Duty, Honor, Country
By Shannon Frost Greenstein
Ashley stared at the rental clerk, then blinked a few times like a disgruntled owl.
“What do you mean the car isn’t here?”
“Well, the inventory log has it, but the supply log still has it out with the Duane Morris team, and their contract stipulates they’re entitled to a late drop-off…”
Running an aggrieved hand through her dirty hair, Ashley sighed with thinly-veiled frustration. The plane had been delayed and cancelled and deplaned; then the rescheduled flight had also been delayed. She hadn’t brushed her teeth in over 24 hours. Her laptop battery was dead.
“Do you know when it might be available?” she interrupted the clerk, who was still cataloging the discrepancy between the inventory and supply logs in painful detail. “I’m kind of in a hurry.”
Renting the car was supposed to be the easy part. Getting time off for the funeral, arranging for childcare, finding a cab, racing to the airport straight from court…those were the elements about which she had been worried. Grabbing a Toyota from the Hertz rental desk was not supposed to be the bit that caused (what was shaping up to be) an imminent mental breakdown.
“Well…not until after 3:00,” the clerk apologized meekly, and Ashley groaned. The funeral started at 3, and she still had to make the two-hour drive to New York.
Mentally composing the apology she would now have to send to her childhood best friend for missing her dad’s funeral, it took Ashley a moment to realize the clerk was still talking.
“…but we do have another vehicle that’s available now.”
“I’m sorry, what?” she questioned.
“I said, we do have another vehicle available.”
Why didn’t he say that in the first place? wondered her inner monologue, and Ashley was inclined to agree.
“Oh!” she responded with surprise. “Well…that’s great!”
“Yup,” agreed the clerk, noticeably relieved that Ashley was not demanding to speak with a manager. “If you’ll just sign here, and here…”
Signing away her right to litigate if she was dismembered while in the rental car, Ashley gathered her suitcase and carry-on and laptop and purse and followed the clerk into the lot.
###
Lauren’s dad was as much a set dressing to Ashley’s childhood as Capri Suns and Freeze Tag and the endless hours spent dressing Barbies in Lauren’s basement. She had never felt quite comfortable around First Lieutenant Robert Matthews III – something about his eyes when he was gazing at football on the television, the air of tension that seemed to trail after him from room to room like a wake, so that even when he was on the floor playing with the girls, Ashley felt a vague sense of approaching danger, a threat dancing right outside her periphery – but she had been unquestioningly welcome in the Matthews’ house for all eighteen years of her childhood, as well as semester breaks, graduation parties, Lauren’s bridal and baby showers…her whole life, that is to say.
When Lauren called in tears to tell Ashley her father had passed, Ashley had sworn to her friend she would attend the funeral for moral support. And she remained determined to keep that promise, even after the deposition was scheduled, even after she and her boyfriend broke up, even after her own mother had broken her hip.
Ashley was proud of herself for not flaking on her oldest and dearest friend, despite the tempest into which her life was devolving. But, damn, getting to New York was shaping up to be a lot.
###
If a car could scream, this one would be bellowing bloody-murder.
Ashley stared in silent horror at the monstrosity parked before her. The Ford Mustang was certainly in fine shape; there was not a dent or scrape to sully the sleek curves of the best aerodynamics of which the best-paid engineers could conceive. But it was ostentatious and garish and campy; it oozed sex like condensation from every seam.
It was neon orange.
“Um…,” she started.
“It’s a 2013 Mustang Shelby GT500,” lectured the clerk. “662 horsepower, 5.8 liter V-8 engine. 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds!”
“Is it…like, is it a stick?” Ashley questioned inarticulately. “Does it drive…normally?”
After assuring Ashley she was indeed capable of piloting a $50,000 car, the clerk hurried back inside, looking relieved to no longer be associated with the neon-orange Mustang and its new, extremely uneasy occupant.
Ashley gingerly climbed inside the vehicle, certain she was defacing the shiny paint and leather interior simply by exhaling. It took a full ten minutes of trial and error, as well as two glimpses at the Owner’s Manual, to figure out how to hook up her phone to the ridiculously complicated interface that apparently controlled everything from the radio to the humidity level to peace in the Middle East.
Finally, finally, she was ready to go.
She reversed carefully, allowing the car to drift in a slow half-circle while marveling over the quality of the backup camera. Then she shifted into drive and, sending up a silent prayer to a deity in whom she didn’t believe, pointed her foot against the gas pedal.
The sound of stray cats fighting over squalling prey would have been less jarring than the roar of the Mustang’s engine in the silent morning. Ashley winced as if she had committed a faux pas, accustomed as she was to the austere quiet of a courtroom. She signaled and turned out of the parking lot, heading for the highway, and the Mustang shot forward faster than she would have thought possible.
Well, shit, her inner monologue spoke up. This is going to be a whole thing.
And, shaking her head briskly to dispel the exhaustion accumulating behind her eyes – alternatively checking her watch and her speedometer, destined for a two-hour cycle of accidentally surpassing the speed limit by 20 MPH and guiltily slowing – she set off for West Point.
###
General George Washington considered West Point to be the most important strategic location in America; as such, President Jefferson signed legislation that established the West Point United States Military Academy on March 16, 1802. Since then, it has pumped out the Who’s Who of Uncle Sam’s favorite nieces and nephews, men and women who would go on to become astronauts, senators, humanitarians, war criminals.
And, of course, it produced one First Lieutenant Richard Matthews III, who had always towered over Ashley and Lauren when they were sitting down to dinner, who had embodied the Irresistible Force Paradox with every action he took, who had looked so insignificant and meaningless from the cancer when Ashley saw him last, at Lauren’s daughter’s birthday party several months ago.
Be honest, criticized her inner monologue as she drove along I-84. You were glad you didn’t have to avoid talking politics with him that last time.
That, of course, was true; talking politics with Lauren’s dad was something Ashley had vowed never to attempt again after the first time she tried to defend voting for Bernie.
As a District Attorney, Ashley’s progressive social values were well-documented. She publicly endorsed the decriminalization of the sex work industry; she worked pro bono for those with life sentences due to mandatory minimums; she had smoked a shit-ton of pot in college. She cared deeply about survivors, about victims, about the have-nots who have forever endured inequity and injustice at the hands of the haves. The U.S. Military industrial complex was not Ashley’s favorite feature of the United States, and she had always had strong ethical objections to her country’s habit of automatically feeding young men and women into its overly-zealous standing army.
The juxtaposition of all these salient points was giving Ashley a headache, as were the dark clouds beginning to descend from the troposphere, the barometer dropping accordingly. She drove on autopilot, her subconscious obsessing about being late and the adrenaline that had gotten her through the morning pretty much spent. And then, suddenly, an imposing structure was dominating the horizon, blocking out the sunbeams, an ashen fortress looking every inch like it could withstand the test of time.
It was stoic and foreboding and mildly depressing, like traversing the United States by train and feeling melancholy somewhere in the middle amongst the rolling hills and corn. With the clouding sky and the threatening rain, it felt perfect for a funeral…except a funeral also felt intrinsically wrong, like something alien and foreign, like something that did not belong. Funerals suddenly seemed to Ashley to be the exact antitheses to life itself, and it was with these thoughts of mortality pinging around her skull that she made her exit.
###
Ashley thought the height of self-consciousness would be walking in front of two dozen horny contractors during their lunch break, or having the servers at a chain restaurant descend unexpectedly with an enthusiastic round of “Happy Birthday,” or giving an important speech without remembering pants; but she was entirely wrong.
The height of self-consciousness, it turns out, is driving down Thayer Road towards the West Point United States Military Academy in a car intended solely for men currently mourning their virility and youth, every detail inextricably tied up in a messy knot of Freudian dynamics and Oedipal urges and the universal allure of well-crafted machinery.
And the car, meanwhile, is neon orange.
What the hell are you doing here? questioned Ashley’s inner monologue as she approached the first checkpoint, a uniformed sentry regarding the Mustang suspiciously the closer she drew to the guard house.
I’m supporting Lauren, Ashley responded in kind, falling back on the phrase like a mantra, hoping it was strong enough to combat the urge with which she was currently grappling to bang a U-turn with a squealing of tires and speed away from this entire, increasingly-overwhelming situation.
The soldier arrived at the driver’s side of the car, and Ashley nervously rolled down her window.
Ask him if he’s ever shot anyone, suggested her inner monologue, and she shut it down like the slamming of a door.
“Hi,” she ventured, her voice quavering for a reason of which she was not quite conscious. “I’m here for the Richard Matthews’ funeral?”
“Name?” demanded the guard, the array of badges on his chest signifying a rank Ashley did know could run the gamut from private to Commodore General, but did not know which was which or in which order.
“Ashley Williams?” she answered, her voice rising uncertainly at the end, as if she was unsure of even her identity within this unfamiliar paradigm, the polar opposite of how she felt at the George Floyd protests and the “die-in” over police brutality on the steps of City Hall.
“ID?” he ordered next, and Ashley wondered why the man had even bothered to ask for her name in the first place; then, with a quick glance at the line of his jaw, she let it go. She fished through her handbag on the passenger seat, her eyes returning again and again to the soldier’s service pistol, a sleek black firearm hovering at face-level outside her window, a synecdoche for everything Ashley found intolerable about her home nation, the respect for the U.S. government which led her to pursue the art of law notwithstanding.
She handed over her ID, watching as the man disappeared into the guardhouse to…confirm she wasn’t a fugitive, or some such official security measure Ashley assumed was standard protocol. She sat and waited, checking the time once again, dimly worrying in the back of her mind about any unpaid parking tickets the soldier might be able to see on his screen.
Finally, he returned, handing Ashley her ID, speaking instructions into a handheld radio that made very little sense to her untrained ear. She tucked her license back in her bag and prepared to roll past the boom gate the moment it was opened; everything about this encounter was giving her the creeps.
“Step out of the car, ma’am.”
Ashley gaped at the guard, confused by this direction, suddenly positive there were unpaid parking tickets, and so many of them she was about to be arrested.
“I’m sorry?” she managed.
“Standard operating procedure,” he informed her dispassionately. “We need to search your vehicle.”
Hide all the drugs! joked Ashley’s inner monologue, running totally rogue by this point and adding yet another dimension to her unfounded paranoia that she was in trouble with the U.S. military.
“Um…ok,” Ashley answered uncertainly, shifting the gear into Park, opening the driver’s side door, stepping out onto shaky limbs – numb after the long drive – tingles immediately coursing from her toes up through her legs.
She stood off to the side, shifting her weight from foot to foot, feeling oddly conspicuous, as if she had been pulled over by the highway patrol for speeding and was now being regarded with pity by all the evening commuters. The sentry looked under the steering wheel and in the glove compartment; he ran his hands over the fabric of the seats. He checked beneath the floor rugs and in the console, then popped the trunk and searched beneath Ashley’s spare tire.
Apparently having confirmed the lack of explosives in her vehicle, the man gestured wordlessly for Ashley to climb back in the car. He returned to the guard house, fiddled with a switch, and beckoned the Mustang forward as the boom gate rose.
Relieved, Ashley rebuckled her seat belt and shifted into Drive. Stepping gently on the gas, she suddenly remembered there was an entire funeral still to follow this ridiculous ordeal; she suddenly felt indescribably weary.
She eased the car through the checkpoint, pausing as she drew abreast of the window where the guard was now perched on a stool, wondering if this would be the part where she was fingerprinted or if she was actually permitted to finally enter the campus of the seminal military academy in all of U.S. history.
The soldier saluted crisply, posture ramrod straight, spine frozen perpendicular to the ground, the most upstanding biped since Sahelanthropus tchadensis first stood upright. Then his face cracked into an admiring smile.
“Duty. Honor. Country. Nice car, ma’am.”
###
The funeral procession…was awkward.
THE END
Author Bio: Shannon Frost Greenstein resides in Philadelphia with her children and soulmate. She is the author of “The Wendigo of Wall Street,” a forthcoming novella with Emerge Literary Press, and “These Are a Few of My Least Favorite Things,” a full-length poetry collection with Really Serious Lit. Shannon is a former Ph.D. candidate in Continental Philosophy and a multi-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Pithead Chapel, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. Follow her on her website at shannonfrostgreenstein.com or on Twitter at @ShannonFrostGre. Insta: @zarathustra_speaks