Tiger's Smile
By Missy

SERIES: Tiger's Smile
PART: 1 of 1
RATING: PG
PAIRING(s): L/L
DISTRIBUTION: To LW, Kai, Myself and FG so far; any other archives are
welcome to ask, but disclaimers must be included, my email left intact.
send a URL, and provide full disclaimers as well as credit me fully.
Please inform me if you are going to submit my work to any sort of
search engine. Please do not submit my work to a search engine that
picks out random sets of words and uses them as key words, such as
"Google"

Please contact me in order for this story to be placed on an archive,
or if you want know of a friend who would enjoy my works, please email
me their address and I will mail them the stories, expressly for the
purpose of link trading. MiSTiers are welcomed! Please do inform me
that you'd like to do the MiSTing, however, and send me a copy of the
finished product. I'd also love to archive any MiSTings that are made
of my work!
CATEGORY: Drama
FEEDBACK: PLEASE?!
SETTING IN TIMELINE: California-era; about '69.
SPOILLER/SUMMARY: Lenny's Vietnam experience.
NOTES: Heavily inspired by the Johnny Cash song "Drive On"; lyrics quoted at the foot.

****

The smell of the forest always reminded him of crawling through the jungle.

It was not the jungle of his childhood fantasies. Tarzan did not swing over his head in an irregular, monkeylike fashion, and friendly elephants didn't lend their trunks. Reality was a long slog, crawling on his belly with a rifle before him, slathered in mud.

He killed a man at twenty-seven. Now, at twenty-seven the only dead thing he had ever seen was his poor turtle.

That had been his fault, too.

He had cried silently for days, his face buried against the humid ground. But the next morning he had stood and marched. Noon brought the second death, and then the third by evening. Eventually the wound festering in his soul developed a skin, a scab.

Squiggy said that it got so easy to kill that he forgot what it was like back in California. He had never been normal in the first place, and what could shooting to death a sixteen-year-old soldier do but estrange him all the more from society?

He was eating k-rations against a tree in Da Nang when the ambush happened; one bullet through the knee. Ludicrously, he was thrilled that they hadn't taken his hands. He would have killed himself if he'd lost one of them.

Another ambush at the hospital; throats lacerated with bullets. He remembered the airlifting, through a haze of pain; they had pulled out the bullet in some triage unit. The pain was like lightening, burning out through his body, sizzling. The damage wouldn't be extensive, but it was enough to send him back to the states.

***

She waited for him as they wheeled the chair past the arrival gate. Fear had gripped him; he had not resisted the draft, while she had marched and protested. Her letters from home had been his only lifeline to a civilized world.

How little there had been between them in the beginning, a little furtive glance, a fancy make-out session here and there, no longer seemed to make the soul of their relationship.

When she saw him, she climbed onto his lap, holding onto him as though he might dissolve. That night, she would stand before the bathroom mirror and cut her long, prized blonde hair, weeping bitterly. She would never attend another peace march.

What he would remember of that reunion would not be the warmth she gave so freely, but the ice dead stare of Shirley.

Her hand rested on a rounded belly, as though to remind him that Walter would not be coming home.

"I was the last thing he saw, Shirley."

She stared like a marble figure back at him, frozen. And he knew there lay no kind way to respond to his words.

***

He cocooned into Laverne's embrace for months; days of physical therapy engineered a fairly serviceable walk. The pain faded from his body, but not his head.

He tried to drive her away, but eventually she drew the darkness from him, and he shared the hell of his tour of duty.

For all of her years, she refused to leave his side.

The Army discharged him, honorably, and thanks to the GI Bill he managed to put a down-payment on a little record shop off of the Strip. It would be awhile, a long while, before anyone would care to hear from the bleeding guitar of a wounded soldier, so his songs were set aside for future gain, though he played them for her.

The little store turned into a chain, and that was when he and Laverne married. His greatest joy in life was to close his eyes and listen to the little arguments of his children as they fought over whose job it was to file away all of those "groady" Janis Joplin records.

The hippie culture died in a wave of apathy and panic, drugs and hatred. In ten years he would be invited to tell his story, and his children would sit in frank astonishment. As though they couldn't fathom that their goofy, loving father could not have been the product of so much pain.

Squiggy had returned to his own dreams, ones that planted him in a far away city. Lenny tried to offer him partnership, but Squiggy simply turned him down. When they wrote, it was not of the old days in Milwaukee, but of the stink of the jungle, the smile of the tiger, the knowledge of death's love of playing the puppeteer.

Most days he was fine. His children smothered him in the sweetest love, and his wife gave herself to him so wholly that he felt ashamed in her light.

But in the woods he could close his eyes, and feel the crawl of the jungle beneath his stomach, in an endless summer rain. The fear meant nothing, he would insist. It didn't mean anything. But in those moments, he would be the tiger's prisoner, waiting for the scrape of teeth down his spine.

Opening his eyes would unlock the cage.

Drive on, don't mean nothin'...My children love me , but they don't understand...And I got a woman who knows her man...Drive on, don't mean nothin', drive on
-Johnny Cash, Drive On


























(Close This Window To Return To LAS Fic)