“Fine,” I said. And I just lay there on my back and looked at the sky. An old man swam up to me like a seal with his nose poking out of the water. He seemed concerned. “Do you need help?” he said. On the drive back to America, traffic was slow. Customs long. A woman on the street sold him three ceramic skulls. They were the size of children’s heads and he gave one to me. “It’s a gift,” he said, “so you’ll always remember Mexico.” Back home he spoke in his sleep, muttering the way infants do, and once I had no idea he was even asleep, in the afternoon, and he rose a little and whispered, “Fifty years of this,” he said, “fifty years.” I woke him up and told him what he said. I thought it was sweet. That we’d get to wake up next to each other for the next fifty years. He slapped his head. “Even in my sleep I’m thinking about dying. Just fifty years before this is over and we’re dead.” Things were happening to him when he slept. Once when I came close he swore and jumped and said, “I thought you were a crescent moon coming in here! And look at this, I’m sleeping in the shape of a crescent moon.” He was a crescent moon: long and elegant like a diver. He apologized for speaking grunt. “The FOBs and S-VBIEDs and triple-stack 155s and OPs, LPs, IPs and TPs,” he said. He took off his baseball cap and put it on again. “It’s the beautiful clipped banter that says so much by saying almost nothing at all.” It’s the thing he missed most about the Corps. “It’s shorthand, a field poetry that owes existence to Hemingway and Chandler and doesn’t even know it.” It was Halloween and we took the job to heart. We were going to dress up as Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn. When I picked him up at the airport we were in a long line of cars, and when it came our turn to pay parking, the box for credit cards broke. That same day the pipes in the house where I was living broke and shit filled the basement. My bank account drained. “Destruction follows me everywhere,” he said. “What do we do?” We decided today was the day to jump out of a plane. We had to wait a long time for our turn. When my parachute opened and floated over Iowa strapped to an instructor I was cold and felt like vomiting and there was a sign on the ground made of old parachutes that read, Will you marry me? We were quiet and waited for the earth to
7