I'm not entirely sure where Erica found peppercorns and bay leaves in the pantry of my house. We had Tony Chachere's seasoning dating to the Carter Administration that I still used. She assured me that they were still good to use, and lightly tapped the side of my face with her hand when I looked at the expiration date. I laughed and left her to cook, leaning against the counter, admiring the shape of her thick legs and round ass. She sang while she cooked and I recognized the song. Lucero - "Chainlink Fence." She bent to retrieve a pot from under the stove and I caught a glimpse of another strange tattoo on her ass. From a distance it look like gibberish, but to pay attention it was another Metro Arms logo, and "A" overlaid onto an M. The same logo was actually part of her hammer. She laughed in between words to the song and turned to wink at me. I grinned, probably looking more like Zerg than I wanted to. I caught up with her on the chorus and stepped behind her. 
"Hold onto me...sweet girl. Don't let go for the world. 'Cause I'm not from here, and I'm afraid that I might never see you again."
I enveloped her in my arms and turned her chin towards me, pressing my lips to hers. We stayed that way for a while, her little body leaning against mine. A thought crossed my mind. 
"Sweetheart, what time is it?"
"Mmmm...." she glanced at the stove. "It's 1345. Why? SHIT!"
"Yeah. My mom gets home at 4:30, stepdad gets home at 5:00. How much longer does this have to cook?"
"Fifteen minutes."
I thought for a second and an idea hit me. I went into the garage and grabbed the broom off the wall. I bent it around my knee and dropped it in the kitchen floor. I grabbed my phone and sent my mom a text message. 
"Tripped on dog. OK. Broke broom."
I waited a few minutes and heard my phone vibrate.
"Ugh. I'll stop and get one. Do you want cigarettes? What kind of pizza? Tnx for sweeping. David stuck in Russelville."
"I just bought us a half hour. Let's enjoy our meal."
She kissed me again and I put my hand on her outer thigh, guiding it slowly up her skirt. She sighed and laid her head on my chest. We stood there for a second and I started making another pot of coffee. A few minutes later she was pulling the Adobo out of the oven. We ate quickly and still had 10 minutes to spare before my mom would get home. I let the dogs go out to the bathroom. While we were standing outside smoking my Pyrenees came out of his dogloo. He stretched hard and sat wagging his tail - message reads: Pet me fuckers STOP Bring me treats STOP I am good boy STOP Erica excitedly stepped over to him where my brother's Dane was licking the bear of a dog She kneeled and held out her hand for him to sniff. He woofed at her and then sniffed her again. A familiar smell. Bananas and alcohol. He smiled in the way the Great Pyrenees does and pawed at her, pushing his huge head against her sternum and whining. She hugged him tight and buried her face in his soft white fur. 
"Awh, Frances! I love you, sweet boy." 
He wooed again and jerked away quickly, his front feet splayed out, panting, his tail wagging. 
"Pounce game?! Yessss pounce game!"
They chased each other around in a tight circle until Frances laid over on his side and huffed. He wasn't tired, but he was sure lazy. She stroked his sides for a little and hugged him and planted a kiss right on top of his head. 
"Bye, sweet boy. Be back in a minute."
"Jesus, girl, you here for me or the dog?"
That earned me another love tap.
"I talk to him just like you do. I've seen you smooching his head and laying in the driveway with him watching clouds, you're so cute Chucks."
I felt my face redden and tried to keep from smiling. 
"Aw, Chucksh is blushin'. Sho Shweet."
She pinched my cheeks and kissed me on the forehead, having to pull my face downwards and stand on her tip-toes to do so. It was so weird at times how she could be outright motherly, when she had the personality of a 16 year old girl or younger. 
As the thought crossed my mind another flash. 
The smell of the sea, the sounds of birds, the bright blue sky. A song came from somewhere. 
"I'm...crazy. Crazy for feeling so lonely. Crazy. Crazy in love...with you."
The distant sounds of approaching engines growing louder. A klaxon alarm and a call to general orders. Running. Scrambling for an ammo can. Opening the feed trays of the twin M2HBs. Slamming them closed. Racking the large charging handles. A flash of black as a strange aircraft breaks across my vision. The heavy THUD THUD THUD THUD of the .50s firing. The aircraft smoking as it impacts the water in a brilliant geyser of debris and water. An impact is felt somewhere below and the concussion hits me before the blast. I roll backwards and in slow motion there sits the USS Arizona, almost white in the sunlight, beautiful and pristine, tracers leaping from her deck guns, men in white and blue uniforms scrambling to and fro upon her and firing rifles and subguns and a cook atop a deck firing a 1911 and over and over again like fire ants they scramble and they shoot and they scream and they cry and I swear I can hear the men and boys alike and the ship herself crying for God and for all of  their mothers and for all of the noise to just stop and somewhere below the sounds of a dying Arizona I hear a small, pleading voice growing large telling me to wake up, wake up Chucks, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to think of that, please wake up, please and then a flash and I am sitting on the floor of the garage, screaming.
I look around me and look at my hands. I see no uniform. My ears don't ring. There's no water or steel, just the warm light of the garage, the cheap wood panelling, the smell of cigarettes and coffee. Erica lifts me to my feet from under my arms and sets me in the red lawn chair in the corner. I'm shaking and I can't seem to catch my breath. She's crying and rubbing my hair. I lean back in the chair and manage to make a motion of two fingers tapping against my mouth and she hands me a cigarette. I take a drag and close my eyes. 
The sight of the ocean and the sounds of seabirds cause my blood to freeze. I hear her from somewhere, everywhere, nowhere. "It's okay. This isn't Pearl."
I turn to my right and she's sitting naked on a chair under a solitary palm, a bottle of San Miguel beer in one hand, a cigarette in the other. I step over to her and she hands me up a cold one from the cooler under the chair. It's early morning and the air is a brisk 80 degrees for this climate, the ocean breeze causing my shirt to dance around me. I sit next to her and twist the top off and take a long drink. 
"Hey Chucks, remember to breathe." I glance at her and wink, tilting the bottle back until it's empty. I lower it with a long sigh and take a drag on the cigarette. She slides her legs into my lap and I run my fingers through her black pubic hair.
She planted a kiss on my cheek and the same flash and I was in the chair in the garage. The anxiety and fear were gone, the vision of Pearl a distant memory. 
"You alright?"
"Yeah," I said. "What was that place?"
"I used to sneak off in the morning before the shop opened. I could blend in pretty well with the locals, so I'd go get a couple beers and sit out there and watch the sunrise, then I could be back in my rack at the warehouse in time for them to be none the wiser."
"Do you miss it?"
"Yeah but I wouldn't go back to the Philippines for anything. I'm an American design through and through. These white boys think they're going to go over there and it's going to be all sex, drinking, partying. For the first week, sure. Then you realize you have no money and the amenities suck. Most of the women propositioning you are prostitutes or looking for a green card. It smells like shit, I really get tired of Filipino food, and you get robbed trying to walk ten feet to a corner store from your hotel room. I love my country, but I love America more."
"Fair enough. Are you always able to do that? To...make me see these things? I mean I doubt you would make me experience Pearl fucking Harbor on purpose," I said. 
"It depends. When I'm excited or I have a lot of excess energy it just happens, I think. I can do it on my own but it takes a lot out of me. When it does it on its own I don't have much control."
"I see. Have you ever done that before?"
"Only once. Why do you think you got me for such a good price? I was bought from a pawn shop in Marshall. The guy that bought me never bothered with me, he just bought me to resell later. He went to shoot me once and I was so excited it just happened. He got to experience the siege of Khe Sanh first hand. He set me back in the box and didn't touch me again until you came along."
"Why hasn't this ever happened to me before?"
"Are you sure it hasn't? You keep having those nightmares for some reason, right?"
"Shit."
I thought about the dreams I kept having. I usually forgot them when I woke up, but I knew they were horrible and involved a lot of pain and death and terror. 
"I'll try to keep it under control, po. Usually if I have some other outlet I'm okay..."
The way she said it was dripping with innuendo, but I had other things going on and my folks would be home any minute. It was pushing 5:00. 
Just then I heard Frances woofing and heard my mom's Challenger pull into the driveway. "Erica, get in my pants."
"You don't have to tell me twice." Her gun form sat on the chair. I tucked her into my waistband and went to grab a cup of coffee.
I sipped my coffee and went back to my room and opened /k/. Should I mention Erica? No, those fucks will be scrambling to dox me so they can at best leer creepily at her and at worst steal her. I made my way to the /wfg/.
"Guys," I wrote. "You come back from coffee and a smoke to see that your 1911 is now a teenaged Filipino-American girl with big puppies. What do?"
The replies were pretty much what I expected.
>cuddles and headpats, Chucks. Cuddles and headpats.
>1911
>not Austrian Glock cutie
>Fuck her "ejection port" and send her to the kitchen
Just then I heard the dogs run to the door leading in from the garage and the sounds of keys landing on the counter. I rubbed my eyes and leaned my head back against the couch, preparing myself for the onslaught that was about to come. 
"CHUCKS!"
"Fuck."
"Chucks, when was the last time the dogs went out? Have you swept or cut the grass or done anything today?"
I sat Erica on the couch and told her to wait. I stood up and walked into the living room. From the kitchen counter my mom tossed my cigarettes to me. 
"Dogs just went out. I swept the floor, but with two hyperactive puppies there's not much point. Grass doesn't need cut, it's all dead." 
"Whatever. So you think you're going to move on down to Corpus, and build boat docks and party and drink and whore all the time!"
"...Yeah."
"Ugh. I don't know why I bother. Well. If you decide to go down there I'll give you some money but I don't wanna hear any of this 'mama I'm hungry please send money' or 'mama this was a mistake, can I come ho-," her eyes widened and I thought I almost saw her smile. "Well, who is this, Chucks?"
I turned to see Erica standing in the door of my room. 
Oh. Shit. 
"Mom, this is Erica, she uh...came over to get some help with her creative writing homework for college."
"Alright, well. You're old enough to know. You get her pregnant, that's your baby. I'm 47 years old and I'm not raising another kid."
"Okay. So about the job in Corpus..."
"Would you let me get in through the door before you start? Christ alive."
I walked back to the room and grabbed two duffel bags from the closet, one a traditional civilian bag embroidered with an obnoxious Eagle, Globe, and Anchor, the other a surplus military bag that was dated to before the Vietnam era. I began taking shirts and pants down from hangers and neatly folding them and packing them into the military bag. I managed to fit nearly everything I owned including two of my M81 BDU uniforms. Then came the civilian MUHREEEN duffle. I put my heavier items in this. I broke down an airshit M16A1 and AK-74M and wrapped them both in newspaper, lining the inside with socks and taping them shut with masking tape. Why did I even bother keeping them? I was twenty years old. I hadn't played in almost a year. Part of me was nostalgic, I suppose. The two replicas had seen me through some of the better times of my youth. I then packed in my ALICE gear, an aged Xbox 360, and two pairs of boots. I heard a snicker behind me. 
"Chucks, I'm astonished. Aren't you a bit old for playing with toys? Especially when you've got a real girl to keep you company."
"I can't legally shoot you at other people, though." 
"Fair enough. You sure you don't have any blow-up dolls in that closet as well?"
"I wish I had them before you showed up. Speaking of, why did you show yourself in human form to my mom?"
"You were really getting an ass chewing in there. I figured if I could make her think you'd finally met a girl that could tolerate you she'd ease off."
"That was nothing. It was just as likely she'd lose her shit at me for having someone, a female even, over when she wasn't home."
"Dude...you're a grown man."
"Tell her that."
"So why are you packing?"
"We," I said, looking at her and putting my hands on my knees. "are going to Corpus."