Under the Oak Pt. 02

Inspired by the Dixie Chicks 'Travellin' Soldier'

Remy Landry returns to the Atchafalaya pier as a ghost, haunted by the promise he broke to Natalie Le Beau. Through flashbacks, he relives the day he fell in love with her, her pink dress, her guitar, their desperate coupling under the oak, while the river carries the weight of his unkept vow.

The wood creaks under my boots, and for a second I freeze, a force of habit, the jungle still running through my legs like a current I can't shut off.

Then I remember where I am. The Atchafalaya moves slow and dark beneath the planks, the same river I grew up watching from this exact spot, and the smell hits me mud, brine, the green rot of cypress pushing up through the water line. Home. Louisiana. September, and the air sits thick enough to chew.

I shouldn't be here. I know that.

The medal they pinned on my chest at Fort Polx says I shouldn't be anywhere anymore. The chaplain's letter is still folded in my breast pocket, underneath the photograph I've carried across the Pacific and back, creased soft at the edges from handling.

But the pier is here, and the oak is here, and the moss sways in the warm night air like it doesn't know about body counts or triage tents or the sound a man makes when shrapnel opens his chest up like a window.

And most importantly my heart is here, the heart I gave to Natalie. It lives here.

I take another step. The wood groans. I stop again, and this time I let out the breath I've been holding since Da Nang.

The oak tree spreads its arms over the pier the way it did when I was a kid, when my old man would bring me out here with a cane pole and a can of worms and we'd sit in the quiet. The trunk is wider than I remember, the bark furrowed deep, and the roots have buckled more of the planking. Time passed here while I was gone. Time passed here while I was dying. Dying in the mud of some god forsaken jungle. A forsaken Jungle in a foreign land. I became a number a faceless number. I went to 'Nam scared, I came back dead. Dead and angry.

I sit down on the edge of the pier, my legs hanging over, the uniform pants bunching at the knee. I'm still wearing the class A's.

Couldn't bring myself to change. The fabric holds the shape of the last year like a mould creased where my knees bent in the transport plane, stained dark at the cuffs where the red dust of Quảng Trị ground into the weave and wouldn't wash out no matter how many times the Army laundry scrubbed it.

I can still smell it. Under the starch and the brass polish, underneath everything, there's that rust-and-copper tang that lives in my sinuses now.

Blood. Not mine. That's the thing people don't understand about medics. The blood we carry isn't ours. The pain we carry isn't necessarily someone else's.

I pull the photograph from my breast pocket. The crease runs right through her through Natalie's face, splitting her smile in two halves that don't quite line up anymore. She's wearing the pink waitress dress, the one with the white cuffs and the apron strings tied in a bow at the small of her back. Her hair is pulled up with a pink bow, and her blue eyes catch the flash of whoever took the picture. She's holding a tray of water glasses, and she's laughing at something off-camera, and she doesn't know yet that the boy she sat with at the counter is going to fall in love with her in the space of a single shift.

I run my thumb over the crease. The paper is soft as cloth. I sit there and I think back to it the day we met.

________________________________________

June. The dry heat of a Louisiana afternoon, the kind that makes the air shimmer over the asphalt of the parking lot and turns the vinyl seats inside Mae's Diner into branding irons. I push through the door, and the bell above it chimes, and the cold air from the box unit hits me like I'm walking into a wall.

The place is a postcard. Pink vinyl stools lined up at the counter, checkered floor tiles white and black, a clock behind the register reading ten-forty even though it's two in the afternoon nobody's fixed it in years, maybe nobody ever will. The whole room smells like pecan pie and sweet potato and the bacon grease that lives in the flat top.

My stomach clenches. I haven't eaten since Fort Hood, and the idea of sitting down in a place where nobody knows my name or my orders feels like the first breath after holding too long.

I take a booth at the far end of the counter. The uniform draws looks, I can feel them, the way the conversations at the nearest booths dip and resume. A soldier in class A's in a small town means one thing: somebody's shipping out. They know it. I know it. The knowledge sits between us like a shared secret nobody wants to say out loud.

I study the laminated menu, not because I'm reading it but because I need somewhere to put my eyes. My hands are shaking. They've been doing that since they handed me my orders at Fort Ord, a fine tremor that lives in my fingers now, and I press them flat against the counter to make it stop. It doesn't.

"Sit anywhere you want, hon. Counter's open." She says.

Her voice pulls me out of the menu. I look up, and she's standing on the other side of the booth with a coffee pot in one hand and her hip cocked.

Pink dress. Pink bow in her hair. Pink lipstick that makes her mouth look like something you'd want to taste. She's looking at me with an expression I can't read not pity, not curiosity, something in between.

"You want coffee?" She asks me.

I nod. She pours, and the steam rises between us, and her fingers brush mine as she sets the cup down. Her nails are pink. The contact lasts less than a second, but something shifts in my chest, a gear catching on a tooth it didn't expect.

"You're from around here," she says. Not a question.

"Breaux Bridge. My family's out past the cane fields, Rousseau Road." I say. I turn the cup in my hands. The ceramic is warm and solid and doesn't flinch when I touch it.

"I'm on leave. Headed to California, then." I say but I don't finish the sentence. I don't need to. She nods, and the pink bow in her hair bobs with the motion, and she doesn't say she's sorry, which I appreciate more than she'll ever know.

"Natalie," she says, tapping the name tag on her chest with one pink fingernail.

"And you look like you need pie more than you need conversation."

"I need both, probably." I admit.

She laughs. The sound lands in my chest like a small bell being struck. Then she pulls a plate from under the counter, cuts a wedge of pecan pie that's bigger than regulation, and slides it across to me.

"On the house," she says.

"For local boys going far away." She says with a warm smile.

I eat the pie. She refills my coffee twice. The diner empties out as the afternoon leans in, the regulars drifting home, the clock still broken on the wall. And then she does something I don't expect, she comes around the booth and sits next to me.

The pink dress rustles as she settles, and her knee brushes mine under the table and she doesn't move it away.

"You're shaking," she says quietly. She's looking at my hands.

I pull them off the counter, curl them into fists on my thighs.

"Nervous habit." I say trying to convince myself more than anyone.

"You're scared." She says.

I meet her eyes. Blue. The same blue as the river at dusk, the kind that looks like it goes all the way down to something you can't see the bottom of. I could lie.

I've been lying to everyone, my mother, my sisters, the guys in my unit. Telling them I'm fine, telling them it's just a job, telling them the training's prepared me for what's coming. But Natalie's sitting close enough that I can smell her soap and sugar and something floral underneath, something that belongs just to her, and the lie won't form. I'm scared shitless.

"Yeah," I say.

"I'm scared." I quietly admit. Quietly because the patrons here all look like the sort who have fought their own wars, but their war was different it was in Europe or the Pacific, it was a popular war against a defined enemy. It isn't mine.

She reaches over and puts her hand on my fist. Her palm is warm and small, and her pink nails press lightly against my knuckles, and something inside me that's been wound tight for weeks eases back just a fraction.

"I know a place," she says.

"If you want to see it." She says her voice slightly hinting at something.

I should say no. I should pay my check, get up and wait for my bus and head on my way.

But Natalie's hand is on mine, and her eyes are the colour of the river, and I'm shipping out in forty-eight hours, and I say yes.

________________________________________

The pier. She leads me through the back paths behind the cane fields, through a gap in the fence line I didn't know existed, past the crawfish ponds where the surface goes glassy-still in the late light.

The path opens onto the old oak, and the pier stretches out under its canopy like it's been waiting.

Spanish moss hangs from the branches in long grey curtains that sway in the evening air. The river moves dark and patient beneath the planks. The sky is going purple at the edges, the last heat of the day lifting off the water in visible waves.

I stop. She stops beside me. The quiet here isn't empty, it's full, full of crickets and the low drone of cicadas and the lap of water against the pilings. Full of the kind of peace I haven't felt since before my number came up in the draft.

"I used to come here as a kid," I say.

"With my old man. We'd fish until dark." I say reminiscing.

She sets her guitar case down against the trunk of the oak.

"I come here to play. Nobody can hear you out here but the river."

"You played for me once," I say, and then realize I've said it wrong, I haven't heard her play yet. But she doesn't correct me. She just looks at me with those blue eyes, and her mouth curves, and she says:

"I haven't yet." She says to me correcting me.

The air shifts. Something passes between us that has weight and texture, something I can almost hold. She reaches for the top button of her dress, and I catch her wrist, gently, the way you'd hold a bird.

"You don't have to." I say.

"I know I don't have to." She turns her wrist in my grip until her palm presses against mine, fingers lacing.

"I want to." She says.

I pull her in. She comes up against my chest, and the brass buttons of my uniform press into the soft cotton of her dress, and her breath catches. I lean down, and my mouth finds hers.

She tastes like pecan pie. Like sugar and butter and the faint bitterness of the coffee she's been drinking all shift. Her lips are soft and give under mine, and her pink lipstick smears, and her hand comes up to grip the back of my neck, fingers threading into the short hair above my collar. I hold her waist with both hands, feeling the warmth of her through the thin fabric, feeling the way her body fits against mine like a question being answered.

She steps back. Reaches for her buttons again. This time I don't stop her.

The pink dress comes off one button at a time, cuffs first, then the collar, then the line of small pearl buttons down the front. The fabric parts, and underneath she's wearing a white cotton slip, simple, thin enough that I can see the shadow of her nipples pressing through. She shrugs the dress off her shoulders, lets it fall, and the pink fabric pools at her feet like something spilling.

She unhooks the slip. Pulls it over her head. Stands in the purple light in just her white bra and panties, her hair coming loose from the pink bow, and I can see the fine hairs on her arms raised in the cooling air. Her skin is fair, almost translucent in places, the inside of her wrists, the hollow of her throat, and she's trembling, but not from cold.

I pull my tie loose. Unbutton the jacket, the shirt underneath. My hands have stopped shaking for the first time in weeks.

I strip down to my undershirt, my pants, and she watches me with an expression that makes my chest ache. Not hunger exactly, recognition. Like she's seeing something she's been looking for.

"Come here," she whispers.

I do. She reaches for my undershirt, pulls it free, runs her palms up my chest, and I pull the bra straps down her shoulders, unhook the clasp with fingers that somehow know what they're doing.

The fabric falls away, and her breasts are bare, C-cup, pink nipples already peaked in the evening air, pink areolas that pucker under my gaze. I bend my head and take one nipple into my mouth, and she makes a sound, a soft, broken note that goes straight through me.

I tongue the nipple, circling it, then sucking gently, and her hand fists in my hair. I move to the other breast, giving it the same attention, my free hand cupping the first, thumb rolling the wet nipple. She arches into me, pressing herself against my mouth, and her breathing goes ragged.

"Remy," she breathes.

"Remy, please." She begs softly.

I pull her down to the planks of the pier. She lies back, and her hair spreads out around her head like a halo, and the Spanish moss sways above us in the oak branches like the whole world is breathing.

I kneel between her legs, run my hands up her thighs, and she lifts her hips so I can pull the panties down.

Her pussy is bare except for a trimmed patch of dark blonde hair, and her pink lips are already glistening.

I can smell her musk and salt, the heat rising from between her legs like something alive.

I lower my mouth to her. The first taste of her hits me like a drug, slick and warm, her juices coating my tongue as I drag it through her folds. She cries out, her back arching off the planks, her hands grabbing the wood on either side of her. I find her clit, circle it with the tip of my tongue, then suck it between my lips, and her hips buck.

I lap at her cunt, in long strokes that gather her wetness and spread it, then short, focused ones that make her thighs clench against my head.

Her moans fill the space under the oak, high, breathless, the kind of sounds that make my cock strain against my uniform pants.

I slide a finger inside her. She's tight, her walls gripping me, and I curl it upward, finding the spot, pressing. She screams a raw, unguarded sound that scatters the birds from the branches above.

"Ah! Ah! God, Remy, your tongue is so good, my pussy is being licked by your tongue so good." She moans.

I keep going. Two fingers now, pumping in and out, my mouth sealed over her clit, and I can feel her building. Her thighs are shaking, her breath coming in short pants.

"I CAN'T! I'M ABOUT TO! AH! AH! I, I, I CAN'T STAND IT, I'M ABOUT TO! HELP, HELP ME, AH, AH!" She cries.

She breaks. Her cunt clamps down on my fingers, spasming, and she floods my mouth with her cum. I keep licking through it, drawing out every wave, until she pushes my head away and lies there gasping, her chest heaving, her nipples tight and wet from the evening air.

I strip off my pants. My cock stands hard and heavy between us ten inches, thick, the head flushed dark with blood. Her eyes go wide when she sees it, and she licks her lips, and that single gesture nearly undoes me. Nearly undoes then and there.

I settle between her legs. The head of my cock presses against her entrance, and she's so wet that I slide in with one long thrust.

She takes all of me, I can feel her cervix kissing the tip, her walls stretching to accommodate every inch. Her mouth opens in a silent cry, her eyes fluttering shut.

"Fuck," I breathe.

"Natalie, you feel." I murmur.

"So full," she gasps.

"You're so big, you're so deep, my pussy is being filled by your cock so deep." She says but her voice is more of a whimper.

I pull back, thrust in again. The pier creaks beneath us. I set a rhythm, deep, slow, savouring every inch of her, watching her face as she takes me.

Her hands grip my shoulders, her nails pressing crescents into my skin through the undershirt I'm still half-wearing.

I speed up. The wet sounds of our fucking fill the afternoon, the squelch of her cunt around my cock, the slap of my balls against her ass, our breathing coming in gasps and grunts.

She wraps her legs around my waist, pulling me deeper, and I drive into her harder.

"Ah! Ah! you're so fierce, so firm! Ah!" She says as she runs her hand down my back.

I can feel her tightening again, her walls rippling along my shaft. I'm close too, the pressure building in my balls, my cock throbbing inside her. I reach between us, find her clit, and I press.

She comes apart. Her back arches off the planks, her mouth opens in a scream that the river swallows, and her cunt milks me in rhythmic pulses. I thrust deep one final time and bury myself to the hilt, and my cock erupts inside her pulse after pulse of cum flooding her, filling her, marking her from the inside. I can feel it overflowing, leaking out around my shaft, pooling on the weathered wood beneath us.

I collapse beside her. We lie there under the oak, the moss swaying above, the river dark and slow below, and her head finds my chest. My arms go around her. The world narrows to this--her breath on my skin, the heat of her body, the fading echo of our heartbeats.

"Come back," she whispers.

"Promise me you'll come back." He says as she holds my hand.

I press my lips to her hair.

"I promise." I say.

________________________________________

I didn't keep that promise. The photograph in my hand knows it, the crease through her face knows it, the medal in my duffel knows it. I made a promise on this pier under this oak, and I broke it in a province I can't pronounce, in mud that swallowed everything.

I kept my promise to be faithful, despite many temptations, from white, red cross girls, to the multitude of Vietnamese girls both Civvies and Whores. I didn't touch another woman while I was away. Unlike everyone else in my platoon. Officer's included.

The letters. I wrote them every week from Fort Ord, then from Da Nang, then from the fire base outside Quảng Trị. I told her about the Pacific, how it looked nothing like the Gulf, how it was too blue, too vast, how it made me think of her eyes. I told her about the other members of my unit.

Petersen from Minnesota who played guitar like she did, Kovacs from Jersey who cursed in Hebrew when the mortars came in. Wilson from California, blonde tall blue eyed who had a peace sign on his helmet. Mo the black man from Detroit, solid like a brick outhouse. Who initially distrusted me because of where I was from.

I told her I carried her photo in my breast pocket, over my heart, where the chaplain said the soul lived.

It was in March. The ambush came on a Tuesday. I remember that because the day before I'd been reading her last letter she'd graduated high school, she was playing guitar on the pier, she was waiting for me and then on a Tuesday morning the tree line exploded and we were in the mud and the blood and the screaming.

I had my hands inside a man's chest trying to find the bleed, and the second round came through the canopy, and I knew I knew in the half-second before it happened, that the photograph was going to get wet. The red cross is no protection in that situation, a Chinese made bullet doesn't know.

I don't remember dying. I remember the light going strange, going gold at the edges, and I remember thinking of the oak tree, of the Spanish moss, of Natalie's pink lips and the way she said my name. Then nothing. Darkness. Then here.

________________________________________

I sit on the pier with my legs over the edge, the photograph in my hands. The night is full and warm around me. Somewhere in town, a football game is letting out--I can hear the distant echo of the PA system, the murmur of the crowd. They read my name tonight. I know because I was there, standing at the edge of the field where nobody could see me, listening to the silence that fell over the bleachers like a shroud.

Natalie heard it too. I watched her leave her white sweater, her loose hair, her face going blank the way faces go when the world removes something essential.

I watched her walk here. I watched her sit down with her guitar. Sit down and gaze into nothing, no tears, just quiet and blank.

She's not here now. The pier is empty. But I can still see the ghost of her, her guitar across her lap, her pink nails pressing into her palms, her pink lipstick fresh like she put it on for him. For me.

I don't know how ghosts work. I don't know if I'm a memory or a haunt or just the last stubborn echo of a man who wasn't ready to stop loving. But I know this pier, this river, this oak. And I know that somewhere in this town, in a house on a street I can't find, there's a shoebox full of letters under a bed, and a woman who plays guitar in the dark, and a promise I couldn't keep. A ring that was in my chest pocket a ring she will never wear. And I cry. Yes it is possible for ghosts to cry.

I set the photograph down on the planks. The crease through her face catches the moonlight. The river moves slow and dark beneath me, and the Spanish moss sways in the warm air, and I sit on the pier where I fell in love with a girl in a pink dress, and I wait.

I wait and I wait. Knowing she will come. And I will watch over her. I couldn't keep my promise, but I keep it in another way.