Fire and Forget (20 page)

* * *

On the weekend, Emily and I went to the county fair with her brother, Joe, and his wife, Melissa. I enjoyed how loud Joe talked because he was one person I never had trouble understanding. It wasn't for my sake he talked so loud. I had forgotten what Joe did for a living, and it was far too late to ask, by at least a year. I might have blamed it on my condition, but I decided to just keep quiet. It involved him talking people into things they were too
stupid to realize were in their best interest, I knew that much. In these stories, there were people who had to be humored like children, either customers or subordinates I think. Maybe his boss too. His stories made him sound frustrated and selfless, but he was sweet toward Emily. He called her Milly. He didn't seem quite as sweet on Melissa, and she was very pregnant then.

Since most of my friends were deployed or couldn't make the wedding on short notice, Emily had put this outing together for me to ask Joe if he would be one of my groomsmen. I must have forgotten to bring it up.

“You just let us know if this gets too much for you. All these crowds.” Joe said.

“Aaron doesn't have a problem with crowds,” Emily told him. “He's just got the sleeping problem.”

“I can't dunk anymore either,” I said.

“You used to dunk?” Melissa asked me.

“Missy, he's teasing,” Emily said.

“Also, there's going to be fireworks once the sun goes down,” Joe said. “That won't bother you will it?”

“He doesn't have a problem with fireworks,” Emily said.

“I still like fireworks,” I said.

“And it won't bother you if I get a beer will it?” Joe asked. “I don't mean to make you feel left out.”

“Go right ahead. I'd join you if I could.”

“Do you have to drink in front of Aaron? You can't wait until later?” Melissa asked him.

“What? He said it was all right.”

“Go right ahead,” I said. “Maybe get me a bratwurst or something.”

Late in the afternoon we went over to the tractor pull on the edge of the fairgrounds, because Joe knew one of the drivers. I always liked the tractor pull when I was a kid, but I had to bow out once we got in the metal bleachers because the sound was amping
up my tinnitus like a dog whistle. Most of the time it's just a little high-pitched whine that's always hanging around, mostly in my right ear. After the first tractor hit top rpms, it felt like a pair of tuning forks had been jammed into my skull. I didn't want anyone to feel bad so I said I was going to find a Porta John.

What caught my eye was the car fire in the parking lot. I saw the smoke beyond the Ferris wheel as the fire trucks first sounded in the distance, or what sounded distant to me. It had been dry for a week, and the parking lot to the fairgrounds was just an open field roped off. It had been laid with dry straw to keep the mud down. I figured somebody's hot manifold must have set off a patch of it and it set the car burning. From the dark color of the smoke I could tell there were tires on fire at least.

It was a Jeep Cherokee that was probably black before it caught fire, and there was an anxious man pacing nearby who clearly owned the Accord next to it. The Accord wasn't burning, but the heat was already peeling the paint. It came as a relief to see no one was sitting in the Cherokee, which should have been fairly obvious. The windows had all burst and the hood popped open in front of us with a black belch. As I watched the fire trucks trying to maneuver in around it, I realized that was the reason I had come over to look at the car fire in the first place, just to make sure no one was inside.

The strangest thing about watching people burn to death inside a vehicle is the fact that you don't have much choice about it. Once the fuel and the tires catch and it's hot enough, and it's full of things that explode, there's nothing to be done. You just have to watch. You can burn the skin off your hands trying to get that door open, but it won't budge. You might see someone inside looking like they're just sleeping and you can bang on the windows at them all you like. They're not waking up out of a concussion and lungs full of smoke, maybe something worse you can't see. Maybe it's better they don't.

If the truck burns itself out on its own, you could be waiting twelve hours for it to be cool enough to get close to if it's a hot day. It might be in a place you don't want to be for twelve hours. When you finally get into that truck you will realize that ants have a higher tolerance for heat than people do.

* * *

When we got home that night, Emily stood by the front door and refused to put the key in the lock. She didn't like scowling—she says it goes straight to your crow's feet—so I could tell she had made a conscious decision to do it. I could feel the sunburn glowing on my face. I was afraid it made me look angry. I was afraid to tell her I had a headache, a worse one.

“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 my 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.