War, page 12
The summer after our junior year was spent “revealing the beauty” of his father’s house and then concealing it quickly with coat after coat of a color called peacock plum. The mom had picked it out, apparently from a swatch. Clearly that had been what peacock plum had been meant to cover. Only a swatch. Writ large across an expansive house, it became the neighborhood bruise. O.’s little sisters were so embarrassed they began spending most of their time at other girls’ houses. O.’s father simply stood in the driveway when we descended our ladders for the last time and said, “You boys sure did it.” It was both an accusation and a thank-you, so we took our cash and headed for the minimart.
With the task complete, O. decided it was time to teach me how to get high. He had an elaborate system and the enthusiasm of a high-school wrestling coach, but no matter how hard I tried, or how deeply I relaxed, I could not get the proper balance between inhalation and exultation. Never got hungry. Never got happy. Never got high. It was oddly humiliating to fail at something so fundamental. It made me want to rob a store or try heroin. Something legitimately wicked. “You’re too you,” O. explained. It was as if I had a birth defect and no amount of training could correct it.
“What does that mean?” I asked, wanting to punch something. Hard.
“You know.” He was right. I was clanging around in my head too much, performing, playing me, to be able to relax and experience something new. I wanted to control what getting high felt like and therefore could never get there. Not that it was a long-lasting tragedy. I knew four beers would get me as chilled as O. got with a joint. And I didn’t even enjoy how that made me feel. I was stuck being too much me, and there was a sick delight in feeling that unreachable.
It could be said, from a distance, that O. was my best friend at the time. Perhaps the best friend I ever had. He asked nothing of me. Never competed against me. We were as good quiet together as we were laughing. Or him high and laughing and me nodding to a song I heard in my head. When he slept with a girl I had mentioned to him once, he apologized. He was nice to his sisters, even when they were mean for no reason, the way only young girls can be. “Hey, baldie!” they would shout if he wasn’t giving them what they wanted. “Baldie O’Balderson.”
“That’s a good one,” he’d say to me, genuinely impressed, touching his thinning hair like a man checking to see if his hat had blown off in the wind.
He didn’t talk back to his dad the way I did to mine, not even under his breath. “He’s got it hard,” he told me, “can’t really breathe.”
“He needs to lose some weight,” I diagnosed.
“We all need to lose something.”
“Careful. You’re starting to sound like a country song.”
“I like country.”
O.’s father shot himself in the head three weeks before my brother died. He did it in the backyard, leaning against the house. “Ruined the paint,” O. told me a few days later. He had the stunned expression of a mummy, his skin tight against his head. And it wasn’t from being high. “Mom came home. She wasn’t happy.” Things must be removed, I thought. For beauty to be revealed. But what if there is no beauty? What if there is only revelation without understanding? Or clarity with only ugliness? It took the war to tell me that it wasn’t beauty that was being revealed.
O.’s mom left a week later. She took the girls and their braces and mean jokes. She let O. remain in the house to finish his senior year. But at my brother’s funeral, before the service even started, he pulled me aside. The corners of his mouth fishhooked down to bite off the tears. “I can’t stay here,” he said. He put his hand on the top of my head, almost said something, then turned and left the church. I never saw him again. The FOR SALE sign went up. The shades came down.
And no one heard from O. Like he’d never existed. He had never been to my house. I didn’t like people breathing the toxins of my father’s spent cigarettes and relentless silence. O. was an outsider at school, like me. Anyone at his house who knew me was gone to somewhere else. I wondered for months how I could even prove there was an O. It became too important, occupying my thoughts like scores in a gambler’s head.
The paint, I finally remembered. I dug through the garage and found my scraper, still yellowed from the job. For a moment I thought about driving Mom over, explaining who O. was, what we’d done to the house, creating proof of the friendship by speaking it out loud. But I knew she’d end up saying, “You miss your brother, that’s all.” But that was not all. O. had been a friend. And even if he didn’t want to say good-bye, keep in touch, be remembered to me, I needed to know I was capable of kindness. Trust. That someone outside my family, someone who didn’t have to care about me, actually did. At least for a time.
I parked across the street. Same address. Same lemon tree in the yard. But this house was white. Perfect, pearled white. The name on the mailbox had changed, the sale sign plucked and replanted somewhere else. I held my scraper before my eyes, then looked at the thick whiteness in front of me. There was no one home. I ran around behind the house and started scraping.
They’d layered on gallons, and the work was difficult. My shoulders and back strained, sweat across my forehead lining up like abacus beads. I was still scraping when I heard a car pull into the drive. Faster. Deeper. Finally. Underneath the whitewash bled a fine vein of our peacock plum. At this level, the white finally opened, and the color bloomed out like a slow wound. I could also see the stain that O.’s father had left behind. I chose this spot not to hide but to reveal. That a life was lived in this house. A life ended. And a friend came and went. Departure would not be forgetting. It would be remembering.
And Mom would have been right. I did miss my little brother. I leaned against the house, the paint stripped away so the memories could breathe, and I wept for my brother. And O.’s dad. And even for O. For what was gone. Because gone was all I had.
A violent pothole in the road jerked me out of memory and up to the top of the windshield. I exhaled a small grunt from the impact. “Didn’t think you were asleep.” The driver’s voice was as familiar and sickening as a vaccination. Mc. I still refused to acknowledge him. I hated that I had failed to kill him. That he was leashing me around. To the hotel, as if to save me, now on the road to some other version of oblivion. It was starting to irritate me that he was keeping me alive.
“You act like we’ve never been friends,” he said. His voice had the deep tenor of teasing that my father had used to humiliate me and my brother. Cruel familiarity. Yeah, I’m an asshole, it seemed to say. What’re you gonna do about it? Nothing. You’re gonna do nothing.
I stared out the window again. “Ever play car games when you were a kid? And don’t give me that bullshit, sad-sack-of-shit-soldier answer, ‘I was never a kid.’ Everybody was a kid. Even God.” I could tell he was looking at me while he was talking. I was hoping he’d not notice something in the road and plow into it. But there was nothing. The emptiness out the passenger window and windshield was almost lunar in its perfection.
I had seen the photos in newspapers, of every far-flung war, civil or uncivil, since I was a kid. Always someone anonymously bleeding, the women wailing, their mouths smeared with grief. Often there was a dust-covered man hurrying away from the photographer, as if late for an appointment. And every one I’d ever seen had seemed utterly staged to me. The light, the squared horror, the containment of so much anguish in such a tiny space, seemed as artificial as cotton candy. Why the fuck would anyone with a camera want to get that close to such a thing? He should have been helping or fleeing, not goddamn clicking away. So instead of trying to find logic in the situation, I found artifice. Pictures lied. The only way to see something that brutal was to stand in the middle of it and remember.
But as I looked out at the rubbled silence of this war, I finally understood the reason for those photographs. Someone had to capture the moment between hope and decimation because, by the time something like this ended, no one who’d seen anything worth remembering would be left to tell the story. Yes, photographers were thieves. But they were stealing from history so there would be proof that life had even passed through a certain place and time.
“What did they want from us?” I finally asked. The question came clear and bold. It made me sit up, though I still didn’t square to Mc. “What was our purpose? To just fucking drink, wait to die?”
“Is, soldier,” he answered. “What is our purpose. This ain’t some past tense we’re driving through. I’m sorry you saw what you saw, but you are more in this than the day they recruited your angry ass. So don’t pretend you’re not here. Or you’re lost, or anyone’s victim. Be alive, soldier, while you can. Everything after is just going to …” He didn’t finish, and it made me look at him. The muscles in his jaw pulsed beneath his skin. He didn’t want to die. Maybe I did have something over him after all. But I’d have to get close enough this time to get a bullet closer to his heart. And for that I’d need his gun, so I’d humor him.
“I miss the old Mc.,” I said. “The one with the bad jokes and endless stories.”
“They weren’t all bad.”
“They were. Bad is generous.” I felt a smile conspire against my lips, and I couldn’t tell if it was part of my act, or if Mc. was really that magnetic.
“I’ve got plenty, if you’re looking to pass the time.”
“Is there a lot? Of time?” I gazed out the windshield again.
“Probably not.”
“Are we driving toward or away?” I asked. “Not that it matters.”
He answered with a joke. It was a new one or, if not new, then one he hadn’t wasted on me before. It was filled with elaborate pauses, his trademark repetitions, and a squandered punch line involving a cow. When he finished he turned to me with the need for approval my brother used to show after doing a somersault, aged five. It was this kind of humanity in Mc. that kept fucking me up.
“It isn’t funny.”
“Then why are you grinning?”
“Disbelief.” The joke bought us ten minutes of silence. “Never had a friend till the army.”
“Are we in the army?” I asked.
“Military. Whatever. Never had any idea I was funny.”
“Repeat. You are not.”
“People listen, then they laugh. That’s the definition.”
“It could be derision.”
“It’s not.” He was right. He knew he had that thing that made people pay attention. Give him their trust. It was how he’d been able to fool us all.
“You blew up the hotel, Mc. I know. I saw everybody dead.”
“You saw what you saw. Can’t seem to talk you out of that.” He let the steering wheel slide between his fingers like a gardener letting out hose. The car gripped and spit over a sudden chop in the road, and then he held the wheel firm again. “People see all manner of things in situations like this. Their past, their future. Hell, I thought I saw Mother Mary herself standing over me like a warning. Or a wish.” He stopped, shook his head like an old man who’d seen too much suffering to do anything but be amazed.
“You believe in that? All that?”
“Hell, I’m Irish Catholic, boyo. It’s not a belief. It’s a tattoo.”
“I’m afraid,” I said, against my will. And a surge of tears was stopped only by the dam of my will.
“Me, too,” Mc. said, but flat. Like the weather report. I didn’t believe him. I started to reach to strangle him, to crash us, to do something besides this friendly banter, this compassionate empathetic bullshit drive. “Don’t,” he said, intercepting my intent like a cartoon character putting his finger into a pistol. It worked. Mc. had a force field around him, and I had still not located the Achilles door. “There.” He pointed and swerved at the same moment, tiring up dust at the harshness of the turn. “See it?” He sped up, then slowed down, his eyes on the dashboard. “This is good. This is important.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because we’re out of gas.”
Mc. raced to a stop alongside a row of gasoline pumps. The pole that held the sign had melted into a shepherd’s staff of metal, and all the identifiable markers on the pumps themselves had been burned away by a localized, supreme heat.
“Why didn’t this place blow?” I asked as I stepped out of the vehicle. It was the first time I noticed we were in a peacekeeper field vehicle. The logo on my door had not yet been erased by the war.
“Gasoline’s underground,” Mc. explained. “Either that, or there ain’t none left.”
The pumps were all that was standing. The cashier booth was a bump of remains twenty-five feet away.
“Where’d you get the truck?” I said, lifting the pump as if I worked there. I jiggered it up and down, but it yielded only the faintest click. The nozzle had been pinched smaller by the attack, but it was still wide enough to sneak gas through. If there had been gas. “Empty,” I said, jamming the arm back into its metal sleeve.
“Not empty,” said Mc, squinting into the dirt-smeared Plexiglas face of the pump. “Probably pay before pumping. How hilarious is that?” Mc. checked the other two pumps, the futile clicking their only response. “It’s under here. I know it.”
Mc. got on all fours to examine the base of the pumps. They had been sealed to the ground, but bombs had crumbled the concrete like stale cookies, and he was looking for an entry. I could have charged him and kicked his ribs through his shirt, but I had come to believe he was either invincible or necessary. The prospect of being out there alone again, without any more answers, kept my violence in check.
“Again. Where’d you get a peacekeeper truck?”
“See if there’s a crowbar in the back,” he said, eyes peering into a cynosure of ground. “I think we can jimmy this up. And I can smell the fumes. It’s down here.”
Crowbar. If I found one, then I wouldn’t need the surprise attack. I could stand over him like a surgical nurse and hand it to the back of his head. Instead, I found the crowbar and gave it to him. He never even glanced up, his shoulders never tensed. He knew I needed him. That was his armor. And that’s why he was keeping me ignorant, avoiding my questions, treating me like a neighborhood child.
“Now,” he said, rising, the crowbar jammed in at a thirty-degree angle beneath the pump. “Let’s pry this open.”
The gasoline came out as if from a water gun. It hit Mc. square in the chest, inking his shirt with a circle that extended to his belt. And we both fell back laughing. There was no way to stop the fountain. We couldn’t get our hands in close enough without enjoying a petroleum mouth rinse. Mc. reparked the truck and chose our only remaining option. I opened the gas tank, he lined it up, and we let the truck drink from the fountain. We watched and laughed, the laughter as odd as applause in a cemetery. Mc. slapped my back. I punched his arm. We were stupid and giddy, and soon the tank was full, the excess dribbling down from the gas tank like booze from a drunk’s chin.
And still the fountain. We’d hit a vein deep enough to fill a parking lot of trucks. “We should be harvesting this,” I said. “And selling it.”
“With what, to who?” Mc. countered, his snort sneaking through the traffic of his teeth. “My fucking shirt.” Mc. took it off and knotted it to the roof rack to dry on the drive. He pulled out an extra from a rucksack in the backseat.
“Anything else in there? Like food?”
“No food. Besides, everyone knows this war’s about oil,” he mocked.
“Is that this war?”
“Does it matter?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Because this could mean we won.” We managed a few final chuckles. The spout finally pissed itself dry and there came the feeling of night. Mc. threw me the keys.
“You drive. I’m tired.” We got in, started up. “Don’t kill me in my sleep or you’ll never get where you’re going.”
“Where am I going?”
“Just drive, and —”
“I know. I know … kill you in your sleep.”
“That’s don’t kill, kid,” he challenged, already tucking himself in to rest. “Careful. Leave out a word, the wrong word …”
Don’t kill, I said to myself. Come to a war and don’t kill the one guy you want to kill. Just drive. And maybe, maybe stay alive.
Being lost is a type of liberation. Destinations create impatience, worry, expectations, disappointments. With Mc. asleep beside me and the night storing away the day, I felt I could drive myself past the edges and the imaginings. In the subtle darkness, I could see the humming outlines of everything that had been burned away. The ghosts of buildings and schoolhouses. The ashes of arenas, the pummeled parking lots, the invisible skyscrapers. This place had become placeless. Stripped of all identifiers, it was now a pure thing. Gone were the magazines and the newspapers. Fliers stuck to telephone poles seeking the missing were now missing themselves. I was driving across a landscape so ruined that it was new. Pre. Uncluttered. And man’s genius at destruction begged for nothing ever to be rebuilt here again.
War had edited it down to the essentials. Air, earth, sea, fire. War had simplified the extraneous wastefulness of man. It had taken the flavor of personality and flattened it, spread it so thin it removed even a taste, a hint. I was nowhere.
And then I remembered music. Like most memories, it was stoked by the lack of the thing. Absence doesn’t make anything grow fonder, it makes things more present. For we never notice a thing more intently than when we want it and it is denied. Mc. had stirred, and his mouth leaked a few hummed notes from inside the chamber of his slumber. That made me reach for the radio. It had been sitting there in the dash the whole time, but it hadn’t occurred to me that there might be some information out there I could steal while my friendly captor slept. Click. I kept the volume infinitesimal, so that the static and popcorn crackle wouldn’t rouse Mc. I spun the dial like a roulette wheel. Only need one. Just one station. Come on, come on. Turn, turn …
