F.N.G

"I can forgive, but if you ask me to forget, you ask me to give up experience."

-Louis Brandeis

Flakes, snow saucers, amble down, like they have a mind and don't want to land. In the streetlight a hundred feet away they float like birds bobbing in small waves. But here, in the forty-watt garage light, they dither in dizzy scribbles, ten feet off the ground. Some hit the old dog's nose and some her filmed-over eyes, but she lies there and looks up as though she isn't missing a thing.

When I say her name, she raises her head and a few flakes coast onto her yellow brows.

Jesus, Seth could be in Iraq in a week.

Except, I'm going to give him a million-dollar wound. I don't want him to come back like I came back from Nam.

The refrigerator whines and the old-water smell of this place passes through the door I'm standing in. The snowfall is thinner. Mary's bathroom light stabs the darkness, a train whistles two miles away, a weak god blowing on a bottle. In Nam, when they asked me what I missed about home, I said a train whistle.

The sparkle of the TV turns nearby snowflakes purple and green for an instant, the dog turns her nose that way. How many times have Seth and I sat in the woods together, watching it snow? I lean against the doorjamb, watch, and rub the silver dollar in my pocket. The markings are all gone, it's thin. My dad was hoeing a potato field, seventy years ago, and got bit by a coral snake but didn't die, so the man told him he earned a whole dollar that day. He carried it forty years and gave it to me when I went to Vietnam. I flipped it for body-bag duty, sucked on it in fear, kept it in my boot for 400 days, and in my pocket ever since.

The transformer in the alley hums with a different tone through the flakes. Someone in the neighborhood is burning plastic. Mary's TV sends game show laughter out here. Everything I see or hear seems bad.

Everything depends on the hunt. I remember telling him about killing animals, explaining the reasons: him as tall as a fencepost when we packed cheese, crackers, radishes, and sat until he had a shot. Little female squirrel the color of dead leaves, in a limb crotch. The sun had broken through and he was asleep against me, gun beside him, cracker crumbs on his cheeks. Woke him up and pointed and he's ready. She tumbled and never moved. He held her by the tail all the way home. Mary cooked it for breakfast.

Taught him to shoot same way my dad taught me. Put a silver dollar on a fence post and use a rifle. He never hit it, but he learned to breathe and squeeze the trigger. They don't tell you that in Boot camp; they tell you to kill. They were right about that.

When the dog raises up and moves I know she hears Seth's car. I get my cane down and we meet in the driveway. Bigger and stronger than I've ever been, a smile that eats half his face. He picks the dog up like a pillow and her long yellow tail sweeps the air, her tongue searches for his chin. He lays the dog on the car's hood, sweeps the 'phones off his head.

"She lose weight again?"

"Must be down to eighty pounds."

"Mom awake?"

"Getting ready for work. We still hunting?"

"Can't wait." Buries his face in the dog's stomach, lifts her to the ground.

Being in this garage is safe. A thousand nights in this chair, its broken spring pressed against my back. Seth'll be waking up in an hour, daylight another ninety minutes, and the hunt is on. What do I say? I'm going to shoot him for my own sake, but how do I explain that?

Electric heater like orange teeth, sound of buzzing flies. Enough warmth for my feet. Agent Orange. Millions of gallons into the jungles to eat away their hiding places. Then it got into the rivers we drank out of, into us, and after years began to eat us from the inside. Some guys' liver, stomach, prostrate gland. Mine, so now I wear a diaper.

Throw-rugs on the clothesline wave beyond the dog. Her head is tucked onto her forelegs and she lies there burbling. Each breath flaps the skin of her lips, a burble. I wonder what color prison diapers are? When I breathe and squeeze this trigger the bitterness will leave me as, sure as a round leaves a barrel. Forty years of regret in one shot. Emancipation, I'm sure of it.

Trembling a little, and when I get up to walk it off she turns towards me, flips her pancake ears up, quits burbling. A mouse dashes under the lawn mower, starts her nostrils twitching, she shifts her weight, rolling marble eyes.

There is a connection to ritual through guns. Dad and I had our rituals, Nam was full of them, all connected to guns. I was never away from my rifle, knew its serial number, trusted it, depended on it, guarded it. Seth and I have ours too. I didn't touch a gun for twenty years, until he was old enough to hunt. Then I wanted to kill something, or at least to shoot again.

The bathroom light goes off.

I carry my dad's Savage automatic, and when I pick it up, it's like shaking his hand. We hunted a lot when I was young. Never after Nam. It's weight makes me feel like he's here. I break all the rules and all the laws because it's been loaded for forty years. At times I've thought of swallowing its load, but today I feel just the opposite, I have plans for it.

I rack a set of rounds through it and they bounce off the concrete with a doink, bring her ears up like gallery targets. Its mechanism is loose and loud, but there's no slop to it. I load Seth's pump and run a set through it too. Tight and quiet, like a new M-16. Sometimes in Nam I wondered who carried mine before I did. There's a grip in that plastic stock that says it's been held, something psychic that says hello! You never get away from your gun, so when you come back to the World you feel its absence, and you still think you're going to get killed. What is that? Cowardice?

I don't hear him, but she does. Her head jerks towards the house, then her tail wags once, yellow Spanish moss. He's barefooted, carrying his boots, like there is no snow. Piano key smile, ruffled hair, he stands in the doorway and pushes his feet under the dog's belly

"Here."

He catches it in his boot, dumps it on the dog's back.

"What? Why give it to me?" he says, pulling on a boot.

"In case you need it."

"What for?"

"You need," I say, and look at him quick, "to give it back to me someday."

"If I lose it over there?"

"Even if you don't go."

"You went."

We load the gear, are hardly a mile away when he falls asleep against the window. The road is icing up. The snow, now fine and wet, and the ample moonlight, his rhythmic snoring, this smell of dog in the truck seat, it all seems like part of the ritual. We ride like that for twenty miles. I'll tell him at breakfast: You get back and know going was the wrong thing for you to do.

"Did you kill anybody? He leans his elbows on his knees, his forehead on the dash. "I mean, you know, dust 'em?"

He sounds like a boy and all of a sudden I'm calm. I'll hurt him a little bit and he'll be better for it.

"How much of the truth do you want?" It just comes out. "I tried to." I raise one finger, "And they tried to kill me. I didn't go over there to kill somebody. Maybe that's what's wrong."

We're at the restaurant. He bends to tie his boots. The parking lot is slushy and we lean into the wind. Inside is a bright box, a few tables of hunters. There's a din of talking, the overhead speakers, the dishes banging around, smell of dirty flannel and pancakes. He starts to sit down but I signal to give me that seat.

"Why?" he asks.

"I can see the door. I've got your back."

A chunky busboy begins cleaning the table behind him.

"Nam?" Seth raises his eyebrows. His lips look tight, he suddenly seems older.

"I guess. That's where it started. Anyway, we're going deer hunting."

"I want to know."

"It screwed me up."

"How?"

"That's a long story."

"Tell me."

The busboy moves to another table. He's a good-looking kid, maybe 15 years old. His mother runs the place. Our waitress is a woman as old as I am, who has never hurried in her life. Round face in a scowl, order book in her left hand and that elbow resting on the side of her stomach. She takes our order and goes through the kitchen door. Seth stretches out in the booth and blows smoke rings. My hand shakes when I fiddle a cigarette out. This is the time to talk to him.

"If I tell you about Nam, I have to start with being an F.N.G., when I was your age."

"What's F.N.G.?"

"Fucking New Guy. It's somebody who's never been shot at."

"That's me," he chuckles, "a fucking new guy."

"Well," I hold his eyes,...