Mississippi Fires

Meadow

In Meadow’s house, everything has names. Most things wear their names on the outsides: cans of soda, all the bags and bottles in the fridge. Cookies have names like “DoubleStuf Oreo” and “Nutter Butter.” Books have names like “The Poetry of Robert Frost.” Yesterday, she found a book that didn’t have a name, and she gave it one with her marker: “Meadows Rat Chaws the Cheese.” Good name for the nameless. Mom and Meadow dance in circles, sing c-h-eee e-s-eee.

Two girls live in Meadow’s house: her and Mom. Dad comes home sometimes; he’s a Sometimes Dad. She shares her home and room occasionally with three dogs—Lou, Tuck, and Scott Stapp from Creed. Lou and Tuck are brothers, nervous little sheddy things all rusty brown. Scott Stapp from Creed used to be Uncle Doug’s dog, but he lives with Meadow now because Uncle Doug had “too much on his plate.”

Meadow’s toys all have names she won’t write down—they’re in her head just fine, thank you: Rhonda G. is a puppy doctor. Texas Man carries a surfboard. Queen Mag is a goddess, and her daddy is the sea.

Will

When an M2 Browning .50 cal machine gun fires, it does so in rapid strokes, two leaden shocks to the chest. ChunkChunk. “Hold the belt.” ChunkChunk. “Hold the fucking belt, Airman!” Most new recruits can’t shoot this thing for longer than a few minutes without complaining about their wrists. Two weeks in, they’re crushing Vicodin and swimming in hot brass.

Staff Sergeant Will Laird and his crew guard a frozen nuke site in a fenced-off North Dakota wasteland. The day he arrived bearing heavy weaponry, his crew cheered, whistled, called him Willy-with-the-D. The boredom was a poison that fell down with the snow and melted on the back of their necks. Each new wave of ice and thunder brought a fresh coat of it. Eight airmen had been sharing a PlayStation and a football for six months’ worth of rotations—three weeks out, two back home. Drinking helps. Will nips Slow & Low rye from a Southern Miss alumni flask most days. Leddy swears she won’t kiss him again until his breath is clean, says Meadow thinks that’s how all daddies smell. He believes God shines a light on children, imagines it glowing in Meadow like lava lamp mud. When Staff Sergeant Willy-with-the-D thinks about his daughter, he usually takes another nip. Afterwards, he’ll fantasize about the cinder block targets scattered across the permafrost, how supersonic bolts of lead and steel will reduce them to dust that will spread like moss across the foreign land.

Leddy

Under her bed, Leddy keeps jars.

Rows of totems like Meadow’s baby teeth, flicked guitar picks, Gram’s costume jewelry, challenge coins, Biloxi dirt, a single strand of broken pearls.

Others carry less important loot: cotton balls, scrunchies, dollar bills, bobby pins, rubber bands, suffocated lightning bugs, tacky magnets.

One holds gifts from her father, like seashells and sand dollars, a vial of muddy saltwater. Leddy’s dad left before he could give her a memory; she tells Meadow her grandfather is the ocean, the great Gulf of Mexico.

She and Will have been together so long she no longer remembers their story, but she’s saved trinkets from their first year—movie tickets, devotions on Post-it Notes, a rusting anklet—all loose fossils she can draw a blurred image around.

The newest jar holds dozens of paper scraps, each with a timed task—March 4 nap: 1hr 46min and April 1 seizure: 1min 2sec and water to boil: 14min to the dot.

She doesn’t mind her daughter playing with her collections. She labels each one on masking tape to help Meadow with her reading.

Someday Leddy will place the jars in a crate back home in Mississippi, cart them out past the barrier islands, and sink them down to her father, an offering to rot.

Meadow

Meadow has, on occasion, what the doctors call complex focal seizures. When stressed or scared or overheated, she freezes, goes blank in the face, and hiccups until she comes to. 

When she wakes up in the New Orleans airport surrounded by strangers and Mom whispering the happy song in her ear, she’s not scared. 

She’s scared a little bit, but only by the light.

Mom says, “Where’d you go, Baby?”

Meadow says, “Same place. Nowheres.”

Meadow pets her mother and says things like, “That plane was just too warm, Mom,” and “Don’t worry. I just got hot like Miss’ssippi’s hot.” Out the missing window, she points at palms and pines, eventually the beach. Sleep overwhelms her, and she rests her head in Daddy’s lap, where he fingers through her hair, attempting to tie braids. She’s got his thick hair; the hot wind blows through it like Bluestem weeds. Dad wants to fish every day with Uncle Doug. Mom says she “just needs to get away,” which only leaves Meadow with more questions: 

Like, “How many sleeps until we’re back at our house?”

“Three sleeps.”

And “Then we’ll see Lou, Tuck, and Scott Stapp from Creed?”

“Three sleeps, Baby.”

Will

The fish are biting. The brothers Laird plan to sip Old Milwaukee and reel bluegills until the sun touches the tree line and casts slender pillars of fire across the lake.

Douglas can crack a tab with one hand without losing his fish. His pole will be arched, bobber and line heavy with a catch, but all is well when his finger hits foam. 

Will laughs and laughs and asks, “You gone teach me? I ain’t too old to learn.”

“That ain’t the way of things,” says Doug. “Way of things is you teaching me.”

“You were always Batman and made me Robin.”

“With Dad’s shirts around our necks, back home punching that bucket swinging from the live oak. That’d be nice.”

“Fuck that,” Will says. “The way of things was drunk Dad and his drunk friends wrecking the house while we played Millennium Falcon in the car.”

“Mom the Wookiee. I’d scold you for breaking character. You’d shoot at me—pew pew pew pew pew—from across the van.” 

Two by two, the worms are surrendered to the lake.

Will says, “Always Robin.”

“At least Robin didn’t end up laying shingles with Dad, shooting pool with Dad, getting drunk with drunk Dad and his drunk friends.”

Will says, “Last beer’s yours.”

“Last thing he said to me before he was gone—a month or so after you joined up. He said, ‘Men like us have to rest our hands in the dirt until we find a living down there. We callus hard waiting.’”

“Pabst Blue wisdom.”

“He said, ‘See if they offer the little retard a scholarship when he comes back with one leg buried in a fucking desert.’”

Will burps under his breath, laughs, excuses himself to check the limblines and piss.

Leddy

Back in North Dakota, Leddy hears Meadow tell her father through the wall, “Here. You can be Superhero Mike. He’s got super gun powers.”

“Can I have a bazooka?” Will says.

“As many as you want. It’s all made up.”

“I need missiles for the zombies,” Will says.

“There are no zombies in the world.”

“Right.”

Leddy sets a timer to see how long Will lasts. During his last rotation, he set a new playtime record of 20min. Today, they explode flesh-eating, humanoid monsters (that are not zombies) for 9min 33sec. When Will asks Meadow to watch him play video games, Leddy rushes downstairs, snatches the two closest dogs and lets them loose in Meadow’s room.

The sound of wrestling makes the house shake like a metal beast discovering life. The chaos adds another 5min 7sec to the stopwatch. Sounds of bark and woof grow quiet, and Leddy yells from downstairs, “Baby, show Daddy your new book.” Robert McCloskey’s Make Way for Ducklings.

Her family rushes down the stairs as soon as the watch ticks 23min even. She records the new play time and hands her daughter a freezer-chilled apple juice—Meadow likes them a little slushy. For Will, a tumbler of water, he already has his flask. He takes a sip with one hand and adjusts his online headset with the other. Already, his online avatar snakes through tall grass, weapon ready and poised for release.

Will

Will has just arrived back at his post. He’s wasted. The camp ATV whisks him farther and farther from his squad. Miles of flatness. He stops, cuts the vehicle off when the camp is no longer visible to his drooping eyes. Vomits. A dakrat scurries out of a nearby hole and stares at the sun. “There you are, son of a bitch.” He pulls out his M18 and fires three shots, the last of which downs the rodent. He makes his way on hands and knees toward his prey. One more quick spit in the dirt, the last of the puke. Up close, he can see yellow buckteeth orange with blood. Will dissects the animal from head to tail with his issued survival knife, nudging its zinc black blade through the mush and meat, looking for God’s light in a dakrat.

Meadow

Meadow has been in a mood to make maps. Mom’s mom, Grandma Bonnie, told her on the phone last week she was born 500 years too late, that she could have caught a ride with Christopher Columbus and made the first map of Mississippi. “You’d have probably had to been a boy, though,” she said. “No more maps to make anyway.” Dad once told her not to listen to that old woman, that she’s never been right about nothing a day in her life. “That’s why Mommy’s daddy didn’t stick around,” he said. “Couldn’t listen to that mouth one more day.” He whispered this, their first secret together. “But Daddy,” Meadow whispered back, “Mom came from the water.”

Dad’s back at work now—eighteen more sleeps to go—but when he was home, they made a map of their house and all its rooms. Up the stairs is a closet where Lou and Tuck sleep. Puppy Cave, her map reads. To the left of Puppy Cave is Meadow’s room, but she doesn’t sleep there so much anymore. She’ll play with her toys in the daytime, but at night she might freeze up, and no one would know. In the big bedroom, they all sleep: Mom, Dad, Meadow, and Scott Stapp from Creed.

Downstairs, there are even more rooms for Meadow to chart: Dinner Room, where Meadow can’t run with her socks on because she’ll slip like that one time. Mud Room, for snowy boots. Bathroom, for poops. Living Room, where Mom and Meadow cuddle and watch ice skating on the iPad. Kitchen, where just last week, Dad snuck up behind Mom at the sink and pinched the little fat under her neck. Dad laughed and Meadow laughed and Mom sang the happy song too low for anyone to hear.

Leddy

Usually, her first step is to turn the water knob a smidge away from full rotation, putting that hot water heater to the test. She leaves the fan off to welcome the steam, black mold be damned. Next, she undresses, her back to the mirror, and tosses the dirty clothes into the hamper. Then it’s swift entry into the shower, where her skin will scald the color of pink lemonade.

Tonight, she doesn’t do any of this. Facing the mirror, she removes her clothes meticulously, and her bra strap a trip wire. A wrong move might expose more cellulite. Dimples like craters. Dimples like the moon floor. A single varicose vein an Indian burial mound weaving down her calf. And Meadow, two weeks late, eleven pounds, pulled mauve runs that don’t mend. The mirror fogs; she escapes behind the curtain.

Meadow

Mom jumps on the bed. “Now I’m the saber-toothed tiger!”

Meadow jumps on the bed. “Now I’m Tarzan Jane!” She beats her chest and lets the inner gorilla-girl howl. She points at the sleeping dogs in the corner, then directs her finger toward her mother. “Get the tiger, Tuck Monkey! Lou Monkey, get her!”

Leddy says, “They’re both dead, Tarzan.”

“Tarzan Jane.”

“They’re both dead, Tarzan Jane.” Minutes ago, when Meadow was the saber-toothed tiger, she killed Tarzan Mom’s monkey dogs.

“Mom, I didn’t all-the-way kill them. I tricked you.”

“Jesus doesn’t like trickers.”

“Jesus doesn’t care about imaginary.”

“Sends all the trickers to burn up in Hell.”

“Get her, Tuck Monkey.”

“Maybe when Scott Stapp from Creed gets home from the vet, he can be your monkey dog.”

“And when Daddy gets home, he can be a hunter to shoot the saber-toothed tiger.”

“Why am I Mom, and he’s Daddy?”

“Mommies are for babies. Daddies are for everybody.”

“Your Daddy ain’t for nobody,” Leddy says. “Not me and not you.”

Meadow gets in Mom’s face, barks, beats her chest, screams, “Tarzan Jane!” 

The dogs come to.

Will

Will gives the childish swell of Meadow’s belly a pinch, says, “There is the belly.” He clips and rounds the syllables, an Ed Sullivan impression with a silly face.

“There is the belly, I say.” He gives it another pinch. “There it is.” Meadow rolls and laughs over the frantic animated images on the TV.

“I see it, little girl. There there there.”

The voice, the face. They weren’t his. Will had an old basketball buddy who performed the same routine with his kid sister. She’d scream and smile, which would make his old basketball buddy smile, which would make Will lump up and excuse himself to the restroom.

“Will you please be quiet,” Leddy asks. Points to the screen. “This is actually one I haven’t seen.”

The kid sister from years ago was younger than his daughter is now. Meadow rolls, laughs, but he can see her wanting to resist, wanting to stop playing pretend, wanting to draw the light-of-God dragon fire from her throat and stamp it out.

“There is the belly, Meadow bear. Meadow fairy.”

“Meadow danger cat,” Meadow corrects.

“Meadow danger cat and the belly.” Will pinches. “There is the belly, the b-e-l-l-y.”

“Stop it,” Leddy says.

“It’s just a game.”

“That’s what you want her to remember? Daddy poking her belly?”

“What?”

“Pinching,” Leddy says. “Poking.”

“I’m playing. It’s just a game. Fuck.”

Meadow says, “I’m gonna go get ice cream now.”

“Fuck. Isn’t that what you want? Me playing with her?”

“Shut up.”

“How are they? My times you’ve been keeping? Have I leveled up to baby dos yet?”

“I’d never have more kids with you.”

“Right.”

“I wouldn’t have more kids with you if you held a knife to my throat.”

“We are happy, Leddy.”

“Held a knife and drew blood.”

“Yes, we are. Yes, Leddy. And it was just a game.”

“Is that what you think we are? You. Me. Talking about happiness here?”

“Happiness. Of course, here. Yes.”

“We’re something. Parents. Subjects of the United States Air Force. Visa Platinum cardholders. Members of the NRA. But happy?”

A cartoon squirrel on the TV says, “I find any more cayenne pepper in my burrow I’m calling the cops. Same goes for garlic pods. No more garlic pods.”

“Texans fans. Bulls fans. Go Pelicans. We’re Mississippians. But one thing we ain’t is fucking happy.”

“We have everything. See? The whole world at our fingertips. Why not be happy?”

“Why not? The luckiest you and me in the U.S. of A.”

Meadow says, “Don’t be mad. I ate two ice creams.”

Leddy

Because she does not know any better, Leddy lets Scott Stapp from Creed bark. 

Just the bird, she thinks. Just the red-belly finch that stops once or twice a day to pick insects out of the grass. The dogs love it; Leddy loves it; Meadow loves it. They’ll stand at the windows and gawk at it, yap-chirp-sing at it. When Meadow first saw the finch, she said it looked like a zombie ‘sploded on it. She wasn’t wrong. But today, it’s not the red-bellied finch, and Leddy does not know any better.

When, after two minutes, she jolts up to give Scott Stapp from Creed a smack, she sees her daughter frozen. Her first feeling is disappointment that Meadow’s winning three-month seizure-free streak has ended. Her first action is to set a stopwatch—for what, she’ll find out later: Meadow’s shortest disappearance? Meadow’s longest disappearance? Happy song sung for . . . ? She notices a disturbance in the air around Meadow, nimble whips of air made visible. A step closer to the door, she can make out planetary specks orbiting Meadow’s rigid form. Even inside, she can hear the whirring of yellow jackets closing in on her daughter’s stillness. 

Leddy should be running, swatting, crying, carrying, mending, mothering. And she does, but only after admiring, for one more moment, the young girl’s unyielding stance in the eye of danger, a courage beyond control, nothing but a symptom of disability. On the girl’s face is the unwavering curve of a smile—paused, captured, fortified moments before stinging fear—searching for red-belly finch.

Will

If there was one thing Will hates most about his post in the North Dakota tundra, it’s the thunder. More than the 1,660 miles that separate him from his mother and brother and any other Mississippi blood; more than the godless, gutless dakrats; more than the wind that settles in clothes and attracts pink-eared cold. More than anything, he hates the thunder. He could live with the lightning—he likes it, how it springs from the ground there and there and decorates the plains. But Will can’t see the thunder. He can’t see the fucking thunder, and nothing is standing for hundreds of miles out on the flat to slow it down. The thunder’s a tidal wave growing taller, sponging up every sound it passes. All them sounds rushing toward him a thousand miles a second. It carries the screaming birds and M2 Browning rounds. Carries the national anthem and some Chippewa Indian kid strumming guitar. Leddy singing the happy song to his paralyzed daughter, to herself; Leddy repeating her calls for him to cut her throat. His own voice shooting pew pew pew across time.

When Will notices two of his Airmen facing each other, tossing their issued M18s into the air and watching them twirl, he’s still full of the sounds. He watches the young soldiers—he knows one, Willoughby, but the other is fresh—catch the pistols, point them at each other, laugh. Then they start again, tossing. Will pounces, grabs the grunt closest to him, the new arrival, a copper-skinned kid from Arkansas, and throws him to the ground. He plants his knee in the kid’s shoulder. “Fuck you think you’re doing, Airman?” he says.

“Sergeant, the weapons aren’t loaded, sir,” Willoughby says.

“That how you respect your firearm, Airman?” Will says, ignoring the other soldier. He digs his knee deeper into the shoulder joint.

The copper-skinned soldier says nothing through his tangled pain.

“You like games? Like dangerous games?”

“No, sir,” the kid finally says.

“What’s your name, Airman?”

“Warren, sir.”

“You like dangerous games, Warren?”

“No, sir.”

“Warren, I like games too, but I’d never disrespect my firearm.” Will releases the Airman, pulls him up, and carries him toward the rec hall. “Grab the door, Willoughby.”

“Sir.” Willoughby opens the door.

Inside the rec hall, Will corrals his soldiers around a poker table in the center of the sparsely dressed room. He shoves Warren into a chair, seats himself adjacent. “How about a game of pinfinger, Warren. You. Me. Pinfinger.”

“Pinfinger, sir?” The young Airmen’s hands are shaking, rattling up into his shoulders.

“This here,” Will says. “Watch close now.” He plants his palm flat on the table, pulls out his survival knife and begins to hopscotch the blade between each of his fingers. He begins to stab harder into the table before turning his head to look at Warren. 

With each thunk of the knife, the jeers grow, and the crowd packs tighter around the table. 

Thunk. Thunk. Will says, “You’ll like this game, Airmen.” Thunk. Thunk. “You’re up.”

“Sergeant, sir. For disrespecting my weapon, sir. It will not happen again.”

“Five finger fillet, boy.”

Warren takes the knife and skips the point between his fingers. His motion is methodical, but he’s shaking. The bored officers huddled around the table grow hungry and call for Warren to go faster faster. Will says nothing, takes only deep breaths. Faster faster. Warren stabs at a steady pace now. He adopts a rhythm that works until it doesn’t, until the young Airman’s knife dives deep into the dip of his knuckles. The crowd screams, some clap. Warren, rather than removing the knife with his free hand, yanks the injured hand up, widening the gash before he’s stopped by the hilt. Will pushes Warren’s wrist back down, braces it, pulls the knife from the table.

He says, “Trick is seeing the path and not overthinking it. You just overthunk it, Warren.” The crowd begins to disperse—a few freaked out, a few looking for bandages. “Look close at how I do it. Warren, you hear me? Wake up now.” Will throws the soldier’s limp hand back on the table and resumes the game. Blood runs out of the wound, sliding between each finger and pooling. Airmen vie for Will’s attention, urging him to pull back, stand down. A few make telephone calls for help. Another grabs the Staff Sergeant by the collar, an attempt at restraint that causes Will to lose focus and punch the tip of his knife into the joint of Warren’s ring finger, separating the digit from the hand. Will turns to the crowd and takes a sudden blow from a subordinate; both he and Warren hit the ground in harmonious thuds.

Meadow

Meadow knows the names of almost everything in her house. She reads them on labels. She spells them out loud. Backwards, forwards. Counts her healing bug bites in twos—two, four, six, eight, ten . . . Mom lets her pull out the jars hiding under the bed, lets her play with the beads, bottle caps, and seashells amassed over the years. She carefully reads little scraps of paper: drive to market: 29min 29sec. April 2 Facetime with Mom: 6min 34sec. Meadow doesn’t know all the words she hears yet, words like discharge and sever and court-martial. Words like eviction. But she gives names to things, names no one else knows. Like yesterday, she named a new toy: a little bearded man in old Star Wars packaging that came in the mail with a Han Solo birthday card. On the outside, the card read I have a really bad feeling about this . . . ; on the inside, Take it out of the box and have a good time, baby. -Uncle Doug. The box said his name was Ben Kenobi, but that didn’t mean much of anything to Meadow. She liked Old Man Crooked better, so that’s what she wrote on the jar she stuffed him in: “Old Man Cruked.” Old Man Crooked in a jar under a bed that would one day be stuffed in a chest thrown in the sea.

JORDAN JAMES

Jordan James has been published in Cagibi, Product, and The Robert Frost Review. He is currently a graduate instructor at USM working on his PhD in Creative Writing.