He’d look at me across the bay while he was talking to somebody else and let me see him do it.
I got an education that week in how much two people can say without saying one word out loud, how a whole second language can run underneath the first one, built out of nothing but the length of a look and where a hand landed and how long it stayed there. We’d stand in the chow line six inches apart talking about absolutely nothing, the food, the schedule, the weather, and the real conversation would be happening in the quarter inch where his arm wasn’t quite touching mine, both of us fluent in it, nobody else in the line able to hear a thing. I have never since been as good at anything as I got that summer at running two conversations at once, the loud one for the room and the quiet one for him, and holding my face still through both of them.
And I pulled back, the first couple of days, hard, scared, because the kiss had made it real and real was the thing that got you a word on your paperwork. I went cold on him, gave him the wall, the short answers, and watched it land on his face, this confusion, this hurt he was too proud to show all the way, and I hated myself for it and did it anyway, because I had a picture in my head, I always had it, of Cole’s face the day they walked him out, and I couldn’t stop seeing it laid over Tanner’s. I’d come two thousand miles to disappear and I’d lasted three weeks before I kissed a man in a government hallway, and now the smart thing, the Cole-was-right thing, was to kill it before it killed us both.
But you can’t go cold on Tanner. I want that understood. He didn’t push when I went cold, exactly. He just refused to go away. He kept being warm at me, easy, undeterred, like he could outlast it, like he knew something I didn’t, and on the third day, in the latrine when it was just us, he caught my eye in the mirror while we were shaving and he didn’t say anything for a second, and then he said it, low, real even.
“You can do the thing where it didn’t happen if you want, I’ll let you, but I’m not going to pretend I don’t know what I know.”
And I stood there with the razor in my hand and my whole life telling me to go cold one more time, and I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t. So I didn’t say anything, which was its own answer, and he saw it land, and the corner of his mouth went up, careful, and he went back to shaving, and I understood that I’d already chosen, days ago, on a mountain, in a hallway, and that all the pulling back in the world was just me being scared in the general direction of a decision I’d already made.