Fountain Girls

There are two exits out of Fountain, Colorado. The northern exit also acts as an entrance to Fort Carson, the Army base located in the foothills of Cheyenne Mountain, just south of Pikes Peak. Fort Carson is “The Best Hometown in the Army—Home of America’s Best!” A large portion of the Fourth Infantry Division is stationed at Fort Carson, and it has two of its own slogans: “Deeds Not Words” and “Steadfast and Loyal.” The base website welcomes incoming Fourth ID soldiers, promising, “The assignment will be challenging yet personally and professionally rewarding.” Someone told me once that the Fourth ID has had the most casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. I don’t remember who; I won’t remember when.

The southern exit winds past the 7-Eleven, a barn-shaped country-western bar, and a trailer park christened Chancellor’s Mobile Estates. Grandpa once managed that 7-Eleven. My mother was a slim eighteen-year-old clerk when the cocky G.I. who was to become my father walked in with a grin and asked for a pack of Marlboro’s. The country bar has changed hands and names more than a dozen times in the last ten years, and recently, accurately, reopened as Country Bar. Just beyond, the Mobile Estates welcome sign beams a cheery red, white, and blue catchphrase: the american dream starts here.

Thailand has sand like Gold Medal flour, water like Windex.

The blue is see-through more than fifty feet below the snorkeling mask, this other world where plants maneuver in alien ways and rocks are not what they seem. The fish dance, frantic for bits of bread, eluding my greedy hands. My back burns through three layers of SPF 80, but I don’t know the protection is failing just yet. I come up for air, and my husband and I watch the palm trees sway on the lush island bank, a live-action postcard: Wish you were here. “You and me in paradise,” I say.

While I hover through fleeing fish, Tara is dying, then dead. She is in Fountain. I am in Phuket. We are both twenty-seven, or we were.

I didn’t know Tara well, though we were both raised at the foothills of Pikes Peak, the mountain that inspired Katharine Lee Bates to write the first few lines of “America the Beautiful,” in the landlocked state of Colorado. According to local lore, the city of Fountain, a waterless place, was in the running to be capital of our square-shaped state—until the Blast in the spring of 1888, when two trains carrying passengers and explosives, respectively, collided on the tracks I know so well. In Fountain, in summer, we have a Blast Dance, and a caboose race, in honor of those who died. I walked those tracks as the poor kids, sans summer camp, always do. I walked them with food-stamped Slurpee and Cheetos in hand. I walked them every day in the summer to Metcalf Park, where the middle-class boys Little Leagued. I walked to escape my siblings and our stressed-out single mother. Tara, I imagine, knew these tracks too.

From what I do know about Tara, we both had mothers who had too many kids, too young, who raised us in houses too small, in walking distance from the 7-Eleven and Paradise Liquors. Both of our fathers died as we were just reaching adulthood. We hocked Girl Scout Cookies at Walmart, dominated Student Council, played in the band, and lost spelling bees. We have, we had, fierce familial pride; our ties to the military are strong, as they are for everyone who attended Fountain–Fort Carson High School. Tara was a friend of a friend, someone I knew from a distance, but I saw these, our commonalities. Did Tara see me too? Her husband came home, if only physically, from Iraq; my little brother, Ronnie, did not come home at all.

My husband and I leave the Phuket fish behind for the day, the clown fish and the flat and menacing...