Chapter 1: Peanut Butter & Jelly

I felt like a stranger in a foreign country arriving at the city bus terminal. People were dodging people, crossing in front of each other’s paths, nearly tripping over luggage, talking loudly on their cellphones, running to catch their bus, or simply lost and confused in the mêlée. I was out of place in this chaotic environment. That’s what happens when you spend six years in the military where everything is done in a more orderly and timely fashion. Now, here I was returning to civilian life, without any plans for the future, no mission.

I was eighteen when I graduated from high school with no idea what to do with my life. I wasn’t college material and even if my parents had been alive at the time, they didn’t have the resources to send me to college anyway. So, I immediately joined the Marines and here I was after three deployments in combat zones and two to disaster areas.

I grabbed a taxi to go to my older brother’s house. He was the only immediate family I had. When we were small, our parents moved all the way across to the other side of the country, and we lost contact with relatives. Our parents never talked about our grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. They didn’t even have pictures. Although my brother was older, he had no recollection of them, nor did he ever show any interest. I would sometimes ask my mother, especially around Thanksgiving and Christmas, but she always made sure to steer the conversation elsewhere. Over time, I forgot about the possibility that such relatives even existed.

The last time I saw my brother, he was married and had a little girl of eight years of age. He now lived alone with his daughter, Susan, or Susie Sweet as I used to call and tease her. I couldn’t remember anything about her, the color of her hair or eyes. All I had was a fuzzy, blurred memory of a little girl who ran around in her panties, giggling and having fun.

My brother’s marriage was rather turbulent and one day for no apparent reason his wife disappeared. According to him, she ran off with another man, leaving my brother with a “shit load” of credit card debt and the “burden” of raising a daughter all alone. Those were his words at the time.

The taxi finally turned into the neighborhood where my brother lived, a working class section of town of mainly two-story houses with front porches and small lawns. Most of the houses proudly displayed the Stars-and-Stripes and, on a few porches, yellow ribbons honoring a family member who had fallen in combat.

The taxi slowed down and pulled over in front of the address I gave the driver who sported a beard and turban around his head and spoke with a foreign accent. My brother’s house was the only one on that street that looked dilapidated, in need of a fresh coat of paint, with a lawn that looked like a war zone. There was no flag to welcome me home or to remind me of the country I had fought for.

The taxi driver knew from the moment I hopped into his cab that I was fresh out of the military. My three-foot camouflaged duffle bag, weighing over 120 pounds, made it quite obvious. He had a son that was still serving in the Army. When I asked him how much I had to pay for the fare, he refused to charge me, saying he was thankful for my service and this was his way to help a returning soldier. I thanked him in return and told him to be proud of his son.

I walked up the front porch to knock on the door. There was a saggy, torn up couch sitting under the front window. It was piled high with stacks of old newspapers, magazines, empty pizza boxes and other unidentifiable junk. The screen door was hanging to one side and there was a gash in the bottom portion. I knocked a couple of times, but no one answered the door. I tried the wobbly door knob, but it was locked. Then I remembered my brother saying he would be at work and Susie at school, and that he would leave a key under the hood of the barbecue grill in the back yard.

The driveway on the side of the house leading to the garage and around to the back yard had more cracks and pot holes than the streets in Fallujah after we retook that unforsaken city. The garage doors were closed with a heavy chain and lock, but not entirely, and I could see it was being used only to store old lawn mowers, rusty barbecue grills, busted up toys and broken tools - junk. There appeared to be so much of it piled up near the doors that it had been impossible to shut them completely.

The back yard was a total mess with piles of empty beer bottles and cans, a broken bicycle, a clothes line all frazzled and torn, the garden patch infested with tall weeds. There were two banged up trash cans filled to the hilt with garbage that looked like it had been there for months, flies swarming all around them. I lifted the hood of the barbecue grill which looked like it had never been cleaned since it was purchased. Sure enough the key was there, stuck to the greasy grills. I tried to clean off the key, but ended up having to scrape off the grease with a beer can.

I unlocked the front door and was met with an odor of stale beer and cigarette butts reminiscent of some old beer joint in a dinky little cow town out west where I was stationed for a while to get additional training for desert combat. The living room looked like it hadn’t seen a vacuum cleaner in years with dust and debris piling up all over the place, old faded wallpaper peeling off in some places, and paint cracking in others. The short corridor leading to the kitchen looked about the same. The kitchen smelled greasy, the countertops felt sticky, and there were piles of dirty dishes along with empty cartons, torn wrappers, and dirty, crumpled paper towels in the sink, on the counters, and on the kitchen table. I was hungry, but for the first time I feared for my life, ingesting something nasty, dying of diarrhea, and becoming a non-battle casualty.

I decided to head upstairs to first put away my things in the guest room. There were only three bedrooms. Mine was on the right down from the landing. The master bedroom was on the opposite end of the hallway from the guest room, separated by a hallway closet, Susie’s room and the bathroom.

I removed the faded pink bedspread from the bed in my room; it was out of step with my military sense of fashion. I folded it very carefully to avoid the dust from going airborne and adding more to what was already finger deep on top of the dresser, night stands, and other surfaces.

The hallway closet was partially open when I walked past it and I remembered seeing a vacuum cleaner. There were also some rags and a pink training potty which probably belonged to Susie when she was a baby. I vacuumed the floor in my room, then filled the potty with water, and moistened the rag to clean off the dust from the furniture. Only then did I open the window to let out the stale, musty air.

Before heading back downstairs to the disaster area waiting for me in the kitchen, I did another quick inspection of the bathroom. The latrines in the Marine barracks were cleaner and smelled better than this part of the house. The inside of the toilet bowl was completely stained in dark brown and greenish colors and looked like it hadn’t been flushed in a while. The bathtub was discolored with soap scum and multiple yellowish brown rings all around, making the whole bathroom look grungy. There was no shower curtain, the faucets were all rusty and I couldn’t find toilet paper anywhere.

I looked next door into the master bedroom of my brother. It reeked of cigarette smoke, dirty laundry, an acrid smell of sweat and foul body odors. There were socks, underwear, and other clothes on the floor, on the chair, on top of the dresser and hanging from the drawers. The bottom bedsheet had multiple cum stains and was worn out in the center; it apparently hadn’t been changed in months, maybe even years. The ashtray on the nightstand was overflowing with cigarette butts. My brother wasn’t the neatest one in our family, but I was disappointed and aghast with what I saw.

The door to Susie’s room was closed. I didn’t want to be snoopy, especially considering it being a girl’s room, and if the whole house was a dirty dump, I sure didn’t want to see dirty panties of a fourteen year-old lying all over the room. I braced myself and slowly opened the door. I was pleasantly surprised and amazed at the same time. Susie’s room was like an oasis in a desert storm. It was impeccably clean. The bed was made, there were no clothes lying around and the room had a fresh, girly smell which was better than the stench of cigarette butts. As I closed the door, I noticed one more thing. The window was partially open and I knew right then that Susie Sweet was an outstanding kid just like her uncle.