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  TOUGH DAY FOR THE ARMY

  Yellow Shoe Fiction

  Michael Griffith, Series Editor

  TOUGH DAY

  FOR THE ARMY

  stories

  John Warner

  LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  BATON ROUGE

  Published with the assistance of the Borne Fund

  Published by Louisiana State University Press

  Copyright © 2014 by Louisiana State University Press

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  LSU Press Paperback Original

  First printing

  DESIGNER: Michelle A. Neustrom

  TYPEFACE: Adobe Garamond Pro

  PRINTER AND BINDER: Maple Press

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Warner, John, 1970–

  [Short stories. Selections]

  Tough day for the army : stories / John Warner.

  pages ; cm. — (Yellow shoe fiction)

  ISBN 978-0-8071-5802-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5803-6 (pdf) —

  ISBN 978-0-8071-5804-3 (epub) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5805-0 (mobi)

  I. Warner, John, 1970– II. Title.

  PS3623.A86328A6 2014

  813'.6—dc23

  2014011185

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, circumstances, and events are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual occurrences, institutions, or individuals, living or dead, is coincidental.

  These stories have appeared previously (sometimes in radically different form) in the following publications: “Return-to-Sensibility Problems after Penetrating Captive Bolt Stunning of Cattle in Commercial Beef Slaughter Plant #5867: Confidential Report,” Ninth Letter; “Monkey and Man,” Bull: Fiction for Men; “Corrections and Clarifications” and “My Best Seller,” Swink; “Second Careers,” The Morning News; “Homosexuals Threaten the Sanctity of Norman’s Marriage,” Pank; “Notes from a Neighborhood War,” McSweeney’s Internet Tendency; “Tuesday, the Bad Zoo,” Zoetrope All-Story Extra; “What I Am, What I Found, What I Did,” McNeese Review; “Poet Farmers,” Chicago Reader; “Tough Day for the Army,” Tarpaulin Sky, McSweeney’s Quarterly; “A Love Story,” Printers Row Journal.

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  For my teachers: past, present, and future

  I really do believe we can be better than we are. I know we can.

  But the price is enormous—and people are not yet willing to pay it.

  —JAMES BALDWIN

  I’m not proud, but I’m not an animal either.

  —MARK BROOKSTEIN

  CONTENTS

  Nelson v. the Mormon Smile

  My Dog and Me

  Return-to-Sensibility Problems after Penetrating Captive Bolt Stunning of Cattle in Commercial Beef Slaughter Plant #5867: Confidential Report

  Monkey and Man

  Corrections and Clarifications

  Not Schmitty

  Second Careers

  Homosexuals Threaten the Sanctity of Norman’s Marriage

  My Best Seller

  Notes from a Neighborhood War

  Tuesday, the Bad Zoo

  What I Am, What I Found, What I Did (Attachments Enclosed)

  Poet Farmers

  Tough Day for the Army

  A Love Story

  Acknowledgments

  TOUGH DAY EOR THE ARMY

  Nelson v. the Mormon Smile

  Nelson was worried about his balls, and because Nelson was the kind of person who tended to put his thoughts into words, he leaned over to the cubicle next to him and said to his friend/coworker, Jürgen, “I’m worried about my balls.”

  Jürgen held up a finger, signaling that Nelson should wait. Jür-gen spoke into his headset mouthpiece, asking if Mrs. Luffnagel was home. “Hello? Hello? Mrs. Luffnagel?” He punched the ESC key on his computer and leaned back in his chair to look Nelson in the eye. “Answering machine,” he said. Nelson and Jürgen worked as interviewers for Survey Circle, Inc., Marketing Researchers. The computers in front of them were engaged in predictive dialing, calling many numbers at once, trying to find one with a live human on the other end so Nelson and Jürgen and the twenty-five other workers on their shift could ask questions. Tonight the questions were about fast food; how much, how often, what kinds, degrees of satisfaction, when they anticipated visiting next. Nelson sometimes thought about inserting “having intercourse” into the script wherever it said “eating fast food,” but he knew that would be juvenile, and besides he needed the job.

  Each week fewer and fewer of the numbers seemed to hit, so Jür-gen and Nelson had plenty of time to talk.

  “Why are you worried about your balls?”

  “Radiation,” Nelson said. “From cell phones. Turns out they cook your balls if you keep your phone in your pocket. I’ve been carrying my phone in my pocket every waking hour for the past four years. The rats in this study I read about got ‘marble-sized’ tumors in less than three months. I can’t even look at what’s going on down there. I shower with my eyes closed.”

  “How did the rats keep the phones in their pockets?”

  “I dunno. I guess they like taped the phones to their junk.”

  “Sounds cruel. You know what you should be worried about?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your deodorant.”

  “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Aluminum chlorohydrate—it gives you Alzheimer’s.”

  “Fuck.”

  Lance Riggins, one cube over from Jürgen, leaned past the cubicle walls, showing his cinder-block head, face as broad as a cereal box, and glared at Nelson. Nelson flipped him the bird in return and mouthed, “Screw you.” Survey Circle, Inc., was owned and operated by Mormons, which made sense because they were located in Provo, Utah. Ninety-five percent of the employees were Mormon, almost all of them students at BYU, which meant nasty looks if you said “Fuck” and no coffee machine in the break room. Nelson and Jürgen got hired because Survey Circle, Inc., needed to keep a certain percentage of non-Mormons on the payroll so the federal government didn’t come down on them for discrimination. Nelson and Jürgen had, for all practical purposes, total job security, since there were very few non-Mormons in Provo, and an even smaller percentage of the non-Mormon Provoians had a desire to work for Survey Circle Marketing Research, Inc. A Venn diagram would show a very small intersection, with only Nelson and Jürgen inside.

  Nelson and Jürgen were supposed to be in Park City, not Provo, teaching snowboarding to hot college chicks on vacation, but Nelson and Jürgen failed the drug test because they both liked pot, because— what the fuck?—they were snowboarders. They didn’t anticipate the piss test, but there’s insurance involved and shit, and they took it anyway, certain they would fail on the merits, but hoping for some kind of clerical error in their favor. But now they were “flagged,” as in no jobs teaching snowboarding in the state of Utah, period. The work they could get was at Survey Circle, Inc., which didn’t have a drug-testing policy because Mormons don’t do drugs because if they did they wouldn’t have any space reserved for them in the celestial kingdom, which Nelson understood to be a kind of endless family reunion lit up by the very bright light of God.

  Nelson had no truck with the Mormon view of the afterlife. He had zero interest in meeting up with most of his relatives for an afternoon, let alone eternity, except his mother, who died when Norman was three, so it’s not like they’d even recognize each other anyway, unless in
the celestial kingdom everyone has name tags, or somehow just knows who is who. Norman left home just under a year after his father had sneered at the long hair coming out from under his ski cap and said he looked like a “faggot.” Jürgen came with because why not? Sure, Jürgen had been accepted to Dartmouth, but Dartmouth was older even than the United States of America and wasn’t going anywhere, and the chance to move three-quarters of the way across the country with your best and oldest friend to teach hot chicks snowboarding presented itself exactly once.

  Vermont was good for snowboarding, but bad for Nelson because it was filled with people who did not understand him, most specifically his father, who knew Nelson wasn’t a “faggot” because Nelson’s father had walked in on him having sex with Nelson’s father’s (presumably now ex-) girlfriend. Nelson’s father had been understandably upset on that occasion, but while it was the two of them (Nelson and Christine) doing the horizontal mambo, it was Nelson alone who got his ass kicked because his pops was an honorable man who wouldn’t hit a broad.

  Nelson wasn’t in love with Christine, but he thought he might be in love with Chelsea Stubbins, who happened to be Lance Riggins’s girlfriend, and also happened to work at Survey Circle, Inc. Nelson understood that one of the reasons he smoked a lot of grass was that he liked to get high, and that another one of the reasons he smoked a lot of grass was because he possessed a barely suppressed rage that only a nice indica/sativa blend could tamp down to manageable levels.

  The rage, Nelson was sure, was thanks to his father, who used Old Crow as his own suppressor of choice, but Old Crow only worked when he’d drunk so much that he passed out. Up to that point, the alcohol seemed to be a rage amplifier. Mostly his father raged at things on the television, but every so often, Nelson got caught in the crosshairs.

  Leaving helped.

  Except that he found himself thwarted in his desire to date and make love to Chelsea Stubbins by the likes of Lance Riggins, whose very blond perfection kindled Nelson’s rage. Lance Riggins had a jaw, prominent, and abdominal muscles, also prominent, as illustrated by his offer to let anyone who wished to punch him in the stomach. Chelsea Stubbins had the face, beautiful, and the tits and ass, incredible. Also the Mormonism, which meant nobody save her husband was going to be making love to Chelsea Stubbins, particularly not Lance Riggins since that was a double Mormon whammy. It’s not like Nelson was eager for Chelsea Stubbins and Lance Riggins to have sex, but for Chelsea Stubbins not to be having sex really was a shame, like owning a Ferrari but keeping it in the garage, which was the kind of dumbass thing Nelson’s old man would say, which didn’t make it wrong.

  Nelson saw Chelsea Stubbins and Lance Riggins get up from their adjoining cubicles and head for the break room. Lance Riggins bumped his shoulder into Chelsea Stubbins, sending her briefly off stride, and she laughed and skipped to catch back up with Lance Riggins. Nelson watched this and felt the rage boil in his fists. He pulled a sheet of scratch paper from the printer on his desk and started drawing on it with a marker.

  “What’s up?” Jürgen said, peering past his cubicle wall.

  “We’re having a party.”

  “Cool, when?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Nice. Who’s coming?”

  “Chelsea Stubbins and Lance Riggins and anyone else who wants to.”

  Jürgen raised his eyebrows and whistled but didn’t say anything else as Nelson finished with the paper and marker and went to the break room where he slapped the notice on the refrigerator using one of the many smiley-face magnets affixed to the surface. Lance Riggins and Chelsea Stubbins sat at a small circular table, sharing a Splenda-sweetened Sprite, Chelsea Stubbins’s hands wrapped around the can, Lance Riggins’s hands wrapped around Chelsea Stubbins’s hands.

  “We’re having a party,” Nelson said, waving at his flyer. On it he’d drawn a crude heart with the initials LR + CS inside, plus the party information: time, place, hosts.

  “What’s the occasion?” Lance Riggins replied, releasing Chelsea Stubbins’s hands and kicking back in his chair.

  “For you, and her,” Nelson said, jerking his thumb at Chelsea Stubbins. For some reason he didn’t want to say Chelsea’s name. “You’re the best couple ever, and me and Jürgen thought we should celebrate your example to the rest of us.”

  Chelsea Stubbins’s face pulled in on itself, and she went, “Awwww,” in a manner so perfectly sincere that to Nelson it seemed insincere, but he knew that Chelsea Stubbins was incapable of insincerity. Lance Riggins, on the other hand, was well acquainted with Nelson’s hostility, with the kicks to the back of his chair as Nelson walked by, with the middle finger salute for no good reason, and so he might’ve been rightfully suspicious of Nelson’s motives, but Lance Riggins was also extremely confident, had life by the short hairs, as Nelson’s old man would say (though Lance Riggins would never be so crude), so he didn’t particularly give a poop if Nelson was mocking him. The Nelsons of the world were flies off the backs of the Lance Rigginses. Lance Riggins smiled at Nelson. He always smiled at Nelson, and everyone else for that matter. That smile made no sense to Nelson, where it might come from, what it was rooted to. Nelson thought he might be able to boot Lance Riggins in the balls and he’d still smile about it.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Lance Riggins said. He shot forward in his chair, grabbed the can out of Chelsea Stubbins’s grip, and drank the rest of it in two large swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing manfully up and down. Finished, he crushed the can in his fist and lobbed it for the recycling bin, turning his back with the can still midflight. The can glanced off the rim and skidded across the floor toward Nelson’s feet.

  Chelsea Stubbins yelled “Hey,” to Lance Riggins’s retreating form, but he never broke stride on his way back to his cubicle. Nelson stared down at the can as Chelsea Stubbins plucked it from the ground and tossed it into the bin in a flawless motion.

  “Nice shot,” Nelson said, and Chelsea Stubbins smiled at him and Nelson felt like he’d been tasered.

  That all happened on Friday, so on Saturday, the day of the party, Nelson spent his time on two things.

  One was looking in the mirror and willing his face to change into some different, more Lance Riggins–esque shape. He was fresh out of the shower, enjoying how the Utah air dried him all by itself. The acne had cleared up, at least, but he could still see purple ghosts of the worst eruptions. His father had named one that cropped up on his forehead junior year. “Here comes Vesuvius,” he’d say. “And look, it brought Nelson with him,” and then he’d laugh like he was the fucking funniest dickhead on the planet.

  Nineteen years old and Nelson still didn’t need to shave, save a couple of long boys that cropped out of his neck, but despite his boyish face, he felt as though he had the capacity for love of someone much older and wiser, and that love was for Chelsea Stubbins. He flexed his chest muscles in the mirror. Not terrible, physical condition–wise, and he was a hell of a snowboarder, but he was no Lance Riggins in the overall-human-being category. Judging from the stock he came from, he never would be.

  Nelson looked down at his deodorant, the ingredient list, and damn if Jürgen wasn’t right, “Aluminum Zirconium Tetrachlorohydrex.” Jürgen was smart and also trustworthy about these things, so Nelson sniffed his pits, which at least for the moment smelled good from the vanilla-scented bodywash, and tossed the deodorant in the garbage. He pulled his favorite hoodie over his head and stuffed his phone in his sock. They were doing amazing things with prosthetic limbs, but as of yet the balls were irreplaceable, and he wasn’t going to live without his phone.

  One thing Nelson did not spend his time doing was reading up on Mormonism, because he’d already done that a couple weeks earlier to see if it was something he could get on board with for the sake of Chelsea Stubbins, but that was a definitive no-go. Nelson considered himself spiritual, and though he had some general suspicions about God/religion of the organized variety, he wasn’t quite ready to go full atheist. But this Mo
rmon business was such transparent bullshit, a bridge he could not cross, even for Chelsea Stubbins. This Joseph Smith character reminded Nelson of one of his and Jürgen’s buddies from back home, Stinkfinger, who did not care for the pot but loved the mushrooms, and when he was peaking could be very convincing about seeing shit like his past lives or the true color of Nelson’s aura, or the twin that Bobby Longkiss had eaten in the womb, living inside Bobby’s body. Once or twice Stinkfinger gave Nelson the shivers with that shit, but afterwards, with a clearer head, Nelson looked at the guy who got his nickname because he claimed he was the first in school to get to third base and walked around telling everyone to sniff his finger. It was Jürgen who called him out, declaring that Stinkfinger (who had been Daniel up to that moment) had just rubbed his finger around the inside of a tuna can, and Nelson went and retrieved just-about-to-become-Stinkfinger’s brown lunch bag out of the trash and brandished the evidence above his head for all to see, and that was that. Stinkfinger was then, and forever, full of shit.

  Like this Joseph Smith with his visions, a direct pipeline from God, messages coming direct, like through one of those pneumatic tubes at the bank drive-thru, one of which just happened to be a thumbs-up on plural marriage, because how awesome that God wants you to bang multiple broads who are also totally subservient in the sack and otherwise? Now, Nelson had grown up in Vermont, where there were plenty of liberals, his father being one of the few exceptions. Nelson had been conditioned not to mind if a chick didn’t shave her legs, or even her pits, and as far back as middle school, he’d learned about the patriarchal hegemony, the cultural reign of the phallocracy, and could sniff out white male privilege when he saw it.

  It bothered him to think that Chelsea Stubbins bought into this horseshit, but Nelson figured it was rooted in the cloistered life— born, raised, surrounded by Mormons. We are who we are with, he figured. He was an exception, he was sure, nothing like his father, the close-minded, reactionary, abusive asshole, but for the most part environment rules, nurture over nature. Once Nelson was able to remove Chelsea Stubbins from the atmosphere of Provo, which was indeed his plan, the Mormonism would fade, like a tan starved of sun.