Fire and Forget

by Matt Gallagher

  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.

  I waded into the shallows at the head of the pool and cast my fly as near to the oak as I could without risking the line. Then, slowly, I retrieved it. I could not see my lure in the water but imagined how my movements would translate. When I
jerked the line, the wooly bugger shot upward, top-lit at the surface, presented to any waiting predator—hopefully a trout, though I had inadvertently caught turtles in this creek. I paused, letting the fly fall through the water toward the bottom.

  On my third try, the rod came alive in my hand. For the first time in a long time I felt a welcome burst of adrenaline, a better drug than booze or pills. The hair on my neck stood on end and my breath quickened. As it fought against a shadow much larger than itself, the fish’s every burst of life was transmitted to me through the fly line via the tippet, a thread of nylon, microns thick, the whole process a kind of naturalistic Morse code. For such a small creature it was surprisingly strong, bending the rod in half.

  I took my time and let the fish run, careful not to give it too much line for fear it would entangle itself on the submerged tree. When the fish tired, I headed to the bank and reeled it in, lifting it from the water. It flopped wildly and fell off the hook onto the mud, where it continued to thrash, opening and closing its gills, gasping. I pounced on it, picked up a rock the size of my fist, and thumped its head until it went rigid.

  It was a big one—not the biggest I’d ever caught—maybe fifteen inches long, a couple pounds of lean muscle. It was a rainbow, a species once foreign to this water, introduced in the 1940s when the government stocked the river to satisfy the increasing demand of sportsmen. The native brook trout, more sensitive to environment than their larger, hardier cousins, had lost out.

  It had been years since I had eaten trout of any kind, but suddenly found I really wanted to. I couldn’t bring my catch back on the bus—the park service’s rules and all—but I had my lighter and pocketknife. I decided the thing to do was to clean the fish, build a small fire, and cook it on the spot.

  First, to cut off its head. I walked up the bank and flattened a patch of ferns to form a work area. I experimented with holding the knife in my good hand, but the fish was too slimy and kept sliding out from under the other. So I switched hands, now holding the trout in place with my right, pinching the knife in what remained of my left. I plunged in the blade just anterior to the pectoral fin near the gill cover. Clear fluid tinged with blood ran into the ferns.

  When I hit the spine, I couldn’t generate enough force between my three fingers to keep the knife from slipping as I tried to sever bone and the sinewy spine. It probably would have been wiser just to gut the thing and leave the head on, but my father had taught me how to cut fillets, and I had done it that way countless times before. Force of habit dies hard.

  I gripped the knife in the palm of my bad hand and nicked the tip of the blade into the spine, balancing the knife perpendicular to the ground. I rammed downward with the heel of my palm. The knife shot sideways and sliced through the index finger of my good hand. I cursed and tried to bend it; it would go only halfway, exposing white bone as flaps of skin separated to reveal layers of red and yellow tissue. Then the bleeding started. Great. Now I only had five good fingers.

  I let out a primal yell, grabbed the fish, brought it to my mouth, and wrenched its head the rest of the way off with one powerful chomp. As I pulled its tail away, stomach, liver, swim bladder, and intestines were stripped from its carcass and fell, a chain of organs, onto my chin. I spit them and the attached head into the water. Black wisps of blood eddied and curled in the shallows of the dark pool. Another trout shot to the surface to strike at the remains.

  My anger was gone as soon as it had arrived. I laughed, tasting bleeding gums pricked by scale and bone, and threw the carcass as far as I could into the woods.

  “Rooster! You okay? Where are you?” Sleed’s voice called to me from somewhere within the ferns on the north bank. I answered and listened to his noisy approach, picturing him whacking away at the fronds with his cane. He punched through the bank too near the oak, nearly plunging through a marshy false-ground before catching his step. Seeing me, he skirted the pool and came around to the shallows.

  “What the hell?” I asked. “You following me?”

  “Naw,” he panted, out of breath from bushwhacking. “There’s a trail and a bench over there. I was taking a break and heard you.”

  “I cut my hand trying to clean a fish.” I wiped blood, guts, and fish shit off my face.

  “Damn, nigga, that’s bleeding bad. Here, take this.” He stripped off his T-shirt, literally offering me the shirt off his back. What a great guy—I wish I could peel his face off and take it for my own.

  “Keep it,” I said. “I’ll use mine.”

  I got him to tear a strip off my shirt and wrap it around my finger. I applied pressure and elevated my hand above my heart. I sat down. Sleed lit a cigarette.

  “You know you not supposed to keep ’em, right?”

  “I know,” I said. “But I wanted to eat it.”

  “How were you gonna do that?”

  I bared my bloody teeth and felt a few rainbow scales still clinging to my gums. They must have glistened like mother-of-pearl in the half-light. Fish and human blood commingled, tasting salty on my tongue. Sleed whistled and said, “Rooster, you one crazy son of a bitch.”

  * * *

  Following the graded path that paralleled Big Hunting Creek, Sleed and I returned to the parking area. There, Grossnickle dressed my wound with his first aid kit. Before returning to his nap on the bus, he said my finger would need stitches. Nothing new there—over the past seven months I had become a veritable expert in plastic surgery, obsessed with the latest advances in facial nerve damage, tear duct injuries, ear avulsions. Able to extemporize on the differences between split and full-thickness skin grafts, tissue expansions, random-pattern flaps, pedicled flaps, free-form flaps, my dream was to someday receive a face transplant, a procedure yet to be performed in the States. A few stitches on my hand were small potatoes in light of the larger project of reconstruction.

  It was almost noon, we were the first to make it back from fishing, and the clear blue of the morning had given way to an overcast sky, rusty-grey clouds moving quickly overhead. Looking straight up, I could almost trick myself into thinking it was the trees in the foreground that were moving, and not the sky behind.

  A cold front had stalled in the valley to the east and finally spilled over the mountains. A fine mist formed in the forest, muted rainbows and halos sparking in the gaps between foliage, blurring distant objects. Two soldier fishers, identifiable only by silhouette, emerged like specters from the wood line before passing again out of sight. Sleed and I sat on a squared log coated with creosote, the border of the parking lot. We took turns pitching bits of gravel, aiming for an empty soda can ten feet away. To make the game interesting, we had a few bucks riding on it. Sleed hit the target first.

  “Got a call from the PI when you was fishing,” he said. He picked up another pebble and shook it in his closed fist. “They’re doing it in public.”

  “What?”

  “The Bitch is banging that nigga in public!”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Yeah. Looks like he’s got a thing for it. Restrooms, parked cars—my man said he got footage of them in the car outside my baby’s daycare. He’s sending me the video.” Sleed flung the stone at the can, nailing it again.

  “Why would you want to watch that?”

  “You know,” he said, ignoring me. “Krystal would never even suck me off. I mean, once in a blue moon—my birthday, right before we left for Iraq, shit like that. But I could tell she hated it. And then I’m gone for a year, and this nigga has her screwing in public. Unreal.”

  What could I possibly say to console this man? Really more of a boy, only twenty-one, and he had already been denied in so many ways—cuckolded, mutilated. What could I possibly say to dignify the situation? Nothing. I hung my head and picked at the gravel, embarrassed for him.

  We pitched rocks, traded stories and small bills, until a red sports coupe with tinted windows pulled into the parking area, empty except for our bus. A decal on the coupe’s rear window read “Princess.” Th
e doors opened and two girls got out. The driver looked no older than sixteen or seventeen, her passenger, a year or so younger. They were both dressed in flip-flops, brightly colored halter tops, and shorts cut so high, the bottom crease of their ass flesh was clearly visible. The girls gathered their book bags and locked the doors. Clearly, they were not here to fish.

  Acknowledging our gaze, the younger one smiled and waved shyly. She had a kind face, and I waved back. Her friend refused eye contact; her face sharp, disdainful, ears pierced up and down with studs and dangling baubles. She looked like a stone-cold fox, like she didn’t give a shit about anything. They both looked fine. I hadn’t been with a woman in almost two years. Sleed never would again, not like that. When they reached the trailhead at the opposite end of the parking lot, the girls took the path to the left, hiking out of sight.

  Sleed returned his focus to the can, tossing stone after stone. He lit a cigarette and smoked it down to the butt in a half-dozen drags. He stubbed it out. He cleared his throat, sighed deeply, took up his cane, and clambered to his feet.

  “I’m gonna go take a walk to warm up,” he said. “It’s cold as hell out here.”

  “What about the game? It’s my throw.”

  “I forfeit. Take the money.” He stretched his long arms overhead and started off.

  “Hold up, I’m coming with you.”

  “Just wait here.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Fine. Suit yourself.”

  We had been together through some shit, and even though I had a bad feeling about what he was up to—or maybe because I had a bad feeling—I couldn’t abandon him now.

  At the trailhead, Sleed took the right-hand fork, easing my suspicions some. The birds that had called so noisily that morning were now quiet. Empty tree limbs swayed in a moderate wind. It was the type of weather you see before a big storm, a lot of rotation in the sky, the barometric pressure going haywire.

  We had been walking for a few minutes when Sleed made an abrupt left off the trail. “It’s a damn school day,” he said, apropos of nothing.