“Don’t worry about it, man,” the teenage ranch hand said, tossing the cigarette onto the dirt near the cave. He looked as if he was eighteen, nineteen years old, his black hair slicked back, a faint moustache on his upper lip, dressed in jeans and a ragged red T shirt.
That kid is me, thought Stacy. Was me.
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“What’s your name?” Stacy asked him.
“Cody.”
“Cody. Okay.”
“I gotta go take care of the horses or they’ll notice I’m gone. Later.”
Stacy watched as the kid disappeared through the brush. A chance encounter outside the cave and suddenly the cocoon was no longer airtight. Just a tiny edge of light turned a shadow from gray to white, the background from black to gray. That was how it was in a cave.
It was time to go, but he had no place to go.
Stacy limped through the cavern, packed his gear and emerged into the morning light, blinking. He pulled his folding cane out, flicked it open and began the trek toward the highway.
Behind him he heard footsteps, voices. Cody saying “In there, boss. He’s living there and I think something’s wrong with him…not right…”
Stacy hurried. He tripped over a few tree roots and found himself humming Amazing Grace.
So sweet the sound. That saved a wretch like me. Once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see.
“But what is there to see?” he muttered.
The highway lay before him. A white Ford truck flew by, its tires shooting pebbles to the side of the road, gravel pellets that landed near the edge of the trees, where the foliage stopped and the concrete began.
“Duck!” someone yelled, but there was no one there in the bright sunlit morning.
Stacy heard an explosion, saw a body drop in slow motion against the side of the Army vehicle. Then he saw the eyes, the terror in them stark against the gray, white and black landscape. A red trickle ran down the body’s left side where an arm and a leg used to be, turning into a crimson river that he couldn’t stop looking at or running toward.
Another explosion and his head hit the side of the vehicle as he, too, fell limp against the metal truck, wondering if his body was intact, not knowing then what he knew now – that some injuries ran deeper than blood, flesh and bones. That he should have been more worried about the imprint of what he was seeing than what was happening to his body.
“I cannot duck!” Stacy screamed toward the empty highway. “I cannot duck,” he repeated, dropping slowly, his cane forgotten, his body playing an odd game of limbo as it crumpled under an invisible bamboo pole, until he collapsed onto his back. He stared up at the blue sky over America and remembered that he was home and safe and now in the land of the Free, but the Not So Brave Anymore.
“I cannot,” he said again.
No cars went past him on the highway to shoot gravel as he almost hoped they would. There was just the blue sky mocking him, reminding him he was in America the Beautiful.
He was safe now, they told him at the hospital. He was going home.
He was supposed to forget what happened in that other place, that other time where bodies turned into red fluids in ten seconds flat, where the sky was never blue, where the locals ran and hid when they knew it was too quiet, right before the white explosions. The red. The white. The blue. But not in that order. Never again in that order.
“I-“ was all he said, blinking as he remembered watching the flag draped coffins taken aboard the transport plane, wondering who was inside and why they died and not him.
“You’re fine, soldier,” the nurse told him when he wept for them. She squeezed his shoulder reassuringly.
She didn’t understand. None of them understood. It wasn’t that he was ever afraid to die in those moments. He just didn’t know why he lived or how to live afterwards. Those questions went unasked and unanswered.
All that was left was silence. Stacy looked up at the blue sky, then closed his eyes trying to block out the images of the white explosions, the red rivers of blood that played over and over again behind his eyeballs until it was all he could see, whether his eyes were open or closed.
And with a certain knowledge that it did not matter where he went, he slowly climbed to his feet, found his cane, picked up his gear and headed down the highway.
Copyright 2008 Ruth Harrigan
