I was in Tampa, Florida to interview the world’s best tennis player when I met the sergeant. I’d seen lots of military men in Tampa — at the airport, in restaurants. Military men are the usual thing down there. I guess they’re the usual thing everywhere these days. I was in the hotel’s garden lounge, making notes on my laptop because the tennis player didn’t want me to watch her lift weights. She was funny that way. She didn’t want people to see her strain. The sergeant was passing my table when he spilled his drink. I never found out what caused the beer to slip from his hand, but we wouldn’t have exchanged even a glance if his efforts to preserve his uniform hadn’t exceeded his attempts to keep me dry.
It was nothing. The beer splashed onto my feet. I was wearing sandals. But the sergeant did this… thing… even before he apologized. He pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket, and he knelt to drape the handkerchief over my right foot, the one that was closest to him. It was a strange gesture, weirdly inappropriate and conclusive. When I had time to think about it later, I saw it as the mark of a man who had learned to dismantle his outrage into its separate parts.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That was stupid.”
I could read his name — Purcell — on his nameplate. That put him at another disadvantage, so I told him not to worry, I could clean myself up just fine.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “It’s my mistake. I will correct it.” He eased out of his crouch just enough to reach the blue cloth napkin that was wrapped around the silverware laid out on the next table. He unfurled the napkin and let it hang in front of him like a blank banner. Then I sat there while he dried my feet, both of them. When he was finished, he pocketed his white handkerchief as quickly as he had produced it. He left the blue napkin, folded as a rectangle, beneath my chair. His attentions startled me, that’s for sure. I invited him to sit at my table until the waitress returned with a fresh beer.
I don’t know why the sergeant accepted my invitation. Maybe my Capri pants and sun-crisped hair and wedding ring made me look like the sisters and wives who had attended his rowdy homecoming barbeque in Palm River or wherever. Maybe I looked like a woman he could talk to.
“I don’t want to bother you,” he said.
“You’re fine,” I said. “I’m not getting anything serious done. I definitely need a break.”
Purcell was at the end of the two-week leave all those guys were getting at the time. He said he’d been south of Baghdad for seven months, and he expected to stay another five. He told me he was a sergeant in an engineering unit, but he didn’t tell me what grade, and I didn’t ask. I watched as he tried to fit himself onto the button-sized café chair across from me. He was long and thick in the torso with the dark, ball-peened hands of a mechanic. He might have been a mechanic in real life, I never found out. He looked like he was a little younger than I was, middle thirties, and he made a functional impression in his starched khakis but no better than that — a guy with razored hair creeping back from his temples, a pair of grayish eyes nested in the creases of a learned, then practiced, shrewdness. I’d seen a similar expression on the face of my tennis player.
I didn’t want to talk about the weather, so I told Sergeant Purcell why I was there, in Florida, in a playground hotel.
“I’m working for a magazine,” I said. “But the story’s in freefall, as usual. The subject keeps getting away from me. And it doesn’t help that this girl really knows how to butcher English. She seems to like the fact that she has almost nothing to say.”
“You’re a sports writer?” he said. “I thought that meant you had to be fat and ugly.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
The sergeant shrugged. He seemed inclined to participate in banter at his own pace. I told him the article was a good assignment for me, one I’d been angling for, even though there was no guarantee I would discover anything unusual, or truly useful, about a twenty-year-old European with a perfect backhand. He seemed interested. He liked sports. He had read the magazine I worked for. But he didn’t know much about tennis, he said. And he’d gotten behind on everything while he was in the desert, everything but football. The Army, he said, took football with it wherever it went.
“America’s got those two sisters that play, right? Those big black girls with the muscles. The really cut bodies. I’ve seen them on TV. Can your girl beat them? They’re monsters. I didn’t think anybody could beat them.” His voice was loose and easy on the high notes.
I said my girl was very small and spoke French, but that she had — for the moment — figured out how to beat everyone. She wasn’t too analytical about it. She’d been good and now she was better. She credited her success to will. Others called it heart, whatever that was supposed to mean. I wasn’t sure what her secret was, although it was my job to find out. I mentioned the doping rumors to Purcell. I guess I wanted him to see what I did as a kind of skepticism.
“But you don’t think she’s a cheater, do you?”
“No. There’s no evidence.” The sergeant was assessing me just as I’d assessed him. He set his jaw in a way that made his mouth look smaller, and wetter, and I could feel it, the cataloging. I’d spent the last three days around coaches who noticed nothing but hard-court perfection. This attention was a warm rinse. A blush bloomed across the back of my neck.
“Will, huh? Is that what she calls it? Because I’ll bet she just works harder than everybody else. Does she say that? Seems like the big-time athletes always say that.”
I nodded.
“And she’s probably got a good head on her shoulders. Mentally tough. Mental toughness. I always wondered if your head was the thing that made you truly great in the end. Or is luck part of it? I wrestled in high school. One hundred fifty-seven pounds. Had to sweat and puke to make weight just about every week. Got to all-state my junior year before my knee gave out. My coach was a ball buster. He worked us blind. He didn’t believe in fucking luck, excuse me for saying.”
Purcell had spread his thighs to support his fast and certain beer drinking. And he’d loosened his collar to reveal an arrowhead of white T-shirt below his throat. I found myself drawn to an asymmetrical quality in his face I couldn’t quite pinpoint. When I finally figured out what it was, how the sergeant had these faint, almost invisible, eyebrows, I didn’t save myself from the wicked thought that he might be smooth and hairless underneath his uniform.
“Luck is… how can I say this… luck plays a role in her kind of success, I think.” I fingered the lip of my empty wine glass. “But it’s not the real key, if you want my opinion. These players — these people — they’re geniuses. I hate that word, but there it is. Their power starts in the body. They can do anything with their bodies, it’s unbelievable. And the genius carries over. There’s focus and selfishness like you wouldn’t believe. I’m not talking about regular asshole behavior, either. That’s there. Everybody talks about that with jocks, but it’s not what makes the big difference. It’s more like they have a way of keeping everything that matters stored inside until they need it to win. They’re waiting to be unleashed. The rest of us aren’t usually like that. We… I don’t know… we get diluted somehow. We… leak.”
Part Two
I could see I’d gone too far. I’d lost Purcell doing what I was supposed to in the pages of the magazine. His eyes were on the tangle of palm fronds behind me. “We got what we got. We do what we do,” he muttered.
“Yeah. Yes. Sorry for going on like that. It’s not important.”
“So what is important?” Purcell’s eyes swiveled back onto mine.
I paused, and he was on me like a dog off its chain.
“Come on. What matters to you, ma’am?”
I tried not to hesitate. “Okay. My kid. My son. He matters. He’s back in Colorado.”
“I don’t have any kids.” The words skated up his throat, escaping on blades.
I should have kept my mouth shut. I should have figured out how to ease the conversation back toward safer ground. But I have this thing about seriousness. I want people, even strangers, to know I take them seriously. “I’d say what you’ve been through in the… over there. I’d say that’s important. It has to be.”
Purcell stiffened. I watched as his blood burned a fire line into his scalp. His hands squeezed themselves to half their normal size. His anger was as pervasive as a smell, a hot gut stink. Then came the determination again — a careful dissection of feeling from action. His self-control twitched the skin below his eyes, and he somehow found a way to come back at me with words. But there was no eloquent gesture with a handkerchief this time. I hadn’t earned a gesture.
“You really want to talk about what I’ve done and seen? Goddamn, I’ve already talked to my share of goddamn reporters. Over there, over here, back on base. And none of you know what you believe. I thought we were having a simple drink. Jesus Christ, a lady sports reporter. Just my fucking luck. I’m ready to ship out. I’m in a high-class place looking for. You want to know what I’m looking for?”
I was afraid I could guess. I focused on the stem of my wine glass. Purcell thumped the rickety café table with the ends of his fingers, hard. “See? That’s how it is. You’ve got a limited mind. You think you know everything, and you don’t know shit. I’m here because it’s clean. The windows are clean and you can see right through them. The air conditioning don’t smell like thirty guys and farts. They got quiet here. They got doorways higher than my goddamn head. They got relaxation. It’s all I want. A guy fucking needs to relax.”
I tried to clear my throat. “I was just I don’t know… talking. I didn’t mean to say the wrong thing.”
“So tired,” he said, staring at the fans that blurred the ceiling above us. “I’m tired of talking.” And he rubbed his whole face with a hand, two hands, as if he was bathing himself with air. I noticed a band of rashiness under his chin, so I tried to imagine him wearing a heavy helmet in unrelenting heat. Maybe things would have gone better between us if I could have seen him in his helmet.
“I should take off,” I said, sliding my computer from the table.
“Tired of the sand,” he continued. “You can’t believe the sand, how it takes over your life. Your gear. I still taste it every day, all in my teeth, and I’ve been away for two weeks. It don’t ever let you alone. You ever go some place where the little things are the things that bring you down?”
“Not like you mean exactly, but sure.” Common ground, I told myself, he wants some common ground. “I waited two hours this morning just to see a girl dry herself with a towel and eat a Power Bar.”
Purcell clucked his tongue as if he knew the feeling. His anger had passed through like a storm and stranded him in some solitary place, a doldrums he seemed to recognize. “You know what I want to talk about?”
I waited.
“Genius. Being one of those. I think maybe I’m a genius if you want to get right down to it. You could write about me. You could say how I run an excavator better than anybody in A Company, better than anybody in Division. It’s true, just ask around. I’ve done trench lines for power cables, ditches for irrigation, sewers, sewage ponds, every river and lake of human shit you can imagine. I’m an artist over there, one of the guys actually said that to me. Sergeant First Class Derek D. Purcell, artist in shit. But my work, when you smell it every day like I have to, it don’t smell good. It smells like hate. It smells dead. Live things maybe grow from shit on farms and in gardens and all that, but shit smells dead to me. How do you think your rich French girl would do working away in a place that’s dead?”
I didn’t answer. Purcell rolled his shoulders as though he’d caught the wave of cruelty he’d been looking for. The wave propelled him forward with a real and bitter power, and he laughed. At me.
“Yeah. You get it, don’t you? You hear me. Smart-ass sports reporter is too smart to fool herself on this one. I’m doing good work over there. I’m excellent. But it’s not about prize money or television, and it’s not Hooah camouflage suicide bloody stuff, so you don’t want to know about it.”
“I’m listening to you. Go on. Please don’t assume—”
“I assume plenty, ma’am. I assume whatever it’ll take to get me back on that plane day after tomorrow. You want to write about will, write about me digging latrines for the hadjis who don’t even care, who hate us. Except you won’t. It’s not interesting.” He showed his teeth. “I also want to say before you ask that nobody in my unit has been killed yet. I’m not boohooing Vietnam to you or anybody else.”
My face felt thickened and numb, like it was drying into a new shape. I thought of my son, the way he slouched over his dull schoolwork, the way he played basketball like it was an assault. “I’m afraid we got a little off track,” I said. “I’m not against you. Please don’t think that. I support you. It’s the policies that we… it’s the… mess. Nobody’s against you.”
“Good,” he said. “I’m not against you, either. We can agree on that.” He was standing now, reaching for his wallet. His shirt was crisp with motion. His pants slipped back into their creases over the pillars of his legs. He drew out a five-dollar bill, one of the new ones that makes Abraham Lincoln’s face look two-colored and bruised. And there was a billowing question in his eyes. It fluttered like a tiny flag across his gray irises: Would I help him? Would I like him? Would I have fucked him if he asked, or written to him when he was gone? I gave him nothing. We both knew what he was really asking. And we both knew the answer he wanted was easy to give, and impossible to rely upon.
