Fire and Forget Read Free Page B

ringing in your ears like a bell from somewhere else? How are you going to hear your old self through that, whatever you thought you wanted? All that fear and heat, satisfaction and lust, that’s what your dreams are made of. Look around you, man, this is not what I was coming back to. This is just dirt and steel and other people.”
    â€œJesus,” Cole waved his hand dismissively, and I laughed to make it easier and egg him on. “I bet you still got a working bullshit detector somewhere in there, but I’m sure that speech gets more convincing every time. Is that what you want to be good at? Making speeches about the war? Look what kind of company that puts you in. Try another line of work, man. Even if you’re a failure, which I’m not ruling out, it’s gotta beat this crooning about the war racket.”
    When I told him Jimmy’s bus was due any minute, he gave me a serious look. “Don’t mention any of that reenlisting and going back over stuff,” he said. “Last thing I want to do is put ideas in the kid’s head.”
    Jimmy worked as a security guard at some college in Michigan. He moved from Indiana to be closer to the Detroitmusic scene and closer to his wife’s family. He got her pregnant before we left, married her on his two weeks of leave, and came home a father.
    We saw him as soon as he stepped outside, scanning excitedly. He beamed when he saw us. “Hey fellas!”
    â€œJimmy boy!”
    â€œC’mere.” Cole grabbed him around the waist, bent back, and lifted him into the air.
    Jimmy was taller than either of us, but he always seemed like the frailest of the bunch. Over there, he’d seen more than most, blood from both sides and some of his own, but he never lost his little-brother manner. You could see it in his stooped shoulders and shuffling walk and hear it in his voice, always hungry for attention, never sure what to do when he got it but ask for more. He seemed somehow still naïve. He’d act out his pain without masking it as rage or contempt. It felt needy, sometimes, even weak, but it was more honest than the subterfuge I went through with Annie. Being angry with her in just the right way never seemed to make her understand.
    * * *
    I was somewhere else when she came in from work and saw me looking through old photos on my laptop, Jimmy’s tracks playing quiet through its tiny speakers. It wasn’t the first time, and it didn’t take long after she kissed me hello. We collected our silence, poised to resume the scene we’d been playing out for months.
    Â â€œIt doesn’t help,” was all she said at first, as one hand clenched the other and they went bright with white and red spots where the blood stopped and started. “Yesterday you barely spoke to me, and when you did your teeth were clenched. It wasn’t fair.”
    She waited, but I didn’t say anything. She went on. “You reminding yourself of better times? Or what it was like to be there?What’s it gonna be like when Jimmy and Cole get here? You gonna tell them everything you won’t tell me and pretend one year is all there is to you? Then you’ll come home, this, here, your home, and be mad at me for not knowing what they know.”
    She held in a breath and her eyes flickered. For a moment I thought she was going to laugh and I wanted to laugh with her, but her mouth never moved and I realized that she was somewhere else, caught in the middle register between a memory of happiness and the feeling of its loss.
    When she spoke again, it was gone. “What about Petersburg and the Neva River? We were gonna be Vadim and Ludmilla. You could go there with Cole, but would he know why? What do they know about that? What do they know about you ?”
    Her voice was still soft and she dipped her head to catch my eye, but I stared down at her feet and pressed my tongue to the back of my teeth.
    â€œYou don’t