Fire and Forget (21 page)

* * *

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.

I
T'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.

* * *

I grab my rucksack, pull my hood down, and go back around the corner. The payphone is decorated in curlicues of dripping black graffiti and half-peeled stickers. I punch in Charlotte's number and let it ring. And ring. Across the street they're advertising a new war game. Pictures flash across a display of television screens: soldiers crashing out of the waves at Normandy, soldiers wriggling
under canopies of barbwire, soldiers hunkered down in muddy foxholes, waiting, chewing on all those broken promises. The phone keeps ringing. This time in the morning and she's not in her dorm. I want to yank the receiver out of its receptacle, swing it by the cord, and whip that phone up into the sky. I sit back down on my ruck and feel like crying. “You're on
my
time,” First Sergeant used to say. Now that I'm on my own time, I don't know what to do with it.

* * *

So back to the rabbits. Once I've got them cowering in their burrows, I will return with an offer of peace. I'll explain that nibbling on flowers is beneath them; they could accomplish more with their lives. I'll spend a year training the rabbits. They'll learn small-team tactics, how to react to an ambush. We'll dig new tunnels together, deep down until we hit the foundations of those old castles. I'll show them how to make bombs out of garden fertilizer.

On graduation day, we'll take the school.

Charlotte will be a senior, posing for photos with her family. It'll be a warm, special kind of day. We'll wait until the perfect moment, when the celebrity is done with the speech about believing in yourself. Diplomas will be passed out, and everyone will throw their caps up in the air. That's when the castles will start exploding.

Big, billowy blasts from underground, the kind that rip up dirt and throw it for miles in the air. Those old castles will fall right into the ground. All the students and families and professors will be screaming and running, hundreds of black robes billowing and catching fire in the wind. That's when my combat teams of rabbits will pop out of their holes, biting at ankles, tearing at new black gowns.

The rabbits will eat everything. They'll gorge themselves on the gardens, tugging up whole root systems, mangling the tender
vines and leaves and flowers, mashing delicate blossoms between their teeth. Their little black eyes will smoke with victory. Then they'll go for the grass, eating every green and living thing until Poughkeepsie is a desert of black graduation caps, ruined towers, and dunes of dried rabbit shit.

I'll find Charlotte. She'll be stumbling away from the fires, her robes all in tatters, makeup running with tears down her face. She'll demand to know why, why? And I'll say, “I needed something to do.”

For a while I'll be named King of the Rabbits. Of course, my victory will be short-lived. With no food left, the rabbits will turn on me, unable to forgive my past abuses. I'll be chased from my own kingdom, set loose back into the world. On the run again.

* * *

Two taxis collide at the intersection up the street, the sound of tires screeching and smashing metal echoing off the block. The Reservist hustles over to the scene, where the drivers are already screaming at each other in two different languages. By and by, the day comes up. The mirrored buildings are casting sun down into the street, and for a second the millions of little glass pieces shine like gold around the wrecked taxis, but then the sun changes and the buildings return to the perfect indifference of an ocean, cold and black and flat-ass calm, bored by the day's violence. Seems like it's going to be a warm morning. The station will open soon, and a thousand buses will be gone before lunchtime, rumbling down concrete ramps, through traffic, and out into the country. The buses will go to Poughkeepsie and every other town, to airports where people are flying out to China, or Africa, or back to Iraq. I could be on any one of them. Or I could just sit here on my rucksack, watching the city fill up with sunlight.