“Kudzu”
By Emily Mills
(copyright 9/05)
Loud noises, like blasting at a quarry that could rattle window glass from miles away, would not normally cause her to pee herself. Normally.
But she was surprised to find that her crotch wasn’t wet. Things were perfectly dry down there. Not that she minded. It was just a little confusing.
A man dressed in a light blue jumpsuit came strolling purposefully into her line of sight. He was a big black man, bald-headed, and had strangely green eyes. He smiled down at her—she was somewhat startled to find that she was lying down—and poked at a plastic bag that hung suspended near the foot of her bed.
“Sorry about the racket,” he said as she watched him slide out the bag—which was full of some yellowish liquid—and replace it with an empty one. “Funeral across the way for a retired tank gunner. They’re using cannon.”
She shifted and could feel her ass tingling, pins and needles but itchy, too, and hoped she hadn’t been bitten by another goddamn spider.
Fucking camel spiders. Everybody at Basic told stories about the things—legends passed down from soldiers who’d served in desert countries. That they screamed as they ran at you, that they injected a local anesthetic before gnawing away at your flesh. That they could be the size of dinner plates! Out of anything, this had been her biggest fear when they’d shipped out. But it turned out that half of the shit was a lie. Camel spiders weren’t huge, they didn’t scream, and they didn’t numb things before eating them. They were just pains in the ass when you were camped out at night in the middle of the dunes, trying to catch a few winks before somebody prodded you awake. And they were just really creepy. She’d even seen a marine jump halfway to the sky after finding one in the middle of the night.
She didn’t envy the nomads their desert life. It was either mind-numbing boredom or pure, unadulterated fear. Nature was out to get you. Men were out to get you. Even a crowd of children didn’t guarantee your safety. Her friend Paul had been with a platoon that was handing out shoes to a bunch of kids in town when some asshole in a truck drove into the middle of them and detonated. Paul lost his right arm and a lot of skin, which was a hell of a lot more than could be said for most of the kids. They found a pair of those shoes dangling from a palm tree down the road. They found Paul’s watch, which had been on his right arm, lodged deep into ground where he’d been standing.
She wasn’t proud of it, but the shiny silver watch on the recruiters’ wrist was what won her over. Or not the watch itself so much as what it represented: a ticket out, good money, some kind of future beyond working for peanuts at the Dog N’ Suds and popping out a few brats. That sparkling piece of jewelry and the finely uniformed body it was attached to was her wakeup call—probably the only one she’d ever get.
“Y’know, strong, smart gal like you, it’s almost a shame we can’t put you into Special Forces or something,” the recruiter said with a grin. “I bet you’d kick some ass there.”
“You know I would,” she shot back sassily. The man laughed and threw a friendly, olive-drab arm across her shoulders.
“I’ll bet we could find you a place where you could really shine. And we’re offering huge sign-up bonuses now, plus the usual full-rides to college and a whole package of other goodies. Not to mention the great and honorable service you’d be doing for your country.”
She chuckled and nodded enthusiastically. The sun was its usual nuclear-heated self that day and she was sweating buckets. All the leaves on the nearby pecan trees were brown and flaky. The recruiter, however, didn’t even seem to feel it. Maybe they lined their clothes with some high-tech cooling fabric. The military probably had that. Those guys were well taken care of.
“You should come by our office sometime soon, check out some brochures and this great new movie we’ve got. I bet we could get you fixed up real nice. You thinking of going to college?” he went on as he followed her toward her next class.
“I dunno, maybe.”
“You serve with us for a while, we can hook you up with a full ride. How’s that sound?” They stopped in front of the door to her Chemistry lab. She wanted to agree that, yeah, a full ride would be a pretty sweet deal, but it almost seemed too good to be true.
“Shit!”
The word bubbled up out of her throat before she could even really process how much pain she was suddenly in. The big nurse patted her gently on the right leg as he secured a series of straps over her body. She could feel them tightening the skin on her arms and torso and leg. Where had the other one gone? The left leg wasn’t sending any signals to her nervous system. Maybe it had fallen asleep. Like one time, years ago, she’d woken up thinking someone was in bed with her because she’d fallen asleep on her arm and it had lost all sensation and felt like it wasn’t even attached to her.
“Ready?” the nurse asked. Another person, a woman dressed in that same light blue jumpsuit, had appeared next to him and they were readying to move her from the bed to a gurney. She didn’t really want to be touched, but she found herself nodding anyway.
“One, two, three!” the male nurse called out softly. Then she was airborne, suspended, sailing over the finely scrubbed white tile floor toward heaven.
“Don’t tell me you believe in that shit.”
“Sure I do. Don’t you?”
“Heaven? Nah. Just peaceful oblivion.”
The sergeant strolled into the middle of their conversation and put a cigarette out in the sand at her boots.
“What’re you all gabbin’ about over here?” he asked.
“Honeywell says he doesn’t believe in God or heaven or anything,” she answered.
“She’s trying to convert me, Sarge,” Honeywell drawled.
The sergeant shook his head and smiled. “Man, don’t you know there are no atheists in foxholes?”
“Don’t give me that line,” the private shot back easily. “Especially when we don’t even have fucking foxholes out here.”
“You got this humvee,” the sergeant noted with just the barest hint of sarcasm. The two privates both chuckled and she kicked sand at the nearest wheel of the vehicle.
“Hey now, be nice to her, you gotta ride forty miles to get to the next drop tomorrow. She’ll be the only thing between your butts and their bullets.”
“Very reassuring, Sarge, you should have been a motivational speaker,” Honeywell said. The sergeant leveled an annoyed glare at him.
“And you shoulda stayed in college and outta my hair,” he shot back. The private was quiet. “Now get some shut-eye you two, we got a long day tomorrow.” He was answered by simultaneous barks in the affirmative.
“Sir, yes sir!” she shouted. A glob of rainwater slid into her left eye.
“You are a load of rat shit, Charlie Company! Fucking waste of human flesh and you’re using up my oxygen! Now get moving before I decide to throw you all in the rocks, pee in your butts, and let the crabs eat you!”
The assembled group didn’t need any more prompting. A small tide of shaved heads and mud-spattered bodies hustled its way through the rain-soaked grounds, each man and woman hoping not to be the one who fell behind and ended up in the rocks with an ass full of piss.
She felt a cramp working itself up under her ribs. Breathe in through your nose—put your arms over your head. Fucking gym teachers! She was surprised she even remembered their advice at all, but it was actually coming in handy.
They came up on a steep hill but the pathway was nothing but a mudslide waiting to happen. The first few guys to hit the slope almost immediately slid and fell back into a heap. There were angry shouts from the men behind the pile-up and someone threw a ball of wet earth at someone else. She ducked over to the side, into the grass that lined the path on either bank. The majority of the company had the same idea, too, and bypassed the four or so poor bastards who were rolling around in the mud, trying to get their footing.
She’d never run so far in her life. Her sides felt like super taut barbed wire that had been set on fire and dunked in acid. So this was pain, worse even than the time she’d fallen out of her tree fort and into a bramble of thorn bushes.
Still, this felt somehow better. There was definitely more pride, more sense of accomplishment in making it through Basic Training than in surviving a fall from a tree. The former had earned her the respect of her ex-marine father and the begrudging blessing of her worried mom. The latter had merely caused a short stay in the hospital for a concussion and an admonishment never to play in the rickety old tree fort again.
Everything beeped and hummed and generally made a tiny racket. Her left leg itched something awful, which she took for a better sign than no feeling at all, but she couldn’t move to scratch it.
Someone had turned her into a machine of some sort. A cluster of tubes and wires was running in and out of her body at various places. Some of the beeping seemed to be keeping time with her heart beat. The lights were very dim but the monitors nearby cast a strangely comforting glow over the room.
Oh God, her leg itched. She was going to go crazy if she couldn’t get it scratched soon.
Some minutes went by as she wriggled weakly in the bed, trying in vain to alleviate the itch. Finally, the big male nurse came into the room and started checking her robot parts.
“Leg itches,” she said. He looked up from one of the monitors and smiled. “Please?” she added.
He ambled over to the other side of her bed and pulled the covers up just enough to get at the afflicted part.
“Where?” he asked.
“Everywhere. Thigh.”
He bent over and started scratching the thigh and kneecap areas.
“Wait. Other leg.”
The nurse straightened up, looked her in the eye, then looked down at the bed, then back up at her, this time with a kind of frown on his lips.
“Are you thirsty?”
Actually, she was, but she was so confused by the abrupt change of subject that at first she didn’t answer. Finally, she gathered her thoughts and answered, “Yes, very, but could you--”
“That’s a good sign,” he cut her off. “Natural thirst and hunger are healthy, means you’re getting better. I’ll get you a glass of water. Maybe later you’ll be up for something to eat, too.”
And he left the room. She was so confused that she had almost forgotten about the itching, but now it came back in full force. She reached out a wire-laden arm in an effort to reach her stupid damn leg.
Everything was rushing past in a blur of tan, brown and gold. Traffic was remarkably light, which was a blessing. The humvee sped along the roughly paved road, the fourth vehicle in a long convoy bearing supplies to another outpost. She would have liked driving these monsters more if they had any kind of decent armor whatsoever. But, as it was, their best defense was speed.
Two miles to go. She could see the wavy outline of low buildings—their destination—just on the horizon. One of the guys behind her in the humvee started shouting and someone tapped her on the shoulder. Honeywell was sitting directly behind her. He had his gun pointed out a small crack in the side door and was pointing out to that side of the vehicle with a grim look on his face.
A dirty white car—some old Japanese thing from the gas-conscious late 80’s—was barreling toward the convoy from a dirt road that ran parallel to them.
A soldier in the humvee ahead of them stuck his hand out of the door, held up in a fist to signal the oncoming driver to back the shit off. Nothing changed. Someone fired a few rounds into the dirt near the car and the thing kept coming. Honeywell let loose with his gun and poured round after round into the engine and tires of the car. It lost some speed and started fishtailing, but now it was headed right for her vehicle. She made to swerve the humvee off to the right to avoid the impending impact. Someone yelled an obscenity. She looked back at Honeywell in the rearview mirror just as she turned the steering wheel. He grinned and shook his head in amazement. Then it got real hot real fast. She felt something punch her in the left side. Then nothing.
In every dream she’d ever had about falling, death never quite came. This kid, Kyle, who’d been in Social Studies class with her during sophomore year, told her that people never died in their dreams unless they were actually dying in real life. Whenever it came time for her fall to end and meet the earth, she’d wake up before hitting.
She didn’t think about death much, not even out there in the desert that was filled with scorpions and spiders and rocket propelled grenades. You heard about death, it came from the TV or the grime-caked mouths of infantrymen fresh from patrol, but somehow you always woke up before you hit the ground. It was never real.
Her ears were ringing—A-flat—and she just wanted to dig her fingers into them to make it stop. There was a lot of movement around her but she couldn’t budge. It was hot, unbearably hot, and she opened her eyes to see why and only saw black and red bubbles of something organic, thick acrid smoke, blurs of flesh-colored ghosts all around her.
Too hot. They’d wandered too close to the sun, this time they’d really done it. Or maybe it’d come down from the sky, perched on the hood of the humvee, and only meant to ask them some questions about their families and hometowns. But they’d all burst into flames instead, causing the sun no small amount of shame and regret.
She wanted desperately to pull her clothes off; then maybe jump into a nice, cool shower. Someone was pulling at her, trying to move her. Maybe she should ask them to at least pull her boots off, maybe undo a few buttons for chrissakes.
There weren’t any fucking cooling devices in the heavy cotton uniforms. It had all been a naïve, far-fetched hope. But she thought she understood how that recruiter had managed to seem so unaffected by the heat. It felt damn good to earn the right to wear it. She didn’t much care for the weird little hats they made the female soldiers wear, but hell if she was about to complain. You didn’t bitch; lesson number one at Basic. She’d made it through, so fuck the heat.
Every cicada in a ten mile radius seemed like it was doing its best to outshine out his neighbors. The buzz was loud enough to drown out even the boys in their tricked-out pickup trucks as they roared up and down the main drag. She was headed away from all that meaningless noise.
Her parents had offered to drive her to the bus station but she wanted to make the trip alone. So they said their tearful (mom) and stoic (dad) goodbyes at home in the front yard. Then she waved and walked off down the road.
The shoulder was narrow, barely wide enough for one person to walk along. She was blocked in on one side by the busy highway and on the other by a steep embankment that was drowning in kudzu. The damn plant was everywhere. In town they’d even organized a club that went out weekly to slash and burn every bit of the kudzu they could find within the city’s limits. But just outside town the plant had free and complete reign over the countryside. They said it might very well kill off most all of the native plants within the decade if a more serious effort to destroy it wasn’t undertaken.
You almost had to admire a plant that had come to thrive that much. Almost. But she missed the old wildflowers she used to see growing alongside the road. They had more color, more character.
The bus station loomed in the distance, the fumes from the idling vehicles blurring the air around it. She checked her watch, straightened her jacket and hat and quickened her pace.