Page 36 of Scout Takes the Lead
I must have passed out, because I woke up to a police officer prodding me with his nightstick. “Come on, get up,” he said.
I looked around, and there were flashing red and blue lights everywhere. People were shouting and there must have been a half-dozen cop cars there. Scout was on his haunches beside me, staring intently at the cop. I grabbed Scout’s lead and stood up shakily.
The cop asked for my ID and I handed it to him. He used his flashlight to read it, then handed it back to me. “Far from home, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Had a bad night,” I said. “I started walking and didn’t realize how far I’d come from home.”
He shone his light directly into my eyes. “You’re not high. Looking for a fix?”
I shook my head. “I have PTSD,” I said. “I heard some gunshots and I must have passed out.”
He looked at me. “You do that often?”
“That’s why I have the dog,” I said, holding up Scout’s lead. He was still sitting obediently on his butt.
“All right, I’m going to let you go,” the cop said. “Straight home, though, OK?”
“You got it. Thank you, sir.” He turned and walked back toward his car, and I hurried in the opposite direction, which fortunately was the right one. Scout walked point for me, leading me home, and by the time I got there, I was drenched in sweat.
That night could have gone very wrong. I could have gotten caught in that gunshot battle, or I could have been arrested for vagrancy or who knows what else. Maybe I wasn’t able to do all this on my own, and Grace was right.
The next morning I texted her to ask for her friend’s name and number, and on Wednesday morning I showed up for an appointment with Dr. Hazel Altman. She was a stately African-American woman with a long gray and black braid, and her office was decorated with Haitian art.
She had a treat ready for Scout when we walked in. He looked up at me, and I told him it was okay. He grabbed the treat and settled on the carpeted floor, chewing it.
Instead of jumping right into to talk about my war experiences, Dr. Altman said, “Let me get to know you. Tell me something about your childhood.”
It was very comfortable in her office, telling her about growing up in Carmel. “You had what we call a free-range childhood,” she said. “You made your own entertainment, with your friends. It led you to be self-reliant, and that’s a great thing. How did you feel when your father died?”
“Like I had to step up,” I said. “Lots of people said that to me at the funeral. That I was a man, and it was important for me to look after my mother. She wanted me to stay in college, but my father didn’t have life insurance or a pension and they’d never saved very much, so I had to drop out and go to work.”
“And then when you learned that your mother had been killed?”
I closed my eyes and let myself sink back into the memory. “My CO called me into his office after we returned from maneuvers. I was worried that I’d done something wrong, but from the kind look on his face I knew it was something worse.”
“Go on.”
“He told me about the accident, and encouraged me to talk about my parents. Were they proud I’d gone into the military? He didn’t realize at the time that my father was dead, too. He said he was very sorry, and encouraged me to talk to the chaplain if I needed to.”
“Did you?”
I shook my head. “My family wasn’t very religious. And my team needed me in the field.”
“You’re a strong young man, Alex,” Dr. Altman said. “You’ve overcome a lot of adversity in your life, and it’s made you very self-reliant. That’s generally a good trait. But sometimes we have to relax that attitude and let other people in. Have you made friends since you moved to Florida?”
Dr. Altman was easy to talk to, and I began to see how she could help me. It was interesting to look at the way that I’d grown up, and consider how losing my parents had made me feel like I needed to rely only on myself.
I was confident that we’d get to the PTSD eventually because I had begun to see how everything was connected. I texted Grace after our first session, and she responded with a thumbs-up. I would have rather had something more, but I settled for that.
I kept working with Scout, and doing exercises that Dr. Altman prescribed. Sometimes I took my laptop with me to Java Boys and worked from there, sitting outside with Scout. I began to recognize regular customers and say hello.
People stopped to pet Scout or say how handsome he was. He was growing up, too. He and Cheyenne outgrew their puppy stages, and Kenny and I continued to have play dates for them. Kenny had started going out to bars to meet guys, and one night he left Cheyenne with me for a sleepover so he could go down to the Keys for an overnight with a new friend.
I was still worried that something unexpected would throw me for a loop, but I began to tolerate leaf-blowers and crazy drivers and the grind of garbage trucks much better. Dr. Altman and I eventually got into the topic of PTSD, and she said that a lot of what Grace had taught me and Scout seemed to be helping me a great deal. “You have to face the fact that there’s no cure for PTSD. What you can do is learn to manage your symptoms, and you’ve been doing very well with that so far.”
We were on our third week of meetings when she asked, “Have you been in touch with Grace?”
“I texted her after our first meeting, but that’s all.”
