Yellow Birds (9 page)

It wasn’t a particularly long ride home in her old Chrysler over the interstate. Half an hour or so. In that time I found myself making strange adjustments to the landscape. We passed over the World War II Veterans Memorial Bridge, which spanned the James, and I stared out at the broad valley below. The sun coming up and a light the color of unripe oranges fell and broke up the mist that hung in the bottomland.

I pictured myself there. Not as I could be in a few months swimming along the banks beneath the low-slung trunks and branches of walnut and black alder trees, but as I had been. It seemed as if I watched myself patrol through the fields along the river in the yellow light, like I had transposed the happenings of that world onto the contours of this one. I looked for where I might find cover in the field. A slight depression between a narrow dirt track and the water’s edge became a rut where a truck must have spun its wheels for a good long while after a rain and I saw that it would grant good cover and concealment from two directions until a base of fire could be laid down which would allow us to fall back.

“You all right, hon?” my mother said. No one was in the field. Certainly I was not. Her voice gave me a start, and I fell back into myself as we reached the other side of the bridge.

“Yeah, Ma, I’m fine.”

I let the green blur of trees along highways and side roads lull me into some approximation of comfort until we turned down our gravel driveway. The yard had not been mowed in a long time.

“What’s the first thing you want to do, sweetie?” she asked excitedly.

“I’d like to shower and then…I don’t know, sleep, I guess.”

It was almost noon and it was spring and the pond behind the house was quiet. She helped me bring my duffel inside the house, and I went into my room. “I’m putting breakfast on, John, your favorite.” Bright sunlight fell between the wood-slatted blinds. I shut them and pulled the curtains over. I shut the light off and pulled the chain dangling from the ceiling fan. The hum of the blades muffled the cars’ engines on the street and the soft rattle of pans in the kitchen. I smelled the grease and the unmowed grass. I smelled the clean house and the wood-frame bed. It was all filler. The noise, the sound, they existed just to take up space. My muscles flexed into the emptiness I still called home.

The room was dark and cool. I was tired. I folded my cover and put it on the bedside table. The blouse came off next. Then the belt, hung over the bedpost. I sat on the bed and reached down, unlacing the right boot first, then removing the right sock. In the muddy dimness, the dog tag strung into the laces of my left boot shone. I fingered it and sat upright.

I was disappearing. It was as if I stripped myself away in that darkened bedroom on a spring afternoon, and when I was finished there would be a pile of clothes neatly folded and I would be another number for the cable news shows. I could almost hear it. “Another casualty today,” they’d say, “vanished into thin air after arriving home.” Fine. I leaned down and finished unlacing the boot and strung the dog tag back around my neck and let it lie against the other. Left boot and left sock off. Pants off. Underwear off. I was gone. I opened the closet door and stood in front of the dressing mirror. My hands and face were tanned to rust. The rest of my body, pale and thinned, hung in the reflection as if of its own accord. I sighed and crawled beneath the cool sheets.

My mind and body waxed and waned under the fan. The sound of motors trilled as they moved toward our house, then lulled off into the distance as they rolled past. A train in the cut beyond the wood line made its shift as well, high-pitched and seeming to hurtle toward my single bed, as if falling toward me, as if I’d become some mass attracting the noise of metal and the metal itself. My pulse fluttered up into my eyes. I exhaled hard whenever the noise rolled past, off toward some other target. I don’t remember what I dreamed, but Murph was there, Murph and me and the same ghosts every night. I don’t remember what I dreamed, but finally I slept.

When we neared
the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn’t been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the ruddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid. I smelled copper and cheap wine. The sun was up, but a half-moon hung low on the opposite horizon, cutting through the morning sky like a figure from a child’s pull-tab book.

We were lined along the ditch up to our ankles in a soupy muck. It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability. Everything was in its proper place, waiting for a pause in time, for the source of all momentum to be stilled, so that what remained would be nothing more than detritus to be tallied up. The world was paper-thin as far as I could tell. And the world was the orchard, and the orchard was what came next. But none of that was true. I was only afraid of dying.

The orchard was quiet. The lieutenant waved his arm from side to side until he had the attention of the sergeants and corporals. When he saw that he did, he made one long sweeping motion in the direction of the orchard and scrambled up out of the ditch. We followed. The only sound was the padding of forty or so boots in the dust, neither running nor walking, and our breathing, which grew louder when we ducked to meet the first low branches and the softness of the orchard floor.

I kept going. I kept going because Murph kept going and Sterling and the LT kept going and the other squads would keep going and I was terrified that I would be the one who did not. So I ducked down under the low-hanging branches and followed the platoon inside.

When the mortars fell, the leaves and fruit and birds were frayed like ends of rope. They lay on the ground in scattered piles, torn feathers and leaves and the rinds of broken fruit intermingling. The sunlight fell absently through the spaces in the treetops, here and there glistening as if on water from smudges of bird blood and citrus.

The squads moved out in an arc, hunched over like old men. We stepped carefully, looking for trip wires or any sign that the enemy was there. No one saw where the fire came from. For a moment it seemed to come from far away through the trees, and I caught myself staring in amazement at the shadows cast by the sunlight falling through the branches. When the first round snapped by my head, I was still thinking that the only shadows I had seen in the war had been made of angles: hard blurs of light falling on masses of buildings, antennas, and the shapes of weapons in tangles of alleys. The bullet came so quickly that the time it took to push that thought out of my head was imperceptible, so that before I even noticed, the other boys were firing back. I began to fire, too, and the noise of the rounds exploding in the chamber pushed in my eardrums and they began to ring and the deafness expanded as if someone had struck a tuning fork at perfect pitch, so that it resonated and wrapped everyone in the orchard in his very own vow of silence.

We didn’t see where the fire came from when it came. We saw only the leaves as they flicked about and the small chunks of wood and pieces of earth that danced around us. When the ringing of the first shots subsided, we heard bullets, sounds like small rips in the air, reports of rifles from somewhere we couldn’t see. I was struck by a kind of lethargy, in awe of the decisiveness of every single attenuated moment, observed in minute detail each slender moving branch and the narrow bands of sunlight coming through the leaves. Someone pulled me down to the orchard floor, and coming out of it I dragged myself on my elbows behind a withered clump of trees.

Soon there were voices calling out, “Three o’clock, fucking three o’clock!” and though I had not seen anyone to shoot at, I squeezed the trigger, dazzled by the flashes from my muzzle. What looked like an obscene photography began, followed by the shimmer of spent casings as they bounced against the bark.

Again, quiet. Scattered fire teams lay prone all over the beaten earth of the orchard floor. Wide, unblinking eyes exchanged up and down the line became a kind of language. We spoke in whispers, great huffs of breath gone monosyllabic and strangled of volume. We got up, resumed our prior pace.

As we walked on line through the ragged grove, we began to hear a sound from our front. At first it sounded like humbled weeping; closer, a bleating lamb. We moved faster as we were called forward and saw the enemy dead strewn about a shallow ditch: two boys, sixteen or so, their battered rifles lying akimbo at the bottom, had been shot in the face and torso. Their skin had lost most of its natural brown, and I wondered if that was because of the light flickering through the low unkempt canopy or because their blood had congealed in pools at the bottom of the ditch.

The medics had a private from third platoon on the ground, his blouse removed, his teeth chattering, mewling like a lamb. He was gut-shot and dying. We tried to help as much we could, but the medics shoved us back, so we watched and softly said, “Come on, Doc,” as they tried to put his insides back in his body. He was a pale shape. The medics were covered in his blood and he shook in his delirium. We stepped away and formed a circle under the light falling through the leaves. His lips turned dark purple in the light and quivered. Snot ran onto his upper lip and the shaking of his body threw small flecks of spittle over his chin. I realized he had been still for a while and he was dead. No one spoke.

“I thought he was going to say something,” I finally said.

The rest of the company fanned out. A couple of guys from the other squads in second platoon moved out of the circle. Murph sat with his feet swinging in one of the shallow ditches, cleaning his rifle. A few acknowledged that they’d been waiting for him to say something, too. When he only died, their faces became downcast and surprised. They moved aimlessly away.

Sterling stubbed out a cigarette near the boy’s body with his toe and a thin rail of smoke rose toward the tattered leaves and dissipated. “They usually don’t,” he said. “I only heard it once.”

An embedded photographer snapped pictures of it all: a private snaking his barrel in a ditch, the dead boy, as yet uncovered, gazing thinly toward the blue sky that had cleared itself of clouds high above the orchard. I thought that he had no regard for the significance of what he saw. But now I think maybe he did. Maybe his regard was absolute.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Who?” Sterling said.

“The KIA. What did he say?”

“Nothing really. I was holding his hand. Freaked the fuck out, you know? Fire was still coming in. I was the only one there. Doesn’t matter.” He paused. “I didn’t even know the guy.” Sterling grabbed at the collar of his vest and closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. He nodded to the photographer and they began to pick their way through the debris; the branches and torn rinds, the dead and the living.

“What did he say?” I asked again.

He turned back. “Bart, you’re just gonna make it into something bigger than it was. You ought to go check your boy and quit worrying about that shit.”

I turned and saw Murph kneeling next to the body. His hands were on his thighs. I could have gone to Murph, but I did not. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be responsible for him. I had enough to worry about. I was disintegrating, too. How was I supposed to keep us both intact?

It is possible that I broke my promise in that very moment, that if I’d gone to comfort him a second earlier, he might not have broken himself. I don’t know. He didn’t look distraught, he looked curious. He touched the body, straightened the collar, put the boy’s head in his lap.

I had to know. “C’mon, Sarge. Just tell me.” He looked at me. I could see that he was as tired as I was. That surprised me.

“Well, he was crying,” said Sterling. “And he was all like, ‘I’m fucking dying, right?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, probably.’ And he kept crying harder and then he stopped and I was just waiting for him to keep talking, or whatever. You know, like in the movies or some shit.”

“Well?”

“He goes, ‘Hey, man, check if I shat my pants.’ Then he was dead.” Sterling clapped his hands together as if to signal that he was done with it, had struck it from his mind.

I turned away, overwhelmed and dizzy, and vomited until I had nothing left in me. But still the bile came out in sickly yellow ribbons. I rose from my stomach to my knees and I wiped it from my mouth. “What the fuck, man? What the fuck?” is all I could think to say as I spit into the ditch, then turned and walked away to the sound of a shutter clicking.

A few hours later we linked up with the rest of the company. The reserve platoon secured a perimeter. We were supposed to sleep. The day was not over for us. Murph and I found a hole and tried to nod off but couldn’t.

“You know what, Bart?” Murph said.

“What?”

“I cut in front of that kid in line at the DFAC.”

I looked around. “What kid?”

“The dead kid.”

“Oh,” I said. “It’s cool, man. Don’t sweat it.”

“I feel like a dick.”

“It’s all right.”

“I feel fucking crazy right now.” He had his head in his hands. He kept rubbing his eyes with the base of his palms. “I was really happy it wasn’t me. That’s crazy, right?”

“Naw. You know what’s crazy? Not thinking that shit.”

I had thought the same thing, how glad I was not to be shot, how much it would have hurt to be there dying, watching all of us watch him die. And I too, though sad now, had said to myself, Thank God he died and I did not. Thank you, God.

I tried to cheer him up. “Got to be at least nine eighty, right?”

“Yeah. Something like that,” he said.

It didn’t work. It was a shitty little war.

We moved on. A lark or finch called as I planted my tired footsteps into the dust. I looked over my shoulder and reinforced that I had been and was still going. My footsteps marked my passage. I made more, more firmly planted in accordance with my training. I held my rifle in accordance with my training. Through this I gained strength and purpose. I have leafed through heavy manuals and have found only these things to be certain in accordance with my training.

The empty city smoldered. We wore it to the bone with our modern instruments. Walls crumbled. Blocks composed of halves of shelled buildings allowed warm breezes to sweep up trash and dust and send them swirling in little cyclones as we walked. We took breaks for water, smoked where we pleased, reclined in chairs behind unoccupied desks. Empty shops with wood-fronted booths still stocked with wares from times at once ancient and obscure filled the bazaars. We placed our feet on the desks, as the soles of our boots could not offend the dead.

We walked in alleys. Saw the remnants of the enemy where they lay in ambush, pushed them off their weapons with our boots. Rigid and pestilent, the bodies lay bloating in the sun. Some lay at odd angles with backs curved slightly off the ground and others were wrenched at absurd degrees, their decay an echo of some morbid geometry.

We walked through the city, down pockmarked valleys of concrete and brick that bore the weight of old cars burning, seeming to follow the destruction as it spread rather than spreading it ourselves. No one around but an old woman. I caught glimpses of her, briefly, a shuffling gait as she floated out of sight. As we turned corners she was turning opposite and I had no solid picture but her form receding, shawled in an old quilt that gave her shapeless comfort.

We stopped at a corner. A parade of rats crossed the street, weaving through the detritus. By force of numbers they shooed a mangy dog away from the corpse that it fed upon. I watched the dog as it loped off down an alley with a mangled arm clenched tightly in its jaws. Soon the dog was out of sight and the lieutenant raised his hand to signal to the platoon to stop near a bridge that crossed over the Tigris and the sparsely wooded banks below. A spare quiet and the river flowing softly nearby. A body sprawled in the center of the bridge. His head was cut off and it lay on his chest like some perverted Russian doll.

“Oh fuck,” the lieutenant whispered.

Someone asked him what was going on. I could see on his face, as he peered through his binoculars, the unmistakable look of recognition.

“Body bomb,” he said. All stopped. It was impossible to know who the man was or what brought him to that place, and it was hard to fathom because a moment is never long enough to account for tragedy when you are in it. Grief is a practical mechanism, and we only grieved those we knew. All others who died in Al Tafar were part of the landscape, as if something had sown seeds in that city that made bodies rise from the earth, in the dirt or up through the pavement like flowers after a frost, dried and withering under a cold, bright sun.

An interminable silence passed. As a group we were on a knee, looking out at the body, wondering what should be done. The lieutenant stood and turned to us, but before he could utter a word we were overtaken by blindness, as if the sun had fallen out of the sky. We were covered in dust and deafened before any sound could reach us. I lay groggy on the ground and my ears rang and buzzed loudly and as I looked up I saw the rest of the platoon moving on the ground, trying to get their bearings. Sterling was covered in black dust. His mouth moved and he gestured to his rifle, pointed out what he saw and began to fire at it. In alleys beneath us, closer to the riverbank, and in windows above us, we saw the tips of rifles and hands. The buzz in my head was oppressive, and I couldn’t hear the bullets as they passed, but I felt a few as they cut the air. The fight was hazy and without sound, as if it was happening underwater.

I moved to the edge of the bridge and began firing at anything moving. I saw one man fall in a heap near the bank of the river among the bulrushes and green fields on its edges. In that moment, I disowned the waters of my youth. My memories of them became a useless luxury, their names as foreign as any that could be found in Nineveh: the Tigris or the Chesapeake, the James or the Shatt al Arab farther to the south, all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own. I was an intruder, at best a visitor, and would be even in my home, in my misremembered history, until the glow of phosphorescence in the Chesapeake I had longed to swim inside again someday became a taunt against my insignificance, a cruel trick of light that had always made me think of stars. No more. I gave up longing, because I was sure that anything seen at such a scale would reveal the universe as cast aside and drowned, and if I ever floated there again, out where the level of the water reached my neck, and my feet lost contact with its muddy bottom, I might realize that to understand the world, one’s place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.