Fatal Light by Richard Currey

curb and my father smiling easily in the cavalier sophistication that leaned on the mantel Errol Flynn style, saying Sure, have a good time for me. So we drove and drove, gentle into the sundown wind past the high school and stadium and the outdoor markets to the highway where Mary opened the night, her hair standing straight behind her, not another car in sight. She took me to a golf course with mist collecting over the water traps: we walked out of sight of the car and sat down at the top of a long fairway.
    We kissed with a determination, a natural ache, and Mary pulled away, looking at me evenly, drawing down the straps of her summer dress.
    Driving home I watched the sky slide over, purple air and the memory of her breasts stippled from night cold, the kind of
private event that might save me, a thing I could own free and clear.
    My stomach began to undulate, to fold in its glove of muscle when the pain used up my legs. I tried to call out.

5
    My father was still awake in his tartan bathrobe. Watching the eleven o’clock news. He asked if Mary and I had a nice drive. When the news signed off he heaved up from the olive-green recliner, pulling his robe tighter. I remembered the spray of Mary’s headlights over a country road as if I were no longer in the car, as if I had been a boy standing alone on the side of the night, watching the points of light approach, flash, slowly flow back into the darkness inside my head.
    My father stood for a few minutes waiting to see what the late show would be: Flying Leathernecks; Thirty Seconds over Tokyo; Back to Bataan; Run Silent, Run Deep. Hell of a time, my father said, we had with the Japs. They just about did us in.
    I wanted to remember but the details swam: I watched the headlights approach, circles of intense light out of a black distance, converging, roaring, blinding sheen, and I know what I heard, capsized insight, the day I was leaving my mother crying and my father shaking my hand, saying All of us have a duty that’s more important than ourselves.

6
    Through-and-through shrapnel wounds with fractured bone. I was airlifted to a staging hospital, underwent surgery, debridement, sewing, plastering. Not too bad —my surgeon nodded from the end of the bed— all things considered. Coulda been a lot worse.
    One afternoon in the hospital we heard an announcement. Bob Hope was touring in-country, entertaining the troops. The announcement came just after a general stopped in to award a Silver Star. I was asked to sit at the soldier’s bedside in a wheelchair, an audience, the witness. The soldier’s head was a white swath stained yellow and green at the temples, eyes staring flat as stones from a window in the tapes. I had overheard one of the surgeons on rounds, looking down at the bandages.
    Brain’s gone, he said. All we can do is wait him out.
    The general’s aide read the citation about meritorious action in the face of a hostile enemy. Citations always told the story in one hundred words or less, small translations of how lives ended on bleached afternoons along riverbanks or inside the nights, suffocating in rain. The soldier with the bandaged head had escaped a mortared bunker but returned to reclaim a burning
corporal, killing four or five of the enemy with knife and side arm on the way back in. He sustained his wounds on the crawl out, taking shrapnel in the head and shoulders but moving on with the burning man on his back.
    The man he rescued, I was told by those who were there, was dead by the time they gained cover. They were both in flames.
    The medal rested in a case lined with scarlet velvet, was opened in front of the soldier’s eye window, and he stared through the box lid, into the bed across the aisle, into the next world. I wheeled slowly back to my cot. As the entourage moved out, the general’s aide stepped to one side in the doorway and announced that Bob Hope and company would be at the hospital in the coming