Fire and Forget

by Matt Gallagher

  “Aaron, when you just wander off like that it makes people think you’re some kind of invalid now,” she said. “Did you just forget about us?”

  “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I just lost track of time. I guess it was longer than I thought.”

  “Melissa was scared to death about you,” she said. “She can’t be getting stressed out like that in her third trimester.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll tell her I’m sorry next time I see her. I’ll tell Joe too.”

  “I can take care of you, you know. I don’t mind doing that,” she said. “You just have to promise to give a shit.”

  “I know. I give a shit,” I said. “I’ll try harder.”

  “Is it trying that’s the problem?” she asked.

  “No. It’s probably something else.”

  The automatic lights on the front porch went out with us standing there, staring at each other. We both made a flailing motion with our hands to get the motion detector to turn them back on.

  * * *

  In the county fair dream, I found myself searching for my rifle in all of the Porta Johns, constantly intruding on angry occupants. I would ask them politely if they could check the serial number on their rifle and get a door slammed in my face. One guy was eating a huge cotton candy on the john, and I thought, who is this guy to judge me?

  There was a FOB gate at the edge of the fairgrounds, the edge of the base, and the gate guards would turn me back without a rifle. I would not be allowed to leave. It was Indian Country out there. Instead of fireworks, there were red-and-white parachute flares drifting down over the carnival rides in between outgoing mortar rounds. Emily was waiting for me back at the car, and I had made some lame excuse. I could tell she knew it was a lie and that I was missing my rifle. She could see that I didn’t have it.

  When I found Renee by the fried dough stand, I asked her if she had seen a small black rifle lying around. She seemed to have gotten older, but not as much as I had. Seeing her at the fair felt like I had found the simple answer to a problem I had made too complicated for too many years. She was counting raffle tickets and had an enormous pink stuffed bear.

  “You might be able to see it from the top of the Ferris wheel,” she offered.

  “All right,” I said, but I had my doubts.

  She turned in a fistful of tickets, which let us bypass the line and board one of the two-seater cars directly. We were the last car to load. The Ferris wheel began to rotate, and Renee smelled faintly of fresh-cut grass. For just a moment I felt the skin of her knee against my knee. Then she climbed out of the car as we neared the top of our ascent.

  “What are you doing?” I called out.

  “Relax,” she said. “This is the only way.”

  Hanging by the wheel spoke below me, she dropped the pink bear into the gear mechanism in the center of the Ferris wheel. It looked like the interior of an enormous clock. The gears slowly pulled the bear inside, its plush skin tightening until white stuffing burst from the seams of its mouth. The gears stopped with only the stretched pink bear head extruding in an expression of agony. The Ferris wheel made an ugly noise and came to a halt with our car stopped at the very top. Renee climbed back up to me. I grabbed her tightly by the wrist as she sat back down. I put her hand on my heart so she could feel how hard it was beating.

  “Do you see anything down there?” she asked.

  It was bright and blurry in the fairgrounds beneath us. There were too many shadows.

  “It’s kinda hard to tell,” I said.

  Instead of a tractor pull, there was a drive-in theater at the far side of the fairgrounds with a giant screen. I recognized myself on the screen and realized it was a homemade movie of my first tour, when I was just a private. I thought about Renee every night of that tour. I remembered wishing she could see me while I was over there. I wished she knew how sorry I was. Now I just felt embarrassed. We couldn’t hear the sound so I had to explain to Renee what was going on, what people were saying. I hoped the movie would jump ahead to my last tour, so I could show her how bad things got, so she could see why I was like this.

  “What did you say right there?” she asked.

  “I think I just laughed a little. We were laughing.”

  “Was it funny?”

  “No,” I told her. “I thought it might be funny later, but it wasn’t.”

  As the movie continued, I noticed that the lights of the Ferris wheel had turned off. People stuck in their cars were shouting out to people below them. They were very upset with us. I thought maybe something impressive might appear on the screen for her to see. I kept waiting for it.

  “You seem so frustrated,” she said. “Did you become an angry person?”

  “No. I didn’t. I swear.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “I believe you.”

  “I just got so tired,” I said.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to be an angry person,” she said.

  “You wouldn’t have been,” I told her.

  “Hey, I think I see your rifle,” she said. “Over there by the ring toss.”

  I looked down at the ring toss booth. One of the prizes on the wall was an M4 rifle that looked like mine. It cost a thousand tickets.

  “That could be anybody’s,” I said.

  People were climbing down the skeleton of the Ferris wheel in the dark. I could hear them shouting out as they lost their grip. We would have to climb down. I was afraid she would mention this.

  * * *

  The nonrefundable tickets to Dominica had already been bought when we cancelled the wedding, so Emily and I decided to go anyway. We were both tense on the plane ride. Neither of us wanted this to be a catastrophe. I think her parents were hoping we would elope while we were there. I told her we should go see the boiling lake, and Emily said that sounded terrifying.

  A tropical storm hit the island the day after we arrived and the power went out, which we found out later was actually from human error. The storm was mild, but the island flooded everywhere. Emily cried all day long in our dark hotel room, the two of us sitting on piles of towels in the bathroom since our room was facing the storm. I tried to reassure her. I told her we could go down to the beach tomorrow and pick through the debris. This will be a funny story some day, I said. I think it might have been funny if it had been a real honeymoon.

  When we walked down to a general store in Rouseau there was a family putting a tarp over their collapsed roof. I showed their shirtless teenage son how to tie a bowline knot to a piece of rebar. Emily kept telling them how sorry she was. I was just happy that my hands remembered the knot and I kept tying it over and over.

  The roads leading out of town had washed out and Emily was not willing to walk barefoot through the flooded streets, so we went back to our hotel room and played pinochle. Emily and I couldn’t sleep that night and the following day was overcast and bleak. The toilets weren’t working and Emily said she thought she was getting sick.

  “You can use the ice bucket,” I said.

  “Not that end,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “Let’s go down to the beach. You can use the ocean.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “So am I. I won’t tell anyone.”

  I dragged one of the hotel blankets down to the beach and laid it out while Emily sprinted into the surf in her two-piece. After I had it laid out, I stared down at the blanket like I was forgetting something. I picked up a blue piece of sea glass and turned it over for a second. I had forgotten about sea glass. A cold feeling came over me. I picked up the towel and ran down to the water. I still had my pants on and I ran in up to my waist after her and a wave knocked the breath out of me. Emily came up out of the water laughing with a guilty grin on her face, rubbing her hands with wet sand. The look on my face surprised her.

  “Were you worried about me?” she asked.

  I was about to wrap her up in the towel in m
y hands, but I realized it was now soaking wet.

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  After Emily had gone to sleep that night, I left our hotel and made my way down through the dark streets to the beach. I stared up at the full moon until I fell asleep to the sound of the waves.

  * * *

  In the moon dream, the moon buggies looked like the Kubota mowers with mud tires. I was worried because I couldn’t seem to get my body armor to go on over the helmet of my spacesuit. I asked the other guys how they got theirs on.

  “We put our body armor on back in the spaceship, before we put our helmets on,” they said, and I felt a bit foolish.

  There never seemed to be any insurgents on the moon. I never saw any; I just assumed they were out there. When the bombs went off, they only had a small amount of oxygen sealed inside them, so the explosion itself was very small. The problem was, if it went off under your moon buggy it would create a large enough force for you to reach escape velocity. It would send you slowly hurtling out into space. The lunar sky was filled with the lost buggies of previous, stricken patrols if you looked carefully enough, bomb-struck mowers turning end over end until they reached some distant, settled solar orbit, the Earth and the Moon passing close to them just once a year. To try to prevent a “drift off,” we had the fishing rods with grappling hooks again.

  It was the truck in front of me that hit the bomb, just like in real life. I saw the moon dust bloom upward thin as chalk powder, rising out into space, and the moon buggy disappeared inside it. I heard them call us on the radio.

  “My suit is leaking,” the radio voice cried, with the hiss of escaping air. “We need space tape up here.”

  The space tape was a thick, chrome-colored reel of one-inch duct tape. I grabbed it and my fishing rod from the back of my mower and started bounding toward the explosion. Running on the moon is painfully slow. It was not until I reached the crater that I realized they were already above me, rising into space. I threw my line out at them over and over again as their moon buggy got smaller and smaller. It got very tedious.

  10

  POUGHKEEPSIE

  Perry O’Brien

  IT’S 0300 AND I’M SITTING ON THE SIDEWALK in front of Port Authority, trying to make a plan. I can’t keep purchase on my thoughts with all this night traffic—taxis and limousines, garbage trucks, buses filled with vacant seats and harsh fluorescent light—this restless march of cars, all of them awake at crow piss and going somewhere. I was going somewhere, too.

  It’s raining a little, and the light from the television screens gets distorted in the wet air. Everything is sponged in a mist of color, even the smog from down below where passing trains rattle along the unchristly nethers of the bus station. Through it all I keep hearing Charlotte, her voice shingled by payphone static. “Medrick,” she says, “what would you even do here?” She thought that was an explanation.

  A female Reservist is guarding the entrance to the bus station. She’s looking rugged in her plus-size digital cammies, and her pistol belt is decorated with big loops of plastic flex-cuffs. When the wind comes up, the plastic loops do a little dance on her hips. I caught her eye on me, one time, and a fat, black eel started squirming in my guts. What if she asks for my leave papers? With all the puddles and boogie darkness between every building, you’d think New York would be a good place for a man to hide. But the Army is everywhere. Look around, all you can see are porn shops, drug stores, and chain restaurants. Kill the illumination and it wouldn’t look much different from Fort Hood.

  * * *

  This morning I met a coke dealer on the 10:45 from Columbus. His name was Ron, but he preferred I call him “Birdman.” Ron liked my tattoos. He showed me the pieces he picked up inside, three black stars, scribbled together in a shot-group on his neck. In prison, you had to make your own ink by melting down Styrofoam cups, mixing the burnt slag with water. For a needle they sharpen a paper clip. Ron hadn’t gone in for drugs, he did seven years for assaulting his wife with a soup can. Ron was surprised to hear the war was still going on. He showed me a picture of his wife, she was up in Saginaw and couldn’t wait to start over. I showed him the photo of Charlotte. She said the picture was from freshman year, five young ladies crowded together on a blanket, all wearing volunteer shirts for the Catskill Folk Fest. On the back she wrote “I’m one of these,” as if I wouldn’t be able to tell.

  * * *

  Calling first, that must have been my mistake. I was just too excited. All the way from Texas I kept the surprise inside me, sleeping on buses and benches, shooting the shit with flatlanders and seed-folk, worrying, eating out of vending machines, imagining the look on her face. Charlotte always said she liked surprises. But she got real quiet when I told her I was coming to Poughkeepsie. I asked what was wrong, if maybe she was spooked by the idea of finally seeing each other. Then she got ugly with me. And now I’m sitting on my rucksack, stranded in this god-awful city.

  * * *

  I picture Poughkeepsie like a village from the Middle Ages. In her letters Charlotte described the big castles covered in vine, forests of respectable trees, stone bridges crossing rivers filled with swans and lake-fish. Charlotte said the gardens were the best part. She wrote about daffodils, pansies, foxglove, and some names for flowers I’d never heard before. My favorite of those is clouded geranium. You can’t say the name of the flower fast, you have to slow down. It helped over there, sometimes. Go ahead and try: clouded geranium.

  In the spring Charlotte started doing work study with the grounds team. Their job was to lay down seeds and mulch, trim the grass, and pick up fallen tree branches after big storms. She said she liked the work except for the rabbits. Someone’s pet cottontail had escaped, back in the day, and I guess this bunny nosed out some kind of rangy, hard-scruff wild hare, and they must have procreated fiercely because now the whole campus was overrun. Other students thought they were cute, but for the grounds team these rabbits were like a plague from the Bible. They excavated fresh seed from the earth, left gnaw marks on bare roots, even scoured long strips of bark from the younger trees. Charlotte’s team tried everything to get rid of the rabbits: cayenne pepper, clippings of human hair, even dried wolf piss. They wanted to use poison, but the environmental clubs said hell no.

  What would I do in Poughkeepsie? I’d show the kids how to deal with rabbits. I’ve got a good knife and a poncho liner, everything you need to live in the woods. When I get to Poughkeepsie I’ll climb into the trees and make a bivouac. From there I’ll study the rabbits’ movements. I’ll watch where they eat, where they fuck, I’ll chart out every tunnel on a laminated map.

  My campaign will begin with overwhelming force. I’ll plant snares in the rose bushes. I’ll drop down on the rabbits from tree perches and break their little buckteeth. I’ll chase snakes and weasels into their burrows, climb down there myself, yowling like a starved dog. The rabbits will be forced to dig deeper; they’ll huddle in dark pockets of the earth and live off dead onions. Charlotte will discover the little mounds of charred rabbit-flesh I’ll scatter around the garden, to make an example of anyone who pokes their head above ground. Just a few nubbles of blackened fur. Other than that, the gardens will be perfect.

  Of course, I won’t be able to stay hidden forever. Someone will see me, maybe a couple of kids out for a romantic walk. They’ll pause on the bridge to look up at the fresh glint of stars, and they’ll squeeze hands and whisper “forever” into each other’s mouths. That’s when they’ll catch sight of me, wild and bent down among the cattails. Splashing blood from my hands and face. Questions will be asked, search parties will be deployed into the woods outside the castle. Eventually someone from the school newspaper will get a blurry photo: a pale body loping through the forest, wearing a hat made from lopped-off rabbit ears.

  * * *

  That female MP has been talking into her radio, like maybe there’s a chance she’s checking my description. I left everything at
Fort Hood very carefully, all my gear stacked and folded in my barracks room, the full battle rattle except of course the boots I’m wearing. Supply Daddy told me they don’t come after you if you leave all your shit behind. Still, if someone runs my driver’s license it’ll come up Absent Without Leave. Or maybe even desertion, since there’s a war. They used to hang people for that.

  * * *

  It was the deaf box that made me realize I was leaving. When we got back to Hood they ran us through a battery of tests, checkboxes about our psychological health, blood-draws and knocking on our joints, x-rays to make sure we hadn’t picked up any shrapnel. Finally you take a turn in the deaf box. It’s a big glass chamber and once the door shuts, the silence is so heavy you worry about suffocating. You wear headphones and they tell you to listen for the beep. I didn’t realize before then how long it had been since things were quiet. The silence was pressing on my ears, and all I was thinking about was Charlotte and her gardens because other things were coming up fast and it was better to think about the gardens. When I came out my hearing was fine, but I was blinking and snotty and there were wet trails on my cheek, and the tech guy looked away and said don’t worry about it, happens to a lot of folks coming back. Probably something about the different pressure in the room. But I wasn’t thinking about that, I was thinking about Charlotte.

  Her first letter was addressed to any soldier. Any soldier. Imagine that, a million guys over there, and her letter happens to end up in the post Conex nearest my unit. Scrambled in with notes from church ladies and little kids’ drawings of a dead Osama, and here was Charlotte, nervous about her junior year, writing about flowers. I’m not sentimental. I don’t know about destiny or whatever, but you’d be dumb to give up on chances like that.

  * * *