The Rank His Family Laughed At
The Driveway I Didn’t Recognize
The hedges were trimmed square. The porch light was on a timer now, gold and steady, the kind of glow a realtor picks out for a listing photo. Somebody had replaced the little wind-battered flag we used to fly with a stiff new one that had never seen weather.
I sat in my truck in front of my parents’ house outside Fountain, Colorado, for longer than I want to admit, listening to the bass line thumping through the walls. Three years is a long time to be gone from a house. It is not a long time to forget the sound of your own family pretending everything is fine.
I am a Staff Sergeant in the United States Air Force, a pararescueman, what my community calls a PJ. The patch on my beret says a Guardian Angel doesn’t leave anyone behind, and I have spent a long time trying to live up to that patch instead of explaining it to people who never asked.
Nobody in my family had asked in three years. Not really. A birthday text here, a missed call there. My mother, Rhoda, sent me a photo of a casserole once with no caption. That was the extent of it.
I got out of the truck, shouldered my duffel, and walked up a driveway that looked like it belonged to strangers who happened to keep our mailbox.
What Fountain Used to Be
We didn’t grow up rich. My father, Cletis, worked parts counter at the tractor supply out on the highway for as long as I can remember, and my mother, Rhoda, cut hair three days a week out of a station she rented in the back of a salon near the Village Inn. We kept a few acres east of town when I was small, a couple of horses and a garden my grandfather worked until his knees gave out, and every Friday night in the fall the whole family drove into town for the Fountain-Fort Carson game, because that’s what a town like ours does with its Friday nights.
My grandfather was the one who first told me what a pararescueman was. He’d served himself, a long time before I was born, and he kept a coffee-table book about the Air Force’s rescue units on the shelf next to his recliner. He used to say the whole job came down to one sentence: some people run away from the worst day of a stranger’s life, and some people run toward it, and the second kind ought to be paid a little more respect than they usually get.