I Am Max Lamm (15 page)

The first month at the barracks, Kelly was desperate to quit. Exhausted, suffering withdrawal symptoms, it was too much. Not just the physical pangs of going cold turkey: stomach cramps, dizziness, hot flushes. It was hatred; the sickening aversion that engorged her. A nauseous reaction to everything at the barracks, erupting within like the sulphur of Hades.

Kelly hated her fellow recruits, hated everything they did
and
didn’t do. She hated that the young soldiers regarded everything that her upbringing had taught her to despise – mediocrity obscurity,
ordinariness –
not as cheap shackles but as a safety harness against the heights that famous men fall. She hated that her fellow recruits chortled like hyenas at the feeblest skeleton of a joke, or didn’t care for appearances beyond ripped biceps and a crew cut. She hated how they followed the drill sergeant’s every word, every damn
thought
, assuming that a mouse on a treadmill existed between that authoritarian bastard’s sunburnt ears. She hated how her fellow soldiers relaxed: playing hip-hop CDs at top volume in the rec hall, where they lifted weights,
voluntarily
did situps and called each other dawg or bitch or bro. These beefy high school dropouts, about a third of them white kids and everyone else Hispanic or black, who ceaselessly talked of designer suits, expensive liquor, bling, sportscars with Italian names they couldn’t spell, and other luxury items that had always bored Kelly in their meaningless abundance back home.

The white kids were the most frustrating. Kelly hated the remorseless patriotism in these pasty recruits with trailer-park names like Braydon or Randy or Dwayne; she hated their cringeless salutes beneath the flag in the drill yard, their blind respect for the Pentagon puppetmasters deciding their fate like a poker hand. How she despised the young soldiers’ obedience to the cowardly bigshots like her own father, who condemn the terrorist prey but never themselves make the kill!

At the root of it, she hated her fellow soldiers’ willingness – their presumed
consent –
to get blown up by the Stinger missile launched by a teenage Iraqi wearing a balaclava and imitation Nikes. Kelly hated her fellow recruits, but she didn’t want them to die. She wanted to stop these pimply boys who should be in senior year at high school, to break their wings before they took flight as clay pigeons amid the shrapnel smog of Baghdad. She wanted to slap these tough guys in the face, to scream into their ears the truths they didn’t know or didn’t want to know. To tell the gungho military boys about the liars deciding their fate; the stone-hearted warmongers; like her father and his buddies, laughing on the back porch of a mansion in Georgetown. But the young National Guardsmen wouldn’t have listened to Kelly Wesson, not a damn word. Because they knew about her.

Somebody at the barracks had made it known that the skinny blonde officer was from
that
Wesson family. Soon everyone knew about her daddy, about her easy ride. At dinner in the mess hall, Kelly pretended to ignore the sneers sent her way. On hikes in the Catoctins, she was allocated the wettest, muddiest, steepest camp site; when her name was called at drills, Kelly heard the sniggers. ‘You lazy rich whore!’ someone yelled from a truck one morning as she walked to the laundry room. It happened again a few days later.

So the National Guard ensured that suicide never fully disappeared from Kelly’s dreams. Not from the dream she’d been having for three years, where she swallowed her dad’s gun like an elephantine steel cock and blew her brains out on the US Senate floor, then staggered about, a bloody ghost like Hamlet’s father, frothing blood from her temples and staining the plush blue carpet as senators fled, while at the dais the Minotaur calmly resumed his tirade about the North Korean nuclear impasse.

Always, Kelly’s splattered head was the dream’s most vivid feature; cleaved open like a strawberry chocolate egg, spilling brains, blood, mucous, saliva, all the slippery things that make a person tick . . . and engrossingly detailed too. Never observed an autopsy, never studied anatomy or paid attention in biology class, but somehow Kelly dreamt vividly, realistically, of pink guts, mashed nostrils, exploded arteries. Kelly
felt
her wet dead skull, saw the ruptured capillaries, smelt the ammonia-like whiff of brains on the Senate floor, and then she woke up. Cold sweat beading her forehead, unable to sleep unless she smoked a joint. That first month at the barracks, the nightmares got worse; redder blood, screams ringing in her ears
after
she awoke, and at 4 a.m., when she badly needed another two hours’ sleep before wake-up, Kelly would sneak into the female toilets and stand atop the cistern blowing smoke through a tiny square window.

Kelly thought of gulping all her Valiums at once, of hanging herself with the polyester necktie that she wore on parade duty. That is, until the day she was assigned a post. Suddenly, Kelly was in control of cleaning duty in the mess hall; the lowliest, dullest command position at the barracks. Nevertheless, she was
in charge
. Under Kelly’s control were five privates from down south: a bankrupt Mississippian peanut farmer, three black teenagers from Huntsville, Alabama and a Puerto Rican electrical engineer who couldn’t find a better job. These men unanimously resented Kelly’s orders and wouldn’t scour twelve stoves every evening, nor rinse dry spaghetti from three hundred plates that they stacked into dishwashers the width of a garden shed. ‘No, lady. We no fucking
sirvientes
!’ the Puerto Rican, their unofficial leader, bellowed defiantly when Kelly pointed at the kitchen floor encrusted with stale bolognaise.

She had always shunned household chores herself. Back home on Massachusetts Avenue, a thirty-seven-year-old grandmother from Tijuana cleaned the mansion three times a week. But now that Kelly was in charge, she
wanted
the mess hall clean. She wanted the kitchen floors spotless, the glasses sparkling, the frying pans shiny. Because those were
her
orders, that came from her lips.
Ipso facto
, following the same perversion of logic that compels toddlers to fight over broken toys and men to go to war, Kelly’s orders
had
to be followed. But they weren’t.

So she began being cruel. Spontaneously, Kelly’s viciousness emerged from its gestation commenced three years ago when she started torturing herself in a big silent bedroom overlooking Rock Creek Park. The cruelty wasn’t quite intentional, nor was it unexpected; it simply
happened
, her new addiction. Beginning the day Kelly noticed a tingle – a warm, pleasant sensation down in the place that her father’s grey dinner guests yearned to touch even if it took them a whole pack of Viagra – while she punished her disobedient inferiors for another lousy cleaning job. Mud beneath the tables, dried soup on the trays, grease coating the stovetops, and again those five lazy soldiers peeled off their rubber gloves and announced that they were done!

Kelly ordered her recruits to stand at attention. No response. The men sat on a kitchen bench, sharing tobacco, reading the sports sections leftover from breakfast. They laughed at the article about a tennis champ who was secretly filmed screwing a prostitute on his day off in Manhattan. The Puerto Rican kicked a scrap of toast that nobody cared to vacuum.

‘OK you screw-ups!
I am not impressed!
Look at the floor! Look at the frying pans! This job ain’t finished! Nobody is leaving until I’m satisfied.
Nobody!
’

Kelly looked flushed, sick from last night’s insomnia. Shouting so loud that even the Mississippi farmer, who’d never actually spoken to his commanding bitch, froze midway through rolling a cigarette. Kelly was shocked too. She hadn’t yelled like this since . . . since when? Cheering for the Rangers in the ninth innings with her mother at a ballgame in Houston six years ago? Screaming at the walls the first afternoon she tried to kill herself, tried to pull the trigger, but instead spent five hours weeping, remembering, in her daddy’s leather recliner? The soldiers were stunned silent by the tirade erupting from their blonde rake of a commanding officer, like a sonic boom from a golf buggy.

‘You fucking dumb lazy cheats! I want this place clean!
C-L-E-A-N
. Now!’

Murmuring amongst the men. One of the black kids replied softly.

‘Yes Ma’am.’

But nobody fetched the mops. Nobody plugged in the vacuum cleaner. They stayed put, sitting on the table.

She’s letting off steam. The bitch ain’t serious. Probably PMS
.

Kelly inhaled, exhaled. Sensing what was to follow Embracing it, perplexed by it.

‘You guys won’t follow my orders? Run twenty laps around the mess hall.
Now!
’

‘
Injusticia!
’ the Puerto Rican exclaimed.

‘Hell, Ma’am, this ain’t no summer camp,’ one of the teenagers protested. ‘We been doing drills all damn day.’

‘If you bastards ignore my orders, I will tell Sergeant Janoski and I will
personally
ensure that you go into the hole,’ Kelly spat, making it all up. ‘That’s solitary confinement in the dark for two weeks!’

One teenager whispered to another. ‘They can do that to us?’

‘Run the laps or you
will
suffer!’

Slowly, the cleaning team got to their feet. ‘Dumb fucking bitch,’ the farmer murmured. Then, staring at Kelly through sweat stinging their eyes, the soldiers commenced twenty laps around the musty hall. She wouldn’t meet their glares of undisguised hatred, and was careful not to smirk at their humiliation, in case it set off the primal predisposition to killing that made these men so effective at war games. She couldn’t stop quivering, not in the hot cathartic climax of finally teaching the chauvinist bastards a lesson.

A few seconds, there it was. Not precisely an orgasm, but pleasurable as anything that the Georgetown quarterbacks ever achieved down there with their tongues. A curious, staggeringly welcome sensation; not quite penetrative, but akin to a steady, expert caress at
precisely
the right spot. It got better and better, then better still, as she watched her insolent macho subordinates running –
suffering –
in the warm hall. One of the black teenagers limping with his bum knee, all five men fixing Kelly with a look of murder as they jogged by. Nine laps until her panties were wet, and from that lovely moment onwards, she never stopped. If her men showed the slightest trace of insolence, if they didn’t address her as Ma’am, if they failed to immaculately polish the ovens, stovetops, grills, or to vacuum every morsel from beneath tables thirty feet long, she punished them mercilessly. And the more explicit their suffering, the better Kelly felt down there.

During those eight months, she forced her five soldiers to run hundreds of laps under the midday sun, to do three-hour march drills, thousands of sit-ups, even to pointlessly lug a three-hundred-pound refrigerator down to the basketball courts and back. And always she savoured the orgasmic tingle. It was addictive; the sensation of Kelly’s years of despair, of the powerlessness that had poisoned her like a radioactive cloud, being projected out into these defiant, degraded men where the misery assumed the form of an ephemeral pleasure unit and then glided back inside her, deep inside, to make her come as she watched the soldiers suffering her retribution. They suffered
for
her. And the closer Kelly approached her breathless climax, the crueller she became, until if one of her men merely sniggered they got fifty push-ups on the spot.

Of course, Kelly’s sadism made the soldiers more defiant. In late July, one of them – nobody would claim responsibility – forgot to refrigerate a crate of mozzarella. Three days later, seven people came down with food poisoning. As their punishment, Kelly forced her men to scour the latrines with their toothbrushes. The merciless discipline satisfied her not just carnally, but bestowed a pure, inartificial sense of calm that she hadn’t known for ten years. Kelly began to acquire the hard stony face of her father (whose features uncannily resembled the monolithic heads on Easter Island). A few adaptations: the sarcastic smirk of his lips, the sharp crest of his eyebrows and though pretty enough for
Vanity Fair
’s social pages, Kelly looked more like the Minotaur every day. The meaner she got, the more intoxicated. Unlike the drug habit, Kelly’s new addiction
upheld
the law, dispensing the authoritarian jab that her father so cherished.

As she tortured five outspoken, outgunned men, Kelly Wesson enjoyed a blanket of power, of resurrective comfort sans narcotics that she hadn’t experienced since she was eleven years old back in Dallas with her mother. With her real mother, a decade ago when her father was merely vicepresident of an oil multinational, before his affair and the cover-up, before her mother’s ten million dollar pay-off and remarriage to the French trucking magnate who, through paranoid manipulation, kept his wife from seeing her oldest daughter more than once every six months. Watching her soldiers running laps in the yard, Kelly rediscovered the sense of indestructibility, the assumption that nothing could destroy her, that she remembered knowing as she clung to her mother atop their favourite mare Smoky, galloping through brush on their old ranch by the Rio Grande. The fanciful belief indispensible to a happy childhood –
everything will turn out okay –
reappeared reassuringly when Kelly scolded her disobedient men, or, better still,
hurt
them using techniques discretely acceptable to her superiors at the barracks.

‘Make a man stand still for a whole afternoon,’ the drill sergeant, recently back from Baghdad, advised Kelly during training. ‘It breaks him. No water, no pissing. Draw two chalk dots for his feet.’

Immune to the cruelty, she did that too, feeling pleasantly aroused as for four hours her soldiers posed in the yard like a row of bowling pins. She felt just as good watching them scrape dry shit off the toilets or doing two hundred pushups as punishment for their collective refusal to confess who had yelled ‘you crazy slut’ when Kelly’s back was turned. The giddy cruel catharsis, the carnal euphoria bundled into Daddy’s discipline, didn’t just render the cocaine in Kelly’s toiletries bag less enticing, it saved her.