I haven't been here in a while, so I thought I would re-enter the lovely Bransforums with an excerpt of my WiP. I haven't posted work here for critique in a while, and this is my newly (as of a few weeks ago) written first chapter. It's a totally different first chapter from what I had before. I'd like to know anything and everything that crossed your mind as you read it: line edits and general stuff. I have two more chapters I could post, if anyone is interested enough to read them.
Title: Gunmetal Gray
Genre: Literary Fiction
Tense: Present
Tags: Military; Iraq War; Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Triggers: The main character in this WiP is gay, though he does not make an appearance in this chapter. It deals heavily with the death of his brother.
Particular Questions: How did the tense work for this? Is it too jarring written in present tense? Is it a problem that the main character is not introduced in this chapter, or the second?
Finally, without further ado:
CHAPTER ONE: THE MEN IN BLUE
Staff Sergeant Thomas Avery has never done this before. His hands shake with trembles of nerves as he sits in the darkened cab of his pickup wishing for a smoke. He could grab one — the pack is right in his glove box, less than a foot away, but that would be improper: he would stain his gloves with flecks of ash and his uniform would smell of smoke.
It would be imperfect, and if he must be anything tonight, he must be perfect.
The sun set long ago behind the trees that surround him with their stark uniformity. The explosion of vibrant color that always precedes an Ohio summer has yet to fade from the leaves that now clutch darkness; the woods through which this single lane road winds breathe nostalgia into the nighttime air, as though the natural world remembers the identity of all who pass through it and knows as inherently as Avery himself that he does not belong here.
This is not what he signed up for — telling mothers that their sons will not come home. Watching the faces of strong fathers in whose footsteps their children tried desperately to tread crumple.
He enlisted to fight; he enlisted to escape the emotional wreckage of his own home and now he bestows that chaos upon the homes of other men, brave, funny, or foolish, like him. Now he dons his dress blues in gas station bathrooms or the back of his Chevy; he answers to the call of those who passed before him rather than the crackling voice of his supervisor over the intercom.
He will not do it alone; the reflection of headlights bright in his side mirror assure him that he will preform this terrible duty in the company of another. When Gunnery Sergeant Masterson’s truck of firebrick red pulls up beside Avery’s own truck of dark indigo, the Gunny is accompanied by another man with more ribbonbars on his chest and wrinkles around his eyes than Avery, joining them for a night of tumultuous emotion unannounced.
Avery’s fingers continue to shake as he presses the button inlaid in his door and the window opposite him slides down with a mechanical sigh in the otherwise silent country night. He offers the Gunny and his companion a timid, young smile that illuminates only confusion in his blue eyes.
The Gunny and other man do not smile back.
“This is not an occasion for smiles, Kid.” When the man who Avery does not know speaks, it is with a cadence of natural, aged authority. Stories of wars written into novels and screenplays eddy in his voice, rough as a winter wind howling through slumbering trees, and Avery listens to him instinctually, without conscious thought.
Avery’s smile falters, folding and collapsing awkwardly in upon itself.
“Tom,” says the Gunny, who neither asked for nor required Avery’s permission to call him by his given name. “This is Master Sergeant Murphy Reed.”
Master Sergeant Reed nods at his introduction, light cast from inside the Gunny’s cab catching a hue of red in his cheeks. “I knew the Garret boys,” he explains just loudly for Avery to hear. The commanding edge to his voice is gone; it evaporated somewhere between his rebuke and introduction. “Their Dad, too.”
Avery is startled, and the emotion catches in the expressive light of his eyes. He was told that he and Gunny were to deliver the news to Mr. and Mrs. James Garret by 22:00 hours tonight; there was no mention in his brief of any Master Sergeant Reed, no mention of a man due to appear with Gunny in a decorated veteran’s pressed uniform blues. Avery was told, when he was assigned to a tour of notifying families of their loved ones’ passing, that it was not a job that was easily dictated by any manual. He was told to go by his gut, that his instincts would steer him right, but his instincts balk at this unexpected deviation from how he planned his first notification.
His voice cracks uneasily, the leaves of the trees absorbing both his nerves and the twin droning of two idling engines. “You knew him?”
Again, the older officer nods. “I knew Cam, and I knew his brother, Lee. Cam has a fiance with one kid — there’s a rumor that she’s supposed to have another. I’ve known Cam since I met Lee: I recruited both of them.”
Avery does not know what to say to this: quick memories of his own wife and daughter filter like a reel of silent family movies through his head and obscure his speech as he imagines his own recruiter perusing an updated list of the dead to discover his name. Searching for something to say, Avery glances at the fluorescent green digits of the clock mounted beside his steering wheel.
Above the clock flutters a small picture of his wife in their youth, her hair blonde and her smile without any stress. It distracts him from the time, from his purpose; he pulls it from where he tacked it and slips it into his glove box, behind the worn box of Marlboro cigarettes.
He returns to the clock and it reads 7:40 PM — 9:40. He blinks and checks it against the time on his watch. Both clocks tick quickly to 7:41PM — 9:41.
He clears his throat. “We should go,” he says. It is not an order: Gunny outranks him and Master Sergeant Reed commands a respect not limited to his rank.
Gunny is the only one who speaks. “Let’s go,” he rumbles, the few words imbued with invisible, potent emotion.
Master Sergeant Reed says nothing at all as Avery pulls ahead of Gunny’s truck, his eyes flicking nervously from the road that leads to the lights of Shawnee glowing like an ephemeral, dying reflection of the stars that see and remember all and to an address card, stained with nervous fingerprints, that reads:
2071, Elm Drive
Home of Mr. James Garret and Mrs. Rose Garret,
Parents of:
Cam Garret (Deceased)
Sgt. Lee Garret (discharged)
Shawnee is a small town, forever sleeping. One street leads in: it cuts between collapsing buildings and is the only standard by which the town keeps itself. Yellow paint bleeds into the cracked asphalt and between the potholes Avery sees no memory of small town bliss. A few lights flicker at the gas station but there is no welcome sign when they enter town. At the diner lingers a duo of motorcycles — the bikes stand watch alone as their riders rest inside the trailer masquerading as a restaurant.
Avery heaves a great sigh in the quiet of his cab. The town is gone when he releases his breath; already, they have abandoned the mess of buildings disguised as a town. Against the darkness, marked both by a single light catching a flag of white stars sewn forever onto a patch of midnight languishing in the humid air and its singular isolation, appears a house, gray as though it was touched by a ghost.
Two cars are parked at opposing angles on the lawn. There is no driveway that Avery can see — he slows his truck to peer at the house, thinking how quiet it looks in the night.
Thinking that he and the men behind him will soon be the trio to forever disturb that peace, Avery swears aloud, “Damn.”
He parks the truck on the side of the road opposite the house and slips his white cover onto his head. Beneath the eagle and globe, he straightens his shoulders, but cannot bring himself to adopt the unseeing, distant stare acquired by all servicemen after a single watch.
This duty calls for emotion, not for the quiet control of a soldier reverted to days of standing at attention before a proud crowd.
Joined by Gunny and Reed, Avery is struck for the first time by Reed’s stature — his shoulders are thick enough to hold the sky, and when they begin their somber procession he walks with a limping gait.
They tread through the grass and their every footstep releases the smell of spring from the earth. Avery’s pants are soaked through at the ankle when they finally climb the porch. He pauses before the screen door, glancing to Gunny and Reed, seeing an identical resolve hardening their faces. In Reed’s eyes, though, beneath the resolve, beneath the training, Avery notices sadness, total and complete, that frightens him. He is out of place here all ready, delivering the news of a strangers’ death to his family.
He should not be here, but he is. Cam Garret, son of James and Rose Garret, brother of Sergeant Lee Garret, fiance to an unnamed woman and father to two anonymous children, should not be dead, but he is. And it is not Cam, but Avery, knocking on the door of Cam’s childhood home.
When Rose answers the door, she sees nothing but the uniforms. She does not see the faces of the men peering through the screen. She sees the starched white gloves, the white cap pulled low over their foreheads. Their ranks stretched taut over their shoulders. The glimmering gold globe and eagle emblazoned on their caps and pinned to their chests, catching the light from behind her as the din in the kitchen quiets and chairs scrape curiously backward.
One of the men in blue begins to speak to her in a soft tone: “Are you Rose Garret?”
They have the wrong house, she wants to say, but Charley’s light steps creak the old wood behind her and when Charley sees the men in classic navy blues, she screams. They have the right house. Charley rushes forward to slam the door in Avery’s face, but she is caught mid-flight in the impossibly strong, impossibly warm arms of Cam’s father.
Immediate recognition in his eyes, Cam’s father knows what he is about to hear. He knows what Avery must say, and he knows why Avery is accompanied by the other officers. The older men remain with Avery as much for the family’s support as for Avery. “Murph,” he says, his voice cracking as Charley dissolves where he holds her still, all the spirit suddenly sucked from her chest. Avery does not know to whom he is speaking until he follows his gaze to the face of Staff Sergeant Reed. “I thought you’d have eaten it by now,” continues Cam’s father.
“We need to sit down,” he says to Charley and Rose. “We need to listen to what they’re going to say.”
Charley pushes her way free of the restricting arms and walks alone to the kitchen table, cut from strong oak, upon which a chicken sits half carved. She does not care to hear what is said; around her, the entire world mumbles with a masculine sureness.
“Which is it?” asks Cam’s mother of Murph. Rose does not know the other two men who now sit across from her. They are divided, servicemen and citizens, across the table. The men could be across an ocean, across the world; Murph is the only man with emotion in his eyes. She is the only man she can touch — the others are too distant— when she rests her hands on the smoothed tabletop.
Murph does not answer immediately, so she poses her question again, her voice scratching through the octaves as she grows more desperate for an answer. “Who is it?”
“It’s Cam.” The name of her son falls harshly from Murph’s lips. He glances to the table but then meets her eyes. “Cam.” Master Sergeant Murphy Reed, known to his friends as Murph, repeats the name of the deadman, thinking only of the teenager he knew, the man he respected and the family —decorated brother, retired father, working mother, weeping widow, and slumbering child— he inadvertently left behind.