A Soldier in Your Home
by Sarah K. Inman

In the shadow of The Independent Man, Rhode Island native & future NOLAFugees correspondent Sarah Inman discovered a thing or two about love and war.

Sitting outside an apartment on Jewett Street, in the shadow of the Independent Man, just blocks from the Rhode Island State House, R sucked on a cigarette. He had pale skin, reddish brown fine hair that got curly, and transparent blue eyes. He and his former military mates exchanged tales of male bravado. One story documented how they earned their “blood wings”: by eating a woman out during her menstrual period.

Nothing below my belt tingled, no lower vibration pulsed, no instant spark flicked, but when R looked at me a second time, I knew he wanted to fuck.

I had recently graduated college and accepted a job at Rhode Island Public Television in the area of fund-raising. I was depleted of self esteem. So when R invited me to smoke some weed he bought from the cross-eyed Reggae musician/dope dealer my friend E lived with, I gladly accepted and thus began a brief courtship punctuated by drunk weekends and visits to downtown music clubs like Babyhead and Lupo’s. I always drove since R had no car.

Once, while being frisked before a show at the Strand, R got into a scuffle with a bouncer who tried to confiscate his pipe. R’s transformation from a gentle boy to a crazed man put me on edge, made me wary. Then I noticed how bad his feet smelled. He always wore his well worn military-issued steel-toed boots and went days without changing his socks.

He told me he really did kill a man.

R wasn’t supposed to show up to the AS220 where I read from a novel-in-progress at open mic, but he did, and then he got up and read a prose poem about shooting someone dead in the desert during the first Gulf War. Later, when he asked to come home with me, he told me it was true, that he really did kill a man. Again, he got that crazed look in his eyes.

At the time I shared a place with my high school buddy who had recently come out of the closet. She needed the freedom the city provided as much as I did. She was tolerant of R’s presence as I had been tolerant of her girlfriend’s. But then one day R needed a place to stay for more than one night, and having a German Shepard puppy only complicated matters. Our lease was clear—no pets. Besides, my roommate (the paying one) was allergic.

R left, sheepishly, sadly, but only after I had insulted him. He found a job and an apartment, both his military buddies having jetted Providence for another city. One day I checked up on him at his new place in Elmwood, near Johnson & Wales, not far from the empty lots near the River where mobsters dump bodies. R seemed to be doing fine. He even had dating prospects. Then he made a move on me, and it was clear that no matter what I did, he would always take me back. But was it for me or for the security my meager apartment and entry-level job provided? Once again, low on self esteem, I gave in. Then he wouldn’t stop calling.

He would show up outside my apartment with his puppy. I’d avoid the window, hide in my bedroom, and wait from him to leave.

One day he called me at work to tell me he’d witnessed a shooting on a downtown bus, not an impossible tale but one that turned out to be false. Again I insulted him, and this time ignored his phone calls. He gave up eventually, but only after I spent what little money I saved on a solo vacation to Jamaica. This is what people do, I told myself—take vacations.

The night after we watched OJ’s bronco ride, we all went to a party—same lesbian roommate, same girlfriend. There I met W, the cousin of a friend. An enlisted Coastie, W proved he could hold his liquor and then wooed me with stories of adventures at sea. He spoke of pulling Haitian refugees from the waters off the coast of Florida and of wild nights spent on leave, one that included his brother, another Coastie, who accidentally headbutted a man to death during a bar fight. W stayed away from drugs because he was still enlisted, but like a good Irishman, he hit the sauce whenever he was off duty. Four days on, three days off, his schedule went. He lived on base, at Coast Guard Station Point Judith when he was bound there. While he was on duty, we could still roller blade together, ride in the cutter, and fuck in the lighthouse (just once).

W’s eyes were green like the sea and he shared a name with my grandfather. It was fun, but when I showed him a story I had written in college, my attempt at imitating Kafka by placing a stegosaurus in the protagonist’s apartment where the extinct beast promptly shat all over the place, and W, after having read the first pitiful pages, put it down and called it children’s literature, I was disheartened and pissed off.

On another wild night, W’s story went, he, his brother, and some other Coasties got into trouble of a different sort, a legal matter involving a young woman, a girl by law. Somehow W and his brother overcame that trouble and were indebted to his family.

So when W’s mother’s car broke down and she needed transportation for work, W gave up his Mazda, and soon I found myself driving W to work the morning after he stayed over. It was a forty-mile-round-trip favor, one that involved dragging my ass out of bed in the wee hours, making the trek to South County, returning to Providence, and then just barely having enough time to drive through Dunkin’ Donuts before arriving to my own miserable job on time. Sensing my displeasure, W offered to drive himself, and with his free hand he chewed nervously on his nails. He knew another Coastie who lived closer to Providence, in Pawtucket. Maybe next time I could drop him off in Pawtucket. Maybe next time he could stay at the Coast Guard Station or get his car back, I suggested.

The thing about W, no matter how shit faced or tired he was, he always offered to drive.

Once we went to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, to see his sister who married a Coastie because of the child they conceived, and ever since the baby’s birth she’d been unhappy. She had W’s same beautiful green eyes, and when W mocked her lasagna I knew why she set her face in a permanent scowl.

Once he said to me, “You can bake, but have you ever made a roast? Do you even know how to cook one?” One Saturday we visited his folks in Smithfield where we ate such a roast, a dry one that we washed down with plenty of beer. At dinner, W’s grandmother complimented me on my Scottish blood and the frugality supposedly encoded in my DNA. “You save your pennies,” she said. There was nothing wrong with being cheap, and it was agreed by all: I was good for W because I had a decent job and an apartment.

When the beer ran out, the brother-in-law offered to make a liquor store run. On the way back, we got pulled over for speeding. He answered the officer with “yes, sirs,” and “no, sirs” and soon we were off, set free with just a warning. The cop understood how trying in-laws could be.

When I finally did break up with W, he took a vacation to Mexico with accrued time off I never knew he had. From Mexico he called me at work repeatedly on the station’s 800 number, so that he wouldn’t be charged.

A soldier can find a temporary home anywhere.

For a long time I believed the U.S. military did nothing but make people dependent. The shiftless mass of Junior ROTC kids from high school and the cadet who brought a gun to school to threaten his girlfriend suggested this truth. Growing up next door to the family whose son had killed himself after his tour of duty in Vietnam and waking to the sound of my father’s restless step as he sleep-walked into Korea, 1952, only solidified the notion that war does terrible things to people’s minds.

When this mental instability mixes with emotional volatility and a woman in her twenties feels arrogant and entitled, but at once depressed and worthless, who knows what can happen? Why wouldn’t she offer shelter to a lonely soldier? Succor to the downhearted. He is a solider, after all. If he can tolerate the ridicule, live by a few simple rules, then he can find a home—at least a temporary one—anywhere.



Sarah Inman is a Senior Correspondent at NOLAFugees.com & the author of Finishing Skills, a novel.