Fire and Forget by Matt Gallagher

Author:Matt Gallagher [Scranton, Roy;Gallagher, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

9

NEW ME

Andrew Slater

I JOINED THE ARMY AFTER MY GIRLFRIEND RENEE drowned because I felt that some people in my hometown would be unable to not blame me. Something would have seemed wrong with the world if they didn’t. The Army was a way for me to leave Elberton for good without seeming like I was making a big spectacle out of it. Renee’s dad called me up about a week after the funeral to ask me why I didn’t go in after her. His voice was calm on the phone when he said it. It sounded like he was reading the question off a piece of paper he was holding with both hands. I think he’d been trying to not say it for a while.

By the time I realized she must be down river I couldn’t see her at all. I had just got back to the riverbank from my car with a pair of foam water noodles and a CD player. I had been scrounging around in the back seat of my Corolla trying to find a CD, something I wanted her to hear. I stood there staring at the flat top of the river, unblemished blue-brown between the cat tails, a foot or two higher than normal with the past week’s rain, but the water was quiet that morning. There was a clear, quiet sky. I never made sense of it.

She picked that spot of the river because it was on her bus route in fifth grade, before her parents got divorced and she moved into an apartment with her mom. It was our tenth date, and she used to put her hand on my arm and lean in to tell me some thought that had struck her in a way that meant a great deal to me. The spot she picked was a sunny bend of the river below the pastures, miles of flat grazing land in all directions dotted by round, browning bales, and she had always wanted the bus to break down there so all the kids could go swimming and miss school. Some fishermen found her on a sandbar a few miles down, and the paper put “All-State Swimmer” on her obituary, like that wasn’t adding insult to injury.

* * *

Nine years later, I was finally discharged from the brain injury clinic at Walter Reed. Before I was leaving, I had a final, obligatory meeting with my overworked neurologist that was more of an informal send-off than a working session. I had told him that I originally enlisted because my favorite uncle served as a Seabee in Vietnam, which was only partially true, because he wasn’t my favorite. The neurologist arrived at our meeting wearing a referee uniform that was a size too small because he was on his way to his daughter’s soccer game, and he said that all the parents had to share the same uniform.

We met at a picnic table in a courtyard I had never been to before. He said he enjoyed the cherry trees there, but I found the people and noise around us a bit distracting.

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