Yellow Birds (14 page)

As soon as the captain closed his teeth around the hard “t” ending “accident,” I closed my eyes. When I closed them I saw Sergeant Sterling on the side of a mountain. Saw the rifle barrel in his mouth. Saw the way he went limp, so limp in that impossible moment when the small bullet emerged from his head. Saw his body slide a few feet down the mountain, the worn soles of his boots coming to rest in a clot of pine needles. Then I opened them.

“So that’s it, huh?” I asked.

He came over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. I could see he was fingering a pair of handcuffs underneath his overcoat. “You’re gonna be OK, John,” he said. “Trust me.”

“There are lies all through this.”

“It’s just the way it’s gotta be, kid. Someone has to answer for some of it.”

“Shit rolls downhill, huh, Captain?”

“Shit’s rolling everywhere nowadays. It’s a shitty goddamn war. You ready?”

I put my hands out, wrists up, and he clicked the cuffs in place in front of me. “You’ll be all right,” he said again.

“I just wish more of it was true,” I said.

“Me, too, but it’s lies like this that make the world go ’round.”

“You mind if I take something with me?”

“Go ahead, but they’ll take it from you when we get there.”

“That’s all right,” I said. I walked over and picked up Murph’s casualty feeder card and my own and tucked them into the elastic band of my PT shorts.

He led me down through the cool dampness of the stairwell and out into the street. His car was parked on the road across the footbridge and I asked if we could stop a minute when we got to the middle of the bridge. I threw the two cards into the river awkwardly and watched them until they had floated past the old railroad trestles downstream and disappeared far out of sight. It was still early. The sun had not yet broken up the mist over the river, and the sky was still white as if heavy with snow. I turned toward the line of trees across the river and saw the whole world in fractions of seconds like the imperceptible flicker of light between frames of film, the long unrecorded moments that made up my life, one after another, like a movie I never realized had been playing all along.

Murph, gape-jawed and
crying, was gone. He left after finding the medic’s body sprawled in a spot of sunlight that fell through a hole the mortar made in the broken chapel’s roof. The tall grass was speckled with her blood. He wasn’t at her ceremony, where the brigade sergeant major stood her rifle between her boots and rested her small unblemished helmet at the top. He’d already left through a hole in the wire by then, his clothes and disassembled weapon scattered in the dust.

He was gone but we didn’t know it yet. We lazed around our platoon area half-asleep beneath the light of a moon that cast shadows over the plywood guard tower and triple-strand concertina. Nothing told us this night would be different from any other until a few hours later when Sergeant Sterling calmly walked into the middle of our imperfect circle and said, “Someone had a big old bowl of dumbass today. Get your shit together.” He’d looked annoyed by our random arrangement. Some of us were lying down, some were upright; some grouped together, some sat a little off, alone. It was hard to tell what bothered him more: his boys sprawled out like we’d been spilled carelessly from a child’s toy box, a shitty head count, or the fact that one of us was missing. The incoming alarm sounded over the FOB, warning us of an event that had already happened, as usual. “Let’s go get him,” he said.

We assembled quickly, gathered our rifles and prepared to advance into the city of Al Tafar. At every gate soldiers poured out into the alleys and neighborhoods, the last echoes of a hundred chambering rifles ringing through the evening heat. As we made our way out into the first fringes of the city, windows showing lit rooms were blacked with a shuffle of curtains. Our barrels moved from place to place. Dogs wilted into shadow as we passed. The city, past curfew, seemed vast and catacombed, its black alleys a tightly wound maze. It was impossible to know whether we’d be back in an hour or a week; if we’d come back as one body or if we’d leave remnants of ourselves out along the dank canals or in the dry fields. Nothing was certain. Plans seemed ridiculous, as did effort. We were tired, and it seemed that we finally knew how tired we were. We trickled out into the city like water wrung from a mop until we’d gone about a thousand meters toward the bridge over Highway 1. Eventually, a man emerged with hands raised high from a doorway. A spare jangling sounded as twenty rifles paused on him at once.

“Mister, mister, don’t shoot, mister,” he pleaded. His language came glottal and broken. His fear was obvious as he stood there shaking, his body framed by the soft light in the doorway. “I see the boy,” he said.

We bound him and sat him on the ground against the block wall of his home and called for a translator, who arrived masked in a black hood with holes cut out for his eyes and mouth. They began to chatter back and forth. Our eyes circled the street, bounced from window to streetlight, from the bent roadside trees to the darkest patches of the night. The translator had his knees on the man’s thighs and his hands gripped his dirty shift, his body language telling us the nature of the questioning: Where is he? What do you know?

He stopped near his home to buy some apricot halawa for his wife. He and his friend the shopkeeper were talking of the heat and family and the occupation. He had his back to the street when the shopkeeper went stiff and pale, eyes wide and glossy. He put his money on the table and turned around very slowly.

From the train tracks that edged the outpost, a foreign boy walked naked, his shape lacking all color except for where his hands and face were tanned to a deep brown by the sun. He walked as a ghost, his feet and legs bleeding from his walk through the wire and detritus.

The man looked at us as he recounted this. His face pleaded, as though we could unlock some riddle for him. As he spoke, his bound hands waved. He paused for breath, finally, and put his hands on his head and said in his broken English, “Mister, why the boy walk naked?” as if we knew and were keeping it from him out of cruelty.

Someone nudged the translator. He barked at the man to continue. He said that Murph walked toward them directly. Where he crossed the street, he left bloody footprints in the pale dust. When he reached them, he raised his head absently to the sky and paused.

We imagined the soft blue of his eyes rimmed red with tears and the city appearing bent in the warmth of the evening and the dry breeze blowing the smells of sewage and cured lamb and the cool moisture of the river nearby.

Murph shuffled his feet at them, and swayed gently from side to side, his body flecked in sweat. He showed no awareness of their presence. It was as if the basic forms of the city, the angles and composition of its softly colored evening hues, were there for him to take in: a quiet stroll through an enormous museum gallery.

Sergeant Sterling gave voice to our impatience. “Where the fuck is he?”

“Ooohh,” the man responded furtively, “I don’t know.” They had attempted to break Murph’s trance, screamed and pleaded with him to return to the outpost. But as they screamed, the boy’s eyes caught the shape of an old beggar. He turned and looked through them both for what seemed to be an endless moment, then walked off.

The eyes of the two men followed Murph as he walked clothed in nothing but the soft wattage of the streetlights, his form seemingly blinking as he passed from darkness into wan and flickering circles of light, then back into darkness. The huddled beggar scoured the garbage heaps on the fringes of a traffic circle. Murph walked through the roundabout and cars screeched to a halt as he passed balefully in front of their headlights. Before he reached the other side, all of the cars in the circle had stopped. Men opened doors and stood on the edges of their floorboards and watched him in stunned silence, the only noise the shoddy cylinders of their engines turning.

When they last saw him, the bleeding boy approached the beggar, who in his sackcloth still crouched down warily, gathering his pastiche of discarded melon rinds and bread crusts. A knot of flies swarmed about his head, glittering in the yellow light cast off the streetlights of their audience, and the beggar took no pause to shoo them. The man said that he and the shopkeeper were like all the others, stunned and amazed by what they’d seen. Spotlit against the wall of an old crumbling hovel, the old man grabbed Murph by the hand and led him into the dark.

He looked to the interpreter and then to us. “They go down the alley…gone.” We cut him free of his bindings, then turned northwest toward the circle. Our boots impacted softly against the dust, which settled like lime on the legs of our pants. Birds and shadows were caught quickly by our eyes, then returned to a fluttering periphery of hollow noises: a motor in the distance, an old man breathing from a doorway, the tails of his wife’s robes softly dragging across a mud floor. We moved until over the crest of a low rise we saw lights splayed out in all directions.

We neared the circle and spread out on its edge. A daze had set in on the roundabout’s occupants. They walked back and forth between one another’s cars, speaking in low voices, hands pointing wildly as if to map out the strange turns that life, in peculiar moments such as this, can take.

Before entering into the light of the circle, we checked our weapons and determined likely threats. Someone shrugged. We rose out of the fringes of the dark, our forms modular and alien to the men standing there. Most of them ran off. We knew they ran for fear of us, so we didn’t follow them. Others got in their cars and peeled loudly down the street, their antique engines high and whistling, the smell of rubber adding to the odor of decomposition that permeated the air.

We searched the perimeter of the circle. The streetlights gave off a shallow hum. The abandoned cars were warm and made little ticking noises at irregular intervals. We looked for signs of Murph in the shadows, some indication of his passage. In a hidden alley, obscured by a tattered green awning, a private called out.

 On his knees, he sifted through a pile of discarded fruit, rotten and blanketed by a collection of flies. We walked over to him and watched as he kneaded his hands through the soggy mass. Flies battered him lightly. He made a small clearing in the alley and a puddle showed itself blackly against the spoiled citrus. The smell of copper stagnated and mixed with the remnants of the beggar’s scavenged fruit.

“That’s blood,” someone said. A light shined down the alley. We followed the footprints, which gently reflected the light, directing us toward a maze that vanished down staircases and around unmapped corners. We checked our weapons again, quietly reasserting our confidence under the whispering noise of metallic levers shifting position, and walked down the alley.

In the dark, a swallow illustrated the turns with its call’s echo. It guided us to a hub, where the alley branched off in several directions. An old man gauzed in dusty sackcloth and smelling of rotten fruit lay prostrate in the center. Someone tapped at him with his boot. No response. The blood, not yet congealing, adhered to the boy’s boot and dripped in the moonlight. We turned the beggar over. The stench of calloused and picked-at sores, now burst from the beating he had taken, overpowered us. The gray of pallor mortis settled quickly over his wrinkled skin, becoming paler and paler as we stood there.

Sergeant Sterling chewed his bottom lip in the dark over the indrawn form of the dead man, his hands stuck casually in his pockets. His rifle hung loosely from its sling.

“What now?” we asked.

Sterling looked back and shrugged. “Shit, I ain’t got a clue.”

The dead man seemed to move for a moment as we stood there, but it was only an effect of the rigor, the slight contraction of dead muscles over his brittle bones. It seemed impossible to know which path to take. We scoured the stonework for signs of footprints. The fear began to set in that Murph had bled out on his journey and been swept up into the arms of captors, too weak to resist, as helpless as a child asleep in the wilderness. We could not avoid thinking of him sleeping in that alley, being found by men who would take him to a basement, burn him and beat him, cut off his balls and cut his throat, make him beg for death.

We followed one soldier as he walked west toward the sloping banks of the river. It was as good a guess as any other. A mosque’s towering minarets fooled the eyes and appeared to curve and hover over everything.

The sun began to rise. Colors, dull and bathed in the pale light, spread over the city in a palette of gray and gold and washed-out pastels. The morning heat began to swell our brains as we neared the river. We knew other units were searching for Murph. We heard the rattle of gunfire and the occasional reverberant slam of IEDs. But we encountered no resistance. The people we saw parted before us as quickly as they could. We walked down either side of a broad avenue that was lined by the hulks of cars set on fire in some recent past.

On the outskirts of the city we approached an open square. Two black mutts of indeterminate parentage heeled at the feet of their master. His dogs and his white shift stood out in the fallow bleakness. He affixed a three-legged mule to a cart. A wood-hewn contraption stood substitute for the mule’s stumped right foreleg. He glanced at us, twenty heavily armed soldiers, and looked back disinterestedly to his work on the cart. We sent our interpreter to see what information, if any, he could give us. Then we waited, seated lazily about the square aiming our rifles at the few open windows and down the empty side streets.

They exchanged words, and the cartwright turned toward one of the side streets and pointed out a minaret of the mosque we had passed earlier. It jutted precariously over the bank of the river, a protuberance of mottled stone. There was nothing between us and the tower but a road and barren fields.

Sergeant Sterling fiddled with his sight aperture, flipping it back and forth from night sight to day sight while trying to decide what we should do. Finally, he spit onto the dusty road and said, “They ain’t much for crop rotatin’, are they?” He paused again. “What’s he saying?” he asked the interpreter.

“He saw some men he didn’t know going into the minaret last night.”

“How many?”

“Five. Maybe six.”

“They look strange or anything?”

The interpreter looked confused. “Compared to what?”

Sterling squatted down on the backs of his calves. “All right, you guys set up a perimeter here,” he said to the rest of the platoon. “Me and Bartle are gonna check it out. It’s probably nothing.”

The cartwright offered to guide us to the tower. He led, followed by his elaborately improvised mule drawing the whole of his earthly possessions. He goaded the mule along. It consented with patient eyes and marked his path with a tripartite staccato of hoofbeats, the blunted wood of his other leg capped with wrappings of molded leather. In the back of his cart, a worn prayer mat covered a few pots of clay and stone. Items of cast iron wobbled about, shaking among a collection of woven figurines beaded in natural shades of turquoise and crimson and green.

On the side of the road a tree rose out of the otherwise sterile field, bent and swaying softly in the stale breeze. The smell of the river got stronger as we approached the minaret, a sweet coolness we had long forgotten. Past the tree and the smell of the river, the faded pink and blotchy minaret loomed at an odd angle, a dominant line through the corners of my eyes. The hermit tapped at the mule’s hindquarter with a long crook of charred cedar, communicating in this fashion a command for the mule to halt. The mule brought his momentum to a stop and as the cart rolled its last few feet, the mule hopped on its wooden contrivance, its face a picture of stillness and calm.

The hermit took off his sandals and placed them in the back of the cart. He slowly wiggled his toes, as if to stretch them for his journey. Looking from side to side several times, perhaps to assure himself of his place in the world, he walked to the front of the cart, where his hobbled mule breathed quietly. He gave it a pear, slowly stroking its muzzle as the mule chewed and addressed the man with its black eyes. He walked out into the dusty field toward the lone tree and, finding a large and appropriately angled root, reclined in the shade of its overhanging branches.