#fpjoriginal

 You feel as though you are swimming through the heat as you load the last few items into the U-Haul trailer attached to your truck. A lamp from the nightstand, a pair of flip-flops that failed to make it into the suitcase, the metal toolbox with a dent next to the handle. These are just small fragments of the last three years. The big stuff is already loaded. You grab the leather notebook holder sitting on the stairs and open it. The most important parts were cluttered inside in the forms of the final poems you had written and the medallion awarded to you for completing your Honors Thesis. You open the passenger side door on the truck and set it on the seat before rolling down the window and closing the door.

You explore the desolate apartment in search of any lost treasure that you might have missed. Kitchen cabinets fly open to reveal only dark crannies robbed of all value, purposeless voids of cheap woodgrain laminate. You walk down the hall and can almost see the ghostly reflections of friends drinking beer on the couch in the polished living room floor. Walking up the stairs to the bedroom, you see the claw marks left on the door by your dog during a particularly rough fight with an old girlfriend. You push open the door and see the pee stains he left on the carpet. Two hours of hard scrubbing still could not remove his stains from your life.

The heat rises in your cheeks, so you walk back down the stairs. Since your roommate will be around another day, you hang the key up next to the door and walk out to the truck. You roll down the window, and take a deep breath as you start the truck. The pickup crushes the dried pine needles on the curb as it pulls away and into the street. Intentionally driving the long way through town, you pass the Potato Shack.

It is still too early for the patio to be filled with old friends drinking themselves into a stupor, and you have already said your goodbyes in a spectacular liquor-filled fashion. You raised your glass of cold Shiner Bock one last time before reading your well-loved potato poem to a group collected in the corner. Fellow vets, writers, and drinking buddies all stopped by for one last send-off. You reminisced, debated, and even planned a US Senate run for the old drunk at the end of the bar. This is where you learned to relax and take a break from the grueling pressure of your new life.

You follow the curve around Sam Houston State, waving to the Evans Complex. Professors there helped you develop new levels of anxiety while you worked to rid yourself of the old ones. On your first day of class, you explained how your choice of seat location directly resulted from the physiological reactions of post-traumatic stress. In fact, every first class period for three years revolved around that same discussion. But this is also where you learned to write, learned how to make friends, learned to analyze literature, learned how to hate the constructed values of your former life. Here, the soldier intersected with the scholar.

You follow the road through the downtown construction and take a left on 11th Street. The little shops and restaurants all fade into one another. Your favorite Salvadoran restaurant passes out of your peripheral as the Popeye’s comes into view. The Golden Corral becomes a gas station, then a post office. You pass the laundromat where you once wrote a six-page paper on Hemingway while sharing Skittles with a girlfriend writing for the same class. The sweetness of the candy mixed with the smell of warm lint created an illusion of domestic bliss. As you continue down the road, you pass the theater with $5 movie tickets and the mall with two stores and offices for prison administrators that mark the boundaries of Huntsville.

The true trademark of East Texas overtakes the scenery as pine trees line the highway. You are tempted to pull over and take one last look at Huntsville. Instead, you settle for the memories that waft with the heat from the road up towards the sky.

You remember the first few months, working at McCoy’s while living in a rundown trailer with your sister and her three-hundred-pound homebody of a fiancée. A month into your first semester, he tried to fight you over the use of a truck he never drove, so you stayed on the couch of a six-foot-ten coworker named Sam before finding a nice apartment. You still owe Sam a few beers.

You think back to the time you met your first non-work friends, a former Army officer-turned-bearded hippy named Charlie and a solid-but-shy park ranger/musician named Jay. The drunken antics of that night led to a karaoke bar next to the prison where all the executions happen. This seemed to occur quite often in the ensuing years.

You think back to the tailgates that defined the Saturdays each fall. Last year, you and your fellow vets in the Collegiate Veterans Association managed to team up with the IT guys and win third place for the best set up. They had oriented the campus wi-fi towards your spot and set up a television under the pop-up canopies. You remember the literary readings in 100-year-old buildings and how, at every one, you ended up standing in line with your college’s dean. You think back to the arguments with the two girlfriends you dated and wonder if you will ever learn how to build a healthy relationship. Then, there was the puppy. He was a sweet dog, picked up from the shelter. Unfortunately, his separation and need for attention turned out not to be conducive to apartment life with a college student. You held on as long as you could, but the financial costs associated with the damage he caused daily and the knowledge that he needed more space led to finding him a new home with a big backyard at a friend’s house. You did the right thing, but that does not remove the guilt of letting him go.

You drive through College Station almost an hour later. Your hometown seems much larger than you remember. It has grown over the years, hot concrete replacing the trees and fields. You remember the cows that roamed in the pastures around town, wondering what happened to them. Did they find their way to the slaughterhouse or move to another ranch? Maybe they escaped as construction crews arrived and tore down the barbed wire fences. Probably not, but the cows planning a jailbreak could be a fun story if it hasn’t already been done.

As you drive through town, you see your favorite restaurant, Wings-N-More. You brought friends and girlfriends here to prove that you knew where the best wings in the world were. Everyone seemed to agree, though they probably just did not want to hurt your feelings. You continue past the signs for Texas A&M and shudder at the thought that you were once part of its cult.

You stop for lunch with your sister and nephew at an old hamburger place inside an ancient wooden shack. The SHSU baseball team mounts a losing effort against Florida State on the television screen. Your sister complains about your stepmother’s refusal to babysit her son in emergencies and little Hunter sits on your lap, rubbing your ear. You will miss being close to them, but you wish you had connected more. The last three years seemed like a failure in attempts to reconcile with the father who largely ignored you through most of your life. You need to keep moving, so you hug the two goodbye and hop back into your truck.

The clean concrete of College Station softens into the shabby neighborhoods of Bryan before you find trees again. You remember a shortcut from Hearne to Temple and chug along the open farmland of Central Texas. You grow frustrated as the trailer fishtails every time you hit sixty-seven miles per hour. You stop at a four-way intersection halfway down the farm road, happy to see stop signs. You once stumbled on an accident here after an eighteen-wheeler smashed into a woman’s Prius. You and a former Army medic opened the door to an unconscious face half-way covered in blood and dangling tissue. A cross marks the intersection now. Once in Temple, you weave through the I-35 construction and head towards Killeen.

Half an hour later, Fort Hood appears on the right side. You hate this place. The two years you spent here before leaving the Army were the worst of your life. You were promoted, but lost your family and your sanity.

A few more minutes of driving takes you through Copperas Cove. You lived here once upon a time. When you were not in the field, you would go home each afternoon and play with your son before bathing him and putting him to bed. He once pooped on the fireplace before you could place his diaper back on him. The fights grew worse and she began to accuse you of cheating if you worked out at the gym on the way home from work on the nights when the platoon got off at a decent hour. One day, she took little Linus from your arms and left. Now, you understand that much of it was your fault, but you still refuse to forgive her. That event served as the catalyst for quicksand that choked you to death over the next year. You attempted suicide four times and tried to drink yourself to death before leaving the military. After your exit, you continued downhill, freed from the constraints of a soldier’s life. You left the Army, but never your problems.

But, you also remember that this journey to redemption began here. The smoke from your cigar swirled from the ash tray on your coffee table up to your nostrils as you took another sip of Shiner and turned the page. The thirteenth chapter of your favorite book spoke to you differently that night. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises was your go-to as a young infantry private and a source of comfort on long slow nights when the howitzers boomed a few hundred meters away. Something about Hemingway’s work always helped you to understand that you were not alone in feeling the pain of patrol after patrol down the streets of Baghdad or in the sands of Kandahar.

You began to understand what Jake Barnes meant when he said that a bullfighting aficionado could be forgiven for anything. A man with passion for something could transcend his mistakes and exist beyond his wartime experience. Hemingway gave you the secret to moving on with your life. You understood that eight years as a soldier did not define you. That evening, Hemingway saved your life.

You focus back on the road and drive up and down a few hills to Lampasas. After stopping at every red light in the small town, you pull out your phone and type in the address on the Google Maps. You do not know the way from here. Midland is still a long drive ahead.

The roads widen. The tall oaks turn into short mesquite. The land flattens into a wide open field. Five hours of driving through sparsely populated farmland turns your brain to mush. You turn the radio knob, cycling through static, but you cannot find many stations. After San Angelo, you realize that you are getting close. Oil derricks and giant windmills punctuate the oranges and reds of the setting sun. You drive two hours through oil fields before arriving at your mother’s apartment under pitch black sky. You park the truck and trailer next to a fence and walk inside.

Your mother greets you and gives you a blanket and pillow for the couch. Your back aches at the thought of sleeping on it for two months, but you are grateful for having somewhere to stay during the transition. You know that you are ready for Texas State University and San Marcos, but the waiting drives you insane. This is your first break from school in three years, and you feel that all momentum and purpose is lost. You begin freelance work, writing blog articles for strangers over the internet. The writing does not feel the same. Instead of writing the truths that life has delivered, you write about fish oil supplements and social security entitlements. Instead of an essay on Chaucer, you are focused on a 300-word article on John McCain for an Arizona news agency. You are ready to move on and get back to writing what matters.

New memories wait on an empty road. New professors prepare to give you a map in order to traverse the strange path ahead. The time grows closer for the next step to begin. Potato Shack will blur into Zelick’s, becoming an updated version of the same memory. New friends and fellow writers will take the place of old ones, but, right now, you are just bored. You are in a mesquite-studded oil field with no one around to grow with and no one to learn from. You yearn for the classroom and all that surrounds it. You are all set up, ready to move, ready to work, but you still wonder if you will survive the wait.

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Clayton Bradshaw served eight years as an infantryman in the US Army. He earned his BA in English from Sam Houston State University and is entering the Texas State University MFA in Creative Writing. His work can be found in The Deadly Writers Patrol, the Second Hand Stories podcast, War, Literature, and the Arts, and O-Dark-Thirty.

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