“This is going to be the start of a new life,” she kept saying, and I knew that meant something different to her than it did to me.
They had a welcoming party for me at the Unitarian Church across the street from her parents’ house, right on the lawn for the whole town to see. I pretended that I recognized everything and some of it was vaguely familiar. A lot of things are vaguely familiar now. I had no idea how many times the old me had been to this town. I had been walking without the cane for a couple weeks, but Emily thought I should bring it along just in case. She explained to the minister that I would not be giving a speech to the small crowd that came, so I sat in a folding chair while people walked by to shake my hand, like I was visiting royalty from the poorest country in the world.
I met the man who would be my boss, Gerald, and he said there was no hurry for me to start work, and I thanked him for the job. I meant to ask him what kind of job it was, but I was afraid he had already told me. He had the kind of large rings on his hand that make handshakes painful. A woman with enormous sunglasses told me Emily used to babysit her son who was now a Marine in Afghanistan, and I said that I had never been there.
“He says you shouldn’t believe all the bad news in the papers,” she told me.
When the owner of the Mazda dealership offered to put up part of the down payment on a house for Emily and me, I said okay, and the local paper contacted me to provide a quote about it. “I was real touched” was the best I could come up with. It was a blue house at the top of a hill that looked out over our whole treeless development, a bright sea of lawns and aluminum siding. We even got a used Mazda for under Blue Book, since I had trouble driving stick now and had to trade in my old truck. Emily said to get the Tribute since it was big enough for when we’d have kids, which was the first she’d broached the subject, and I guess I said that was fine.
Since I wasn’t sleeping, and Emily got up early to open the pharmacy, I stayed downstairs all night and unpacked our things as quietly as possible. I get easily distracted now so these nights were not always productive. I got my army stuff down to about two black Contico boxes and a rucksack of stuff I couldn’t bring myself to throw away yet. I took naps during the day on the futon chair on the patio because I seemed only able to sleep soundly in indirect sunlight. Once I started working at the Tractor Supply, I slept in my car during my lunch break and went to bed right after work. I was not looking forward to the long nights of the winter months.
* * *
My afternoon naps were filled with the sound of neighborhood lawnmowers. It seemed as if people mowed their lawns every day, like brushing your teeth. In the lawn-mowing dreams, I was mowing the wide shoulder of the state highway with the rest of my old squad, which was six guys before I got hit. We were driving zero-turn Kubota mowers, because there was good clearance in front to see hazards in the grass. These were a big seller at the Tractor Supply. We had a dozen lined up on the front berm at the entrance to the shopping plaza. Our other job in the dream was to gather up the roadkill, which was everywhere, dogs and deer mostly. We had these fishing rods with little grappling hook ends, because we all knew that if there was a bomb in the roadkill, it would safely detonate while we were dragging it.
I would crouch behind the mower and cast my line over and over until I’d hook a deer on the side of the face or the shank and reel it back in to where I was. Sometimes I spent most of the dream casting the line over and over without success. This part of the dream got rather tedious.
The deer had the usual power-drill holes in their joints and skulls and cigarette burns on their legs. Some had illegible confessions stapled to their bodies. Most dogs had been beheaded and hog-tied with fence wire, but we never seemed to find any dog heads.
* * *
They had a card table and a chair for me by the main entrance of the Tractor Supply—which was the Super Tractor Supply, the flagship store of the state—right in front of the big windows, and it was so bright in the mornings I had to wear sunglasses and sun-block. After my first day at work, Gerald called Emily at home. She said I should wear my Georgia Tech hat to work, which I guessed was on account of the scars. I had meant to grow my hair out long enough to comb over the scars, but I wore the hat like she said. After a week, I had the initials “STS” from my polo shirt lightly stenciled in un-tanned skin onto the left side of my chest. The shirt was made of thin material. They made a placard that said “Three-Time Iraq Veteran Sergeant Aaron Ferguson, Combat Engineer and Tractor Supply Super Specialist,” which was awkward because I was not very good at answering tractor supply questions. I kept the store catalogue in front of me and studied it when no one was talking to me, which was just about all the time.
After my first week, Emily came home from work—she got off a few hours after I did—with a bucket of fried chicken and a bouquet of flowers.
“Who are those flowers for?” I asked.
“They’re for you, baby. It’s congratulations on your first week,” Emily said and handed them to me.
“They smell real nice,” I said.
“So, tell me, what is your favorite month of the year?” she asked.
I thought on this a while.
“December, I guess. Because of the holidays.”
“That’s not a great month for an outdoor wedding. How does early October sound?”
“For a wedding?”
“Yeah.”
“October is fine too,” I said.
After the first few weeks it became apparent that there was not much greeting for me to do, and I spent half of the work day at doctors’ appointments, so I asked what the previous store greeter did with his time. Gerald admitted that I was the first greeter they had hired. He could see I was uncomfortable with the lack of work, so I started to make delivery runs with a young guy named Ramon down to their store at the County Mall. It was only small inventory—tools and outdoor gear—but customers would place orders for larger items and we would move the orders from our warehouse down to the mall before it opened.
Ramon let me drive and I’d watch the truck while he unloaded goods onto a dolly at the service entrance. The main food court did not open until eleven, so we would have a breakfast of pretzels and iced tea at the Auntie Anne’s and talk about the strange, jobless, non-housewife people that shopped at the mall on weekday mornings. Ramon did not have much work to do back at the Tractor Supply either, or so he told me.
* * *
In my mall dream, the County Mall was attached to the side of the granary building on the Tigris. At the far side of Belk’s, the aluminum silos ran up alongside the parking garage. When rockets hit the silo walls, the grain dust blew out in red clouds, little burning clumps of falling grain smoldering. The fire seemed like an intentional part of the building to me, a kind of theme park fixture. It burned constantly, like the waste gas flame over the south Baghdad refinery. We had to open up all the stores before daylight.
I ran my fingers over the store locks in the dark, to see if they were tampered with, to see if men were waiting inside. The dark corridors of the mall were filled with grain-fattened pigeons, and their fluttering was all we could hear. We were casting our gun lights over the penny fountain when the neon lights turned on in the food court.
“It’s coming from Arby’s,” someone said.
The Arby’s front window was spider-webbed with bullet holes. A shopping cart from Sears sat by the entrance, filled with artillery shells and sweaters with a wire running up into the ceiling. There were mannequins at the registers wearing Arby’s uniforms and suicide vests. It smelled like someone was cooking fries.
“That’s probably the decoy,” I said.
As we scanned around us, I felt two of my grenades tumble out of a pouch on my body armor. I had to whisper loudly, “They’re mine, don’t worry, they’re mine. I’ll get them.”
The two grenades rolled under the metal security curtain in front of Old Navy, which was propped up just a few inches. The curtain was jammed and would
n’t raise any further than where it was and it made a terrible racket when I pulled on it. I could see my grenades on the floor, just a couple feet away.
My friends were shouting about Arby’s. There was someone in there.
“I have to get my grenades,” I said. “Just hold on.”
I got down on the floor and I tried to sweep the grenades back toward me using my rifle as a hook. I could just barely nudge them but was unable to sweep them any closer. I reached my arm in further, as far as it would reach. To do this, I had to turn my head away. Something inside the store pulled the rifle out of my hands. I was wedged under the curtain. I yelled out. My friends were gone. I woke up in my car to the sound of my phone alarm.
When I returned to work after the dream, I couldn’t sit at the desk. All afternoon I did slalom weaves through the aisles, thinking about what Emily might say if I came home and said I quit the Tractor Supply. I flipped through the landscaping magazines until I started feeling short of breath.
* * *
When I came home that day, the screen on the front basement window was busted in. The day prior, I discovered a crack in our house’s foundation where water had gotten into the basement during the storm, so I had left the basement windows open to help it dry out. It looked like someone had busted into the basement. The shades were drawn on the other floors to keep our AC bill down so I could not see into the rest of the house. There was a car I did not recognize at the end of the street, but I wasn’t confident about not recognizing anything. I took my revolver out of the glove box and checked the rounds while I decided what to do.
It seemed like a reasonable reaction I was having, but I couldn’t bring myself to call 9-1-1. There’s something normal about this you’re not noticing, I thought, something you would have noticed before.
When I came in through the patio door, it was hard to remember how things in the house had been arranged. I couldn’t tell if the living room looked different. The furniture was all hand-me-downs from Emily’s parents, couches with patched cushions. There was a creaky recliner that smelled like pipe tobacco. The stack of catalogues was still on the kitchen table where I had not touched them, things Emily wanted me to go through for the registry. None of the appliances seemed to be missing.
As I opened the door to the basement, I saw trash strewn on the stairs. I had to force myself to breathe through the tightness in my chest. I walked downstairs, feeling as if a slowly winding cable was pulling at my sternum. Every step felt like I was about to fall through the boards. All I could see was shredded army gear—uniforms and ponchos, things like that. When I turned the corner at the bottom of the stairs, I was alone in a room full of trash.
I guessed a stray dog had broken in, judging from the shit and the muddy paw prints on the workbench under the window. My old rucksack was busted open on the floor, and the chewed up remains of a two-year-old MRE that must have been buried inside were scattered all over. It was Chicken Tetrazzini. I could tell from the smell. Then the gun went off.
A lot of time must have passed while I was just standing there staring at the gun, my ears ringing. In all my months walking around with a loaded gun I never had an accidental discharge, not once. I couldn’t even remember putting my finger into the trigger well of the revolver. It was hard to explain. I felt like reality had just cheated against me. There was a fat chip in the floor in front of me and another in the wall in front of it where the bullet sat mashed up on the floor. It looked like a tiny brass dolphin lying on its side, from where I stood.
The patrolman called to me from the window with his gun drawn.
“Mr. Ferguson, it’s the police. Are you all right in there?” he called down.
I dropped the gun on the basement floor then put my hands up and turned toward the window.
“Don’t shoot,” I said. “It’s my house.”
“Sir, would you mind meeting me at the front door?” he said.
“Sure,” I said. “It was a stray dog.”
* * *
Emily ran up to the house in hysterics when she saw the police cruiser with the lights on. I had forgotten to call her. Officer Landau was just about to leave by that point anyway.
“What were you doing with that gun in your car?” Emily asked.
“I’ve always had a gun,” I told her.
“But you can’t have a gun anymore,” she said. “You just can’t.”
“Officer Landau said to just be more careful. He said there wouldn’t be any charges. I’ll send some flowers over to Mrs. Morris in the morning. She was the one who called about the gunshot.”
“We’re selling that gun tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll pick you up on my lunch break and we’ll go down to the pawn shop.”
My bad ear was still ringing the worst. I couldn’t tell how loudly she was talking. I had to judge from the expression on her face. There seemed no sense in arguing it.
“How about I just give it to you now so you don’t have to cross town to pick me up? Anything over two hundred’s a fair price,” I said. “It’s not a bad gun.”
* * *
I threw the last of the .38 rounds from my driver’s side window on the way to work the next morning, right off the side of a bridge. I made sure no one was within sight. I sped up just a little after I threw them. I think part of me thought they might go off on the rocks below and chase me down the road.
* * *
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 parkin
g 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.
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