Fire and Forget (24 page)

The air brakes released with a hiss, and we pulled out of the parking lot and onto Georgia Avenue. I thought it must be a painful reminder for Sleed to have to live on a street named after his home state, where his wife was probably hard at work trying to have more babies with her new boyfriend, a divorced first sergeant with two kids of his own. Sleed had sworn to fight his wife—“The Bitch,” as he unfailingly called her—for custody of their three-year-old daughter, but the judge in the case had ruled the proceedings delayed until Sleed's medical retirement could be processed. In the meantime, Sleed had employed a private detective to gather dirt on his wife.

 He had been raised in a foster home, surrounded by people he called his brothers and sisters, some black, some white. The way he talked about it, it had been rough, and he still hadn't rid himself of the bad habit that had resurfaced way back in the first week of our deployment: the liberal use of the n-word. The drill sergeants had broken him of this unfortunate tic in basic, but it had reared its ugly head again in Iraq and never gone away.

Sometimes, if we were in a public place, I would have to elbow him to silence his incessant rants about “that nigga that stole that fucking bitch and my kid.” The thing was, his wife's new boyfriend wasn't black. Sleed wasn't a racist. He used the slur at random, sometimes affectionately, sometimes reproachfully, but never in reference to skin tone. Trouble was other people didn't know that.

He was one of those larger-than-life personalities, able to pull you out of your troubles and into his. Christmas morning, 2004, the bombed-out UN compound in Baghdad. In the muddy field on the other side of the wall, an Iraqi boy called up to my tower: “Mistah, Mistah, Merry Christmas! Chocalaté?”

Eight hours of soft and steady rain falling from a grey sky, soaking our body armor and black fleece, sucking the heat from our core. Along with myself, Sleed and the other members of 3rd Platoon pulled guard in the towers and bunkers encircling the UN. We were cold and wet on Christmas; engaged in the pointless activity of guarding an abandoned complex of buildings. Morale was especially low.

We carried walkabout radios, and Sleed came over the net thirty minutes into the miserable shift. He proceeded to tell jokes about our mothers for the better part of an hour, one after the other, a ceaseless string of insult: “Hey, Tower Seven, yo' momma so fat, she have to put on lipstick with a paint roller”; “Front Gate, yo' momma so stupid, when yo' daddy said it was chilly outside, she ran out with a spoon”; “. . . so poor, she hangs the
toilet paper up to dry”; “. . . so greasy, she sweats Crisco”; “. . . head so small, she got her ear pierced and died”; “. . . so nasty, she have to creep up on bathwater.” And once he had insulted all our mothers and exhausted his extensive repertoire, someone else came over the net and took up the banner. Trifling, moronic, and juvenile, yes, but in this way 3rd Platoon passed Christmas 2004.

Never at a loss for words, he was now unusually quiet as we traveled due north for a few miles before merging onto the Beltway. We passed out of DC proper and into Maryland, taking I-270. The scenery changed from urban to suburban. Million-dollar McMansions, quarter-million-dollar condos, strip malls, golf courses, and commercial parks lined the highway. Traffic lightened up—the cars all headed the other way, into Washington. Compared to Baghdad, everything looked so green. The vividness of it was like being on a mild dose of psychedelics, all the time.

Readjusting my sensibilities was a slow process, and I was also just getting used to not having my weapon with me. Call it “phantom gun syndrome.” Like an amputee who still feels his limb tickle, I would find myself reaching down my right side, searching for the M4 carbine that should have been slung on my shoulder. I missed its reassuring heft, the way the charging handle dug into my hipbone.

We traveled for an hour. When we hit the clustered spires of Frederick, my old hometown, we switched onto US-15. Francis Scott Key's Frederick. John Whittier's. Lee's, Grant's. Located on the cusp of a pass through the Appalachians, the town had changed hands several times during the Civil War. Each time, the citizenry had filled the streets to cheer whichever conquering army happened to be marching through. This fact had always struck me as telling. Even during our most brutal, existential war, most Americans didn't care enough to stick their necks out for the cause.

We drove through the north side of town. I watched familiar scenes through the glare of my window seat: the ice rink where I
had taken my first date and played countless games of hockey in high school, my favorite used bookshop, the liquor store owned by the Pakistanis who never carded. I caught a glimpse of myself reflected in a passing SUV. From a distance, I didn't look half-bad. The only thing off was the size of my head: swollen, as if it had been stung by a thousand bees.

On the horizon was a familiar set of industrial-looking buildings. I got Sleed's attention and pointed them out. “Fort Detrick,” I said. “They do testing on monkeys there.”

“What kinda testing?” he asked.

“Chemical and biological weapons. They have a big incinerator where they burn the dead monkeys.”

“How you know that?”

“My dad works there.”

“You never told me he was Army.”

“He's not, anymore. Civilian contractor.”

The first time my parents had come to visit after I'd arrived at Walter Reed, my father had given me a check for twenty thousand dollars. “Starting out money,” he'd called it.

I lay on a hospital bed in a paper gown, recovering from the latest skin graft. Before entering my room, my parents had to scrub down like surgeons, donning hospital coveralls, masks, hair caps. My father placed the check on the nightstand beside the bed. He said it was the least they could do. He could hardly bear to look at me. My mom wept quietly. Nobody talked much. They visited often in the beginning, dutifully, every weekend. My mom went so far as to stay the first two weeks in a nearby hotel.

Five months later, the grafts had hardened nicely. I was a fast healer, and the risk for infection had returned to near baseline. Physiologically, I was out of the woods, off morphine and onto muscle relaxers for the pain. I had completed the initial course of therapy, and the Army had started the paperwork for a medical retirement. My parents were in town on yet another visit.

“So what are your plans?” my father asked.

“Live off the government,” I said. “Get wasted.” I was a little high on pills, or I wouldn't have been so bold. In Valium veritas.

“You don't mean that,” he said, looking agitated. “You're just upset because of what happened.”

“No shit I'm upset,” I said. “Look, maybe you two should just leave. To tell the truth, I want you to stop coming here. This place depresses me enough without having to deal with this.”

A month had passed since then, and they hadn't been back.

Now, to the west of the interstate, the bus ferrying me and Sleed along at a steady seventy miles per hour, I sighted the building where, for the good of the nation, my father infected rhesus macaques with smallpox, his lab only miles from the antiseptic home where my mother spent her days watching cable news and talking to the cat. I tried to imagine how it must feel to be a parent to a son in pain who doesn't want your help. I felt awful for them, but that didn't change the fact that I felt better apart. They were not rotten people—don't get me wrong—statistically speaking, they had been the best I could have hoped for: upper middle class, free thinking, well educated. I had been taken to art museums as a child, read to, enrolled in the finest preschool, kindergarten, et cetera. I had not entirely failed as a son, either. About the worst trouble I had ever gotten into was partying too hard and flunking out of school, and I remedied that dishonor by joining the Army a month after September 11. None of us had been bad people; we had simply made the wrong choices. How could they have known their values would lead me to this? That all that safety would push me into the fire?

I asked myself these and other unanswerable questions as we passed the borders of my old home, into acres of corn broken by the occasional exurban neighborhood, the new houses, trimmed in plastic, out of place in cul-de-sacs carved from cow pastures.

We turned off US-15 near the little town of Thurmont, onto a state road climbing into the Blue Ridge Mountains. The winding, two-lane road tunneled through a forest of oak, poplar, and hickory. The trees grew from a mat of ferns and decaying leaves atop a thin but rich soil broken by crags of limestone. A sign said we had entered Catoctin Mountain National Park. We drove a ways farther and then pulled into a gravel lot, where we filed off the bus. Sleed struggled down the narrow steps with his cane and prosthesis, which he was still getting used to. This had been a sticking point in his coming.

“How the hell am I going to fish?” he had asked. “I can't even hold a damn rod and stand at the same time. Let alone wade.”

“You don't have to fish,” I said. “You'll like it up there. Just sit down and relax by the river. It's beautiful country.”

In the end, I had convinced him to come with the promise I would owe him, and as Sleed stepped off the bus and into Mother Nature, he said, “Well, Rooster, you weren't kidding. This is nice.”

A short ways down the hillside, a creek gurgled through a rock-strewn channel. The rounded stones of the riverbed gave the water an amber tint. Manicured bluegrass ran down to moss-covered outcroppings lining the bank. My mammalian brain translated the white noise of running water into feelings of rejuvenation, nourishment, safety—a comfortable place to stay. I could feel it working on me. My shoulders sagged as a knot of tension buried in my upper back began to unravel. High overhead, songbirds built nests and called vigorously to rivals. Beams of sunlight streamed through leaves rustling in a gentle wind. The left side of my face was numb, but I felt the draft on the hairs of my forearms, the back of my neck. On the ground below, the breeze was no more than a stranger's breath. Any stronger and the air would have been too cool—but it was a perfect day. The fishing guide chartered by the Army had brought along the equipment we would need, and under
his direction we unloaded the luggage bins beneath the bus. Once that was done, the guide gathered us around.

“Name's Grossnickle,” he said. “This here's Big Hunting Creek. Y'all ready to do some fishing?”

A few of us answered with half-hearted yeahs, about as much affect as we could muster. Some joker said Big Hunting Creek didn't look so big. Unfazed, Grossnickle told us the stream became deeper and wider the closer it got to the Chesapeake Bay. Up here we were near the source. The Parks Service had designated this stretch as fly-fishing only, catch-and-release. Strictly for the purists.

He showed us how to set up a rod and gave us a quick clinic in fly-casting. I already knew how to do it and didn't pay close attention, absorbed instead by all the greenery, and the way the sunbeams reflected off bits of road dust floating in the air. After the lesson had finished and we were turned loose, I took my rod and hobbled off on my own, but not before asking Grossnickle to tie a fly onto my tippet. I was getting better at using my bad hand, but I'd never again have the dexterity to manipulate fishing line.

It took me awhile, but eventually I could flick the wooly bugger into the creek with some degree of accuracy. I cast, then gathered in the line with my claw-like left hand, jerking it erratically to simulate the movement of a wounded minnow. I wasn't even trying to hook a fish—just liked the look of the fly moving freely in the whiskey-colored water, its black feathers undulating like real fins. Cast and retrieve, cast and retrieve. There was something comforting in the rhythm of it.

After practicing for a while, I reeled in the fly, set down the rod, pried off my shoes, peeled off my socks, rolled up my jeans, took the rod, and waded into the creek to fish for real. The shallow water was ice cold. It rushed up my shins and around my calves with surprising force. My balls tightened and my toes
numbed, but I kept my resolve and headed upstream in search of a pool suitable for big fish. Every so often I stood on a rock until my feet warmed and the feeling returned with pins and needles.

I had been wading about a half hour, casting into a few deep pools where falling water had eroded the earth between boulders, but still no luck. The farther upstream I went, the trees grew closer together and the canopy tightened, admitting less and less light.

I passed through a deep cut with steep and muddy banks. On the other side, the terrain flattened out, and the creek took a sharp bend, becoming much wider. A massive white oak had fallen and created a natural dam. Radiating from the main trunks like the brittle fingers of dead men, a tangle of limbs dipped under the foamy water, snagging floating branches, leaves, and plastic bags.

The bank around the oak was covered with a heavy growth of ferns and giant cattails. The downed tree had caused a web of rivulets to overflow the main stream and flood the low-lying surroundings. My feet sank to the ankles in cold muck as I hacked my way through the tangle of fronds. When I had bypassed the oak, which must have been nearly a hundred feet tall, I cut back toward the water. I emerged from the undergrowth to find a deep pool on the upstream side of the dam. The leaves lining the bottom of the pool leached tannins. The bed of decay colored the sluggish water dark, almost black.