Fixers

Fixers

I never really thought about relationships before Mel. It ain’t often you meet someone that understands you instantly. It makes everything in your life that much easier.

We met up in Los Alamitos, at the base. I had been there for three years; I’d go out with the fellas and all. Those guys were getting with girls left and right, but nothing ever took for me. They all said I was, what’s that dumb word? Standoffish. What a stupid word that some idiot made up. I just didn’t meet up with women right. Wasn’t ever good at it.

The only things I was good at is soldiering and fixing stuff. I worked as a mechanic in the Army, and damn it I was good at it. I just love working on stuff: cars, bikes, copters, whatever. If I could put a wrench on it I loved it. There isn’t a feeling in the world like making something work that wasn’t working. It’s like being god and breathing life into the world.

I rode my bike a lot. It’s a good thing to have when you want to be alone. A motorcycle with a full tank of gas, on the California coast, it’s as close to heaven as I’ll ever get.

I throw on my leathers and roll. The thing about leathers is, it’s animal skin. Or at least it used to be. So when you put your leathers on, and you’re riding 80 miles an hour on the freeway, the wind whipping, it feels like you're the fast fastest animal ever.

That’s why I dug Mel so much. She rolled in one day on her V-twin, and pulled up near my bike. All the bikes park in the same place, a yellow square in the corner of the lot with white diagonal lines in it. It’s a good spot to park, right up by the building, so you can always see if someone has a bike. For the first three years I was there, mine was usually the only bike there. You don’t usually see bikes on the base too much, most people drive SUVs. So when I hear another bike come by, I always take a look.

So we got to talking; I’d see her by her bike about to leave, or in the mess. We’d mainly talk about bikes, or biker culture. Neither of us were into it to much; we were each the only other person we know who rode bikes but didn’t have tattoos.

After a week or so, I got up the nerve to ask her to go riding. After work, we got a bite then rode around for awhile, but the sunset was early. In bed that night, she said she didn’t know anybody out here, so she as really happy I asked. I told her the people I knew out here were the kind of people that go into and out of your life without making much of an impact.

She said she liked me the first time I peaked at her bike, but that she said this might be too fast for her. I told her I’d never slept with anyone on the first date before, and she said the same. Then she kissed me on the head and put her head on my chest.

We found out that we both entered the Army kind of the same way; a little older than normal, after doing other stuff first. I’d always been a mechanic, so when I joined they had me working on copters. It paid great, and the people treated you much better than at the shops I’d worked at.

Mel was a nurse practitioner for a while, but didn’t much like working in hospitals. She didn’t mind sick people or dying people. She couldn’t deal with the families visiting, though. It made her sick seeing what these people went through, sometimes they would get all pious and mean to her. She was always secretly happy if the patients didn’t have family. She figured being a medic in the army, she wouldn’t’ have to deal with families too much. She could just treat people, make them feel better and go home. She said it was liberating.

Those first few months were crazy. I didn’t know stuff like this actually happened. It just got better every day. Every weekend we’d go out riding, and lots of times we’d go far. We rode up to LA and sat up in the hills. We rode down to Baja, where the beaches have water that’s nice and warm. We even rode up to San Francisco one Friday night. We rode through the night, got there at sunrise and watched the sunrise over the hills from the top of the hotel, and then slept through the day, and rode right back the next night.

Even though I knew the roads better, I liked following Mel. She was really good at keeping her hair up at the base, but it was pretty long, and watching her dark hair flowing in the air, from under helmet, it always got me going.

Then, after a couple months, we rode out to Vegas one weekend, and got hitched. We both lost a lot of money that weekend, but we didn’t care too much.

Her parents were pissed though, so we flew up to Ohio one weekend so they could have a wedding, even though we were already married.

She liked to talk about her job, and I liked hearing her tell stories. She told stories all backwards; she’d tell you the end or the result, then she’d tell you how it happened. She was so good though, that by the time she got done telling what happened, I’d pretty much forgotten the end, so it was still kind of a surprise.

Nobody on the base was ever hurt too bad. Maybe a broken arm or leg in a training exercise, or sometimes a car accident near the base, that was about as bad as it got though. But the boys were respectful to her. They were all kids you know, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. All far from home. She was 29. They all called her ma’am. On the base, 29 is old, and she was one of the few women they were gonna see there. She was like a mother to some of those boys.

She liked to say we were both fixers. She fixed people and I fixed copters. I never really had too much to say about my job though. What was I going to tell her about, some nasty bolt I got unscrewed? It’s one of the things I liked about my job. I know how to fix stuff, so I don’t really need to think about it. I just went there and fixed it.

About a year after we got hitched, they said the country was going to war in Iraq. We didn’t pay too much mind; if we were gonna get sent, we were gonna get sent. Neither of us was combat, though, so if we get sent, we’d be back in twelve or thirteen months. We just told them to send us both at the same time. Neither of us wanted to sit here in California while the other was in Iraq. So it wasn’t gonna be too bad. About a year after that we got sent.

I got sent three days before Mel. That first night away from Mel was pure hell. I didn’t sleep at all. I really just tried to keep my mind on my mission, but it really didn’t help at all. The long flight over there was the first time I’d slept in a couple days.

She sent me an email just before she left, saying she cried all three nights before she left. I told her she couldn’t tell me that, I was hurting bad enough as it was. She said she wasn’t gonna tell me that anymore; every email after that just talked about seeing each other again and that kept me pretty positive. I just kept thinking, if it weren’t for the Army, we wouldn’t be together, but if it weren’t for the goddamn Army, we’d be together tonight.

We weren’t stationed close at all. She was stationed in the southern part of Iraq; I wasn’t really stationed anywhere. I was on a team of copter mechanics. We had a security detail, and they just sent us where there was a busted copter. Sometimes a copter would get shot down or crashed, they’d pile up all the pieces and we’d scavenge the pile for parts. It changes your perspective on things when you have to install a part that has blood on it. We had a big truck in our caravan and just got sent all over the place. We were never anywhere more than a few days.

Every once in awhile, we’d get sent to the south, and some of those times we set up at Mel’s camp. Seeing her, in the middle of the hot awful desert, was like seeing a goddess in the middle of hell.

Whenever we got sent to a camp, the camps always treated us well. They knew they couldn’t get shit done without their copters, so the better we were treated, the faster those copters were getting fixed.

I always let Mel know a couple days ahead if I was headed south to her camp. The head medic, Steve Bulm, was a really good guy, and sometimes, he'd set us up in his private digs for a night, which was like the Hilton compared to the 20 bed tents we were in sometimes.

The first night, after we made love, she just talked about how nice it would be back on the Pacific Coast Highway, or riding passed the crashing waves at Big Sur. I’d just tell her I’d be fine being back in our bed in Los Alamitos.

In the first nine months we were there, my team set up at Mel’s camp twice. Those times sustained us through all the hell and bloodshed. She told me she’d had more people die on her in nine months than in nine years of being a nurse. She said the toughest thing was when someone would come in wounded and in a hospital in California they’d be fine, but out there in the desert, with all those other soldiers, they just didn’t have enough to deal with it all. So the poor kid would die. She was so committed to fixing everybody that came in that should always thought she could save everyone. I guess that’s how you have to go into it, never say die, but it wore on her more and more each time I saw or heard from her.

My team was pretty fortunate. We moved around the country a lot, and traveling out there is just about the most dangerous thing there is there. We had the best mobile unit there; top class security detail, and they scouted the hell out of our routes. They cleared every IED well before we passed through, and we really only had four or five skirmishes with the enemy, and none of them all the bad. We only lost two guys the whole time there, and none of the mechanics died.

After the second time together, I told her I was getting sent pretty far, they had new batches of copters that need to be inspected before flying. We probably weren’t gonna see each other again before the end of our tours. We only had three or four months to go, so it wouldn’t be too long. She told me the next time we were together would be in our big bed in Los Alamitos, and we could go riding in the morning.

About a week later I got a call from Steve Bulm. He told me to sit down, and that Mel had died. He said there was a big firefight near the camp, and that Mel and the other medics got sent out to treat some of the wounded. She went in the mobile unit a couple times; the second time her and a doctor had this kid that was shot put pretty bad, but was trying hard as hell to stay alive. On the way back to camp, her unit drove by and IED and that was that. Everyone but the driver died; the doctor, the poor kid that was trying hard as hell to stay alive, and Mel. Steve Bulm was pretty beat up about it. He said she was his best medic. The driver just had some burns; he told Steve Bulm the story.

He said they were gonna put her on a plane back to Ohio for a funeral, and asked if I wanted to go; I said yes. And that was then end of our talk. I gave the phone to my commander, and just put my head in my hands. I got on a plane the next day over to Mel’s camp. Every guy there said she was the best. I went to Ohio the next day.

The funeral mercifully went by pretty quickly. Her older brother said a short eulogy. They wanted me to say something but I really couldn’t. I told her mother later that nothing made me feel better than being Mel’s husband. She gave me a hug. They said I’d always be welcome as family but I haven’t seen or heard much from them in the five years since.

A few months later, after the military gave me some money and an honorable discharge, I called an auto-body guy I know in Washington State, Paul Paiva, and we ended up opening a shop up there. It’s great working on cars again; I’m able to focus on fixing the cars and not think about too much. It feels good to just ride my bike, and avoid all the other stuff.