Only the Rain(35)
She said, “I told Pops to be ready by eleven.”
I nodded. Drank a little more of the water and swallowed hard. Those bits of macaroni felt like shrapnel in my stomach.
Cindy must’ve seen the look on my face, the way I was wincing probably, because she smiled at me and said, “Let’s try to forget about everything else today, okay? Let’s enjoy being a family and living in a nice town with good people around us.”
It sounded like a fine suggestion, and I did my best to follow through with it, I really did. But that heaviness in my chest wouldn’t go away. I went through the motions okay, I guess, did all the right stuff for the next few hours or so, even though I felt like one part of me was a robot and the other part was standing off to the side watching me and shaking his head in disgust. We might even have gotten home that day with Cindy’s optimism still intact if it hadn’t been for the girl. It happened around two or three that afternoon. I’m not at all sure about the time of it. All I know is that I suddenly got dizzy. I thought for sure I was going to pass out. But then I looked up and saw her. The girl and the two guys with her, all of them looking my way across the courthouse lawn.
“I feel the world go black and heavy.”
Do you remember when you said those words to me? We were sitting in the chow hall one night, nobody but you and me, eating bowls of cherry cobbler with milk poured over it. I asked how you always managed to know an RPG was coming, the way you had that afternoon, and it wasn’t the first time either. You’d yell “Incoming!” before there was any sound at all, any flash or movement to be seen. And what you told me in the chow hall was, “Right before it happens, I feel the world go black and heavy.”
Of course when it happened to me at the picnic, when I saw that girl and the two guys with her checking me out, I didn’t put the feeling together with anything from Iraq. I felt a terrible heaviness all of a sudden, so sad and hopeless that it made me go all weak and dizzy. And then a shiver went through me. Gee used to say that a shiver happens when somebody is walking across your grave, and that pretty much sums up the feeling, doesn’t it? Like you’re trapped in a box wrapped up in heavy darkness and you know that life is up there in the sunlight somewhere, a place you can never reach.
Before that, everybody had been having a really nice time at the picnic. Right away Pops found some of his buddies to throw rubber horseshoes with on the short, one-way street that’d been blocked off for the day. And the girls were jumping back and forth from the bouncy house to one of the inflatable pools to the cupcakes and back to the bouncy house. I’d been focusing on them and nothing else, Cindy and me taking turns keeping an eye on the girls, checking on Pops every now and then, bringing him a plate of food and a cold drink. I was able for a while to sort of borrow from everybody else’s happiness and innocence.
Around two o’clock or so a local bluegrass group started setting up on the bandstand on the back lawn, pinging and twanging midway between where Pops was throwing horseshoes and where the girls were squealing and laughing inside the bouncy house. And then out of nowhere that awful feeling hit me, and it was exactly like you said. The air seemed to thicken and pinch in on me, and the light went dim and gray. I actually looked up and away from the bouncy house, looked to see if some big black cloud was crossing the sun. But there was nothing, the sky was as clear and washed-out blue as always. And then that icy shiver hit, and something told me to turn and look back at the bandstand.
There was Donnie grinning like an idiot, holding a canned soda in one hand and pointing across the lawn at me with the other. The girl standing beside him was already holding her sunglasses up off her eyes and squinting in my direction, and then the two guys with her turned their eyes on me too.
I put my back to them and stood there looking in through the bouncy house window at the girls. They were in there with five or six other little kids, all of them bouncing and laughing and crashing into each other like it was the greatest thing in the world. Meanwhile there’s an icy shiver still crawling up and down my spine. Cindy is there beside me saying “Not so hard, girls,” and “Watch your head!” and things like that. And I can feel that RPG bearing down on me from out of nowhere and without a sound.
“Excuse me, sir,” the one guy says.
Every muscle in my body seizes up with dread, but I make myself turn and look at him. He’s at least in his fifties, not a big guy but wiry and hard, and he has a full head of short gray hair and eyes as blue as river ice. He’s smiling when I turn, and he keeps smiling all the time, that type of smile like he thinks everybody but him is a joke of some kind.
He says, “Donnie tells me you did a tour in the Mideast a few years back.”
And now Cindy turns around too. I tell the guy, “Personally I wouldn’t trust anything Donnie says. But in this case he’s right.”
“I was wondering about those desert boots GIs wear,” he says. “You must have a pair of those, am I correct?”
“Had a pair,” I tell him, and I can feel Cindy’s eyes on me now. I can feel the question she’s thinking.
That’s when the other guy takes a sheet of folded-up paper from his pocket and opens it up and holds it in front of me. The paper has two images on it. The one on top was probably copied off the Internet. It shows a pair of tan desert boots, with the right boot standing upright and the left boot turned to show the Panama tread pattern. Below that image is one he probably took with his cell phone. It’s a snapshot of a muddy boot print on a linoleum floor. That boot print has the same tread pattern as in the top image.