Procession

We were notified of Jake’s impending deployment during the busy, gray stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas. How shocked was Jake when he received the news?  He sent out a text message blast to all of the contacts in his cell phone, stating:I’m going to Iraq in March. Getting drunk tonight. Come out if you want.

The usual channels were alerted, and we assembled at the Hunky Dory Pub. The bar was a cozy iPod dive that rocked eclectic after the happy hour regulars cleared and took their Steve Miller Band with them. Jake came in alone and stuck out in his blue polo work shirt and apron. He flung the apron in a corner, accepted a shot, and declared, “Well, this fucking sucks.”

After a cheers to fucking sucking, we talked around the implications of his orders and calculated the sting of life’s latest sucker punch. We’d been on a hot streak. We were in our late twenties and it seemed like we all were getting married and buying homes and/or building careers and contacts. Jake’s news was the underbelly of all of our options and a grim reminder of just how much control we lacked outside of the reception halls.

He operated the pub like a console: ordering drinks, requesting songs, cracking jokes, rebuking insults, extinguishing cigarettes all with the fluid motion of the rehearsed. Similarly our reactions felt preordained and sequenced. Of course he was still Jake, still familiar all the way down to the dark stout at the bottom of his pint glass, but he was weighted by oncoming history. We spoke of his future as though it were an affliction—an illness both unknowable and tragic—and we searched his face for fever and his eyes for fear. He belched wetly and dispelled the growing cloud of nostalgia. When we left Hunky Dory, we were far away from March.

On Christmas night, we got together as we usually did. We regrouped from the stresses of the season with freshly acquired DVDs and gifts of red wine to watch and consume in a living room. Low key. His roommate got a text from Jake, who was noticeably absent from the festivities.

“Says he’s staying at his dad’s place across town. Says he’s kind of freaking out.”

We sighed. It had hit him. Who wouldn’t crumble under the oppression of a holiday like Christmas knowing what he knew, that maybe this family Christmas was possibly his last? We marked his absence by trying to find acceptance of his situation.

We sat with our arms draped over our spouses and significant others, reminding each other that while Jake was an unrepentant bachelor, that man still sought love with the romantic’s zeal. Searching for the one, having a good time doing it. He bounced from one low-level job to another, scrambling to pay the rent from month to month. We theorized that the deployment was the answer to some of these problems, a just-so-crazy-it-might-work scheme to start fresh and get called a hero in the process. Despite the suspicion that the Army had snatched a promising young man for fodder in a phony war, we understood Jake had willingly signed up for this eight years ago and spent the last four outside of any military commitments. The situation’s resemblance to an acquired disease broke down when we suggested that this experience might actually be good for him.

After the New Year, time went elastic as Jake worked and we worked and kept our lives afloat as responsibility necessitated. Though we kept his nearing departure in our minds, the early darkness and cold temperatures of winter kept all of us separate save for the most deliberate of planning. When we’d see Jake, the setting was usually innocuous and our conversations mundane and weightless—status updates. He’d make mention of the loose ends he was tying up: what he was going to do with his possessions, who’d be taking care of his dog, where his car would be parked for the duration. Words he used were measured, his plans logical and thoughtful.

It wasn’t until very late at night, after all the videogames had been played and the liquor swilled, when we reverted to the feral approximates of our college selves and stood on freezing porches or decks and smoked furiously. We asked him lurid questions.

“What’d it be like to kill somebody?”

“Probably not fun. No sense in worrying about it till it happens,” he said.

“What’s it like to get shot at?”

“What the hell do you think it feels like to get shot at? It’s loud and not fun,” he said.

“What’s the shitting arrangement like over there?”

“Fucking sucks,” he said.

We’d shake our heads, laugh and caricature the bloody thoughts because we were agreeable people and unaccustomed to the flexible morals that official enlistment demands. Despite the thousands we’d killed in games and the dozens of hours we spent watching zombie apocalypse movies, we never considered living on the other side. Now here was Jake, coiling himself up, readying to fight in a war we’d already seen depicted in movies. Jake looked at us sideways and called us pussies, but we weren’t pussies. At worst, we were liars skirting the edge of the abyss, and we drank more to keep our bravado up.

March arrived exactly when it meant to. We stayed close to Jake during his last week among our number. The weather was pleasantly deceptive and the days were 72-degree beauties. As we gathered firewood, card tables, and chairs for Jake’s final, final going-away party, he was disassembling his belongings and jamming them into room-specific boxes for storage. We helped when he requested, but he was content to do the packing on his own. We stacked the boxes in his roommate’s living room, and they remained there all through the party that night, silent monoliths that obstructed flow and socialization.

We stayed outside by the fire. The warmth of the afternoon had given way to a chilly evening. We were fascinated by the flame and tossed our bottle caps and cellophane wrappers into the blaze. We poked at it with long sticks and crushed the starter logs into embers. We fueled it with more kindling and alternated our fronts and backs to the heat. Huddled as we were, there was always a conversation to join.

We started off quiet and reflective, talking. Then, as more and more of us arrived and we continued to drink, the texture of the party ripped open. We competed for volume and clarity. A stereo was turned on but we couldn’t hear the words, just dull bass vibrating the ground. Beer bottles went crashing into the fire. We spoke louder. We split into pockets of three and four.

Jake was not interested in playing the role of sequestered godfather who waits for us to pay our respects. He was there in the middle of the madness, a diplomat and common thread. A host.

“So you’re leaving when?”

“Tomorrow,” he said. “It’s a bitch.”

“How long are you gonna be gone for?”

“A year. Unless I go career. I might go career.”

“We could shoot you in the foot!”

“I’d shoot you in the face,” he said.

If this was the wake, we had forgotten to inform the corpse. Jake mingled with every group. He provided every told story with current commentary. Not a privilege of the dead. He peeled us off our groups one by one and we shook his hand and clapped his back and embraced him and kissed him and cried with him and told him to be safe. Be safe.

In the morning, Jake woke us from our hangovers with a series of blasts from the horn of an enormous Ryder truck. We sat up coughing and rubbing our eyes. We squinted as he threw the front door open and drenched us in radiant sunlight.

“Moving time. Since there’s a lot of us here, I was thinking we could form a chain, FEMA-style, to get all these boxes in the truck,” he said.

We got up and took our time doing it. Shifting from reckless abandon to grunt-force labor is never an easy transition. Jake busied himself with possibly overlooked details. We drank some water and brewed some coffee and got sick in the bathroom. He grabbed a large box and hefted it on his shoulder. He looked us over and saw we had our motor skills back.

“All right, let’s do this. I hate moving,” he said.

“Technically, you’re not moving. This stuff is going into storage.”

“Yeah. It fucking sucks. C’mon,” he said.

We went outside, stood a few paces apart, and formed a conveyor. We exchanged boxes out the front door, down the porch steps, over the lawn, and up the ramp into the truck. The pace was steady, and we were mostly laughing as we worked even though our hands grew sore and dusty. Jake arranged the boxes in the truck like lines in Tetris.

“Last one,” said someone by the door.

“Incoming,” said a person on the lawn.

“Finito,” Jake said.

As the boxes stopped coming, the chain broke apart incrementally and walked away rubbing arm muscles and drinking from bottles of water. Lots of sighs, pushed breaths. Jake shoved the last box into the truck. He hopped down from the bed, raised the ramp, and slammed the shutter down.

“Thanks for the help,” he said. “We’re gonna head down to the storage facility and transfer all this stuff in there. I don’t really have room in the truck, so if you guys could all just follow me individually, that’d be cool.”

He climbed behind the wheel of the truck. It started with an empty growl. He honked the horn a couple of times and edged the behemoth out of the driveway and into the street. He pulled away slowly and turned a corner out of sight. The rest of us looked at each other as if to say, “That’s that; let’s get going.” We went to our cars and put on our seat belts. We followed each other through the neighborhood and downtown. To the unfamiliar eye, our convoy would look like a funeral procession, but to us that observation would’ve been exclusive, wrong, and morbidly self indulgent.