After the Fire

by Daniel Robinson

“I didn’t have dinner today so I thought I might have a late snack,” Ruth said, taking a plate from the cupboard. “You hungry? Care for a roll?”

  “I’m not hungry, but I’d still like one.” He put his cup of tea on the counter. There was always a roll or sandwich or bowl of soup, along with drinks. Since he could not reciprocate in turn, not with his bachelor’s refrigerator, he at one time had wished that Ruth and Call would not so often go to the trouble. The evening he had mentioned that to Ruth, Call answered quickly, “Goddamnit, Barnes, if I didn’t want you eating my victuals, I’d boot your butt out.” It was not a matter of receiving, Barnes realized, but of giving, and although he did not always accept the offer, he had come to welcome the attachment.

  Ruth placed two of the rolls on small plates to warm in the microwave. She and Barnes dropped into a steady silence within the oven’s hum.

  “How are you doing?” Barnes asked.

  “Without Robert, you mean?”

  Barnes nodded, “Or with Robert.”

  “No, it is most definitely without Robert. . . . Not hot and cold anymore, maybe just warm and cool. Which is good, I guess. And which shows you how far along to separating we were in the first place. That road is not one we just lately took the entrance ramp onto. We’ve passed the speed limit already and have just been on cruise control for a good while.”

  She handed him the plate with his roll on it. Whiffs of steam wavered above the roll. Barnes looked at Ruth’s hand as she withdrew it, slim and long and tan.

  “Warm and cool, I guess,” she repeated. “Tepid maybe.”

  “Tepid is good then?”

  “I suppose. It’s a numbness, like the center of a storm before you can start again. It’s that necessary stage you go through when being numb is preferable to feeling. It’s nice for a while and hopefully it’s short-lived, and finally you come out the other side and all at once you start to feel again. I’m looking forward to that, to feeling some of the pain again so that I know I’m not yet dead. And since I got a jump-start on the numbness, maybe it will end soon.”

  Ruth sighed and blinked. She shook her head as though thinking over what she had said.

  Barnes looked out the kitchen window. A cat’s-eye moon was supposed to rise, but a light mist had already captured the night. The mist turned into a drizzle and Barnes wondered if the coming fire season would be a washout.

  Barnes watched Ruth as she ate. Her hair swung long against her back in slow-motion waves of deliberate brown. The brown of her eyes glinted half-tamed and strong and sharp, and her lips, slightly over-large as though bruised from kissing, curved slowly in a full red arc. Everything about her held a small shock of surprise that drew Barnes toward her. But it was not her beauty alone that drew him. It was that her body hummed. He wanted hard to step into her melody and be danced by it.

  “Maybe,” Ruth said, then she paused for her last bite of cinnamon roll. “Maybe, I’ll take a drive this summer, in a couple of weeks after school ends. I’ll take a scenic route somewhere, not like driving with Robert. Hands hard on the wheel, you know, like driving is serious business. No, I’ll just drive a while and stop. Maybe go down by La Veta, where I spent a few summers back in my wild woman days.”

  “See how many cafés have been replaced by Kentucky Fried Chickens?”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Or how many coffee shops say Starbucks?”

  “Barnes, you’re going to wear out your welcome real fast if you keep popping my bubbles.”

  “Just kidding. It sounds like a good idea. Would you take Grace with you?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I might leave her here with Daddy. They do well with each other, sometimes I think better than she does with me. Certainly better than she does with Robert.” She lowered her head for a moment as she placed the two plates in the sink. “Robert wanted a boy. It wasn’t some macho thing, you know, like some women think men are like. It wasn’t that he wanted a boy he could teach about cars or something like that. He didn’t want a girl because he’s afraid. He won’t admit it, but I remember the look on his face when he saw Grace that first time . . . in the delivery room and the doctor handed her to him. He was scared of her, not that she was this little thing, this little baby, but that she was a girl and he just didn’t know what he would do. How do you raise a girl? I could see the question across his forehead light up like a neon sign. I knew then that I would, someday, be raising her alone.”

  “Not all alone.”

  “No. I’m glad you’re around as much as you are.”

  “I didn’t mean me.”

  “No, I know. I just wanted to say that, to say that I’m thankful you’re here. But, yes, Dad. I wish I would have appreciated him more when I was younger.”

  “That wasn’t your job. Kids are supposed to hate their parents. It’s a rule or something, like not understanding their mortality. I fought with my parents, you fought with Call, and someday Grace will drive you crazy. It’s all written down somewhere.”

  “Yes, but that’s not exactly what I mean. I don’t mean the battles. I mean appreciating or respecting what he provided. Little things I was too stupid or blind to see. I remember when I was a kid on Sunday mornings. Dad would get up early, before Mom or me, and come downstairs and cook breakfast. He would set the table, squeeze the juice, and make pancakes, flapjacks he called them, or these incredibly decadent omelets with three cheeses and fresh veggies and deli ham. Oh, God, it was heaven when Mom and I would wake to that smell wafting into our bedrooms. Heaven. First that smell and then softly the sounds of Dad working at the meal and Mozart, always Mozart on Sunday mornings. I would roll out of bed and toss on my robe and run down the stairs. We would sit, my mom and I, and Dad would first serve us and then sit with us. I’d say thanks, sometimes, but I didn’t really fathom what it all meant, why he did it. You know?”

  Barnes nodded. His own parents had been good people who had gone too early. One day he was ignoring them and the next he no longer had the opportunity to tell them what they meant to him. Standing in the sudden light of Ruth’s kitchen, he felt a vague hollow at that recognition of not just who he had lost but also what that loss intimated.

  Ruth said with a smile, “I just don’t understand why I didn’t want to marry a man just like the man who married dear old Mom.”

  “Another part of growing up, I guess,” Barnes sighed.

  “You’re full of mournful wisdom tonight.”

  “He’s full of something but it’s not wisdom.” Call limped into the room and clasped Barnes by the shoulder. “What are you two doing down here while I’m up comforting the little girl?”

  “Comforting, my rear,” Ruth said. “I heard you wake her so that you could read another story to her. I know you. Don’t give me any of your Irish blarney, old man. I’ve lived too long under your roof to be fooled by you.”

  He shrugged slightly against Barnes, letting his body fold into itself. He said with an adopted brogue, “Oh, but it’s a sad world when your own daughter speaks to you in such a way. An old man like myself.”

  “Don’t come looking to me for support,” Barnes said.

  “Another dagger. I had better brace myself with a spot of the poteen. Care for a snort, Barnes?”

  “Thanks, but not tonight.”

  “Oh, but the civilizing influence of women.” He shook his head with a show of dispirited woe until a smile lined his face. He used Barnes as a support to raise himself straight again, then stepped to the counter.

  Ruth said, “You are just too full of it, Dad.”

  Call winked at Ruth and retrieved a bottle of whiskey from his cupboard. The rest of the kitchen cupboards held a communal array of foods and spices and utensils, but Call’s cupboard was his alone. At the end of the line of glassed doors, he kept his cupboard stocked with bottles and old-fashioned glasses together with wooden and tin boxes of treasures for himself and his friends, one holding a stash of dog bones for Harp.

  He poured a couple o
f fingers’ worth of Bushmills into a glass and turned to face Barnes. Holding his whiskey between them, he toasted, “May the wings of liberty never lose a feather.”

  Barnes nodded and met Call’s toast with his teacup, feeling, suddenly, a touch inadequate.

  “What were you two doing down here?” Call asked, sucking on his lips after the first taste of whiskey.

  “Just talking,” Ruth said.

  “About?”

  “Why? Were your ears burning?” she answered.

  “Ruth was saying what an SOB you were when she was growing up.”

  “Barnes.”

  “Guilty,” Call said. “Sometimes you can hug too tight.”

  “Actually, she found me in your study looking at the photo-graphs on your wall,” Barnes said.

  “The ancient and the not-always-honorable, my past in rust.” He toasted again before drinking.

  “You sound as though you’re especially invigorated tonight,” Ruth said.

  “Just full of vinegar is all. That wonderful girl of mine upstairs told me I was the bestest grandpa in the whole world. It just struck me as being a particularly wonderful thing for her to have said. Charges the circuits.”

  “We were just talking about that.”

  “What?”

  “Those nice little compliments,” Ruth said as she brushed past Call. “I’ll go tuck her in again.” She turned and gave Call a kiss on his cheek. “Thanks, Dad, you’re the bestest.”

  She walked from the kitchen into the shadowed hall. Barnes listened for her sound to recede up the stairs, the wood groaning and creaking in response to her steps.

  “I don’t know exactly what has happened, but I like it,” Call said.

  “Just talk,” Barnes said.

  Harp nudged Barnes’s leg, offering his lazy muzzle for Barnes to rub. Then the dog tested the wood floor and padded over to Call. He looked up expectantly, his legs spread wide for support and his tail wagging.

  “He doesn’t quite trust the floor,” said Barnes.

  “No. He can’t really see it too well. Probably thinks it’s one big hole, the way he gingers himself across it. He likes big rugs and his fat dog bed on the floor.”

  “You better hope nobody breaks in through the kitchen or he may just not attack.”

  “He never was worth much in that way and now he’s just worthless. Aren’t you, old boy? You are a worthless hound,” Call said, scratching the dog’s ear. He reached back into his cupboard, taking a couple of dog bones from an old cookie tin his father had liberated in Germany to send to Call’s mother. “You can’t see, can’t hear, can’t bark hard enough to scare a dust mite. If you weren’t as old as me, I’d put you out in the street.”

  Call handed a bone to Harp and Harp broke the bone into pieces, chewing one end and dropping the rest onto the floor.

  “You had best lick that floor clean, hound, or you and me will both be out on the street.”

  Harp sniffed and ate the remaining crumbs left on the floor. He nudged Call’s leg.

  “Worthless. You hear me?” Call leaned toward the dog, holding another bone close to his muzzle.

  Harp growled.

  “What?” Encouraging the dog.

  Harp barked, a soft backward bark like an old man’s cough.

  “What?” Holding the vowel out a little longer to further encourage Harp’s response.

  A louder bark.

  Call placed the bone on Harp’s muzzle and signaled the dog to stay. Harp sat motionless, eyes elevated and pleading up at Call. Call said, “Okay.” Harp flipped the bone in the air and tried catching it in his mouth. The bone, however, bounced from the tip of his nose onto the floor, where he merely picked it up and ate it.

  “Worthless,” Call said, running a hand down the dog’s back, then walking from the kitchen.

  Barnes followed Call. They walked back into the warmth of Call’s office. Call sat at his chair, then Barnes sat. It was a comfortable routine, a sovereign groove that promised a momentary stability. Call filled and fired his pipe. “Which photograph were you and Ruth looking at?”

  “The one in Cu Chi. Christmas, I think.”

  “Christmas, 1965. It was hot, Jesus Christ, hotter than a poker, but, anymore, I can’t really recall how hot it was, just that it was hot. And how much I didn’t want to be there. You had to keep in the shade, which wasn’t an easy thing to do on a hilltop firebase scraped perfectly clean. The only shade was in the jungle below us, and that was overfilled with Charlie. We went out on patrol just after that photo was taken and that kid next to me, Voznesensky, the little one who looks even more frightened than the rest of us, never came back. He’d joined us just a week or so before, fresh from home and bam, he’s in the middle of it all. Voznesensky, I didn’t even know his name then, was killed inside a tunnel the day after Christmas. We found the tunnel outside a little Vietnamese village. I called it in and was told to check it out. Voznesensky was a little guy and cherry-new, two qualities that didn’t bode well for him. When I looked into the black hole of that tunnel opening, all the vets knew what was coming. One of them said to send in the FNG. It didn’t matter, though. I had already tapped Voznesensky for the job. He stripped off his gear and dropped down inside, a .45 in one hand and a flashlight in the other. After a few minutes, we heard some fighting—a .45 and a bunch of AK-47. The AK-47 ended it. Voznesensky was dead. No two damn ways about it. I waited another fifteen minutes with everybody else in the squad staying in their perimeter posts and avoiding my eyes, just in case I decided to send down another mole. I sat there and watched that hole and listened, but nothing. Oh man, some holes that we stare into are too dark and deep and black. There’s a part of me that’s still looking down that hole, hoping that kid comes wiggling back out and the last thirty-seven years have been nothing.”

  Call paused and smiled an embarrassed smile, then continued. “I was convinced if I sent someone else down to pull out Voznesensky, that he’d die as well. We tossed in a few grenades, left, and called in Air to pummel that hill, burn everything on it and turn the rock to sand. But I left Voznesensky down there. As he was stripping his gear, his fingers couldn’t undo his belt they were shaking so badly. I helped him. I told him to buck up, to take it easy and slow, and if he found anything to scoot back out and tell me. I told him that the VC knew we were coming and had probably already left the tunnel for the next province. I told him that at least he’d be down in the shade and out of the sun. He smiled. I gave him the thumbs-up. Never saw him again. I can still see his eyes. They, he, trusted what I told him, that he’d be fine.”

  For a long time neither man spoke. Each relived his own raw moment in time when the world and all the people in it suddenly stopped, when the fragile endings of life unraveled in exact violence. It was a moment Call had known for a long time and which Barnes was realizing would stand still forever, stretching unbounded ahead of them, a moment of such infinite suddenty for which a certain price had been paid in the loss of a man’s soul.

  “I couldn’t stop it,” Barnes breathed.

  “And I couldn’t stop what happened, either.”

  Barnes felt a weight on his chest. “But I could have, if I’d been there first and seen it.”

  “And I could have too, maybe, had I known what was going to happen.”

  “How long did it take for you to get past it?”

  “Haven’t yet.”

  Barnes rubbed his eyes.

  “Some men are lucky,” Call said.

  “How so?”

  “Some men are defined simply by what they do. Some of us, you and me and many others, are defined by how we live with what we have done. It’s a matter of how you deal with that day that matters now.”

  Barnes swallowed hard. He looked away for a moment and silently nodded his head.

  Call spoke slowly, his words tinged with years, “You can’t believe me yet but you will, I hope. It will take you years to understand what it took me years to understand. What happened in that t
unnel and what happened on that fire are no longer what’s important. They happened. We can’t, neither of us, we can’t change the physical parameters of our lives. So what happened to us is not as important as what happens within us.”

  Barnes thought of himself standing on that ridgeline like a shaman reading blood omens, finding in the whispers of a wind some intimations of his fate. He heard Hunter’s last words to Chandler before Chandler took half the crew to the fire. “Vaya con Dios, amigo,” Hunter had said, and Chandler gave them a quick nod, then took long, steady strides to the head of the crew’s line. “Mount up,” Chandler called. By the time Barnes reached the fire, the world had already begun to turn. Soon the smoke preempted the sun, tinting the world a sepia. Then the fire moved like spilled mercury. And by then, there was nothing he could do but echo lost prayers.

  Near midnight, Barnes woke to his bedroom’s darkness as though he had not been asleep at all. He walked down the short hall to his other bedroom, his study, the room from which his ghosts always launched. Passing the mirror he saw he was naked and went back to his room for his robe. Back in the study he walked to the desk and turned on the lamp. He pulled two envelopes of photographs from his desk and dumped them into separate piles. He knew each photograph without looking. Each remained fixed in his mind as though it lay in its chemical bath. But he studied each one, hoping that by looking at them he might erase them, lose them from his memory and from his life.

  He breathed through his nose, which brought a sharp, burning pain deep into his sinuses. Holding a photograph of Lopez, or a photograph of the charred body of who Lopez once was, Barnes felt a wind gust and saw cattails of clouds blow along the belly of the sky. Sweat rolled down the sides of his face to gather beneath his chin. The fire’s noise roiled as loud as a train, and then louder, like a train wreck. A noise which built and circled and formed itself in space, a naked volume racing ahead of itself to swirl around him like demons. The moving bulk of flame and smoke drained the valley, all its air and existence, leaving an emptiness filled only by its own smoke.

  Within that riled moment of memory, Barnes realized that he needed to go to the cemetery, to where Lopez was buried, to see her place, although he had visited her grave four times since the fire. Maybe this time he would find the words to whisper to her.