Janna Moretti
Night at Smith’s Ranch Drive-In, 1998
Lanette hasn’t had Big League Chew since she tongued it through Olsen’s lips the night they went from fellow Marines to lovers in the bed of his navy-blue pickup truck. Light from the drive-in screen cast moving shadows over them, him fighting to untuck her shirt while she toed his jeans down from knees to ankles with her sandaled feet. A quiet voice and then a louder one played through the speaker on the pole. Other Marines in other cars nearby took shots of liquor. Caps of cold cans of beer cracked open. Olsen said over the symphonic music, “I’ve been wanting this ever since the platoon’s run up Sugar Cookie when you passed everyone but me,” and she told him to shut up so he did.
Lanette chews, remembers the day prior to that night at the Smith’s Ranch Drive-In, how she was unable to keep her bearing when marching the men for the first time from the barracks to the radio technician classroom. At the command right face she laughed and at forward march she laughed harder for having said harch. Afterwards in the smoke pit, Olsen said, “You know, it’s okay to give a fuck.” She spit on the ground and told him to fuck off. They avoided each other’s gaze the rest of that day. Prior to service Olsen had been a survival expert in Alaska, cutting guts from animals he’d bow shot. Lanette used to skate burgers and dogs on trays to parked cars in Jersey.
It had been 20 years since she had thought of Wyatt Olsen, how he loved when she tucked the gum into the well of her lip, called it chaw. What ever happened to him? Did he marry that girl back home who sent him letters every so often? Did he ever think of Lanette through the years in some cold place when setting the loop on a snare, stilling a dead-fall trap?
Two reenlistments and an ex-husband later, Lanette left active duty but stayed around Twentynine Palms, California. At a park, at a dry-rotted picnic table, the heat lines making waves of straight things, her daughter fists her another paw of Big League Chew. Lanette pulls a single pink strand at a time from her daughter’s hand, rolling each into a tiny snail shell. On her palm five snail shells lay before she mashes them into one flat disk and sticks it into the back of her mouth on a deep far molar. Before long, the gum turns so sweet it slips into a swallow, before ever losing flavor, before ever turning stiff enough to spit out.
“I felt nostalgic about my time in the Marines, the Mojave Desert, the late 90s. I thought of the first line of the story, then the story took off on its own with made-up people in the real places I’d been while stationed in Twentynine Palms, California.” —Janna Moretti
Janna Moretti is a Marine Corps veteran whose work has been published by Southeast Review, Raleigh Review, The Panacea Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of University of Florida’s MFA program in Fiction, she teaches writing at Sante Fe College in Gainesville, Florida, where she lives with her husband and daughter.
