Three Ways Out
We’re The Three Justins and we live together. It’s like we’re back on deployment; the apartment’s walls are covered in mud we got shipped over from Afghanistan. Inside we stand post, clean weapons, and rest at staggered intervals so someone’s always awake. Red lens-only after nightfall, stand-to at dawn and dusk. No patrols, though. Not enough manpower. Instead we take target practice at photos of ourselves pinned up against the walls. The thick mud stops most of the bullets, but our neighbors still say please stop fucking shooting indoors. They knock and knock and one time it’s open. Maryellen from next door comes in, she says hello is anyone home? Before any of us can say out loud you’re the first woman we’ve seen in years, we have to go through our whole escalation of force procedure with her. Show shout shove shoot. Pre-recorded STAY AWAY warnings in ten languages, little pen flare fireworks zooming down the hallway, warning shots from a mag full of tracers. Maryellen breaks contact. We hold a debrief mostly focused on who left the fucking door unlocked?
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The three of us haven’t spoken in years. It’s like our lives are broken into equal thirds: before the Marine Corps, the Marine Corps, and after the Marine Corps. Those middle four years, though, hold all the weight. They’re what define everything else. Even when we grow hair down to our asses, grow beards down to our waists, and get peace signs tattooed on both cheeks, we’re only doing it because the Marine Corps said not to, which isn’t that far off from doing what we’re told. A certain men’s magazine recommends getting away from it all, so we move separately to Alaska, find ourselves a corner of the country where the sun doesn’t set for six months and doesn’t rise the rest of the year. Permadawn, permaday, permadusk, permanight. Northern lights like fireworks. No neighbors for a mile on either side. We want to be alone, and we are, marking off days on our countdown calendars, just like deployment. But then we run into one another in the produce aisle of the only grocery store in town, wordlessly reaching for the same overripe bunch of bananas. Bill, Phil, and Will, coming together like pieces of Exodia in the marathon Yu-Gi-Oh card duels we’d hold in the barracks, holed up because the three of us were the weird ones in the platoon, until the weight of that ostracization broke us apart. Now we’re just the weird one, each of us, unwilling to look into the mirror that is the others. We take two bananas a piece and run.
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The three of us buy a summer cabin in the Adirondacks. We pay in cash, equal thirds for equal claims. It’s like a simultaneous timeshare, and there’s some wrangling. We married triplets because we thought it would be convenient and because we loved them, but now we all want a romantic weekend alone on the same weekend every year. At least there’s no question about spending July 4th together. It’s only four days but for that weekend, it’s just like deployment; totally immersed in one another’s lives. We paddle the lake, carving its mirrored surface at dawn and dusk. When the sun is directly overhead, we lie on the splintery dock side by side, feeling our sweat evaporate, pressing our faces in the cracks between slats to watch salamanders crawl on the mucky bottom.
The neighbors come to our place for a cookout every year. Aaron won’t let anyone else touch the grill, and Alex is obsessed with cornhole. That’s fine by me. My new thing is I’m a writer. I let my wife lead me from one conversational cluster to the next, speaking to our guests as people and imagining them as characters so I can rearrange them on the page later, where the story only goes one way.
Alex tosses his last bag, Aaron calls us in for dinner. There are hamburgers and hot dogs, red white and blue sheet cake, glistening slices of watermelon, coleslaw with just the right amount of mayo. While we eat, fireworks burst above the lake, and the explosions don’t even make us flinch.
Adam Straus is a Marine veteran. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Iowa Review, The Hopkins Review, Pithead Chapel, JMWW, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. Adam holds an MFA from Rutgers-Camden.
