Free Fire and Forget by Matt Gallagher Page B

out at first. But you go through like you were trained and it works.
    In Wilmington, you don’t have a squad, you don’t have a battle buddy, you don’t even have a weapon. You startle ten times checking for it and it’s not there. You’re safe, so your alertness should be at white, but it’s not.
    Instead, you’re stuck in an American Eagle Outfitters. Your wife gives you some clothes to try on and you walk into the tiny dressing room. You close the door, and you don’t want to open it again.
    Outside, there’re people walking around by the windows like it’s no big deal. People who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died. People who’ve spent their whole lives at white.
    They’ll never get even close to orange. You can’t, until the first time you’re in a firefight, or the first time an IED goes off that you missed, and you realize that everybody’s life, everybody’s life, depends on you not fucking up. And you depend on them.
    Some guys go straight to red. They stay like that for a while and then they crash, go down past white, down to whatever is lower than “I don’t fucking care if I die.” Most everybody else stays orange, all the time.
    Here’s what orange is. You don’t see or hear like you used to. Your brain chemistry changes. You take in every piece of theenvironment, everything. I could spot a dime in the street twenty yards away. I had antennae out that stretched down the block. It’s hard to even remember exactly what that felt like. I think you take in too much information to store so you just forget, free up brain space to take in everything about the next moment that might keep you alive. And then you forget that moment too, and focus on the next. And the next. And the next. For seven months.
    So that’s orange. And then you go shopping in Wilmington, unarmed, and you think you can get back down to white? It’ll be a long fucking time before you get down to white.
    By the end of it I was amped up. Cheryl didn’t let me drive home. I would have gone a hundred miles per hour. And when we got back we saw Vicar had thrown up again, right by the door. I looked for him and he was there on the couch, trying to stand on shaky legs. And I said, “Goddamn it, Cheryl. It’s fucking time.”
    She said, “You think I don’t know?”
    I looked at Vicar.
    She said, “I’ll take him to the vet tomorrow.”
    I said, “No.”
    She shook her head. She said, “I’ll take care of it.”
    I said, “You mean you’ll pay some asshole a hundred bucks to kill my dog.”
    She didn’t say anything.
    I said, “That’s not how you do it. It’s on me.”
    She was looking at me in this way I couldn’t deal with. Soft. I looked out the window at nothing.
    She said, “You want me to go with you?”
    I said, “No. No.”
    â€œOkay,” she said. “But it’d be better.”
    She walked over to Vicar, leaned down and hugged him. Her hair fell over her face and I couldn’t see if she was crying. Then she stood up, walked to the bedroom and gently closed the door.
    I sat down on the couch and scratched Vicar behind the ears and I came up with a plan. Not a good plan, but a plan. Sometimes that’s enough.
    There’s a dirt road near where I live and a stream off the road where the light filters in around sunset. It’s pretty. I used to go running there sometimes. I figured it’d be a good spot for it.
    It’s not a far drive. We got there right at sunset. I parked just off the road, got out, pulled my rifle out of the trunk, slung it over my shoulders, and moved to the passenger side. I opened the door and lifted Vicar up in my arms and carried him down to the stream. He was heavy and warm, and he licked my face as I carried him, slow lazy licks from a dog that’s been happy all