Cody Thibodeaux

---

Grant Pelkowski's dorm room smells like Axe body spray and the ramen he never finished, and you are sitting on the edge of his unmade bed with his phone in his hand, and his leg is bouncing — no, that's not right, that one's already gone, that's the next one waiting for you. Three hours and fifty-three minutes of being nineteen and blond and six-foot-three, of freckles you keep catching in the mirror like they belong to somebody you're borrowing a jacket from. It was fun for about an hour. Then it was just a body that gets carded at the gas station and has a Tuesday morning gen-ed at ten he is absolutely going to skip, a body with nothing wrong with it and nothing especially right either, and you are bored in a specific way that only nineteen can produce, which is to say completely, structurally bored, the boredom of a life that hasn't decided anything yet. You open the laptop. The wheel is already the last tab. You didn't close it last time. You never do.

You spin.

The pack strap is in your hand and your leg is already moving on its own — a fast, tight bounce, heel drumming against asphalt — and your other hand is halfway into a side pouch, fingers walking through a rifle-cleaning kit by feel, counting patches, counting rods, and the count comes out wrong. You stop. You do it again, slower, and this time the number is right, and you do the next ten pouches the same slow deliberate way though your hands clearly already know this order in their sleep, because something in the rhythm just skipped like a needle and nobody in this body noticed but you.

The strap is canvas, worn soft at the buckle, and it gives you a barracks hallway at 0500 dark, cinderblock cold through socks, a sergeant's voice saying a name that isn't Grant's and isn't yours yet either — Thibodeaux — and you're in it before you've decided to be, a full year folding open from one strap in one hand.

The dog tags against your sternum are warm from your own skin already, which is a strange thing to feel about somebody else's skin, and they give you the day you got them, nineteen and terrified in a line of other nineteen-year-olds, and underneath that, quieter, a rosary an aunt in Chalmette pressed into your palm the same week, and you not knowing which metal to trust more.

The moustache you can't see but you can feel it when your upper lip moves, and that gives you a barracks bathroom mirror and a buddy laughing at you for growing it, and you laughing back, easy, nothing behind it.

The camo shirt against your back — sun-warmed already, morning heat coming up fast off the wet street the way it only does here — gives you this morning whole: you standing in the shotgun house's front room, one bulb overhead, buttoning up slow because your hands were shaking a little, not from fear, from the rum still in you from last night, and you thinking, not for the first time, that you drink too much and you'll deal with that later, you always think that, there is always a later. The sleeve, rolled just so over the tattoo — your unit's insignia, half-hidden, the ink still meaning something to the skin under it even when the arm belongs to somebody else now — gives you the tattoo parlor, gives you three friends who don't talk to you anymore and one who does, gives you a name you haven't said out loud in eight months: Marcus. An ex who calls sometimes still, late, when he's had a few, and you always pick up, and you always regret it, and you always pick up again.

The boots give you ten thousand mornings just like this one — laces double-knotted, toes checked, a habit older than thinking — and the street under them gives you New Orleans itself, steam coming up off asphalt like the city's breathing, magnolia and diesel and somebody's crawfish boil three doors down that happened last week and hasn't fully stopped smelling like itself. You are twenty-three and Catholic and gay and mostly alone with it and none of that is a wound, it's just weather, it's just what the air is made of in this particular life, heavy-drinking and clear-eyed both, a man who goes to Mass some Sundays hungover and means every word anyway.

Your leg is still bouncing. It hasn't stopped once.

You look down at your hands, at the cleaning kit patch pinched between two fingers that know exactly how to hold it, and you turn the hand over like you're checking it for a wound that isn't there, and you look up into the New Orleans morning, into the light coming low and gold off the wet street.

"Wrong hands," you say, to nobody, and your leg keeps time under you like it always has, like it will until you decide it won't.