Yellow Birds (13 page)

I made my way uneasily toward the chapel. Its steeple had collapsed. The small wooden cross was broken and speared the earth near a clump of tamarisk trees. The girl was there, the medic, about where I expected her to be, lying on the ground next to the chapel, her hair blowing in small wisps behind her, in and out of the dust in a manner both fantastic and actual. Her eyes were half-lidded. The uniformed backs of two boys blanketed her in the performance of some ancient pantomime, a silent and shuffling attempt at recuperation.

One of them looked up at me when I reached them. “I think she’s dead,” he said. The other one turned around. It was Murph, sitting on his knees with his hands resting on his thighs, gape-jawed at the sight of her. “I just got here yesterday,” the other one said. Murph was silent. He didn’t move. “I didn’t know what to do,” the boy said, weeping now, and then shouting, “Where were the fucking medics?!” I reached over to him and grabbed him by the shoulders, standing him up.

“Come on, buddy,” I said. “We’ve got to get her moved.”

Two of the chapel’s warped and battered planks had fallen on her and we reached over to pick them up. The force of the blast had torn her shirt open and a deep wound in her side had already ceased bleeding. Her skin was a pale gray. Dead gray. We repositioned her shirt to cover her and laid out three planks parallel and placed her on them.

I tied off the planks with some rope and lifted her up. “Murph,” I said. “Come on, give us a hand.” The new private grabbed the back end near her feet while Murph curled up helplessly in the still-smoldering ruins of the chapel, muttering to himself, over and over again, “What just happened.” As we walked her up the hill, his litany faded from our ears. The new boy and I walked the dead girl’s body up to the medics’ station.

We walked her past a copse of alder and willow that bowed in the heat of the small fires burning nearby, their old branches lamenting her, laid out as she was on that makeshift litter. Our hands began to cramp with each passing step, each taken with whatever reverence we could muster, clutching at the edges of the boards. Thin splinters roughed the flats of our palms as we walked. Listing in concert with our deliberate footsteps, the gentle curves of her body swayed beneath her torn clothes. The boards creaked. A small number of boys out on a head count stopped and turned toward us. A pale review as her body ascended the gently sloping hill, fringed by the bleached and spotted patterns of their uniforms. We conducted her pall in earnest up the remainder of the hill. At the top, we lowered her to the ground and set her under a tree on the tied-together boards, her body now translucent and blue-tinted. One of the soldiers alerted the medics and we watched them as they came to her. Her friends grabbed her and enveloped her in hugs and kisses. She rolled absently in their loving arms and they cried out beneath the setting sun. I held my hands to the back of my skull. As I walked away, the muezzin call began. The sun set like a clot of blood on the horizon. A small fire had spread from the crumbling chapel, igniting the copse of tamarisk trees. And all the little embers burned like lamps to light my way.

By the time
autumn came again I was firmly settled in the old gasworks building at the edge of the river. My life was small. I lived in an apartment on an upper floor and had little in the way of companionship. It was perfect for a while. A stray tortoiseshell cat would occasionally settle in an unkempt flowerbox hanging from my window. It had a habit of meandering over ledges and sills, jumping between air-conditioning units and the building’s few balconies. I reached out once or twice and tried to pet it. “Here, buddy,” I said, “here, kitty-kit,” but it only mewed at me and continued rubbing its face on the stub of a naked branch. I’d strung a few medals above a small gas heating unit. The picture of Murph I’d taken from his helmet was tacked into a nook of broken plaster next to the window. I rarely went out.

Sometimes I’d cross the footbridge to the city side of the river to get a case of beer or a box of frozen potpies. On the way back I always noticed the diminished intervals between my footfalls, looking mostly down at the tops of my boots, how my gait had withered to a shuffle since I’d come home. When it got cold enough I’d rest a few beers on the windowsill overnight. I’d cook a potpie on a hot plate, as I was unequipped to follow the proper heating instructions. As night settled in, and frost spread on the edges of the windows, I’d flip through news stories in magazines picked out of garbage cans, searching for the names of places I had been. I’d eat a half-cooked meal and drink enough of the window-chilled beers to fall asleep. I often wondered what someone would see if they looked up from the river as it cut its habitual curve through the little valley, my arm above it, skinny and white, reaching through a yellowed curtain, a disembodied hand pulling in, from time to time, one last, yes just one last, beer before sleep.

In the mornings I’d walk up to the roof of the building and work the lever of a cheap rifle I’d picked up from Kmart, shooting at the refuse accumulating at the base of the building. Small trash fires sometimes began when a spark from the lead settled into ember on the cardboard and discarded fabrics below me. I traced the paths of birds in flight, following closely behind the creatures, embracing them in the two stakes of my sight post. But some reflexive tremor always overtook me and I’d work the action, over and over, expending the unfired cartridges to scatter on the tarred rooftop around my lawn chair.

That was more or less my life. I was like the curator of a small unvisited museum. I didn’t require much of myself. I might return a small trinket from the war back to a shoebox, take another out. Here a shell casing, there a patch from the right shoulder of a uniform: articles that marked a life I was not convinced had needed to be lived.

I knew the C.I.D. investigators would find me eventually, and I was pretty sure I knew what they wanted. Someone had to be punished for what happened to Murph. It probably wouldn’t matter what our level of culpability was. I was guilty of something, that much was certain, that much I could feel on a cellular level. What crimes we had committed, though, which articles we’d be charged under, didn’t seem to matter. They’d find ones broad enough to fit over what it was we’d done, and justice would be served, and Murph’s mother would be satisfied, would stop asking whether the army covered up the nature of her son’s death.

And me? That letter? Five years was my guess. I only vaguely remembered the long cursory sessions of legal instruction in the auditorium during basic. The drill sergeants had seemed to really turn the screws on us the night before. Front-back-goes for hours in the barracks hallway, the morning run that turned our legs to quivering spindles, and when the JAG officer got up on stage to tell us everything that was expected of us according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, all I can remember is being on the edge of sleep, feeling like I was floating in the cushioned theater chair and loving it. I’m not blameless. Some will say I should have known: goddammit, you were a soldier and you couldn’t even stay awake? Well, see, I was no hero, no poster boy, I was lucky to get out upright and breathing. I’d been willing to trade anything for that. That’s what my cowardice was: I accepted the fact that a debt would come due, but not now, please not now, anything for a little more time.

It happened so easily when the day came. Something turned. The note was called in. I remember the white sky and fog above the James, snow, unbelievably early for Virginia, beginning to fall over the hotels and abandoned tobacco warehouses, each flake a repetition of the one before as they descended through the veil of just how little I remembered, and my memory narrowing, the snow falling unmercifully as it spread over the river, the sky now white forever and unbroken and low.

Every moment has turned over in my mind since I came back from Al Tafar. Each one unlinked. But then it was just another day, the snow nothing more than a curious way to distinguish that day from the day before. I’d put my hands through the open window when it started and watched, untroubled, as each flake met my skin and melted, saw the river stones take on a thin sheet of blankness underneath the naked sycamore and dogwood trees that lined the avenue below. A car pulled up, a Mercury, I think, gray in color. A man stepped out. The small silver bars on his shoulders reflecting off an unknown light as he closed the door.

As I think about it now, all the times I think of the unceasing footfalls, the endless loop in which I watch him walking up the street, it seems as though I should have asked the snow to stop, for one reprieve, to not have to face another
next.
But even in my mind the fire of time still burns, just the same as it did then.

The knock came quickly after that. I opened my door, ashamed at the state of myself, unshaven, my life more or less ignored. There were times I’d been pleased with my ability to give up, to forget, to wait…for what? I don’t know. The captain entered the room and stood looming over the emptiness in which I lived. I wore only a pair of PT shorts and an unwashed sleeveless undershirt, stained a little. It was cold. The snow filled the window with whiteness as though a shroud had been hung over it. A thin blanket hung from my shoulders and I stank. It had been weeks since I’d drawn a sober breath.

“John?” he asked softly.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m Captain Anderson, from C.I.D.” He laid his hat down on the small table that more or less furnished the room. “Do you know why I’m here?”

“My mother said—”

“She said you left.”

“I did.”

He smiled. “You can’t run from us, John. Anyway, we just want to talk.”

Something about the way he spoke seemed strange. His voice was gentle, but it had a power and certainty behind it. I remembered that as he spoke, Mother Army also spoke. Tall and athletic-looking, he also carried the paunch of a tenured gym teacher who lives alone and washes down the sports news shows with a six-pack by himself. His eyes were a little worn down. He was old for captain’s bars.

“You know LaDonna Murphy.”

I didn’t say anything.

He pulled a clear bag with an envelope inside it out of his inside jacket pocket. I could see that it had been torn open, roughly, hurriedly. “That wasn’t a question,” he said. He walked over to the wall where my few medals hung and looked at each one carefully, pausing for a few moments at the spot where I’d tacked up the photo of Murph.

“You wrote this letter.”

I didn’t know what to say. If writing it was wrong, then I was wrong. If writing it was not wrong, enough of what I’d done had been wrong and I would accept whatever punishment it carried. I was ready. Everything I could recall about the war flashed kaleidoscopically, and I closed my eyes and I felt the weight of time wash over my body. I could not pattern it. None of it made sense. Nothing followed from anything else and I was required to answer for a story that did not exist.

The call of a whip-poor-will outside the window opened my eyes. The captain had not moved. And I could not comprehend what separated one moment from the next, how each breath I took would somehow be made into a memory, assigned its own significance, and set aside as the vast material I was left to make an answer from.

He waited, then said, “What, you’ve given up?”

“No.”

“Not what it looks like.”

“It’s different out there now.”

“No it’s not. You’re different.”

“No one cares.”

“So what?”

“I don’t know how to live out there anymore.”

“Hmmm…I was well acquainted with that idea back when it was just called cowardice. Have you seen the doctors?”

“Yeah, I saw them.”

I remembered the long, weatherless February in Kuwait waiting for an unknown period of sequestration to be over, to go home, home. Day after day of staring into the desert stretched out on all sides like an ocean of twice-burned ash. We would be evaluated. Our ability to reenter the world would be assessed. The company was herded into a huge canvas tent. Clipboards and pencils and sheets of paper handed down the rows of boys on benches, dress right, dress. Outside the desert still expanded, slowly chewing foliage up the way a wave breaks on a shore, toward disinterested and inescapable infinity, but we were glad to be so far south of Al Tafar: hors de combat. The benches on which we sat were planted firmly in the sand and off toward the distant end of the tent an officer began to speak.

“Boys, you have fought properly and were well led, so you are alive. Now you are being sent home.”

I had in me a profound disquiet.

“I will ask you to fill out the form affixed to the clipboard in front of you. This form will measure your level of stress.” He paused and pulled on the bottom of his starched blouse, straightening out the untidy folds. “Any man who feels that he is suffering from any kind of, oh, disorder, can be assured that he will receive the best mental hygiene care that the government can afford. More conveniently…”

I began looking at the questions as he spoke, forgetting my place and immersing myself in the ramifications of the questions and the possible mental deterioration that might be in store for me. I ignored the dust, the haughty speech of the officer and the odd warmth of the February air.

Question one: Were you involved in combat actions?

I checked yes.

Question two: After a murder-death-kill, rate your emotional state and indicate it by checking one of the following boxes:

A. Delighted

B. Malaise

The officer was still speaking. “We have this questionnaire down to an exact science. If it is determined that you are overly stressed, you will be given the opportunity to recuperate in the presence of the best doctors available. You won’t even have to leave. You will go home when you are cured and have recovered your requisite hard-on for your country.” He laughed a little after the last part, as if to let us know he was still our brother, that Mother Army still loved us just as much as she always had, and wasn’t it funny that we had to jump through these hoops in the first place.

I thought of something Sergeant Sterling had said after Murph died. Fuck ’em. Yes. Fuck ’em, my new design for living. I checked A. I went home.

“Yeah, I wrote it,” I said, finally answering the captain’s question.

“Sir,” he said, his tone changing ever so slightly.

“Y’all don’t have me anymore.”

“We can have you anytime we want, Private.” He took the letter out of the envelope. The slight sound of the paper unfolding filled the room as he began to read: “Mom, everything is going well here, Sgt. Sterling is taking care of us…”

“Stop it.”

“What?”

“Stop. I said I wrote it.”

“You know it was wrong?”

“I guess.”

He shook the letter. “We know what happened now. We know what you did.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Not what we heard. Why don’t you give us your side of it?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

The captain laughed and began to pace around the room.

I felt like scum then, worse, and still do, so sometimes, on days when I remember well, when there is a deer gone down to drink in the creek behind my cabin, and I get my rifle out and for the hundredth time don’t shoot the thing and just sit there starting to tremble and then the sun is out, I’ll realize I can’t smell any of it, not the burned powder, not the metal on fire, not the rank exhaust or the lamb or the stink of shit in the Tigris, where we waded up to our thighs that day. I think maybe it was my fault, fuck, I did it, no it didn’t happen, well, not like that, but it’s hard to say sometimes: half of memory is imagination anyway.

The captain wouldn’t tell me everything, only that there had been an incident. Civilians had been killed, and so on. Sterling had gone on leave just before it had gotten the attention of some higher-ups who felt they needed to come down hard on someone to prove that all these boys with guns out roaming the plains of almost every country in the world would be accountable. And Sterling never made it back to be accountable.

So it was a rumor that had brought the captain to see me, the underlying truth of the story long since skewed by the variety of a few boys’ memories, perhaps one or two of them answering with what they wanted the truth to be, others likely looking to satisfy the imagined needs of a mother, abused and pitied as a result of that day in Al Tafar, which sometimes seems so long ago.

Thinking about him now, I’ve come to realize that Sergeant Sterling was not one those people for whom the existence of others was an incomprehensible abstraction. He was not a sociopath, not a man who cared only for himself, seeing the lives of others as shadows on a thinly lit window. My guess was that he’d been asked a question and he had answered it as broadly as he could, not thinking of all the room he’d left for the gaps to be filled in by the men who had asked it.

But I still believe in Sterling now because my heart beats. A lie by anyone on his behalf is an assertion of a desire to live. What do I care about the truth now? And Sterling? The truth is he cared nothing for himself. I’m not even sure he would have realized he was permitted to have his own desires and preferences. That it would have been OK for him to have a favorite place, to walk with satisfaction down the long, straight boulevards of whatever post he may have gone to next, to admire the uniformity of the grass, green and neatly shorn beneath a blue, limitless sky, to bury himself in a sandy shoal in the shallow of some clear cold stream and let the water wash over the pitted skin of his scarred body. I don’t know what his favorite place would have been like, because I don’t believe he would have let himself have one. He would have waited for one to be assigned to him. That’s the way he was. His life had been entirely contingent, like a body in orbit, only seen on account of the way it wobbles around its star. Everything he’d done had been a response to a preexisting expectation. He’d been able to do only one thing for himself, truly for himself, and it had been the last act of his short, disordered life.