Preterition

So I’m back at 3rd & Pennsylvania in Southeast DC once again, with a seat by the window looking out the window at the soggy and dismal gray streets with their half-naked trees. They’ve already got the holiday music on full blast in here. Visited my brother (he says he hasn’t tried to bench press his goal of 315 yet, but he can do multiple sets of 265 with no problem: at least somebody’s in shape for the holidays) and later had a fine Thanksgiving dinner with my dad and his sister and her family. The drive down from New England was pretty bad, as I knew it would be even though I religiously avoid I-95, and I’m not much looking forward to the trip back up. And the girls are with me, and they’re a little freaked out. Lots of climbing up and begging to be held.

So — on the day after the number one dysfunctional family holiday — I’ll offer a dysfunctional piece of short fiction as my Friday non-dissertational; a story about needles and adultery. It’s one of my rougher stories, and I still wince when I see the tough-guy tone and the clichés, but I’ve done it a couple times at readings, and I take a little glee in seeing some listeners wince, too, when I read the stuff about needles.

The Stick

Late April morning, coastal Georgia, a number of years ago. Where it all led to was the small grassy area behind battalion headquarters, between the low brick building and the ball field. The building, battalion HQ, was industrial plain and Army-ugly, and there, that day, out back, three battered picnic tables sat covered by Army blankets, the blankets strewn with medical supplies. Nearby, olive-drab canvas stretchers were loosely scattered across the grass, with the ball field beyond. You could smell the pine trees from where the swamp starts across the road, and over that the smell of fresh-cut grass, the sound of gas-powered lawnmowers, and two of Bravo Company’s desert-tan tractor-trailers blew by thirty yards away on Route 119, with their big diesels and flat grills pointed downrange, down towards Remagen DZ. Vincent was in one of them. He pulled on the air horn when they passed.

I didn’t wave, and I didn’t wave because I was trying to get myself ready to stick an 18-gauge needle into the arm of the married female soldier I’d been involved with not long before. She lay on her back on one of the stretchers with a clear bag of Ringer’s solution — saline and lactose — by her left arm. Her name was Katie, Private First Class Katie Haupt, and just over a month before, Bravo Company had put her in my squad. I was in charge of her, and after an exceptionally nasty breakup, both of us were hurt and scared and angry. She was in her army-issue olive-drab t-shirt, the camouflage overshirt folded and tucked under her head for a pillow. I tried to slip the plastic catheter over the needle, tried to slide it over and down to the base, tried as hard as I could not to look nervous.

More than anything else, I wished Vincent was there. Instead, there were thirty other soldiers from the battalion, and twelve medics. We were doing combat lifesaver requalification.

Combat lifesavers are the soldiers in every unit trained to do the quick and dirty fixes that hold someone until the real medics arrive. Splints, tourniquets, pressure dressings; burns, head injuries, sucking chest wounds. And every year, you’re required to re-qualify: written exam, practical exercise, and what’s called a live stick. A live stick means starting an IV on another soldier.

A lot of the people there were people I knew from the barracks, all of them in camo. There was big Hank Kehoe and Junior Butler from the mechanics, there was Scaipe the fuckup, and there was Staff Sergeant Jason Roser, who I hadn’t seen since the barracks New Year’s Eve party. He was overweight, with hair longer than regulation permits, and the last time I’d seen him, Vincent was putting his face through a window.

Katie and I avoided eye contact. I was still struggling with the needle. When Roser walked up front to begin his safety briefing for the live stick, I stopped. We had all heard the safety briefing before, but we listened despite the fact. Especially those of us with needles in our hands.

New Year’s Eve had been just over four months before, and it was when Katie and I first got together. I didn’t know her, not then, except as the pretty, petite brunette female soldier who worked in the training office, headquarters platoon. She had an officer husband in Guantanamo Bay. I’d just earned my sergeant’s stripes.

The party was Vincent’s idea. He knew a lot of the enlisted soldiers in the barracks didn’t have the cash or the leave saved up to go home, and he thought a keg and a case of champagne in the barracks’ second floor common area — the barracks are dormitory-style, three people to a room, two if you’re a sergeant — was a better alternative than a hotel party in Savannah. And he wanted to make it special, so people would want to come. On duty, we saw each other every day in camouflage, off-duty in jeans or sweats, and Vincent thought people might want to front a little. He even sent out invitations, invitations that said appropriate dress requested. It worked. Kehoe’s from Alaska, and I’d never thought I’d see the big Eskimo in a double-breasted sharkskin suit. Vincent wore a classy priest-collar shirt with a mother-of-pearl button at the top and had more hair gel worked into his Korean flat top than anyone would think possible. I bought a silk tie and a pair of nice pants; Katie was in a white blouse and a long skinny velvet skirt the color of burgundy wine, no ring. We looked good.

Vincent and I turned away more than a few strangers, soldiers trying to crash, but there was one who looked so down we didn’t have the heart to kick him out. He introduced himself as Roser, from the medics. I told him we went by first names that night. He stuck out his hand. Jason. He was alone, he said, living back in the barracks; he’d had to move out of post housing after his wife found out about an affair and took their son up to Connecticut to live with her parents.

It happens. The military isn’t kind to marriages. I won’t say soldiers aren’t responsible, but the separations, the deployments, the stress — people get lonely.

Vincent and I were the only two sergeants from Bravo who lived in the barracks. It was a party, but that night, we were in charge, as well. A girl named Luna, Corporal Luna Skaarsland, was in Vincent’s squad, one of his soldiers, and she came over to talk to both of us. She was upset, almost crying. Katie — who I knew then only as PFC Haupt — was watching. Luna told us Roser had made a pass at her, more than a pass, and she’d told him to stop. She’d had to tell him more than once.

Vincent and I talked to Roser. Roser, by that point, was drunk, denying, and worked his way into saying nasty things — like, vicious — about Luna. Vincent told him, quietly, to watch his mouth. Roser snarled a last insult about Luna and shoved Vincent in the chest.

Vincent spun him towards the edge of the room and rammed his knee up into Roser’s gut. Roser doubled over. Vincent grasped him by one shoulder and by the back of his collar and put his face through the window.

The blood was everywhere. The sill, the wall, the floor, spattered on the shattered glass. No one called the military police.

Katie said that she’d been drinking, but if someone wanted to they could drive her car, drive Roser up to the base hospital. Kehoe said he’d go.

After it happened, everyone who wasn’t drunk got that way. Vincent and Butler walked Luna back to her room, to try and calm her down, talk to her, make sure she was OK. Katie and I stayed behind to try and clean up some of the mess. There were blood-smeared footprints through the common area, from the keg through to the couch and in and out of the rooms. We got rolls of paper towels to blot up the worst of it. People moved the keg into one of the rooms, worried about the MPs. We could hear the TV on, laughter, talk about the fight. We were the only ones in the common area when we heard Dick Clark and then the rest of them count down, heard them shout Happy New Year from behind the closed door. I tossed the last of the dirty paper towels into the pile in the corner, looked at Katie. “Happy New Year,” I said.

She put her arms around my neck. “Happy New Year,” she said.

Roser had major surgery. Kehoe spent the rest of New Year’s Eve at the hospital, waiting to make sure he was OK. Katie wound up spending the night in my bed.

Vincent should have gotten in a whole lot of trouble. Our sergeant major likes Vincent, though, and he talked to the brigade commander, the brigade commander talked to Roser’s CO and the military police, and it was discovered that Roser had done stuff like this — harassment — before. Vincent got his pay docked and thirty days of extra duty, and that was the end of it.

Sergeant Roser had been wearing his ring New Year’s Eve. When he gave his briefing for the live stick, I could see he wasn’t. The scars on his face and neck still showed. His briefing, the briefing we’d all heard before, was about the dangers of needles and catheters. Some of it was simple: don’t drop the needle, and if you do, get a clean one; make sure there aren’t any air bubbles in the tubing that goes from the IV bag to the catheter. Stuff most soldiers know anyway. What Roser had to say about the catheter itself got a little scarier. A catheter is a thin plastic sleeve that fits over the needle; you slide it into the vein with the needle, then ease out the needle. The danger is that the catheter’s made of soft plastic. You wiggle it around too much, you can break off a piece of it in the vein and give your partner an embolism. Dead: that quick.

Katie and I were furious at each other, in that way you can only be once you’ve broken up with someone. I felt like everything she did she did to make me angry and I know she felt the same for me. We’d talk trash about each other, me to Vincent, her to her friends. Right then, during Roser’s briefing, I saw her look up at my hands to watch me fuss with the needle and catheter again, and I couldn’t read her face at all. She was wearing her ring.

It had been good for a while. She lived in an apartment off post and didn’t like coming to the barracks, and I didn’t like her coming there either: too many soldiers around to see and figure things out, some of them my soldiers, soldiers in my squad. The Army can court-martial you for adultery, can and will. Beyond that, there was the issue of respect. I’d just earned my stripes, and setting an example was on my mind a lot. Sleeping with a married soldier wasn’t the way to do it, and there was also the fact that there was a reason the soldiers I was in charge of would lose respect for me.

I can see that now, and I could see it with the needle in my hands. After New Year’s it was a different story, but still the same old story, the story everybody knows: sex and shortsightedness.

But at first — I was kind, understanding, patient; so was she. She’s the only woman who ever gave me flowers, daisies, although I didn’t have the balls to bring them back to the barracks with me. When I was in high school, I’d done some stuff with acrylic paints, the artistic kind, and I did a still life, a picture as close as I could get with daisies copied from a magazine, and I gave it to her. Real canvas, everything. She liked it.

Katie had met her husband in Somalia. She was a buck private, brand new to the Army; he was a young officer. She was nice to him, he was nice to her. They were in Somalia eight months. Three weeks after they were shipped back, they got married at the Liberty County courthouse in what passes for downtown Hinesville, ten minutes off post.

For the most part, I would go to her place. I got used to the fact that he would call from Cuba at 3 AM, hostile drunk, and tell her about all the ways she treated him wrong. I got used to hearing her ask him which of his soldiers he was sleeping with, and I got used to the fact that it never bothered him to tell her. What I couldn’t get used to was the fact that she’d stay on the phone, stay on and argue with him. An hour sometimes, an hour and a half. He’d demand to know whether she was cheating on him. She’d click her fingernails against the receiver, ask if he heard. She’d wait for a response. And she’d say, “I’m still wearing it.”

I couldn’t get used to going into the other room, tired of hearing her insult him; I couldn’t get used to smoking a cigarette, leafing through one or two of her women’s magazines, going to the refrigerator for a beer, having another cigarette, and she’d still be on with him, going through all the different ways he was a bastard. There were times when she’d get mad and hang up. Ten minutes later, he’d call back, and it’d be another hour. I’d get angry, but I never thought to think out why it continued, and after the call was over, I’d forget about it, until the next time it happened.

That was January. There was one afternoon — it was cold, even in Georgia — when I’d come up to the training office to drop off some documents for my squad: counseling statements, a recommendation for promotion, grid coordinates for the next week’s training. She was there, in uniform, working on the training calendar. When no one else was watching, she whispered in my ear: “How about a date?”

I hesitated, looked over my shoulder, looked to make sure no one had heard or seen. “Sure,” I said.

“We’re both due for combat lifesaver re-qual,” she said. “You free in April?” She was smiling, half-laughing at me, looking pretty in that way someone looks when you’ve been seeing them a while and want to see them more.

Neither of us figured on what it would come to. We were the only two Bravo truck platoon people at the qualification other than Scaipe, and neither of us trusted him. I’d hoped to hook up with Kehoe or Butler, or to see someone else I knew. I guess Katie had hoped to do the same. Everybody else had paired up except for us, though, and there was nothing we could do but play it off. Keep it professional. She was a soldier in my squad: why shouldn’t we have been comfortable?

The Army has rules against fraternization for a reason: as a sergeant, I was completely responsible for Private First Class Katie Haupt. If we went to the desert for training exercise, I’d be expected to make sure she got enough time to eat and sleep, make sure she got showers, make sure she got her mail. In garrison, I gave her monthly counseling statements, I set up the training sessions she took part in, I talked to her about her Army career development. If she’d bounced a check, gotten a speeding ticket, needed a ride from the PX, wanted to take a college course, or been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease at the Troop Medical Clinic, I’d have been the first to know and the first to talk to her about it. I was the one to recommend a medal or an award, and I was the one to recommend disciplinary action. As a sergeant, I was supposed to serve — to a degree — as her priest, her coach, her therapist, her teacher, and her boss.

I watched as Big Kehoe lay back on his stretcher, twenty feet away, and began clenching and unclenching his fist to get the blood pumping, to make the veins stand up. It could have been a mile. He looked my way, and Butler did too.

They both knew about us, just like Vincent. Katie and I left the New Year’s party with our arms around each other. From the stretcher, Kehoe gave me the hand sign to widen unit dispersal: used informally, it means hang loose.

It’s hard to keep anything a secret for long, when you live and work and play with the same group of people. In my platoon alone, I knew of four people who’d engaged in adultery. In the company, I knew of at least fifteen: although unacceptable by military standards, it’s not uncommon. Which isn’t to say that made what I’d done any less wrong. Before I’d gotten together with Katie, I’d see people I knew about, and I’d shake my head. Screwing up, I’d tell myself.

I checked the use-by date on the IV bag, which I should have done before I took the needle out of its blister-pack and placed the catheter over it. Everything got quiet, people concentrating on the prep. There was the sound of wind in the trees, and the occasional military police humvee going by on 119. The medics walked around, going from stretcher to stretcher. Staff Sergeant Roser didn’t come near.

In February, Katie’s husband came home. The night before, I’d been at Katie’s. I left to come back to the barracks around midnight, but I’d wanted to stay. Things to do. Looking back, it was a good thing: Katie didn’t make six o’clock formation; I wondered about it until Butler approached me after physical training that morning. “Don’t call her,” he said. “Her husband’s here. He surprised her.”

We went five days before he had to go back up to Fort Bragg to wrap up the loose ends from his Cuba deployment. She called and asked me to meet her for lunch that weekend at a restaurant off post.

She looked nice, dressed up. I started to reach out to touch her wrist. She said, “Don’t.”

It was a Dear John conversation. They were going to try to work things out, to fix their marriage. I couldn’t say anything but OK. I felt hurt. Angry. And stupid.

That night, I went with Vincent to the gym. Vincent’s my roommate, and just about the best friend I’ve got. He’s a boxer, and he got his stripes pinned at the same time as me.

Vincent trained twice a week, and when I was pissed off enough, I’d go with him. He started out saying he would work with me, but I figured out real quick I’d never be on his level. He’s not good enough to make a run for All-Army, but he’s good. He says I’m a smart boxer, but I’m not that fast, and he’s got twenty pounds of muscle and a whole lot of reach on me. The fact is I like drinking and smoking too much to ever be serious about training, and Vincent’s said that the only times I fight well are when I’m mad. I’m smart enough to know that makes a bad fighter. Still, there are times — still, even now — when it feels good to pound the bag, and then, there were times when I knew I was wound up enough to give Vincent a good run.

Fort Stewart didn’t have a ring for regular use, so Vincent and I reserved a racquetball court at the brigade gym and checked out gloves and headgear from their equipment closet. We started out just loosening up, throwing jabs, and Vincent gave me a hard time for being rusty. The thing that made it interesting was that I knew how he boxes: he uses his reach, keeps people away. Get in close, he doesn’t know what to do with those long arms. When we started sparring, that’s what I did. Straight body work, nothing else, and him always trying to back me off. If he didn’t have any other shot, he’d aim for that little Everlast square on the headgear, straight in the center of my forehead, and nail it one time after the other, all the time talking around his mouthpiece, talking about me, talking about Katie. He’d hit the headgear, but he’s got a strong punch, and after enough of those hits, each time was a blood-hot flashbulb behind my eyes.

He’d gotten used to me, too. He knew what kind of a boxer I was, and he was ready for the body work. He kept his elbows close in.

He started talking too much, though, or not too much, but saying certain things, taking things too far. He asked if I knew how dumb I was being; asked if I thought she was going to leave her husband for me; asked what I thought I was getting out of it; asked what my soldiers thought about me.

I backed up a step, out of range of his arms, my sneakers squeaking on the varnished wood. I kept my guard up. I was breathing hard. “You know how it is,” I told him. “Don’t ask, don’t tell, right?”

He snorted. “Shit,” he said. He moved in a step, and another, feinting with his fists and shoulders. “Least I keep my business out of the unit.” I dodged a jab. “You’re fuckin up and people know it, and you’re fuckin up for someone who ain’t even worth it.” It’s trouble enough sparring: I didn’t need the cracks about me, and I didn’t need the cracks about Katie. He kept at it, though, trying to wind me even tighter, keeping up the abuse, and soon enough he worked up to calling Katie a whore. I got mad, the kind of mad where you don’t think, the kind of mad where you just put the whole force of your hip and thigh, the whole weight of your right side behind a hook. It was the worst kind of good punch, like Vincent practically put his face in my fist; that heavy, yielding crunch that lets you know you’ve connected.

He ended up sitting against the wall of the racquetball court, blood from his nose steady dripping all over the varnished wood floor. I had one hand on his shoulder, trying to hold my t-shirt up to his face with the other. Vincent just shook his head and said he must have tried too hard. I apologized, and apologized again. I tried to tell him what an asshole I felt like, because you don’t do that when you’re sparring; you don’t punch like you would in a fight. Especially not when it’s your friend, your partner, someone important to you.

The worst part was figuring out who’d go first, who would stick the other one first. The reason the medics walk around and watch is that you’ve got three tries to find the vein: if you don’t get it, you have to take the course again, and qualify again at the end. It’s bad enough having that catheter slid into your vein that you don’t ever want to do it more than once.

There was no way we could keep it professional. Both of us wanted the last stick, the chance to get in the final hit, the opportunity to do as we’d been done unto. I cleared my throat, tried to hide my nervousness, asked as coolly as I could: “Do you want to go first?”

She shrugged.

“Do you want me to go first?”

She looked at me, met my eye. I knew the answer. She was my soldier, and I had to set the example. If I wanted to be good, to do things right, rank and privilege had already decided it: I would stick first. It would be up to her to determine how badly I screwed up.

I uncoiled the plastic tubing and set it by the bag. I broke open the sterile swab pack. I took a breath. “Show me a vein,” I said.

After our lunch, it didn’t take long for her and her husband to get back on bad terms, or maybe not bad terms, but at least hot and cold. He was at Bragg and would come down to Fort Stewart every few weekends; they’d be OK sometimes and fighting on other times. It didn’t mean she and I got along any better, though. There were times when she would call me up, usually after they’d fought, and we’d have a tense conversation, a conversation scattered with silences. I was still angry at how quickly she’d dropped me, still not understanding, and she was still angry at how resentfully I’d reacted — “Look,” she would tell me, “I’m married; what did you expect?” — and I still couldn’t figure out why she stayed with him. We would try to talk about it, and end up cursing, shouting, slamming down the receiver.

Her veins aren’t what you’d call prominent. She had to flex her fist for a good minute before one started to rise. I wanted to begin halfway up her arm, her left arm, to give myself room in case I made a mistake. I prayed that I wouldn’t, but I knew I was far from steady. I swabbed a small circle on the skin of her arm with the alcohol pad, and put my finger on the vein, trying to find a feel for its size.

Working in the training office was choice duty for Katie. She wasn’t in the motor pool breathing diesel fumes and breaking down 400-pound tires with the rest of Bravo’s soldiers. The office is air-conditioned, and there’s a soda machine nearby. The company commander at the time would rotate people every six months, and in March, Katie got rotated back down to the motor pool. They put her in my squad, and there was nothing either of us could do about it.

I tried to be as fair as I could. I would always put her on a task with three or four other soldiers so there’d be no way I’d be seen as singling her out. I made sure always to talk to her with others around, so there’d be no way I’d be percieved as harassing her. It worked, slowly. We relaxed around each other; we managed to joke like other soldiers. There was still always that undercurrent, though, that tension.

Fort Stewart’s springtime gear-up for the desert war games was called Victory Focus. Bravo Company is a transportation company, and that meant we were overdeployed. I had nine soldiers going in ninety different directions, sometimes running three or four missions in a sixteen-hour work day, and it quickly got to the point where everyone was on the road except me one afternoon, late afternoon, and the only reason I wasn’t was because I was in the operations office, trying to work the logistics of it all. Katie finished a mission quicker than expected — hauling milvans to the rail yard — and rolled back into the motor pool at about the same time another call from brigade came in: one more mission to fill, hauling a lowboy trailer to a distant drop zone — Remagen DZ, 25 miles out on Georgia 119 — to pick up an ACE. ACE stands for Armored Combat Earthmover, a cross between a tank and a bulldozer. Lowboy trailers are big enough that it takes two people to handle the ramps. What it meant was that Katie was driving and I was riding shotgun.

When we got to Remagen, there was no ACE in sight. Only a humvee, sitting out in the middle of the wide, wide clearing. We pulled up beside it, and a major hopped out and came over to the truck. They were running about three hours behind schedule, he said. We could wait there, or come back in three hours.

I’d been running ragged, and wanted a break. I knew Katie had to have been equally tired. I looked at her. She shrugged. “We’ll wait,” I said. The major nodded; I saluted. He got back into the humvee and they drove off.

We just sat there in the cab of the truck for a while. I don’t think either of us knew what to say.

She finally cleared her throat. “So,” she said. “What do we do now, Sergeant?”

It was dark when we made it back to the motor pool. We were the last truck in. I had Katie stop inside the motor pool gate and told her to get out, go home, get some sleep. It felt odd, the slippage between familiar and formal. The commander came over while I was backing the truck into the wash rack.

“Sir,” I said.

He returned my salute. “How’d the mission go, Sergeant?”

I grimaced. “They were three hours late,” I said.

He was looking at the truck. I turned to look as well, and my heart plummeted. I hadn’t been able to see it from inside the cab, but from the outside, the barefoot footprints on the inside of the glass might as well have had a searchlight on them.

He was quiet. After a time, he said, “Be very careful, Sergeant.” He handed me the keys to the gate and told me, “Lock up the motor pool when you’re done.”

I held up the needle in my hands, turning it in the late morning light, looking for the bias cut, the sharpest part of the needle’s point, so I’d know how I’d have to hold it to have it slide in with the least resistance. I found it, and placed that side against the flesh of Katie’s forearm, right over the vein. I looked at her. She was staring at the sky. It hurts less if you don’t watch it go in.

I wanted to say something then, say anything, apologize, let her know I would do it as best I could. I couldn’t find the words, my tongue frozen and numb, a thick lump stuck behind my teeth.

I eased the needle into her arm. The vein rolled, rolled out from under the needle, rolling to the side. All I’d done was puncture the skin. I tried to angle the needle, tried to direct it to the runaway vein. I didn’t want to have to do this twice. I felt her wince.

“I’m sorry,” I said. It came out flat and lame.

The vein continued to refuse to cooperate, slipping away from the point. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “It’s not working.” I slid the needle back out of her arm. It left a single, bright bead of blood. I wiped it away with the alcohol swab.

The weekend after that mission, Katie’s husband came down from Fort Bragg again. He promised he’d stopped cheating on her; he promised he’d go to counseling with her. He promised they’d make it work.

She told me this in a series of 3 AM phone calls. I told her I didn’t want to deal with it. She said that if that was the case, I should never have started things up again.

It was worse that time. We would yell at each other, threaten each other. The only thing I can say to my credit is that I never brought rank into it. The final phone call was on a Friday night. Her husband had been deployed again, to Honduras; I’d been out drinking. I came back to the barracks after last call, to find five messages from her on my answering machine. I called her back. I wasn’t diplomatic, or sweet, or kind. We went back and forth, and after half an hour, I was fed up. I told her I wasn’t going to let her treat me like her husband anymore.

She hung up.

In the motor pool, she began disobeying orders. She’d fail to report for formation, she’d take two hour breaks, daring me to come down on her. People noticed. Vincent asked me about it, and said that if it had been anyone else, they would have long since been in front of the commander for disciplinary action. I was paralyzed.

Soon enough, operations told me that the commander had called. He wanted to see me in his office. He had me close the door behind me.

“Sergeant,” he said. “You remember my warning?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

He held up a sheaf of papers. “Effective immediately, PFC Haupt is transferred to temporary duty at division headquarters.” I was still standing at attention. “This is a freebie, Sergeant,” he said. “Get your shit together.”

I went back to the motor pool and told Katie. We stared at each other a minute. She turned and left.

I swabbed a spot higher up on her forearm, a place where the vein was wider. I tore open a new blister-pack, took out the needle, checked for the bias cut again. Katie looked off to one side.

“Look,” I began.

She shook her head. “Just do it,” she said.

I slipped a fresh catheter onto the needle and slapped the vein lightly with the tips of my fingers to bring up the blood. I could sense myself breathing too fast, far too fast, hyperventilating in short shallow breaths, my pulse racing. I placed the tip of the needle against her flesh. I was forcing myself not to shake.

The needle broke the skin and went in smoothly. The vein didn’t roll.

“It’s in the vein,” I told Katie. “I’m putting the catheter in.”

She closed her eyes. If you’ve ever had a catheter, you know it’s not pleasant. You can feel its thickness slide through your skin, down through the muscle and the walls of the vein. I moved it down the needle, gradually, easing it in. I could see the muscles on her neck stand out.

The catheter went in. I placed my ring finger over the point of insertion and withdrew the needle. As soon as it was out, I capped the end of the catheter with my index finger. With my free hand, I took the free end of the tube from the IV bag, and brought it as close to the catheter as I could.

“I’m hooking up the IV,” I said. She nodded.

And I screwed it up. I took my ring finger off the vein when I uncovered the catheter to hook it up to the bag. A thin jet of blood squirted from the catheter, spraying my arm.

I cursed, and placed my finger back on the vein. I wouldn’t be able to hook the tube up to the catheter.

“Katie,” I said.

She groaned.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I fucked it up again.”

She sighed and opened her eyes and looked at the sky.

I had her blood dripping down my arm. I slid the catheter back out, swabbed the exit hole, and put a Band-Aid on it. I was starting to reach for a third needle when she propped herself up on her elbows. She looked at me.

As hurt and scared and angry as I was at first, the last thing I’d wanted was to tear up her arm like I did.

“Look,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I know you’re not doing it on purpose.” She paused. “It’s just business,” she said. “Just get it right.”

As far as I know, Katie’s still in the Army, more than likely on her way to getting her own sergeant’s stripes. I decided not to reenlist, and got out.

It’s been over a year since the stick. I got it right, the third try. She got it on the first. It hurt like hell, but it went in. We both passed the re-qual.

After that, we never spoke again. The last month before I left, before I moved out of the barracks for good, there were times when my phone rang half a ring, a ghost ring. I’d sit up in bed and reach for it, and it would have already stopped. Some of those times, I’d sit up and hope for it to ring again, hope to catch it in time, hope to pick up and say hello and not hear anything for a minute, until she clicked something against the receiver.

Sometimes I still do.