19. Clarry

CLARRY

The boom was so loud it woke me instantly.

My eyes snapped open, I sat bolt upright and looked around.

I felt a pang in my chest when I saw no sign of River.

Had he changed his mind in the night?

Had he abandoned me?

Was it all just a dream after all?

BOOM!

I jumped as another blast shook the ground.

The noise was so deafening, so violent, it rattled me to the core, sending ripples of fear through me. What was happening? What was making those terrible sounds? Where was River?

BOOM!

I jumped to my feet, found my shoes and desperately scanned the surrounding woods. "River? River, where are you?"

The only response was my own voice echoing back to me from the trees, followed by yet another BOOM!

I didn't feel safe.

I didn't know if River was safe.

All I knew was, I had to find him.

I ran into the forest, slipping on the mossy ground, tripping over fallen branches and pushing through the fern fronds and bushes.

"River? River!"

My voice was shrill and frightened.

I stumbled onto a beaten track then slid on a patch of dead leaves and landed on my hands and knees, snapping twigs and grazing my palms. I crawled back to my feet and found the track, quickening my steps as I blundered farther and farther into the woods until—

"River! Oh no."

Through the thickets and ferns, I caught sight of him.

He was positioned at the base of a large tree, his back pressed against the trunk.

I pushed my way to him as fast as I could, twigs and branches lashing at my arms and face.

When I reached him, I saw he wasn't just sitting at the foot of the tree. He was huddled in a ball, his knees to his chest and his big arms wrapped around his legs, hands gripping his ankles. His head was buried between his knees, and he was rocking back and forth, pressing his back harder and harder against the tree, the bark tearing his shirt. I could see his blood had stained the tree trunk. From his lips came an endless spree of indecipherable mutterings and whimpers until—

BOOM!

With another blast he clenched his teeth and gave a stifled scream.

I hurled myself to my knees beside him.

Shocked.

Panicked.

Not knowing what to do but throw my arms around him.

"River. It's okay. I've got you. You're okay. It's gonna be okay. I'm here."

He rocked even harder .

I wasn't sure whether he was trying to push me off or tell me to hold on tighter. All I knew was, there was no letting him go.

I tightened my embrace.

"River, it's okay. I'm here. I'm here." I didn't know what else to say, so I just kept repeating myself, trying to calm him down. "River, I'm here. Don't be scared, I'm here."

BOOM!

He let out another cry then tried to choke it back, the sound guttural and tormented. He bucked harder against the tree then turned his face to look at me. His eyes were enormous, full of tears, full of terror.

"Make it stop! Make it stop!" he screamed at me.

"The noise? I don't know what it is. I don't know where it's coming from—"

"Make it stop!"

I nodded frantically. "I'll go. I'll find out what it is. I'll make it stop—"

But as I let go of him and tried to stand, he grabbed my shirt in his fist and yanked me back toward him so fast he ripped the sleeve.

"No, don't leave me."

BOOM!

"Just make it stop!"

"How? How do you want me to make it stop?" I was overwhelmed, confused, horrified to see him like this. I couldn't stop my own tears from flooding my eyes and streaking down my cheeks. "What do you need me to do, River?"

"Stop it! Stop the blood," he spat through his clenched jaw. "Stop the blood!"

I looked at the tree behind him, the blood on the bark. It was seeping through his torn shirt. "If you let me help you up, we can walk back to our camp. I can get you cleaned up. I can—"

"Not me! Them!"

"Them? Who? "

"The bodies!" he screamed. "The blood! Make it all stop! "

His pain made my blood chill.

I realized in that moment, it was a pain only I could end.

I sucked back my tears.

I puffed my cheeks and steadied my breath.

I gripped his shoulder and squeezed as tight as I could to get him to focus on my words. "River, you stay here. I'm going to find out what's making that noise."

"No! No, no, no, no, no! Don't leave me!"

"I'm not leaving you. I'll be back as soon as I can. Don't move from this spot. I'm going to stop this."

I jumped to my feet and stepped backward before he could grab me, then I turned and ran toward the sound of the next—

BOOM!

My heart shattered into a million pieces as I left River's cries behind me.

But I knew whatever had reduced him to a terrified shell of the River I knew—whatever pain had been unleashed—it had been caused by the blasts we heard, and I wasn't going to stop that pain unless I stopped whatever was rocking the forest. I also knew that taking him with me closer and closer to the source of the explosions was not an option.

Chances were he'd buckle even more the nearer we got.

Chances were he'd slow me down and only prolong his pain.

Chances were I was headed straight toward danger; I was trying to stop whatever was harming him, not drag him toward it.

I raced through the underbrush, slipping and staggering and fumbling and floundering, the sounds of the explosions getting louder and louder until suddenly I burst through the forest onto the banks of the river.

There I saw an old man standing in the water up to his waist. He was wearing fishing coveralls and puffing out smoke from a cigarette clenched between his teeth. In one hand he held a net full of dead fish. In his other hand he held a stick of dynamite .

I gasped as I realized who it was.

Dynamite Dwight.

Casually he lit the fuse of the dynamite stick on his cigarette, then tossed it a short distance upriver and BOOM!

Water erupted…

Along with a bunch of dead fish that splashed onto the surface and floated downstream for Dwight to collect in his net.

"Stop! Dwight, stop!" I stood on the shore, waving my hands frantically to get his attention.

When Dwight turned, he squinted at me then smiled with recognition. "Clarence? Is that you? What are you doing here?"

"Come quick. I need help. We need help!"

I ran through the forest with Dynamite Dwight hurrying behind me until soon we reached River, still huddled in a ball beneath the tree.

I dropped to my knees and wrapped my arms around him. "River, it's okay. I'm back."

By now he had stopped crying and muttering and screaming. In fact, he didn't make any sound at all. He simply stared at the ground, trembling so violently I couldn't calm him down.

"What's happening?" I begged Dwight for an answer. "Is he having some kind of seizure?"

"He's gone into shock." Dwight reached down and pulled River to his feet by one arm. "Get under his other arm. We have to get him warm. My cabin's just up here a way."

Flames crackled, but this time it wasn't our campfire and there were no s'mores in sight. Instead, the glow and warmth came from Dwight's fireplace, with River lying on a woven rug in front of the blaze, a blanket wrapped tightly around him. After his ordeal, almost as soon as we laid him on the floor and bound him in the blanket, he fell into a deep, deep slumber.

His body was spent.

His tears were gone.

For now.

"Do you want a cup of hot cocoa?" Dwight asked quietly. "I think we could both use a hot cocoa."

I was sitting beside River on the rug, one hand resting on his broad shoulders. It was my way of connecting with him, even as he slept; a gentle, humble gesture that I was there to protect him, no matter what it took.

"Yes please," I answered.

As Dwight shuffled over to a small, potbelly stove and sat a kettle on top, I looked around his tiny, four-walled log cabin. In one corner, at the opposite end of the room from the fireplace, was a stack of wooden crates labeled ‘Danger - TNT'. Along another wall was a bed with a mattress that had several springs poking loose and a nightstand with a stack of old hardcover books and a pair of reading glasses perched on top. Beside the potbelly was a small kitchenette, beside it were shelves above an oven that were crowded with cereal boxes and tobacco tins and cans of beans and sweetcorn. While by the fire was an old rocking chair, beside it a small table with an ashtray and a lighter and a packet of roll-ups, the kind you use to make your own cigarettes.

But the one thing that really captured my attention was the large, gold-framed poster of a black-and-white movie classic titled The Goddess of Happiness . Front and center on the poster was a ravishing beauty in a toga and tiara, draped upon a cloud as though it was a chaise lounge, a harp in one hand and a bunch of grapes in the other. And above the title of the movie—in print larger than the title itself—were the words ‘Mavis Morningstar is… '

"The Goddess of Happiness," I breathed quietly.

Dwight looked over from the tin of cocoa he'd pulled down from one of the shelves. "The one and only." He smiled. "She was the most heavenly being I'd ever laid eyes on. Still is. After I finished up in the mines, I discovered that she was living in Mulligan's Mill, running the Ritz, so I packed my things and moved to this cabin just to be near her. Took me another six years to work up the courage to actually head into town and introduce myself. Now that I've found her, I'm never letting her go. Life's too short, even for an old geezer like me. More so, in fact." He poured two cups of cocoa. "Marshmallow?"

"You have marshmallows?"

"I'm not a philistine!"

"Oh, sorry. I didn't mean anything by that. It's just with… all the dynamite…"

"You think I'm a hillbilly? You think I'm uncouth? You think I'm unhinged?"

"Maybe. Yeah. After all, you were blowing up fish."

He handed me a mug of cocoa with a marshmallow bobbing on top, then sat in the rocker by the fire. "I see your point. But when you get to my age, the old joints tend to squeak a lot more than they used to. Casting a line is one thing, but reeling in one of those ten-pounders feels like a tug-of-war with Neptune himself. Trust me, the dynamite makes the job a whole lot easier."

"Yeah, but it's kinda… I don't know… violent, don't you think?" I gestured to the stack of crates in the far corner. "How do you even get your hands on something like that? Isn't it illegal?"

"Once my soldiering days were done, I worked in the mines for almost forty years. It's a brotherhood, just like the war. I have one or two friends who manage to keep me well supplied. "

"You were in the war?"

He blew the steam off his cocoa and took a sip. "U-huh. One of them, at least. If you ask me, there's been too many wars to count."

"River was in the Marines, although he never talks about it."

"I kinda figured that already. I tell ya, the world would be a better place if we just stopped feuding and started showing each other a little goddamn respect."

"But you love to blow things up? I don't get it."

"There's a difference between blowing things up and blowing people up."

"But those explosions… they're scary. They scared the fudge out of me. And what they did to River… I'm not sure I even wanna know."

"Are you two… boyfriends?"

I hesitated. I wasn't certain how River would want me to respond, and in his slumber he couldn't speak for himself. But I knew the answer I wanted to give. "U-huh," I nodded shyly. "Yeah, we're boyfriends."

"Then you don't have a choice about whether you wanna know or not. Whatever's giving him the terrors, that's something you need to know. So you can hold him when it happens next time. So you can protect him from it. So that someday, with your help, he may eventually be cured of his pain."

"I don't want it to ever happen to him again."

"It will. It's in him now, like a goddamn parasite. Whatever has happened to him, it won't ever let him go."

"How do you know?"

"Because I've seen it before. What he was going through out there in the woods, that's a hurt like no other. That's trauma. That's war. And I'm not talking about the war in which he served. I'm talking about the war he's having with himself. One that might never end. One that takes its toll over and over and over again. It breaks you down and brings you to your knees. It reduces you to a husk of the man you once were. Your soul becomes like an empty house, haunted and howling when the wind blows through it."

"How do you fix it?"

"The house? You can't ever fix it completely, but you can at least try to fill it with love. That's the best you can do. It's the only thing you can do."

I wasn't sure what to make of Dynamite Dwight. Here was a man who seemed to have such a quiet wisdom about him, and yet lighting the fuse on a stick of dynamite was his idea of a good time. "I still don't understand."

"You still don't understand what?"

"Well… you. If those explosions can bring a war hero like River to his knees, why doesn't it do the same to you?"

Dwight put down his mug and picked up his cigarette rolling paper. "Mind if I smoke? It's the good stuff. Grown in the finest hydroponic environment. As I said before, my brothers in the mines keep me well supplied."

I shrugged. "It's your home."

"That it is." Dwight stood from his chair and it rocked in his wake. He fetched a tobacco tin from a shelf in the kitchenette, then returned to his seat, rocking as he rolled his whacky tobacky. "Now, where were we?"

"You were going to tell us why the dynamite doesn't trigger a panic attack in you." The answer came not from me, but from River. There was a calmness in his voice, something somber and sad. At some point he must have woken from his sleep without Dwight or me noticing. Slowly he sat up, wincing as he did so.

"River, take it easy," I told him. "You should be resting."

"I know. But I want to hear his answer. I need to know. I heard you tell Clarry you were in the war. Always pleased to meet a fellow troop. I'm River, by the way."

"Dynamite Dwight."

"Why doesn't a name like that surprise me," said River .

"What can I say, I'm a simple kinda guy. What you see is what you get."

"Well, you sure made one helluva first impression."

Dwight lit his cigarette and inhaled deeply before blowing out a plume of smoke. He offered it to River. "Joint?"

To my surprise, River reached for the cigarette. "Sure, why not."

"River, should you be smoking in your condition?" I asked full of concern.

"Clarry, I have PTSD. I'm not pregnant."

As River handed the joint back to Dwight, his words sank in.

"PTSD? You have post-traumatic stress disorder? River, you never told me."

He paused then took a deep, slow breath. "I've never told anyone. Not because I'm ashamed of it, but because I'm afraid that talking about what happened to us over there would bring it all to the surface. I figured if I buried it deep enough, then that's where it would stay. But I guess Dwight here blew that theory out of the water, literally." He turned to me and reached for my hand. "I'm so sorry you had to see me like that."

I took his hand and squeezed it tight. "River, you never have to apologize for anything. You're a war hero. You're my hero. You always have been."

He quickly palmed a stray tear away from his cheek. "I didn't feel much like a hero today. Heroes don't exactly crumble into a blubbering mess, screaming and rocking like a terrified kid."

"Poppycock," Dwight chimed in. "That's exactly what heroes do. You think they sit around polishing their medals for the rest of their days? Bullshit they do. Heroes have to try to come to terms with what made them a hero in the first place, whether they stepped on a landmine or saved their squadron and came out of the battle the last man standing. Heroes have guilt they can't absolve and enemies they can't run from and scars that won't ever stop bleeding. So next time you crumble into a mess, remember… that's what heroes do. And remember that Clarence here was right—you never have to apologize for anything. I'm the one who should apologize for triggering all this in the first place."

"You weren't to know I was within earshot of the blasts," said River, taking the joint that Dwight offered once more. "But you still haven't told us why it doesn't have the same effect on you. How can those explosions not turn you into a quivering wreck?"

"Because what fills most with dread, reminds me how lucky I am to be alive. Every stick of dynamite I light reminds me of every battle I survived. With every boom, I count my blessings. I guess I'm just wired differently."

As the blue haze of the whacky tobacky created an almost mystical veil in the air, I noticed Dwight's eyelids begin to droop.

"Well, for what it's worth," I said, "I'll always be honored to be in the company of those who have served their country."

River tightened his grip on my hand.

Dwight gave me a wobbly salute. "Well thank you, Clarence. Thank you very m—"

Midway through his word, Dwight's head suddenly slumped on his shoulder while his chair still rocked.

I turned to River, somewhat alarmed. "Holy jitterbugs! Did he just die from an overdose of whacky tobacky?"

River spluttered out a laugh. "No, I don't think so. But I should probably rescue that joint before he drops it on the floor and blows this whole cabin to oblivion."

Getting up from the rug, River winced again, and I saw the bloodstains on the back of his torn shirt.

As he gently took the joint dangling precariously between Dwight's fingers, I stood. "River, I need to look at your back. We need to get that shirt off."

River glanced at me, a glazed look in his eyes and a somewhat mischievous curl of his lips. "Why Clarence, are you trying to seduce me?" He stumbled a little.

"Careful, River. Let me help you back down onto the rug." I eased him down into a cross-legged sitting position, then headed to the kitchenette and ran some water over the pink handkerchief still in my pocket. While Dwight began snoring in his rocking chair, I returned to the rug and knelt behind River. I eased off his shirt to see the red, raw cuts on his broad, muscled back. The lacerations were shallow, but if nothing else I needed to clean the dirt out of the wounds. "I hope this doesn't sting too much."

"Don't worry," he said, holding up the joint before taking another puff. "I've got just the thing to help numb the pain."

Gingerly I dabbed at his wounds.

At first, he flinched.

He inhaled again on the joint, blew smoke into the air, and my own eyes began to see double. I giggled at the luscious sight of River's shoulders growing even broader than normal, yet I couldn't deny the pang in my heart over the words he'd said earlier.

"What did happen to you over there? What is it you try so hard to bury?" I suddenly realized that my question might trigger another panic attack and wished I'd never even opened my mouth. "Oh willikers, I'm sorry. I shouldn't ask you that. Please forget I even—"

"No. It's okay." He flicked the butt of the joint into the fireplace and turned around on the rug to face me. He slid his palm against mine, entwined my fingers with his. "I think it's something I need to learn to talk about. Even if I only talk to you about it, at least it's no longer trapped inside me. Maybe if I set it free… it'll set me free."

I leaned forward and ever so gently kissed his lips, before feathering away to tell him, "If it'll set you free of your pain, you can tell me anything. Tell me everything. "

And so, over the next hour—through anxious pauses and a quavering voice—River told me about a day in the desert that changed his life forever. He told me about how he was supposed to be driving the lead jeep, but at the last minute his leader switched him to helm the truck carrying the rest of his squad in back. He told me how he caught sight of the shell fired from a mortar hidden behind a rock cluster, unable to do a thing as it ripped through the lead jeep and turned it into a twisted, blackened wreck. As he slammed his foot on the brake, a second explosion tore through the back of the truck he was driving, hurtling him out through the windshield. When he came to, the attackers had fled believing everyone was dead. They were right, everyone was dead. Everyone but Private First Class River Raven, sole survivor of the ambush that claimed his entire squad that day.

When River was through telling me, he loosened his grip on my hand.

I didn't even realize he had squeezed it so tight, I'd lost all feeling in my fingers.

It wasn't until he finished telling me his story that the tears began to fall.

It was just a sprinkling at first, a few shiny gems streaking down his cheeks. But then he began crying in earnest. Then he sobbed. Tears that had been bottled up for too long gushed down his cheeks. He planted his face in my shoulder and draped his arms around me and released all the anguish and agony inside him.

Outside, a summer storm broke.

As tears spilled down my shoulder, raindrops fell down the chimney and evaporated in the fire.

Dwight snored in his rocking chair as I rocked River in my arms.

And when the sobbing subsided and the storm rumbled away, I said to the man in my arms, "Let me make you a hot cocoa. I'm going to make us both a hot cocoa."

River sniffed back the last of his tears and smiled at me. "Dwight has cocoa?"

I smiled back and nodded. "He even has marshmallows."