His favorite time was dawn.
Every morning Stacy huddled in the front of the cave, laid down behind the brush and watched as the sky turned colors. He enjoyed watching the streaks painted by nature or God or the Entity that Hovered Above Us All, as one military chaplain said in a makeshift church tent that shook from explosions nearby as they prayed for the Very Best Christmas Ever in Iraq.
Sometimes the colors blended and he would squint at them, almost reaching toward the sky with his good hand, ready to add texture with an invisible paintbrush.
And then he would go back to bed, to his makeshift tarp in the back of the cave., where he would sleep for several more hours.
The second time he woke up each day was his least favorite time. Hours yawned before him. At first he was just glad to be rid of the grueling occupational therapy, but then he realized that his plan presented real problems for him.
Staying in the cave might not have been the best idea, considering how far off the road it was. Although it hid him away, it was impossible, despite his best attempts, for him to get to the road to get anywhere without exhausting himself.
He tried to improve his stamina, but there was little difference even after a month of trying, so Stacy resigned himself to dividing his forages out of the cave to the wooded area between the highway and the cave. Sometimes he hunted small animals by setting traps made out of discarded materials he found around the ranch, cooking rabbits and squirrels for occasional meat over a fire in a clearing.
He discovered a babbling brook in the woods and fished. Although he only caught small junk fish, they tasted decent enough.
But these diversions weren’t enough to make him look forward to getting out of bed. The woods held their own charm as he made his way around, but he was also constantly on guard every minute he was out of the cave to avoid detection. Stacy never forgot that the land was part of the ranch and, as such, employees might appear to do maintenance tasks, such as mending fences or chopping down trees.
So there were days he laid in the cave on his tarp, staring at the walls without moving. It reminded him of patrols he went on in Iraq, where they sat in empty houses, deserted by unknown people, waiting for orders from the top to tell them what to do next.
Except now there was no one sending an order. He was just in limbo.
But there was the glorious dawn each morning, the time before the day really began, that kept him going. It wasn’t just the beauty or the mystery behind its daily appearance. It was that Stacy felt he owned it the same as he would if he was never injured. All he had to do was look up at the sky and he could once again feel part of the dawn the way he did before he left for the war.
The dawn restored his faith in himself.
The rest of the day stole it away again. And that same dull, deadly feeling of despair descended, as if he had nothing to look forward to. It was no better than when he lived at home. He’d brought it with him.
Sometimes the memories came then, riding on the heels of the despair like the four horsemen of the apocalypse thundering through the narrow passages of the cave. He would toss and turn on the tarp, trying to shut out the sounds and sights of the war, those moments when explosions rang out, when buddies fell to the ground, arms or legs left red stumps of flesh waved as their screaming echoed around the empty buildings, their blood caking on the hot sand.
“No!” Stacy screamed, sitting up, telling himself that it was just post traumatic stress disorder, triggered by this or that, the color on the wall of the cave, the markings, the sound of a bat, or anything at all.
Shadows, merely shadows.
Only the dawn in its perfection, in its unreachable glory, did not set him off. The dawn, untouchable, was safe. The dawn rose in the sky, remaining a fleeting hope. A daily call to him that maybe, just maybe, he could get beyond the rest of it – the injuries, physical and emotional, that held him so tight to the ground below.
There were times when he lifted his tarp off the cave floor after one of his screaming sessions and was surprised to see no stumps, no blood, no human carnage there. He shined the flashlight on the ground, wondering how he could be so afraid of – nothing. How he could fear phantoms from so many miles away, visions that weren’t real.
He’d weep, huddled in a ball, ashamed of himself. No one should be reduced to this. Yet he couldn’t stop the light-sound show in his head. It was like a concert on drugs, a nightly horror flick that replayed the same scenes over and over.
He never bought a ticket for it.
Stacy remembered reading an article about a nightclub in New England where pyrotechnics went wrong and over a hundred people were burned. Many were killed. The survivors told the press they felt forgotten, that they were blue collar people who were unable to return to former jobs as contractors, stuck taking eight dollar an hour jobs in ill health as they healed from their burns and injuries.
And injuries, Stacy knew, meant their post traumatic stress too. Their memories of the hell hole that nightclub turned into, the flames eating people alive, licking at the ceiling, the floor, demolishing the very ground they stood on, melting their skin, their humanity away. Taking their faces, their identities, and doing what with them?
For what? So there would be something cool to look at while music played?
Stacy never knew why he joined the Marines until after he was injured. Then he realized how utterly stupid he had been. Unlike some of his friends, he didn’t join because of September 11. He didn’t go because he was patriotic.
He went to show Rick up. He went because he knew it would drive Rick crazy that he actually had a war to go to, that his generation of Marines could go fight somewhere real, rather than talking about it.
Stacy wanted to get a little injured, get a few medals that he could pin onto his uniform that Rick would never have, wear them at family picnics, come home and strut around and show them off so Rick would have to grill hamburgers and hot dogs and swallow down that his son was a war hero. With medals and awards he’d never get, retired and old and out of shape and in civvy clothes that didn’t even fit him right.
But when he saw Rick and his mother in the hospital, Rick took over just as usual. He turned Stacy’s injuries into another battle, a way to put him down. He ignored his medals, making sure they disappeared from view.
And he never let a day go by that he didn’t imply that Stacy got injured because he screwed up. Or that he didn’t think Stacy would get better if he , Rick, didn’t oversee every last bit of his recovery.
But Stacy knew they were playing a losing game. His injuries were never going to be better. He was never going to be rid of the limp, the gumby, paralyzed arm movements, or the creep show that went on in his head.
And, worse yet, he realized he was never going to be rid of Rick. Not even in the cave.
Copyright 2008 Ruth Harrigan
