Six weeks before they separate and a year before they divorce, my parents sit inside a pickup truck they borrowed from my uncle, waiting to help me move on, away from the academy. Yesterday, they sat in the football stadium and watched me throw my cap into the air as two F-14’s flew straight at each other, coming within inches of a head-on collision before breaking away one to the north, one to the south. But now, they’re in the truck that is not theirs and they are hot, bored, and not used to the thin air. My mother has her bare feet propped up on the dashboard, reading a Left Behind book. Since New Year’s my mother has lost twenty pounds, a fact my father takes pride in — Doesn’t your mom look good? he asked me last night — without realizing the obvious. My mother has lost twenty pounds for the benefit of someone else.
In the past hour, he’s drunk four, maybe five bottles of Aquafina. My father is a recovering alcoholic. He says he has to take a piss. Maybe my mother ignores him, maybe she says something like That’s more information than I needed, or maybe she says Enjoy, which is what I would have said.
In one direction is the mountain slope and the other a parking lot packed with other parents waiting for newly christened Second Lieutenants like me. My father, a Midwesterner by birth and temperament, needs privacy and his only choice is to go uphill. Twice he has to catch his breath, but eventually he finds a spot where the hill plateaus before dogwoods and fir trees and trails that rise into a snow-capped peak.
When he’s finished, my father turns around to head downhill and a bear stands before him. A big bear. This is a fact both my mother and father agree on and, since the only other fact they agree on is that they would have divorced years ago were it not for me, I imagine he’s big and brown and grizzly vicious. The bear gazes left and right, licking its lips. My father has picked the wrong place to mark his territory. Surely this happens all the time, he thinks. My father imagines a couple of enlisted boys in camouflage emerging from the woods with guns and tranquilizer darts for those pesky ursine bastards who occasionally threaten the tourists.
Later I’ll inform my father that there’s never before been bear sightings on campus grounds. “Well, goddamn,” my father will say. “That has to mean something, right?”
“Yeah,” I’ll say. “It means you can’t even take a piss without putting yourself in danger.”
My father looks at the Academy’s grounds, the angular steel dorms that remind him of that summer he spent in Prague. He looks at the mountains and a distant blue cloud hanging low like a waffle cone. It is, he tells me often, the thing he loves most about Colorado. Seeing it rain, but not feeling the rain. Beyond the low clouds, my father sees the orange roof of the Howard Johnson he and my mother are staying at, the last hotel room they will ever share, and the Waffle House and the TGI Fridays. By now my bear is on all fours looking my father in the eye.
At this point, accounts diverge. My father says he shakes his head, sucks it up and stares the son of a bitch bear down for at least ten seconds, though it seems, he’ll tell me, like twenty seconds, or five hours even, in retrospect. The bear stands and roars the way every bear should. My father knows not to move, to stand still and show no sign of fear. The bear then turns his head back toward the campus and the wet clouds and runs through the parking lot.
My mother tells it like this: The bear turned around and your Dad still had his dick in hands. The bear ran away and your father started crying.
The bear jogs through the parking lot and the bored parents and girlfriends and aunts take notice. They cheer like he’s on the last leg of a marathon, standing to take pictures in their truck beds and open sunroofs. My father makes his way down the mountain — there may or may not be tears in his eyes, and those tears may be of fear or they may be of joy — and he leans into the truck he borrowed from his brother. He watches the bear exit the parking lot.
“That was something,” my father says. “I mean that was really something. That son of a bitch could have taken my head off.” My mother then kisses my father for the last time.
I cannot and will not imagine what it’s like for my parents to kiss each other. Instead, I think of another kiss. I was thirteen and playing Mortal Kombat at Chris Dempsey’s house with him and his sister, Katie. Chris went to the bathroom. This was the summer I had my braces taken off, and I was chewing a lot of bubble gum. Katie asked me what was the first thing I ate without braces. She was fifteen but because she was smart she was going to be a junior. I told her I didn’t remember. Who was the first girl you kissed without your braces? She leaned my way, and I dropped my controller. Her mouth was open with a spider web of saliva bridging her lips. She kissed me and things were wet for three or four seconds. Then, she stood up and backed out of the room on the balls and heels of her bare feet, chewing my piece of bubble gum. At that moment, Chris reentered the room and our game resumed.
What the fuck? Chris Dempsey said as his video game character decapitated mine. At least put up a fight.
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