dragonlady7

He calls just as I’m getting ready for practice. He is in a terrible mood, just devastated by a recent fight with a friend, and I’m doing my best to be distracting. So I’m complaining about my knees.

“I bruised the hell out of the good one,” I moan, “and the scar tissue in the tendon on the other one is just aching like crazy.”

“Mine’s bad too, lately,” he says. “Just the bad one, though.”

“You have a bad knee?” In my (derby-heavy) social group I’m used to always knowing who has chronic injuries where, out of courtesy and habit. So I’m shocked not to already know.

“The right one,” he says. “It dislocates. Ever since the thing with the helicopter. Did— Wait, have you not heard this story? With the dead Rangers?”

“What? No!” I would remember that, my dad was almost a Ranger.

He laughs. “I guess I gotta save at least one story for when we’re old and gray.”

I snort. I’d been less-than-gently needling him that his current woes were his mid-life crisis. “Shut up,” he says, but he’s laughing.

“When was this?” I ask, more politely.

“About 1995?” he says. I decide not to mention that I was in high school then. “It was one of those war games exercises. And the thing we had to do, for my team anyway, was that we had to jump out of a helicopter into this river. And the fucking pilot didn’t slow down like he was supposed to. My team chief was so mad it’s lucky he didn’t shoot the guy. I wasn’t the only one who got hurt.”

“What, just jump out? No parachute?”

“Pah, of course,“ he says. “We just jumped out with about 100 pounds of gear on. He was supposed to slow down, see? I hit that water so hard— and now I know, it is possible to scream underwater. I would’ve drowned if my friend hadn’t hauled me up— big Samoan guy, he saved me a couple times.”

I remember Big Samoan Guy from the story about the scars on K’s shoulder, the scars his tattoos cover, the one he won’t let me tell yet. Saved his life then too. “Yeah,” I say, wishing I remembered the man’s name but not wanting to interrupt.

“It was kinda fucked-up,” he says. “The corpsman we had, he wasn’t very good. Guys would come to me instead. So they hauled me out and half-carried me back to the beachhead, and this useless fucker has no idea what to do with a dislocated knee. He won’t give me anything but ibuprofen. And I’m lying in this, basically a foxhole, and you know how I am, I’m pretty fuckin’ grouchy. And they say they can’t medevac me to a real doctor for another two days. And I’m just watching this thing swell up and it hurts bad and I’m so mad at the stupid chopper pilot.”

“I don’t blame you,” I comment.

“But then they say oh, there’s an Army helicopter coming in. They’ll drop their guys and come by for you.”

“Oh,” I say, “there you go.”

“Yeah,” he says dryly. “So this Blackhawk helicopter comes in. I don’t know Blackhawks. It comes in over the beach, then suddenly the pitch of the engine changes. Like I said, I don’t know Blackhawks. But this thing suddenly went careening past the next line of trees, disappeared behind it, and then there was just this huge fireball.”

“Fuck!” It’s an awful image. “Did anyone get out?”

“Of course not,” he answers. “Killed the whole crew, plus the entire team of Army Rangers waiting to jump out.”

“Fuck,” I say again.

“Yeah,” he says. “So like, after that nobody cared about my knee. I couldn’t blame them. But I lay in that hole for three days with my knee dislocated.”

“Shitty,” I say.

“Shittier for those Rangers,” he says. We’re both silent, thinking on that. Finally he says, “It’s not a very good story. I think that’s why I never told it to you before.”

“Not a good story?!”

“No,” he says. “All I do is lie in a hole and feel sorry for myself.”

In another phase of K's life, he served in the ranks of a particular water-based armed force for a large North American nation. But in the spirit of not spelling anything out, we're being needlessly coy here. Roll with me; one of K's endearing features is a healthy sense of paranoia and he's sure someone's going to come get him if they find out he's been talking. (Another of K's endearing features is that sometimes it's hard to tell when he's kidding.)
He has many, many stories about this, since he happened to serve partially during wartime, and over the course of his career had numerous positions of increasing sensitivity. Alas, even in coy rephrasing he won't let me write down the stories from once he had a particular security clearance. So this one is from when he was simply a shipboard firefighter.

( Go Fly A Kite )

In 2007, I attended my first Pennsic. I camped with friends-of-friends. It was all very magical, and overwhelming, and amazing, and it was very hard (and remains very hard) to distill just what… what it was, what happened, what it was even about. That’s the magic of Pennsic.
But one of the first amazing things that happened was that the neighbors, a new household on the block, came over to introduce themselves as I was getting my bearings and just beginning to set up. The heads of the household were a married couple about ten-twelve years older than I was (I was in my late twenties). They recognized the tent I had as being a replica 18th-century tent. They were former Civil War re-enactors. They turned out to be the most interesting people at the entire event. (This is saying something, as there were 11,000 total weirdos at that event.) They were, of course, K and his wife S. And the most representative thing for me about that event was the evenings I spent drinking by the fire listening to K tell stories.
K has stories. He has stories, and stories about stories, and stories upon stories. He is a prepossessing guy, charismatic and outgoing and usually one of the focal people in any given group. And he has had the most bizarre, eclectic, incredible life. S is a little quieter with strangers, a great deal less outgoing (ha, until she gets either comfortable or drunk or both), but she and K have been together since they were barely adults, and know one another incredibly well. A significant part of K’s charm is how, despite his crudeness and occasional violence, he is visibly hearts-in-eyes in love with S, as if they were still twenty-two and had just met.
Over the years I have grown closer with them, and now am not only part of their Pennsic household but am trying to start a business with K (if we can ever get the logistics squared away). At my fourth Pennsic I camped with them in a combined-household situation, and it was then that I decided to start writing K’s stories down. Most of the foundation of that work was done at an event just after that Pennsic when S was sick, my boyfriend was committed elsewhere, and nobody else came, so it was just K and I, and we sat by the fire and drank and he told me stories for about eighteen solid hours.

So the K stories series is my attempt to tell the stories as they were told to me. It’s an exercise in semi-fiction. Because I didn’t record them; this isn’t just a transcription. And most of them, I have now heard more than once, or they were told in a fragmentary fashion and I am trying to compile a clear, thorough narrative from the fragments, often interrupted with other events. I am also trying to capture K’s distinctive voice. I may not be doing this consistently, as it’s tricky— he doesn’t have a distinctive accent, and he’s a bundle of contradictions. He works in construction, but is very well-educated; like many natives of the South, he has an accent that he turns up or down depending on circumstance, audience, drunkenness, mood, etc.
Note: elsewhere in blogs I have mentioned K by name, or with identifying details, so readers of this may well know of whom I speak. I am attempting, however, to keep his legal name and actual identifying details out of these stories, because of course, some of them have details such that it’d be best if they weren’t public. So wherever possible I’m anonymizing, taking out proper names or place details, and so on. That’s why the coy tone— I’m not exactly trying to hide anything, but especially since some of these may well be semi-fictionalized, there’s really no need to go attaching real names and dates and places to them.
Though I admit, as I began the work of compiling these stories, I did engage in a little bit of… not exactly fact-checking, but corroboration— mostly because if I had to fill in a detail, I wanted to fill it in accurately. And I did discover that actually there are a lot of verifiable details; K fibs a whole lot less than you’d assume given how sensational most of the stories are. He’s a person of considerable integrity, though that doesn’t always mean truthfulness— but his logic is generally internally consistent.

“If you’re a paleontologist in Utah,” he says, deftly snagging a piece of bread from the basket in the middle of the table, “you don’t let on. You say you’re a geologist. You say you’re looking for minerals. You don’t ever mention the words evolution, fossil, paleontology. It’s actually dangerous."

"Really,” I say.

“Oh yeah,” he says. “You could get shot out there. One time we were out working on BLM land– Bureau of Land Management– way out in the desert, and we’re doing what we do, and this pickup truck full of guys with rifles drives by, real slow, watching us. So we’re like, what’s that about? But they don’t stop and don’t say anything. But then they come by again, and again, a couple more times that day. And each time they just drive by. Looking at us."

He pauses to take a bite of food, then continues. "Next day we’re in town getting something to eat. And there in the parking lot is a horse trailer, and there’s this beautiful mare tied up alongside it. So, I mean, I’m a horse person, so I go over to look, like you do. She’s gorgeous, real nice lines. And I can see that she’s got a nasty hock rub, and it looks fresh."

"A hock rub?” I kept horses, but I only ever had two of them.

“An injury on the inside of one back leg, where the other one struck it,” he says. “It’s often caused by improper shoeing. But if it’s not treated it can abscess, you know how these things are– it can scar, it can cripple, it can even kill if it isn’t resolved. So I come closer to look at it, and a woman comes out and is standing there. So I ask if it’s her horse, and she says yes, so I compliment her, and after a moment she realizes I know horses and am not just some creep. So we talk a little bit about horse breeding, about conformation and the like, and then I mention the hock rub. She admits she’s noticed it but doesn’t know how it happened or how to keep it from happening again, the horse never had this trouble before. So I ask if the horse has new shoes, and she says yes, just the day before. Well, there it is. I look at the shoe on the opposite foot and sure enough, it’s just a little bit offset, a little crooked toward the inside, and it’s enough that it pulled her hoof off-balance and made it cut the other leg."

"Ohh,” I say. We never put shoes on our horses, so I never knew that.

“So she goes and gets her son and shows him, and they thank me profusely, and ask who I am, and I tell them my name and who I’m working with, and then we go our separate ways."

"That’s nice,” I say.

“Well, here’s the interesting part,” he goes on. “After that, the pickup truck with the guys with rifles never comes by again. And whenever we’re in town, everyone knows my name, and makes a point of greeting me and being polite. But seriously, everyone knows my name.”

“Oh how funny,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says. “The professor I’d been working with– Dr. A– he’d been working out there 22 years and nobody knew his name. I was out there three days and suddenly everyone was my friend. And he asked me, how did you do it? What did you tell them to make them like you? Cuz they don’t like our type, and these are dangerous people.” He shrugs. “I said, Everybody’s dangerous. These people are no worse than anyone else. But if they figure out you’re one of them, they aren’t nearly so dangerous anymore. It’s a universal thing.”

He shrugs again. “The thing is, I wasn’t trying to kiss up to anybody. I just wanted to help that horse.”

“I was trying to give someone a business card I had in my coat,” he says, texting me at work. “I kept pulling out dog cookies instead. Finally he asks if I have a dog. I answer, ‘Naw, I just like these things,’ and eat one.”

We have no fire, so we sit in camp chairs illuminated by the glow of a distant electric light, drinking corn whiskey from pewter mugs. It’s cold out, really cold, and the night is dark even though the clouds have cleared. I’m wearing almost all the clothes I brought, including the fur-lined hat he made for me, years ago. The cold doesn’t seem to bother him, but I know he’s lived rougher than this.

“She still has depression,” he says. “It’s pretty bad, but it’s nothing to what it was.” We digress, the conversation going off in a different direction for a while, as ours do, but he returns to it.

“For a period of about five years,” he says, “every day, every day I would come home from work and not know, as I opened the door, whether she’d be there to greet me, or if she’d have killed herself."

I say something softly horrified, something sympathetic. He shrugs. "It got to me,” he says. "It was hard. But I couldn’t be mad. People kept asking me why I stayed with her. And I didn’t know how to even answer that. If I left, I knew there was no goddamn way she’d live through that. And I couldn’t do that to her. I love her. And people don’t seem to understand what that means.“

We sit for a while, digressing again, refilling cups. The bottle’s nearly gone.

"I think the worst part was when it was getting better,” he said. “She brought me these journals she’d written. Really intimate, soul-searching stuff, and it was hard for her to share it, but she made herself do it. Because she wanted to show me she was better.” He drinks. “She was writing about how she’d finally fallen in love with her husband again. And I thought, ‘how sweet,’ and then I stopped and thought about it for a second.” He is leaning, elbows on knees, cup in one hand, staring past me in the dark, the light coming through his hair.

“She didn’t even have enough of herself left to love me, all that time.” He shakes his head, and sighs. “It wasn’t like I could say anything, or be mad, but it makes it even harder for me to think back on those years. And now I think I’m on almost as much medication as she is. But God damn it, I love her. I couldn’t do anything else. Can’t do anything else.” He shakes his head, then laughs, a little bitterly. “But that’s why I had to get out of [state redacted] for the weekend. She does, actually, literally drive me crazy sometimes.”

mostly true, paraphrased, details removed