War, page 9
When I got home that day, my mother grabbed me by the shoulders like a tailor fitting a suit. “You are,” she said, “brown as a berry.”
“Berries are blue.” I smiled. My first smile since. “Sometimes they’re straw or ras. But they are never brown.”
“This one is.” Her forefinger pressing the tip of my nose. We stood in the foyer, dumbfounded by, if not happiness, then a gaping lack of sadness. “Should we …?” she asked, her expression finishing her sentence. On any other day it would have ended, “call your father for dinner?” Or “clear the table, do the dishes?” But this one ended differently. We needed permission from each other, permission to let go of this hypnosis. To return to before. Yet the problem was that our before was so graceless, so faceless, that at least in grief we’d found a small disturbance along the way. An exit ramp. A place to lie low, hide out, and not be whatever we were. “Should we” ended with “return, go back, descend.” And it made the grief seem comforting, almost alluring in its foreignness. We both nodded no, not ready to let go yet. It wasn’t for little brother, it was for us. And if his final gift to us was this grief, then it would be wrong to put it up on the shelf before we had used up everything it had to offer.
That was the dream that my mother had tucked me in with. A good memory from an endless file of unhappy ones. She veiled me with it, and, when the voice returned, this time yelling, and closer, I did not want to yield to waking. I bit my lids down tight as coffins and felt the hot breath of the exhortation.
“Get up.”
Not ready. I yanked myself down deeper into sleep, deafer as I fell away. Forcing memories to become the dream of the dream to unpack more memories. I could feel the muscles of my mind carve and strain at the descent. Up above, the outline of my alarm clock, barking mute over my sleeping. He didn’t know my sleeping was anything but laziness or rest. It was an energy. A tirade. A defiance that required all my strength, real and imagined. And then he was gone. I was back inside.
I began to hover like a bird caught between two winds, and watched the landscape change below me. Me at ten, breaking a toy I couldn’t figure out how to use, the plastic no leaving a six-inch tear in my flesh as its defense. Me at fourteen, standing outside a school dance with an untorn ticket and a too-tight tie. It was my father’s, and it bowed out at the bottom like I was wearing a napkin. Me at six, climbing a tree, hoping to fall, not having the nerve to jump. Almost midnight when my father climbed up to snatch me down, his fingers pressing into me like a trumpeter holding a note. “Happy now?” he’d said to my shivering self.
“Yes,” I’d said. Whack.
The memories lazy-Susaned by long enough to entertain. It didn’t matter that they stung. Just that they’d already happened. Already hurt me. Whatever was awaiting my awakening had the power to hurt me in the now. I didn’t seem to have enough strength for new pain. So I lingered on the past. My memories suddenly felt like burning money. I could see their worth only as they disappeared.
Me at seventeen, trying to steal a car by mimicking the hot-wiring I’d seen on cop shows. Wound up laughing so hard at my ineptitude that I drew a cop’s attention. “You all right, son?” the wide-nostriled officer asked.
“Lost my keys,” I lied.
“Laugh so you don’t cry. I get it,”he smiled. Then he gave me a lift. When my mother saw the squad car dropping me off, she ran out in worry, concocting an unnecessary alibi as she ran. “Mom, it’s cool,” I calmed her. “Thinking of joining the force.”
“Good kid, ma’am,” the officer said, tipping his hat, checking out my mother’s figure, the house. He seemed to want to move in.
“My husband agrees,” Mom lied.
“I’m sure he does.” The cop backed away as if we had the gun and drove off chastened.
“Why’d you do that?” I asked.
“Because I felt like a pie in the window.”
“Not such a bad thing.”
“Never mind that,” she said, backpedaling in her furless slippers. “You’re not really wanting to become a policeman.”
“Nah,” I answered, half disappointed, watching the cruiser turn off of Victory. “Tried to steal a car.”
“What?” Without bothering to stop at the door.
“Don’t worry. I’m no good at that either.”
Me at twenty-four. In the village pub with an unquenchable thirst. Pints of beer disappeared as if they’d been spilled. Not wanting to drink, yet ordering another. Drowning. Ordering another. The rage of it all kept me sober. Girls rotated by like pieces on the game board of my life. Staying only long enough to want to roll the dice, get the hell away. In this dream I felt exactly as I had during the actual experience. I wasn’t there. Just above or just outside, my body as artist’s replica, my voice useless, my presence an injury. Present, just not accounted for.
I went outside without paying, the sunset like a hood pulled over bright orange eyes. It was six-thirty, and I was fifteen beers in.
A young couple passed me on their way into the bar. “They got live music?” Both had the forced cheeriness of people who needed to have a good time like an infant needs a vaccine.
“You know where you are?” I asked, the tiniest of slurs.
“Yes.”
“Then you should leave.”
“Let’s go, baby,” the girl said, sensing the darkness in me before her blond, sweatered boyfriend.
“I like this town,” the guy said. He wanted it competitive.
“Don’t you get it, sport?” I spoke to him like an uncle to a child. “Everything entertaining is either happening tomorrow or was on last night.”
“He’s drunk,” girlfriend muttered. “Let’s go.”
“Run inside, sport. She’s right. You won’t like how this conversation ends.” He wanted to do something bold. To rise up like a primitive and smack my smart ass down. His girlfriend pulled at him, her arms tight as reins.
“I like it here. You don’t, you can’t just …” All I had to do was lean in. That’s how scary I was in that unscary environment. He cowered as if hit, his dignity shed like a winter coat. She saw it. She saw how a simple gesture had undressed her man. It would end their relationship. If not that night, then soon after. She hit me. Punched me hard in the arms and chest for stealing him from her. Hit me until the boyfriend was the one pulling her away. My shoulders burned from her small angry fists. It felt, not good, but something.
“You folks have a good night,” I said, still not moving from my spot.
“Fuck you,” she yelled/swallowed. And they were inside.
“I agree,” I said. “I agree completely.”
“Soldier!” That was the word that woke me up. That was the word that completed the dream. Being the drunk asshole had gotten me into this position. The dream had become a sober reality. I wanted to fight over nothing just to feel alive, and the hotel had given me that chance. “Soldier!”
“What?” I said, sitting up so fast that I grazed R.’s cheek with my forehead.
“We gotta move.”
“How long did I get?” I asked, unfurling to an awkward stance. My feet were so tingled it was like stepping on frozen shards of glass.
“Sorry. Gotta move.”
I crab walked to the door and outside saw the exact sky I’d left behind. In the fast approaching distance, the clear sound of truck tires and voices.
R. yelled, “We need a vehicle,” as if volume would grant his wish.
“I feel like I didn’t sleep at all.”
“You didn’t, kid. I watched you lie down.” So I hadn’t been sleeping. I’d been hiding. First refuge of the insane, the waking dream.
“Where were you?” I said as he took off in a walk-run away from the church.
“Behind the vestibule. Came in through the choir door. Listening to you talking to your goddamn mother.” I caught up to him, but he wouldn’t look at me.
“I met a peacekeeper,” I said. “Dutch. Dead.”
“Thought you said you met him.”
“He died after.”
“You kill him?”
Almost, I thought. I’d wanted to in the beginning. “I haven’t killed anybody.”
“Except Y. Great war, eh, kid? All these enemies and all you killed yourself was a fellow grunt.” We reached the top of a small rise where we could see down onto a flooded street, where the water looked neck-deep if it looked an inch. Stopping let us guess how close the trucks were. We had less than a minute. “Water main,” R. said, as if explaining it would make it passable. There was no end to the break to the left or the right. And because it was on a slight decline, the water funneled through at speed. Fear fingered around my ribs and brain. I felt electric with terror, that if I touched the water I could have put out the stars.
Closer. The trucks rolled with the certainty of the revolving earth. The voices were closer now. The language, English as broken as the landscape. “It doesn’t matter,” R. admitted. I wanted it to not, for it to be just another moment of disappointment, ambivalence, nonchalance, the void. But I hated being needled to this shimmering edge, like a butterfly awake for the pin.
“There’s only jumping. We could get across.” R. looked afraid, too, his body like a package damaged in the shipping. But we didn’t jump. We simply stood at the flood’s edge and watched carcasses drift by. Each body that passed seemed to have died in the crossing. Bloated and floating, their arms in midstroke as if they might still make it. The top half of a deer swooshed by, antlers close enough to grab. R. did, pulling out a mounted trophy from some hunting-themed restaurant. We laughed and held it high as if we’d bagged it.
“I thought for a minute …”
“I know, I know,” R. said.
“I mean, where the hell are we? A deer. What city is this?” and I laughed, even shouldered against him, hoping desperate kinship would squeeze out the answer.
“Fucking deer,” he said instead.
The trucks were upon us. Vision was useless, but our ears told us that we’d reached our end. We had waited on this edge for a reason. Somehow, courage had abandoned us, but so had panic. It wasn’t fight or flight, it was neither. We waited as the convoy approached.
“Better load,” R. said. “I guess.” He sounded like an old man deciding to get in off the porch for supper. Exhausted, hungry for nothing, yet obliged to behave in some familiar fashion. We hoisted our weapons as the volume played in our ears, bright and insistent as an ice cream truck in July.
“Maybe they can’t see us,” I wished.
“They can see us.”
“Then why can’t we see them?”
“Just … wait.” We splayed out onto the soggy ground, guns like cameras to capture the moment of arrival. The earth smelled like a ruined greenhouse. Dead flowers and stale herbs. Face this close, the soft soil seemed to be sucking us down, a head start on our graves. I squinted against the dissident air as it refused to show us our enemy.
“Come on,” I hoarsed. “Hurry up.” The trucks, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, were now less than fifty feet away, their speed unabated. The voices were a choir of yelling and distortion. “I know,” I recommended. “Let them roll over us into the water.”
“Good for the first few. The rest’ll figure it out.”
“Fuck ‘em. If we die, let’s take a few with us.”
“Who said we’re going to die,” R. flatlined.
Your voice does, I wanted to say. He already sounded dead.
I saw the grill first. It shone oddly bright as it zoomed out of the fog and into view only ten feet away. It was going fast enough that it wouldn’t have had time to brake and miss the water. And it was at an angle to pass us by. We could have remained invisible, at least for another moment. But R. decided to shoot. Stand and shoot. Unload a fusillade like a last stand. World War II soldier, lonely in his foxhole. He screamed as he shot, knowing his death was imminent, and he wanted to go out with nothing left in the barrel. His bellowing drowned out my shouts for him to get down, to save bullets, to do anything but what he was doing. He might as well have lit himself on fire for all the focus he was pulling in our direction.
One of his bullets worked. I saw it crease the windshield and pierce the driver’s windpipe. The driver slumped onto the wheel, his body knocked sixty degrees wrong, and the truck began to spin in its own tracks. I stood and throttled R. to the ground, his last bullets puncturing the earth around us in useless thumps. His breathing was heavy, his mouth crooked as a boxer punched. “What the fuck?” I wanted to punish him, adrenaline barbwiring through my veins.
“Shhh,” he said, his eyes mad-happy. “I got him.”
“They all know where we are.”
“So shhh.” We listened. The convoy of trucks still as loud, just out of view. Then slightly quieter, as if retreating. Had R.’s splurge fooled them into backpedaling? No. The trucks again, close as skin, the voices shouting. “They’re not firing,” R. said.
“That’s because they’re not as fucking stupid as —”
“No.” And this time he looked at me with actual hope in his eyes. “Because they’re not there.” R. rose. He unpeeled himself from my grip and walked toward the voices, which now seemed to be retreating again. Like a foolish apostle, I followed him. R. reached the truck first. He timed its spinning and jumped up into the cab, pulling the driver off the gas pedal and out onto the ground. I watched him calmly brush away all the glass from the driver’s seat and put the thing in park. The trucks were closer than ever now, the shiver of voices screaming in our ears. Until R. reached across the dash and turned off the recording.
The quiet was so absolute that the water at our back sounded like a country brook. R. sat behind the wheel and slowly realized that he was alive. The face of his youth flickered beneath his tattered age.
The door had the decal of the peacekeepers. And the dead driver was wearing the same uniform Dutchman had on in his photograph. “What was he doing?”
“Trying to scare … whoever.”
“It worked.”
“Not for him.” We dug a small grave as the night settled in around us. We snapped the antlers off the deer head to make a bone cross. R. looked confused as we stood wordless in front of the grave.
“Don’t feel bad,” I said. “You …”
“Don’t try to comfort, bleeder. Soldier shouldn’t know how.”
“Bullshit” jumped out of my mouth.
“I don’t feel … anything but alive.”
“What if this is it?” I asked. “What if there isn’t even a war anymore? Just assholes driving in circles to scare assholes who are running in circles?” R. didn’t have time to answer. The explosion tore the night into a Halloween party of black and orange and catapulted us into the surging water. I surfaced first, then R., then the deer head without its antlers, floating on in its wonderment, staring up at the bright dark. R. and I both thought about speaking but then took the deer’s approach. Lay on our backs and decided to see where the flood wanted to take us.
We floated, the emasculated deer head, R., and I. Floated like apples waiting to be bobbed for by competing angels. The water was filthy and deeper than the ocean had seemed. The speed of the current allowed me to be flat on my back and fear neither sinking nor arrival. Whatever part of the city we were passing was submerged to the point of invisibility. The only hint of injury from the blast was a creeping sting from shin to thigh. I could feel with my fingers that my fatigues had been split, but no shrapnel was protruding. And this had been the good leg, the one that hadn’t been chopsticked by the land mine. The enemy was taking the theory of limb-by-limb very seriously.
Crunching up, I could see R. about five feet to my left. He was making swimming motions as if a coach were watching him. Useless but perfectly executed. So I decided to simply lie back until we got beached.
The night sky was lifting its hem, teasing at the day that lay behind. And directly overhead, close enough to shoot, appeared a hawk. The first living nonhuman creature I’d seen since exiting the hotel. It was still too dark to call its color, but it flew in a straight line on wings of authority. And it traveled equal to the current’s speed. If the water pocketing into my ears didn’t remind me I was moving in haste, it would have seemed motionless, as if nailed to the wall of sky.
The underbelly had two tones, and the tail was split into three sections that shimmered and beat in the air like a summer girl’s hair. My ex-wife’s hair, long as July, striped by air and sun as she walked faster than I, like she always did. Perpetually in a rush to beat me anywhere. See a thing first. Register surprise, then pass the story on to me. For a while, when love was still bright-white as an inhalant, I stopped looking at things. Only wanted to hear them described. Listen to her apricot voice grant shape to a painting, a landscape, or a building, more vibrant in her tone than any architect could draw. We once did a walking tour of a historical site without my ever opening my eyes. “Everyone thinks you’re blind,” she laughed, pulling me toward another landmark.
“I am.”
She spoke with the certainty of facts despite her lack of education. She knew the essence of what had gone on there, and her imagination must have made history jealous. The silver teeth of bayonets and smoking failure of muskets. Men booted in mud, waiting to be stolen from life. Cannons drumming in jazz rhythm. One, two, three, four, boom, one, boom, wo ta ra ra boom deeay. And then she’d be singing. Pulling my blind self into a dance, into a wrestle, into a heap of laughter that bordered on a seizure.
She was the first and last to make me laugh like that. As if she had a coin that operated the mechanism of happy. And once I sent her away, they stopped making that coin. Or my works rusted over from lack of use.
That was her magic. To take the ancient pain of the land and spin it into laughter from a sullen boy. I needed her now, now that I was the ruined soldier, ducking bullets and sinking into the mud. History wasn’t stories, or even survival. History was death piled on top of death until the earth crashed into the sky.
