Manas

By Don Mateer

I drove up to Seattle that morning, whiskey fumes still clinging to my brain. The sky hung low, a grey mass pouring steady rain over the cracked yellow lines of I-5. Classic Pacific Northwest weather—the kind that seeps into your bones and makes you question every decision. Traffic moved steady until Olympia, where it always bottlenecked. By the time I pulled off at King Street, I was on autopilot.

Andy was already at the hot dog joint he loved. The one with reclaimed wood walls and dim Edison bulbs hanging like a bad joke about irony. He was hunched over two red sausages, drenched in sour cream and jalapeños. A pint of Rainier beer—the cheap stuff—sweated in his hand. His jeans and undershirt looked slept-in. Probably were.

The place was almost empty. Just him and a waitress off in the corner, her red-and-black dyed hair covering half her face while she scrolled through her phone, lost in its glow.

I hung my coat by the door, watching raindrops slide off, wishing they’d take me with them. I didn’t want to be here. We’d done this before, but I’d fallen off the wagon last night. When Andy called, his voice heavy with the kind of emptiness that mirrored my own, I said yes before I could think twice.

I slipped into the booth across from him. He didn’t look up, just took another bite of his hot dog, sour cream smeared across his lips.

“How you doing?” I asked.

“Surviving,” he mumbled, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You want anything?”

“Yeah, maybe just a regular hot dog. Nothing fancy.”

He glanced at the waitress. She didn’t move.

“She don’t care,” I said, waving it off. “What’s going on?”

Andy stared at his pint glass, his finger tracing the condensation pooling underneath. “Divorce finally went through. Good it’s done, but... I don’t know. Still stings. Sarah’s never getting off those pills.”

“No,” I said softly. “She won’t.”

He tapped the rim of the glass, not looking at me. “It’s my fault she started. She sprained her arm one night, and we didn’t have any Tylenol, so I gave her some of my pills. Thought it was nothing back then.”

I nodded. The rain picked up, turning the city into a smudge of foggy lights.

“You still writing those war stories?” he asked, breaking the silence.

“No,” I said too quickly. “People don’t care about that stuff anymore. They got new wars now.”

Andy looked past me, somewhere far away. “Yeah, Kabul falling... hell of a thing.”

“It was.”

He leaned forward, wiping his hands on his jeans. “You ever think about writing someone else’s story?”

I knew where this was going. Andy had one war story, and he was about to tell it again. Not because he wanted me to write it—he just needed to hear it. Needed someone to sit there, listen, nod in the right places. Go through the motions.

He pushed the second hot dog toward me. “You want this? I can get another.”

“Nah, I’m good.” I glanced at the waitress. She was still glued to her phone, earbuds now tucked into her ears. “I’ll wait.”

Andy pulled the hot dog back and bit into it. Sour cream and jalapeños smeared across his face like war paint. 

“Man, I was something back then,” he said, chewing slowly. “Fresh out of West Point, wearing my new Ranger tab, ready to kill some bad guys. My battalion had already left by the time I got to Fort Carson, so I had to catch up. Left the states a month behind everyone else. Got stuck in Kyrgyzstan for a week. Manas Air Base. You remember that place? Those mountains at sunset. Beautiful. Wish I’d sat back and enjoyed them.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I remember.”

He set the hot dog down, eyes drifting. “But I was excited to get out of there. We landed in Kandahar at night. First thing I smelled when I got off the plane was shit. They had that sewage pit in the middle of the base. You remember that?”

“I couldn’t forget it if I tried.”

Andy’s gaze settled on his pint. “They crammed our company into a brick building, a hundred meters from that sewage pit. Stank day and night. Never got used to it. It Took them two weeks to send me out on my first mission. We were supposed to meet some police commander at a checkpoint outside a village—Tor Kalay or something like that. You know the place?”

“Kalay means village,” I said. “Tor means black. I think.”

He nodded, deep in memory now. “My platoon had already been hit by a few IEDs. Half my guys already had their Combat Infantryman’s Badges. Me? I’d never even heard a shot fired in anger.”

The rain beat harder, a steady hum filling the silence between us.

“I was hyped, though. Like a kid before Christmas. Couldn’t sleep. I paced around the barracks, trying to talk to my soldiers. Joes don’t like officers doing that stuff, but I didn’t know that then. Most just nodded at me. Except for Mike Johnson, my radioman. His eyes were glassed over when I saw him. He even told me he was nervous. Wanted advice. You know what I told him?”

I didn’t answer. I knew.

 “I told him it was like being on an airplane. Once you’re in, you can’t control what happens. Just sit back and enjoy the ride.” He let out a short, bitter laugh. “I was a dumbass back then.”

I nodded, not sure what else to do. 

The room felt colder. The rain tapped harder at the windows.

“We rolled out that morning,” Andy said, his voice flattening. “Everything seemed fine. We parked by a hill, formed up. Minesweeper in front, Johnson behind me. I kicked something. IED. An old Russian mine. Who knows. All I remember is that white flash.”

He squeaked his fingertip over the rim of his glass. “Whatever it was, it was daisy-chained to a bigger IED. Killed Johnson right away. They never found his weapon. Two other guys got hit. One worse than me. Mark Garza. He died a few months later.”

I didn’t say anything. Just watched the rain blur the window streaks of grey, like the city was washing away.

“They sent me to Germany for surgery. Then home. A year of doctor appointments before they retired me.” He tapped his leg, where metal and plastic met flesh and bone. “It felt like limbo. I wasn’t a soldier anymore, but I wasn’t a civilian either.”

I looked at him, unsure what to say. This was always the part where the conversation stalled out. “It wasn’t your fault,” I said, the words hollow in my mouth.

Andy stared at the crumbs beside his half-finished hot dog, then up at the ceiling. His eyes traced the lines of a water stain. “You know, I used to think the guys blamed me for what happened. But now... I don’t even think they remembered me. They just didn’t want to make eye contact with a guy in a wheelchair.”

He finished his beer in one slow gulp, then reached into his pocket and slapped a hundred-dollar bill on the table. “Let’s get out of here.”

We moved outside into the rain, the air heavy with the wet chill of the city. The world was a haze of headlights and soaked asphalt.

A few months later, more rain beat on my office windows. The house quiet after my wife went to bed. I’d been scrolling through headlines about Kyiv and Gaza when I saw a story about the Taliban working out of an old American base I’d helped build. That’s when the email came.

I knew it was coming. I’d known since the restaurant.

The email had the details. Date. Time. Where to send condolences.

I poured myself a drink and spilled a little on my copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. Brown whiskey droplets spattered across Hemingway’s wrinkled forehead.

I stared at him a moment, glass in hand. The rain tapped on the windows. Then I went out to the kitchen, flipped on the light, grabbed a few ice cubes, and dropped them into my drink. They bobbed for a moment, their edges melting away.

Then I poured the whiskey out, watching it swirl down the drain until the only thing left was the faint smell of something that used to burn.

****

Don Mateer is an Army veteran of the war in Afghanistan. He currently lives in Oregon with his wife where he works on short stories and a novel.