Yellow Birds (11 page)

A small deer run led down the hill below the bridgehead toward the flat, muddy riverbanks. There were fifty yards or so of good bottomland with birches and elms scattered around and then little islands leading farther out which became sparse until they were just spits of sand and muck between dark runnels of water. The broad river, not yet whitecapped, ran a half or a quarter of a mile to the other bank. Beyond the river and up the opposite hill, the city stood outlined against the sky. It squatted on the high ground above yet more rail lines and past the remains of a canal carved out by colonial merchants who sought to break the impediment of the fall line which Richmond straddled. And it seemed, as I lit a fire by the waterside and sat under a lean-to of birch branches, that whole rotations had reversed themselves and that I alone watched the city and the ground on which it sat spin throughout the night inside the universe.

When I woke I saw that the fire had decayed to ember in the night. It was late morning and the sand in the bright light looked like burlap sacking where I’d slept. The driftwood from the fire was all black and charred. Music swam toward me from a boom box leveled on a midstream rock where a group of boys and girls about my age lay out on towels or jumped into the swift water, laughing. I could see Luke, but I couldn’t tell who the others were.

The ash and smoke had seeped into my skin while the fire burned out during the night, and I waded into the water below the rail bridge to try to wash it off, but I could still smell it an hour later. I climbed back up the hill and onto the tracks again and shuffled across the bridge one hundred feet above the water. I moved to the edge where the ties met the structure of the bridge itself and moved along the oxidized metal, occasionally swinging my foot out over the water flowing down below while watching the kids laugh and swim in the fresh water. The day was warm and clear, and the sky behind the city was bright blue and empty. When I got to the north bank of the river, I followed the tracks toward the city for a while, then turned down a worn path that led toward the water.

It was hard to cross the canal and even though it had been cut out some two hundred years before, it still seemed industrial and slightly dirty. Finally, I found a spot where the river hung up behind a couple of downed oaks on the canal side and doubled back toward the path along the river’s edge. It took me to a campsite looking right out over the water, and it was the afternoon now and the site was empty but only recently so. Three lean-tos perched beneath strong, firm elms bordered a small clearing with a fire pit and a few stumps for seating.

I set my duffel on the ground and got a fire going and took my boots off and my clothes off and hung them on a branch near the fire. My feet were in the water, and the river ran docilely by and I was hardly a speck on the landscape and I was glad. An egret flew just over my shoulder and skimmed the water so close and I thought there was no way a body could be so close to the edge of a thing and stay there and be in control. But the tips of its wings skimmed along the water just the same. The egret didn’t seem to mind what I believed, and it tilted some and disappeared into the glare of the gone sun and it was full of grace.

Small lines wound their way up and down the surface of the stump on which I sat. They were intricate and sort of gouged out or termited into a pattern that struck me as oddly orderly. Luke and the rest of the boys and girls still splashed in the water, taking turns diving from the broad gray rocks into a little draft of current that swept them ten or twenty feet downstream like an amusement park ride. They were beautiful. I had to resist the urge to hate them.

I had become a kind of cripple. They were my friends, right? Why didn’t I just wade out to them? What would I say? “Hey, how are you?” they’d say. And I’d answer, “I feel like I’m being eaten from the inside out and I can’t tell anyone what’s going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I’ll feel like I’m ungrateful or something. Or like I’ll give away that I don’t deserve anyone’s gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I’ve done but everyone loves me for it and it’s driving me crazy.” Right.

Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn’t any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you’re taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you gonna do?, but really it doesn’t matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you’d like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn’t even realize you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts and everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you now and you say, How can metal be so on fire? and Where is all this fucking trash coming from? and even back home you’re getting whiffs of it and then that thing you started to notice slipping away is gone and now it’s becoming inverted, like you have bottomed out in your spirit but yet a deeper hole is being dug because everybody is so fucking happy to see you, the murderer, the fucking accomplice, the at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every goddamn yellow ribbon in sight, and you can’t explain it but it’s just, like, Fuck you, but then you signed up to go so it’s all your fault, really, because you went on purpose, so you are in the end doubly fucked, so why not just find a spot and curl up and die and let’s make it as painless as possible because you are a coward and, really, cowardice got you into this mess because you wanted to be a man and people made fun of you and pushed you around in the cafeteria and the hallways in high school because you liked to read books and poems sometimes and they’d call you fag and really deep down you know you went because you wanted to be a man and that’s never gonna happen now and you’re too much of a coward to be a man and get it over with so why not find a clean, dry place and wait it out with it hurting as little as possible and just wait to go to sleep and not wake up and fuck ’em all.

I started crying. Through my tears night had fallen. The girls in the hot summer night were toweling off and laughing, standing on the darkening rocks beneath the soft light of the lampposts on the nearby train bridge. I got up and followed a path that skirted the banks of the river and I followed it aimlessly. At the edge of the river, I waded in. It was hot then, but the river cooled me, and the moon above the trees on the hilltop, blocking the streetlights, kept the river flickering softly, and I felt myself calmly fading in it. As I leaned forward and floated, I drifted a little, a little down, a little to sleep.

The river had a dream in it. I faced the opposite bank and stood there naked in the water. I saw a band of horses in a field dotted with dogwood and willow. Each was like the others in temperament, all roans except for a single old palomino that looked at me as the others grazed in the thin moonlight. It was bloodied on its hooves and carried the marks of both lash and brand on its haunches. Ducking its head sweetly, it entered the shallow water. As it walked toward me the blood washed downstream and the horse left a little red wake as it walked. It stepped lightly, but bore no grimace on its face, and was only tentative in its step. I stood, still naked, and softly splashed the water around me with both hands. Not hard, just back and forth through the water with my hands in semicircles. It neared and I watched it snort a little and as it neared it shook its head, once, twice, calmly. It stood before me, old and worn from the lash and it bled into the gently flowing water and stood tall despite its wounds. It leaned in and nuzzled me about my shoulder and neck and I leaned in too and nuzzled back and put my arms around it and I could feel the power in its bruised old muscles. The horse’s eyes were black and soft.

This was my vision as I woke. Goddamn the noise. The yelling closed in. Them yelling, “Get him out. Goddamn it, get his ass out.” I shocked awake and spat up water from the river and they banged on my chest until I spat out more and I lay on the bank, drunk and smiling, looking out at the strange faces gathered there. I lay for a little while half in and out of the water and it ran over my feet, lapping up and down and cooling them, shallow enough to be safe where I lay. I smiled absently and thought of the old palomino nuzzling me as I came around. Whatever. They called me in the lamplight. Night now.

Luke had seen me floating and called 911 from one of the girls’ cells. The cops didn’t make me go through the motions of any kind of psych evaluation out of respect for my service. I’d given them my military ID when they asked for one and they said, “All right, soldier. Let’s get you home.” When they dropped me off at my house one of the cops looked at me with a pitiable concern and said, “Try to keep it together, buddy. You’ll be back in the swing in no time.”

When I opened the door my mother was waiting. She grabbed at my face and began kissing my cheeks and forehead. “I thought I’d lost you.” she said.

“I’m fine, Momma. Everything is fine.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening to you. I’ve been worried half to death.” She stood there, then moved to the counter and started shuffling the letters nervously where they were stacked. “You know I’m getting calls now too, on top of this,” she said.

“Yeah? Who from?”

She turned to look at me and I saw in her eyes all the pain and horror that I had given her. “Some captain. He said he was from the C.I.D.” She mouthed the words slowly. “The Criminal Investigation Division. He wants to talk to you.” She paused and moved toward me again. I moved away and went into my room and closed the door. Her voice came through the cheap layers of artificial wood. “What happened over there, Johnny? What happened, baby? What did you do?”

What happened? What fucking happened? That’s not even the question, I thought. How is that the question? How do you answer the unanswerable? To say what happened, the mere facts, the disposition of events in time, would come to seem like a kind of treachery. The dominoes of moments, lined up symmetrically, then tumbling backward against the hazy and unsure push of cause, showed only that a fall is every object’s destiny. It is not enough to say what happened. Everything happened. Everything fell.

Fall came at
the tail end of our first storm. We’d been granted a reprieve from the heat and the dust, both gently smothered by flat sheets of rain fallen from skies the color of unworked iron. We were still tense, but now we were tense
and
wet.

On a morning several days after the fight in the orchard a major came to our platoon area just before first light. Our platoon had done well in the orchard, minimized civilian casualties, killed a lot of hajjis and suffered only a few casualties of our own. This had earned us good duty: regular patrols with forty-eight hours on and twenty-four off. When the major arrived, we were just returning from one of our cushier patrols through the sparsely occupied buildings on the southern outskirts of Al Tafar. We casually tossed our equipment on the ground and lolled against the low concrete barriers and trees in whatever position was easiest to achieve.

“Platoon, ah-ten-shun!” barked the major’s aide as they sauntered into our area through a veil of camo netting.

The LT was snoring, stretched out on top of a concrete enclosure where we’d often wait out mortar barrages, playing spades or engaging in close-quarter wrestling matches until the last bits of shrapnel whistled by. He didn’t move. The major and his aide looked at each other, then at us, and we looked back at them only slightly more aware of their presence than we’d been the moment before. Even Sterling remained unstirred. All his gear was on, as taut and orderly as ever, but we’d spent the three hours prior to dawn waiting for a medevac that couldn’t fly through the cloud cover from the storm, carefully picking thin slivers of metal out of a boy’s face and neck while we huddled in a sewage ditch. We were tired.

The aide cleared his throat. “Ah-ten-shun!” he said, louder this time, but we enjoyed resting in the cool rain and the quiet of the early hour and hardly noticed.

Sterling roused himself, looked over at the LT sleeping soundly, and said, “At ease,” with what little earnestness he could muster.

We began to mill about as the major spoke. Only Sterling kept his military bearing and remained attentive. I think it was all that he had left at that point. On the periphery of our gentle domestic activities, citations were read. All the while, weapons were cleaned on dry squares of ground below camouflage nets and tarps, other boys ignored the rain and washed the dust and salt out of their clothes in red plastic buckets full of water gone brown and dingy with their filth, and still others traded care package items for packs of smokes, lighting up and coalescing into the major’s audience. But most paid the unasked-for ceremony the attention they thought that it was worth, and as the major spoke, the orders bestowing medals of gallantry and commendation upon us became soaked through, falling apart into wet organic tatters, whereupon they were received from him or not as each name was called, depending on the interest level of the boy in question at the time.

Only Sterling’s promotion caused any comment, and most of that because it was accompanied by a Bronze Star for valor. But we said, “Good job, Sarge” and “You earned it, Sarge,” and took turns patting him on the back. He gave the major a crisp salute, a sharp about-face, and sat back down against his tree trunk, the ribboned medal hidden in his palm.

After the major and his aide disappeared I noticed that Murph had missed the ceremony. Over the next few weeks I started to get the impression he was avoiding me. There wasn’t any particular thing that made me curious at first. He was aloof on patrol, which happened from time to time. When I saw him on the FOB, he would act as if he were in a hurry, or he’d turn his back to me when I tried to catch up to him, casting down his eyes when we’d make contact. But you give a guy a break at times like those. Shit, it wasn’t but a year or so since he’d spent the better part of his life buried in that goddamn mine he was always talking about. “Shipp Mountain,” he’d say, “now that’s a bitch. We’d go down in, three, four o’clock in the morning, laying on this cart and I’d just lay back and look up and think the whole world’s a couple feet above me, just looking for a seam to let loose and bust me into nothing. Damn, Bart,” he’d say, “I don’t recall seeing the sun for weeks at a time.”

“No shit?”

“Honest and true,” he’d say.

It was heating up in Al Tafar then, and we’d be out on patrol hour after hour, so hot that it seemed that the dust gave off its own light even after the sun went down, so fucking hot that we’d joke with Sterling to get a rise out of him. “Sarge, it’s a hundred and twenty degrees. Why don’t we surrender and go home,” one of us would say.

“Shut your fucking cock holsters,” he’d answer if he was in a bad mood. Those rare days he could be said to have been in something resembling a good mood, he’d look back at us as we struggled over a wall or tried to scramble up over the scree of a sewage ditch, and he’d smile and say, “Life is pain.” And I’d tell Murph, both of us blinded by a sun that seemed at times to be the whole sky, “It would have been nice if somebody could have eased us into this shit.”

I spent a lot of time trying to identify the exact point at which I noticed a change in Murph, somehow thinking that if I could figure out where he had begun to slide down the curve of the bell that I could do something about it. But these are subtle shifts, and trying to distinguish them is like trying to measure the degrees of gray when evening comes. It’s impossible to identify the cause of anything, and I began to see the war as a big joke, for how cruel it was, for how desperately I wanted to measure the particulars of Murph’s new, strange behavior and trace it back to one moment, to one cause, to one thing I would not be guilty of. And I realized very suddenly one afternoon while throwing rocks into a bucket in a daze that the joke was in fact on me. Because how can you measure deviation if you don’t know the mean? There was no center in the world. The curves of all our bells were cracked.

I couldn’t think of anything else. My days passed sitting in the dust, throwing rocks into a bucket, missing, didn’t matter. I thought a lot about that ridiculous promise I’d made to Murphy’s mother. I couldn’t even remember what I’d said, or even what had been asked for. Bring him home? What, in one piece? At all? I couldn’t remember. Would I have failed if he wasn’t happy, if he was no longer sane? How the hell could I protect that which I couldn’t see, even in myself? Fuck you, bitch, I’d think, and then think it all again.

I finally went to Sterling with my concerns. He laughed. “Some people just can’t fucking hack it, Private. You’d better get used to the fact that Murph’s a dead man.”

I scoffed. “No way, Sarge. Murph’s got his shit together.” And I tried to laugh off Sterling’s comment, turning back to him. “Nothing’s gonna happen to Murph, he’s solid.”

Sterling sat carving reliefs of animals into a broken ax handle beneath the slight cover of tree branches. “Private, you forget the edge you’ve got, because the edge is normal now.” He paused and lit a cigarette. It dangled out of his mouth and the ash grew long as he returned to his whittling. “If you get back to the States in your head before your ass is there too, then you are a fucking dead man. I’m telling you. You don’t know where Murph keeps going, but I do.”

“Where is that, Sarge?” I asked.

“Murph is home, Bartle. And he’s gonna be there with a flag shoved up his ass before you know it.”

I walked off, intending to look for Murph, when Sterling called after me. “There’s only one way home for real, Private. You’ve got to stay deviant in this motherfucker.”

In a way, I knew it was true. Over the next few days Murph came to embody an opacity I couldn’t penetrate further. I had my own speculations. On our days off I gave myself free rein to explore them. I talked to myself in bunkers at the few rarely traveled edges of our FOB, fueled by cheap Jordanian whiskey. My mutterings in the dark were punctuated by short percussive sobs. I was becoming spectral, too. An afterthought. I began to visualize my own death in those raw, purposeless tubes of concrete between which I wandered in the evenings. If someone could have seen me, if I could have been seen, then I might have looked like I’d been hurtled into my future, huddling under roofs of an urban landscape just below street level. My mutterings would not seem uncharacteristic, but rather inevitable, and the passing men and women would not pay me much attention. They might in their passing talk say, “What a shame he couldn’t get it back together.” And one might answer, “I know, so tragic.” But I would not embrace their pity. I might be numb with cold, but I would not ask for understanding. No, I would only sit muttering with envy for their broad umbrellas, their dryness, and the sweet, unwounded banality of their lives. But it would not matter. Couldn’t, because the rain would still fall on the alleys and culverts where I’d rest. It would fall at the edges of parking decks where one might remain for a night or two before discovery. It would fall in the city parks where the leaves or bare branches would conspire with a cardboard sign to keep me dry, all legibility bled away from the pathetic messages I’d written on it. It would fall the way it fell in Al Tafar, soft and intermittently over the war, the rain’s stops and starts becoming nothing more than weathered sighs of resignation.

When I imagined my death that night, sitting in a bunker at the eastern edge of the FOB, I imagined all of its possible permutations. I sipped from a bottle of Royal Horse and gazed out through the round entrance of the bunker, an aperture through which I could see the buildings and minarets tinged in purple and black by each variety of night passing through the hours. I imagined it all, the first wound coming soon, in fall or what would pass for winter, likely to be cold, apt to be. I’d bleed, to be sure, if I were not also concussed, boxed on the ears, and de- and re-pressurized in an instant. I would bleed. I’ll bleed. I spoke out loud, slurring the words slightly, my voice echoing with a dull reverberation in the concrete tube. Murph would find my body, but first I had to become a body, so that there would be something to be shot, but more likely there would be an explosion, more likely there would be metal made into sheets with jagged edges folded over into my skin and my skin would be torn. And as confusion always seems to follow blasts, I would be left to bleed until my face became gray and my skin all over became gray and thus would I become a body. I said “gray” and “body” and my quiet vowels echoed out the ends of the short tube and I’d be dead and A and O sounds trickled into the night, into the slight rain, and I saw Murph. I was drunk. I saw Murph cradling my head, its new concavity, saw him drag me by my arms. My legs, limp and dead, dragged sputteringly along the ground, where they bounced at slight shifts in elevation, but I didn’t notice them as they were dragged behind my body. I laughed and the soft expulsive H made no echo and I saw water and my body floating, my blood in it, and I thought I smelled my blood, my body, a ripe metallic. I was so drunk. I saw inside dark boxes, cheap tin caskets and Virginia and all the little graves lined up like teeth in the field and the dogwoods blooming and then the falling petals and my mother crying, she was crying. I made her cry. I saw the solidity of the earth, the worms, the flag and the tin box fading away and I saw brown earth forever and I thought of Murph and water and I mouthed the word “water” in a questioning tone and that is all I remembered before I woke up, all except the syllabic echo of my voice against the concrete going “qua, qua, qua.”

The rain stopped. The weather mellowed. Our next forty-eight-hour rotation on patrol was uneventful. We were unaware of even our own savagery now: the beatings and the kicked dogs, the searches and the sheer brutality of our presence. Each action was a page in an exercise book performed by rote. I didn’t care.

I hadn’t talked to Murph in days. No one had. I found the remnants of his casualty feeder card and the letter and picture from his ex-girlfriend in a laundry bucket, soap and all. I put them in my pocket. I started tailing him, trying to figure out what he was up to. I didn’t want to believe that I was watching the actions of someone who was already dead, so I searched for evidence that would contradict this; I searched for some grasp, at least, at life.

I began to find his mark all over the FOB: Murph was here. A little tag: two eyes and a nose peering over one thin line. Sometimes the fingers over the wall as well, sometimes not, but always the eyes and nose, ridiculous and searching, and the tag, Murph was here. I considered the possibility that he had been doing this all tour. There were never any dates, at least not on the half dozen or so I found, but I didn’t believe that any of them were older than a week or so. I attempted to triangulate his whereabouts from those half-dozen tags, narrowing down the places he could be one by one. Over the next few weeks I tried a stakeout on the DFAC, a transportation company, distant guard towers, even the hajji market that the brigade colonel had allowed to be set up on post so that we could further assist the native population by participating in their local black market economies. I couldn’t find him anywhere.

Out of ideas, I asked around. “Anybody know where Murph’s been off to?”

“Naw, man,” they’d say.

“How the fuck would I know?” said others.

I ran into Sterling, his feet resting on a short stack of sandbags, a porno mag shading his eyes from the dulled sun. “Hey, Sarge, you seen Murph around lately?”

“Yeah,” he said. “He’s been going up to the medics’ station and eyeballing some bitch up there.”

“At headquarters?” I asked.

“No, dummy,” he replied. “He’s eyeballing our medic, fat-ass Smitty.”

“Oh, right. I’m going to head up there and see what he’s up to.”

“Your war today, Private,” Sergeant Sterling said, and I headed out of our area, ducking under the netting stretched from bunker to bunker and from connex to connex. I used my hands to keep the sagging fabric from falling over me like a shroud. Thin light rippled down through the voids and fell onto my hands and my body and fell onto the dusty track toward the little hill where the HQ medics’ unit was quartered.