Yellow Birds (12 page)

I chain-smoked my way up the base of the hill. A small clapboard chapel stood in the packed dust that stretched out over the majority of the base. The white painted boards were chipped and peeling from the abrasive wind, and a few trees rose out of their potting holes around its perimeter, not yet taken by the earth where they were planted for shade, then left to fend for themselves in the heat of summer. A helipad was roughly scoured out of the dirt at the top of the hill. Behind it a series of tents and exhumed concrete culverts sat in a sectioned maze. A low stone wall surrounded the entirety of the small compound, snaking along the crest of the hill like an unwound ribbon of decalcified bone, seeming on the verge of collapsing back into the earth from which the stones were taken.

The grade of the hill was gentle. I reached the top and looked back over the base and the fence line punctuated by towers and emplacements in the slight distance. Over the fence a road and a railway line ran together for a few hundred yards, edged by broad evergreens gone limp from the cool air and recent rain. Through those drooping branches the city sprawled out haphazardly like a drunk on a sidewalk, fallen where he may.

“Hey, Bart,” Murph said.

He sat in the shade cast off by the wall, seemingly palsied against the unfinished outcroppings of stone.

“Where you been, buddy?” I asked.

“I’ve been here. Here.”

“You OK?”

Murph’s hands were in his pockets. His stretched-out legs crossed at the ankles. He seemed to be looking at the medics’ station, waiting for some particular thing that I did not know about. The thwump, thwump of a chopper rolled out of the sky. The bird dipped and swayed in the air, coming in low over the horizon, out of the glare. I sat down next to him in the shadow of the wall, and we put our hands over our covers so they didn’t blow off in the fine particles of dust swirling in little spirals over the compound beneath the rotor wash.

The compound began to bustle as soon as the chopper fixed its hover above the helipad. A medic guided the chopper in and two more medics had a stretcher at the ready. Even from our position at the wall we could see that it was stained rust brown with blood. Another medic, a girl, squatted in the dust next to the stretcher. She was blond and wore a brown T-shirt and latex gloves that reached up to her pale elbows. The short sleeves of her shirt were rolled up toward the gentle white arc of her shoulders, and her gloves were a shade of sky blue that stood out against the desert’s dull wintry monochrome so vibrantly that we were transfixed by every minute motion that they made.

“You looking at this girl?” I asked.

“It’s what I’ve been doing.”

The chopper landed and the crew chief and the medics dragged a boy off the metal floor of the cabin, and he wailed in pantomime beneath the staccato beat of the spinning blades. His own blood followed his passage from the floor to their arms and onto the stretcher, and his left leg was no longer a leg but instead dangled like a coarse cornmeal mush the color of wet clay beneath his scissored pants. The girl’s hands applied a tourniquet to the leg, and she took a position next to the stretcher and they ran beside it toward the makeshift hospital, and one gloved hand was in his hand and one gloved hand ran over his face, into his hair, over his lips and eyes, and they disappeared behind the tent cloth and the chopper took off, again listing in flight and receding off toward the horizon. As the whip of the rotors faded over the city, the boy’s voice became louder as he screamed in the small enclosure of the hospital tent. The few people wandering near the hill stopped. Murph and I did not move or speak. All those gathered listened as the unavoidable sound of the boy’s screams weakened and then died. We could only hope that his voice had broken, that it had become tired or had been anesthetized, that he now took deep breaths of cool air, his vocal cords unshaken by the music of his agony, but we knew it wasn’t true.

“I want to go home, Bart,” Murph said. He pulled out a dip, tucked it behind his lower lip and spit into the dust.

“Soon, man, soon,” I said.

The passersby moved on, over and down the hill, reverted to their prior state.

“I’m never going to tell anyone I was here when we get home,” he said.

“Can’t help some people knowing, Murph.”

The girl came out of the tent. All urgency subtracted from her movement. She peeled the gloves off, now splotched darkly with blood, and tossed them into a barrel. Her arms were pale, but her hands were dark, and I could see that they were small. I looked at Murph and I thought I knew why he had been coming here. It was not because she was beautiful, though she was. It was something else. We watched as she took a chunk of soap out of a dish and washed her hands in a makeshift sink bolted to a post. In the afternoon light, the soft down on her neck was visible and she was washed in the light. Sparse clouds floated by and she sat on the ground and lit a cigarette and she crossed her legs and began to cry quietly.

And I thought it was this and not her beauty that brought Murph there over those long indistinguishable days. That place, those little tents at the top of the hill, the small area where she was; it might have been the last habitat for gentleness and kindness that we’d ever know. So it made sense to watch her softly sobbing in the open space of a dusty piece of ground. And I understood why he came and why I couldn’t go, not just then at least, because one never knows if what one sees will disappear forever. So sure, Murph wanted to see something kind, he wanted to look at a beautiful girl, he wanted to find a place where compassion still happened, but that wasn’t really it. He wanted to choose. He wanted to want. He wanted to replace the dullness growing inside him with anything else. He wanted to decide what he would gather around his body, to refuse that which fell toward him by accident or chance and stayed in orbit like an accretion disk. He wanted to have one memory he’d made of his own volition to balance out the shattered remnants of everything he hadn’t asked for.

The girl rose and tossed her cigarette on the ground, smothered it beneath the toe of her boot, and walked toward the chapel. She walked past the poplar and withered hackberry planted haphazardly about, toward the chapel, which rested like an afterthought in its dusty hollow, set back from the netting that covered the artillery pieces perched on the far side of the outpost’s gentle summit. Light fell between the wood slats, passing from one side to the other through the gaps in the warped boards. Its steeple with its simple unadorned cross was visible even to the residents on the edge of the city. The girl in the distance was framed by the plain white structure, chipped and bruised. There were no doors and the windows lacked both frame and glass. She tracked the fine dust as she walked and it rose up behind her in small plumes slightly as she went.

I put my hand on Murph’s shoulder. “We’re going to be cool,” I said. “We’ve got each other. We know what’s up.”

“I don’t want to be tight with anyone because of this. Being here can’t be the reason we’re tight. I won’t let it be.”

“Naw, man,” I said. “You and me, we’re tight just ’cause. We’d be tight anywhere. It isn’t about this.” I can’t remember if I meant it. I felt so different then, with everything immediate and new, with no reflection, and I saw only with the short sight of looking for whatever might kill me in the next few moments. I don’t even know if we were actually close. It was only after that I tried to understand, to discover what it was I was guilty of.

I clasped his hand in mine and pulled him up and we stood and walked back toward the platoon area. I knew what he was trying to say and it frightened me. He wouldn’t be bound by this place to anything or anyone, even me. And I was afraid because I wondered what would be required for him to keep that promise to himself.

We did not take more than a few steps before we heard the whine of incoming mortars. A bright sound like the sky had become a boiling kettle. We looked at each other, Murph and I, dumbly staring into our own infinity made up of fractions upon fractions of seconds. For one brief incalculable moment we were not brave or afraid. Neither spoke nor moved. Welled eye abuts welled eye, a look between gun-broke horses. I couldn’t tell where the first one hit, but it sounded close. It enveloped me, a small metal fist to the chest of the earth. The whole ground shook under my boots, and all I saw was a bright flash and then gray smoke flung like dirty paint on a washed-out canvas, all shapes beaded and dissipated by the angry crunch of the impact.

I hit the ground without thinking and covered my head with my hands, opened my mouth and crossed my ankles over each other. Count the heartbeats. Still there. Small pieces of metal flew over my head with each deep concussive impact, moving with a speed and sound that seemed beyond all governance. Take a breath. Then another. Getting harder now. Focus.

I gave up, surrendered, whatever, I was gone. My muscles became marionetted by nerve ending and memory. “Murph!” I heard the sound of my own voice, disembodied, arching into and out of the dust and smoke. “Murph!” No answer. The voice of my drill sergeant entered my mind, dominated each and every synapse as it fired inside my as yet unpunctured brain. Get small, Private. If your dumb ass wants to live, you get so fucking small you can take cover under your K-pot.

I didn’t count the mortars. All measures of time and increment were discarded like childish superstitions. Crump. Crump. Crump. The earth shook and the vibrations ran up the heels of my palms where my hands, now bloodied, desperately tried to push the dry earth into a ridge in front of my face. They flowed up to my elbows and shook the buttons of my blouse, which dug like rivets into the ground. Get small, Private. You fucking get small and stay small.

There was a lull, brief and intangible like a small circle of sunlight falling absently through clouds. A deep constriction occurred in my chest, under my breastbone, as if my ribs had turned into fingers clutched in an arthritic fist. I was still prostrate on the ground. My face and body had plowed a small plot in which I lay. Dirt in my mouth ground against my teeth, coating my tongue with a thin particulate film. It was in my nose too. Each breath was thick and structural and I felt for a moment like I was falling, like falling into wakefulness after dreaming your fingers have slipped from their last nocturnal handhold.

I listened for an all clear but heard nothing. This is my life again, I thought. Fuck it, I’m not going to die in a grave dug by my own bleeding hands. I got up and as I rose to my knees the mortars began to fall again, though not so close as before. An adjustment of fire. No one was around to call out direction or distance, so I ran. I was afraid. My eyes welled with tears, and I wet my pants and though there was no need I shouted “I’m up” and took off on limbs of unset jelly. “I’m moving,” I screamed, sobbing with each step, and, “I’m down,” I said, out of breath and fallen into the womb of a low ditch running with dirty foul water that would not wash out for weeks. Only my nose and eyes were above the level of the water. A flock of babblers scattered in the distance, and the crumpling noise dissipated, fading with the mortars as they were walked away from my position. I heard the fragments tearing through the air again, hard and fast but not as close. I stayed in the shit water until I was sure that none had fallen for a little while. Gray smoke settled down into my fetid ditch. Fuck. I breathed. I made it.

I looked around and tried to figure out exactly where I’d ended up. The sewage ditch ran through the center of the base, below the hill where the chapel and the medics’ station sat, just below another small rise where the colonel allowed the hajjis to set up little shops in a strip of abandoned buildings from before the war. The little shops that everyone on the FOB called the hajji mall must have been the mortars’ intended target. It seemed they’d caught the brunt of the barrage. On the knoll above me, the hajjis arranged themselves supplicant, clutching at their wooden prayer beads. A chorus of grim wails began. Their little storefront hovels were on the brink of destruction, fires ablaze here and there, and parts of cheap knockoff watches had been scattered in the open spaces around the bazaar. Their bent and broken faces counted time without standard. Coils and springs, the bright silver and gold of counterfeit metal, were all sown errantly about, which made the freshly pocked earth glitter in the sun just so.

Like the dust, the smoke from the last of these mortars dissipated and floated away toward sparse clouds roughly brushstroked against the pale blue sky. A siren blared, warning of the already fallen mortars. I crawled out of the ditch and began to move toward the little burned bazaar, my boots sloshing with stale wetness.

In an open courtyard medics treated the wounded. A shopkeeper was lying in the dust, blood pulsing from his neck, black and jugular. His black eyes widened and then shut tightly. His feet kicked out wildly. Worn brown sandals conducted themselves through the dust, back and forth, leaving abstract markings on the ground like the hands of an obscene clock. The medics held his neck and applied pressure to the wound, unable to stop the bleeding until his body was spent of its supply and he wrenched one last time, the surface of his body now settling in the dust. He was surrounded by his fellow itinerant merchants, who shooed away the medics and lifted him onto their shoulders, his blood soaking their white shifts and the tails of their headdresses. One fetched a piece of plywood and laid it out on an inert fountain centered in the courtyard of their bazaar. They rested his body on the fountain and began an otherworldly recitation. The artillery pieces near the chapel began to buck and jump. Each pull of the lanyard sent shells screaming out toward the city. The ground was stained rust brown where the man died. The last tremors of his legs and arms left a strange impression in the earth. I got down on one knee for a closer look, but turned away, fighting convulsions of dry heaves and bile. The image burned into my mind like a landscape altered by erosive weather. Even as I walked away, I saw it, a perfect bloody angel made of dust.