First Blood, by Kyle Seibel

"Did I fall in love with her? I did. As much as that was worth back then. Not much I don’t think... That summer I had so much love that it drove the price to historic lows."

Kyle Seibel has quickly become one of my favorite writers. His stories are often in that sweet spot where I can tell a lot of my favorite writers are favorites of his too, all while also always feeling uniquely and excitedly original to Kyle. I was lucky enough to get to read his collection, Hey You, Assholes, and I can’t wait for it to get snatched up and published, mostly selfishly, so I can recommend you all buy it, and also for you all, so you’ll get to read it. Excited to get to feature this one!

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Nicole grabbed the guy next to her, this random drunk asshole at Gasoline Alley, and kissed him in front of me. She had been threatening to make out with a stranger since we started arguing earlier in the night. I was almost relieved when she finally pulled the trigger. I could go home.

Walking back to my apartment was when I spotted the woman. She was in a teal dress laying face down between two cars parked on Tejon Street. Didn’t register at first. I kept going for a few seconds before being like, hang on, and doubling back.

I watched for a few moments for signs of life. My findings were inconclusive. I didn’t think she was dead, but then again, I wasn’t an expert or anything. I took a step closer.

She stirred. Thank god. The street light caught her back flexing as she pushed herself up. She would describe herself to me later as a genetic freak and I guess she was. Tremendous looking muscles stuck out all over her. I had never seen something like it up close. It appeared almost fake, like a suit she was wearing.

I asked if she was okay and she sat there, cross legged and looking at me blankly, her brain rebooting. A light popped on behind her eyes and she fixed her dress in front of her. Two big globs of muscle hung over each knee cap which were all scraped up. She reached for her square black purse and poked around inside.

“Where are my friends?” she asked.

I didn’t know. She looked at me like she didn’t believe me.

Jackie was an amateur bodybuilder and when preparing for a competition she would dehydrate herself, “dry out,” she called it, and doing that in conjunction with the very few calories she was subsisting on in the weeks leading up to the show led her to wander off and pass out on the street after drinking a few cocktails with her friends who had all come out to celebrate her hard work. She revealed this to me afterwards as we became friends in the weeks that followed, a friendship that started the moment I helped her to her feet.

“Thank you,” Jackie said, straightening up and coming back to life a little more. “For not looking down my dress.”

Did I fall in love with her? I did. As much as that was worth back then. Not much I don’t think. It was because my heart adhered to the principles of economics. That summer I had so much love that it drove the price to historic lows.

As a reward for not looking down her dress, Jackie gave me the gift of her smile. And right there, that’s what did it. That’s when I saw those teeth for the first time.

Her mouth, it must be said, was a nightmare. Just an absolute wreck. Big crooked chicklets jutting all over the place. It looked like it hurt her to chew.

The rest of her was so ludicrous in its strength and proportions and perfection and symmetry that the disaster of her smile had the effect of making her human. Not just human, though. Singularly beautiful, is a better way of saying it. I fought the strongest urge to kiss her as a pretense for running my tongue along them.

I didn’t, though. Kiss her, I mean. I wanted to, but I didn’t. Not then, anyway.

Instead, we walked around together until we found her friends at a sports bar around the block. I thought they were all older than her, but they weren’t. Jackie just looked young because of her insane body. Or rather, she didn’t necessarily look young, but age was not among the top things that defined her, which I don’t think you can say for a lot of people. She was a decade my senior and it couldn’t have mattered less.

“Everyone,” Jackie said, introducing me. “This is Arthur. He’s in the navy.”

I had imagined a much more exalting reception from Jackie’s friends. Some kind of gold medal for rescuing a member of their party. But they all seemed to not have even noticed her absence.

Jackie explained how I found her on the ground and one of them asked what she was doing on the ground and Jackie said she fell and they said, Ohhhhh, and we didn’t talk about it again.

“So what do you do in the army?” one asked me.

I was having trouble distinguishing their faces. In the barlight they all had a disquieting sameness. It appeared as if there was the same actor playing all the roles of Jackie’s friends. “The navy, actually.”

“Oh wow, he can’t tell us,” another said. “He’s one of these special guys.”

I assured them there was nothing special about me.

“Mr. Modesty,” one sang.

Jackie announced that she was going home and would I mind taking her. I said that I didn’t mind, but that my car was a mile or so away, back at my apartment. That wouldn’t do, she said, and took my phone and put her number in it. She would get someone else to take her home, she said, but maybe another time I could.

Take her home, she clarified, flashing that smile at me.

Back at the battalion, any real sense that we were still in the fighting military was coming to an end. The unit was no longer taskable for any operational support, but there was also no point in starting to get things packed up yet. The final decommissioning felt like a tree off on some hill in the distance. And you’re headed there, sure, but it’s so far away that who gives a shit. We would muster midmorning and poke around the spaces for a few hours and then just drift elsewhere. Czajkowski and McDaniels had commandeered an undeveloped lot near the tank tracks and set up a paintball field with leftover gear pallets and oversized empty wooden spools. There was a group that went to play on Fridays and one week I invited Jackie, who I’d been texting back and forth with a little.

Nicole and I had patched things up since that night at Gasoline Alley, but it had all the makings of a false peace. She said she was sorry, that she just gets crazy when she drinks like that, what was between us was special, and it was worth working on. She promised she would go to therapy and deal with the stuff with her mom because she knew how much it weighed on our relationship.

Nicole knew exactly what she wanted and I had to respect that. I wished it wasn’t to destroy my life, but I understood where she was coming from. Sometimes I felt like doing the same thing.

By contrast, Jackie drove an ambulance for her day job. She barely drank. Her drug of choice was anavar, a steroid compound cycled for muscle growth. It caught me off-guard when she told me how the side effects had permanently enlarged her clitoris.

Jackie got married, pregnant, a hysterectomy, and a divorce all in the same year. She had a nervous habit of going to the fridge and eating handfuls of raw spinach right out of the crisper. She was such a fantastic looking individual that by association, I also became a little fantastic.

For her part, she wasn’t impressed with the battalion when I brought her on base for paintball. She couldn’t believe how soft-bellied we all were.

“You guys are the defenders of freedom?” she screamed at McDaniels, who she had pinned behind a container box with an aggressive forward assault. “Try defending a salad once in a while.”

Amidst the pock-pock-pock of the paintball guns, Delgado called time out. He walked in the middle of the enclosure, waving his hands.

“First blood,” he said, pulling up his sleeve and exposing a red elbow. Snagged on a nail, he thought it could have been.

We sat in the shade and McDaniels passed out the beers. The rule of first blood came from construction sites, supposedly. The idea was, if the job was cutting into your actual skin, then you at least deserved a drink while it stopped bleeding. That was the story Warrant told us, anyway. It morphed into a kind of working philosophy among us at the compound. Anything happened that resulted in any sort of blood, it fell under the jurisdiction of the rule. Beers were produced and drunk no matter what the time. I thought it was some universal tradition amplified through the gonzo logic of the military, but it’s not. I have discovered in the years since that the rule of first blood was unique to our command. I have not been able to find a single other construction worker or navy veteran who knows what the fuck I’m talking about.

“First blood?” they say, after I find out they were a seabee. “Not, uh, not me, not where I, uh…”

I feel my face get hot. I feel like I’m lying. I watch them completely reestimate my credibility.

Or maybe it’s this. Maybe their reaction isn’t disbelief. Maybe they’re taking offense. Maybe it’s not something we’re supposed to talk about. Maybe I’m breaking some sacred oath. Maybe that’s my fate.

McDaniels asked Jackie what’s this called and touched the hump of muscle that connected her neck and shoulder. He asked what she ate in the morning and what she ate right before bed and how she got her quads to look like two braided steel cables. Czajkowski asked what she would suggest for someone looking to get back into shape.

Jackie sipped her beer and answered all their questions. It was happening to them too, I could tell. They were falling in love with her, those bastards.

We paintballed for hours, pausing for beer breaks in the shade.

“I’m the most fucked up out of all the guys in battalion,” McDaniels said, grinning at Jackie. “The FOB was basically a crater by the time my team rotated out. That’s why they gave me Tulip. Some of these guys need whatever, but she’s my medicine, really. My emotional support mongoloid.” He gestured to Tulip, his big dumb cow of a dog, who was lying in the dirt next to him, chewing on an empty two liter plastic bottle. McDaniels leaned back and put his hands behind his head. “Yeah, I’m just an absolute fucking mess come fourth of July.”

“You mean mongrel,” I said. “Emotional support mongrel.”

“What’d I say?”

“Mongoloid.”

“You’re right,” McDaniels said. “What I meant to say was, ‘Shut the fuck up, Dartman.’”

“Don’t listen to these peckerheads,” Czajkowski said to Jackie. “You’re into sob stories? You should hear what my bitch wife does to me. Breaks my damn heart every time.”

“What?” Jackie said, flexing her calf muscles, which were the size of small rabbits. “She’s cheating on you?” Her delight at our attention was on full display. I almost expected her to roll over so we could rub her tummy.

“Worse,” Czajkowski said. “She won’t leave me alone. I can’t get rid of her. I drive her out into the mountains and leave her blindfolded on the edge of cliffs but she always finds her way home.”

Jackie covered her smile with a hand, hiding her teeth. She wouldn’t let them look at those things. They were just for me.

It was a little past noon when Delgado said he better get going. The rest of us called it a day and walked around the enclosure, picking up stray beer cans.

McDaniels had heard they were playing Top Gun at Red Rocks. It was free, he said. They did movies out in the amphitheater all summer long. We could get tacos and go up there.

I said we could take my car and everyone laughed.

“No offense, Dartman,” McDaniels said. “But I would rather be on one of those pervert registries than go anywhere in your car.”

“I wouldn’t put it like that myself,” Czajkowski said. “Personally, I would rather suck Chief’s dick after two weeks in the field than take the Saturn.”

The four of us—me, McDaniels, Jackie, and Czajkowski—met a few hours later at the parking lot of the Chipotle on Nevada avenue. Jackie offered to carpool in her arctic white 4Runner. I made a big show of giving McDaniels the front seat on account of him being the fattest and ugliest and whatnot. Frankly, I was paying him a compliment by openly competing with him. He had no shot with Jackie. And me? I still wasn’t sure what I wanted. To Jackie, I was a mysterious and noble stranger. I guess I wanted to see how long I could fool her.

At Red Rocks, we walked up the stone stairs to sit on a bench high in the canyon. In the sky above the stage and packed amphitheater, armies of purple and orange warred and faded. When it turned dark, Jackie watched the movie and we watched Jackie.

Top Gun is a movie about the love men have for other men that they don’t know how to express. They don’t know what to do with it, so they join the navy and fly jets and launch them from aircraft carriers and shoot rockets and sing to women in bars and drop bombs and conduct surveillance sorties and play sand volleyball. It’s completely illogical and deeply moving, which makes it the perfect American film.

We were walking back through the crowd to Jackie’s car after it was over when I lost contact with our group. We got separated at the bottleneck near the bathrooms and I couldn’t find them again in the sea of heads. I fumbled in my pocket for my phone. I felt something brush against the back of my hand and pulled away out of instinct. I turned to look and saw Jackie next to me, half-smiling and revealing a single crooked tooth. We stopped walking. The exiting crowd flowed around our bodies. People who passed by looked at us and made a noise like this:

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

They were making that sound because we were kissing. We were kissing because it no longer felt within our power to refrain from doing so for one more second.

I didn’t care if McDaniels or Czajkowski saw us. If the mood in the 4Runner on our way back to Colorado Springs was strained, I didn’t notice. My lifeforce was focused on a single goal: kissing Jackie again.

For a hazy hour that night in the Chipotle parking lot, I kissed Jackie against the dented bumper of my Saturn Ion. Who knew where McDaniels and Czajkowski went. Who cares. We confessed our love to each other over and over again like horny teenagers. I imagined our auras clashing in the astral plane over our heads like clouds in the sky over Red Rocks before the movie started. I could almost feel cosmic raindrops. Amazing, I thought, until I realized it was actually raining.

I followed her to an apartment complex. The rain had picked up enough to completely soak me on the short walk from the car to her door.

Inside her place, the walls were bare and boxes were stacked in the corner of the empty living room. There were keys on the counter and a bleachy smell hung in the air.

“You’re moving?” I said, my voice booming in the open space. And then, whispering: “Did you tell me that?”

“Yes,” Jackie said, opening a box and handing me a towel. “Well, wait. Yes, I’m moving. No, I didn’t tell you.”

She grabbed a half-drunk bottle of white wine from the fridge and said she wasn’t sure how old it was and unscrewed the top and took a healthy swig and handed it to me and smiled.

In a few days, en route to wherever she was moving, Jackie would swerve to avoid colliding with a stalled semi truck and flip the 4Runner over three lanes of traffic on I-25. She’d get airlifted to the Ernest E. Moore Shock Trauma Center at Denver Health and survive, but all her money would be gone from hospital bills and a traumatic brain injury would prevent her from going back to her day job. Her personality would change drastically. Her friends would move on. She’d find work at the strip club in lower downtown, first as a waitress, then as a dancer. A customer would become fixated on her. It’d start to get scary, even for Jackie. She’d tell her boss. He won’t give a shit.

She’d go missing and it’d be a month before they find her, discovered by a golden retriever on a morning walk.

I’d find this all out in pieces long after it happened from one of McDaniels’s email updates. Wasn’t this the chick you brought to paintball? accompanied a link to the news story.

I never saw Jackie after that night in her empty apartment, but I also didn’t expect to. She said she was moving. I thought she was moving. I spent years holding the memory of our time together in my hands like a snowglobe. To me, it was a fling. To her, it was, in a very real sense, among her last days alive. If you’re wondering how that feels, it feels very strange.

Up until recently, I would routinely look up the news article about her disappearance and follow it with the update filling in more of her biography and then follow that with the update after the press conference where the police said they had no leads.

And the one where they found her body. I would read that one too. I imagined finding her lying there, like I had all those years ago between two cars on the street.

And then finally, I used to read the article that was filed after her memorial that listed some of the people who came out to the sunrise service at Ute Valley Park and all the nice things they said about Jackie.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that even if I’d known, I probably couldn’t have done anything to help. Not really. I was already busy becoming someone else in an entirely different version of reality.

I know. Even to me, it sounds fucking pathetic.

When I went to look this morning, the articles had all been archived and I couldn’t find any mention of Jackie in any syndication. I went through a hundred pages of search results and she’s not there. They’re trying to erase her. Well, I won’t let them. And don’t think they’re not coming for you as well. Because they are. They’re coming for everyone. No one survives. You can’t save anyone, but there’s this, at least. Proof she existed. Proof I did too.

The rest of you are on your own.

STORY:
Kyle Seibel is a writer in Santa Barbara CA. His work has been featured in Joyland Magazine, New World Writing, and Wigleaf. His debut collection of short fiction, HEY YOU ASSHOLES, is currently looking for a publisher. Follow him on Twitter at @kylerseibel. He's been getting a lot better lately.  

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ART:
Matt Mitchell is a poet, critic, editor, and semi-regular artist in Columbus, OH. Find him online @yogurttowne. 

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Next Tuesday, July 4, we’ll feature an interview with Kyle Seibel about this story (and maybe a little info about the novel this became a kind of deleted scene from)!

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