“Someday,” my father said, “A wall of fire will come across this field and burn us all to nothing.”
We stood on the porch of our mobile home, a deck of upcurling two-by-fours and worn burgundy paint. There was no railing, just a trio of plank stairs leading down to the concrete slab where the trailer’s flattened tires were settled like slugs behind plywood skirting. There was more slab than trailer, leaving ten feet of something like a patio furnished in wooden cable spools, their cores stuffed with cigarette butts and flattened Coors cans. There were folding lawn chairs of aluminium tubing and interlaced green and white vinyl strap scattered around the slab and the dirt circling the cement cap of the septic tank with it’s handle of rusted rebar bent into a U. Then the corn field (not ours) that my father believed would burn.
“Why?” I asked. “Where will the fire come from?”
“The Russians,” he said. “They’ll drop bombs that will burn everything. Called nukular bombs, but we’ll drop bombs on them too so all of us will get burned up.”
“Why?” I asked again.
“They’re Communists. And we’re Americans.”
He stared across the field for a few moments more before turning back to the trailer and going inside, letting the screen door slam behind him.
We didn’t live there for long. We bounced from trailer to duplex to apartment complex, sometimes with my father and sometimes just Mom and me. I’d grown up and changed town twice, the Berlin Wall had been torn down, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and my father had been disintegrated by cancer and cremation before I passed by that way again and stopped to look.
Apocalypse.
The slab was still there, embedded in the ground, pierced by capped plumbing pipes and littered with road trash, chip bags and styrofoam cups, but the trailer was no more, not a splinter of wood paneling or a scrap of brown shag carpet left behind. The field was black earth and corn stalk stubble. The mesquite tree where my first dog, Jack, had been chained still stood between the slab and the interstate, its narrow trunk rubbed raw from the chain and the long-dead dog’s circling.
I had spent so much of my father’s life telling him how right I was and how wrong he was. He was a printer so I told him about the paperless society that was coming. He listened to George Strait and Hank Williams so I told him how inane country music was. He bragged that he got through school without reading a single book, so I majored in English.
But he understood something about Armageddon, not the nuclear kind, or the nukular kind either. It was the more common, slow Armageddon he saw coming over the field that day.
I guess he got me on that one.
Bryan Lindsey is a public high school teacher in Dallas, Texas. He lives with his wife, writer, editor, and teacher Chelsea Laine Wells. Together they raise a blended family of four children, two cats, and two rescued pit bulls. When they aren’t working, caring for their animals, or parenting, they’re on a movie date. Bryan’s work has been published in Gravel, Shimmer, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, and the Hypertext Review, where he now serves as a contributing editor. He’s @LitWithLindsey on social media.