Yellow Birds (3 page)

The girl ducked behind the building, then emerged again, this time shuffling toward the old woman very slowly. She tried dragging the body, and her face contorted with effort as she pulled the old woman by her one complete arm. The girl described circles into the fine dust as she paced around the body. The path they made was marked in blood: from the car smoking and ablaze, through a courtyard ringed by hyacinths, to the place where the woman lay dead, attended by the small child, who rocked and moved her lips, perhaps singing some desert elegy that I couldn’t hear.

The ash from the burning of clay bricks and the fat of lean men and women covered everything. The pale minarets dominated the smoke, and the sky was still pale like snow. The city seemed to reach upward out of the settling dust. Our part was over, for a while at least. It was September and though there were few trees from which leaves could fall, some did. They shook off the scarred and slender branches, buffeted by the wind and light descending from the hills to the north. I tried to count the leaves as they fell, removed from their moorings by the impact of mortars and bombs. They shook. A thin sheaf of dust floated off each one.

I looked at Murph and Sterling and the rest of the platoon on the roof. The LT walked to each of us and put his hand on our arms, speaking softly, trying to soothe us with the sound of his voice, the way one would with frightened horses. Perhaps our eyes were wet and black, perhaps we bared our teeth. “Good job,” and “You’re OK,” and “We’re gonna be OK,” he said. It was hard to believe that we’d be OK and that we’d fought well. But I remember being told that the truth does not depend on being believed.

The radio came on again. Before long the LT would give us another mission. We would be tired when the mission came, but we would go, for we had no alternative. Perhaps we’d had them once: alternatives, other paths to take. But our course was certain then, if unknown. It was going to be dark before we knew it. We had lived, Murph and me.

I try so hard now to remember if I saw any hint of what was coming, if there was some shadow over him, some way I could have known he was so close to being killed. In my memory of those days on the rooftop, he is half a ghost. But I didn’t see it then, and couldn’t. No one can see that. I guess I’m glad I didn’t know, because we were happy that morning in Al Tafar, in September. Our relief was coming. The day was full of light and warm. We slept.

Mrs. LaDonna Murphy,
rural mail carrier, would have only needed to read the first word of the letter to know that it had not been written by her son. The truth is, she had not received all that many letters from him, so when I wrote it, I took a guess that she might not have that much to compare it to. He’d rarely been more than a few miles away from her during the first seventeen years of his life. About five miles, depending on where Daniel was, when she reached the farthest stop on her mail route if measured as the crow flies. Seven, if we allow for depth, at midnight, during those three months he worked in the Shipp Mountain Mine after he graduated from the Bluefield Vocational and Technical School. Then on to Benning in the fall, the farthest he’d ever been from home, where Daniel would write her a few short notes before lights-out, scrawling out his thoughts about the redness of the clay, the pleasure he took in sleeping under those endless Georgia stars and, when time allowed, making space for the assurances that boys like me and Daniel always end up sending to our families, assurances that were as much for us as for them. The rest of his life he’d spent with me. Ten months, give or take, from the time he appeared next to me in formation that day in New Jersey with the snow so high over our boots that our left and right faces made only a whisper in the snow. Ten months, give or take, from that day to the day he died. It might seem like a short time, but my whole life since has merely been a digression from those days, which now hang over me like a quarrel that will never be resolved.

I’d had this idea once that you had to grow old before you died. I still feel like there is some truth to it, because Daniel Murphy had grown old in the ten months I’d known him. And perhaps it was a need for something to make sense that caused me to pick up a pencil and write a letter to a dead boy’s mother, to write it in his name, having known him plenty long enough to know it was not his way to call his mother “Mom.” I’d known a lot, really. I’d known that snow comes early in the year in the mountains where Daniel was from, November, sure, and sometimes as early as October. But I only found out later that she’d read that letter with snow falling all around her. That she’d set it on the seat next to her while she mushed her old right-hand-drive Jeep up and down the switchbacks on her route, carving clean tracks through the white erasure that had fallen all throughout the night before. And that as she pulled down the long gravel path leading to their little house, on the winter-dormant apple orchard Daniel had talked about so often, she kept sneaking glances at the return address. She must have taken those glances with an unusual level of skepticism for a rural mail carrier as experienced as she was, because she thought each time that something different would be written there. When the wheels of her old Jeep finally stopped, and the whole mass of ’84 metal slid a few last feet in the snow, she’d taken the letter in both hands and become briefly, terrifyingly happy.

At one time you could have asked me if I thought the snow meant something and I would have said yes. I might have thought there was some significance to the fact that there had been snow on the day Murph had come into my life and snow on the day I willed myself into the one that had been taken from him. I may not have believed it, but I’m sure I would have wanted to. It’s lovely to think that snow can be special. We’re always told it is. Of all those million million flakes that fall, no two are alike, forever and ever, amen. I’ve spent some time looking out the window of my cabin watching snowflakes fall like a shot dove’s feathers fluttering slowly down to the ground. They all look the same to me.

I know it was a terrible thing to write that letter. What I don’t know is where it fits in with all of the other terrible things I think about. At some point along the way I stopped believing in significance. Order became an accident of observation. I’ve come to accept that parts of life are constant, that just because something happens on two different days doesn’t make it a goddamn miracle. All I really know for sure is that no matter how long I live, and no matter how I spend that time, those scales aren’t ever coming level. Murph’s always going to be eighteen, and he’s always going to be dead. And I’ll be living with a promise that I couldn’t keep.

I never intended to make the promise that I made. But something happened the day Murph pivoted and moved through the open rank of our formation, took his place in the squad next to me and looked up. He smiled. And the sun careened off the small drifts of snow, and he closed his eyes slightly against it, and they were blue. Now, so many years distant, I picture him turning to speak, with his arms clasped behind him at parade rest, and it seems like whatever he says back there in my memory could be the most important words I’ll ever hear. In truth, he didn’t seem special then. All he said was “Hi.” He only came up to my shoulder in height, so when Sergeant Sterling, our newly assigned team leader, heard the muffled whisper Murph had made, he didn’t see him. Instead, he saw me. He glared and clenched his teeth and barked, “At ease the fucking noise, Bartle.” There is nothing else to be said. Something happened. I met Murph. The formation broke. It was cold in the shadow of the barracks.

“Bartle. Murphy. Get your stupid asses over here,” called Sergeant Sterling.

Sterling had been assigned to our company when our deployment orders came through. He had been to Iraq already, on the first push north out of Kuwait, and had been decorated, so even the higher-ups looked at him with admiration. And it wasn’t just the fact of his having been there that caused us to respect him. He was harsh, but fair, and there was a kind of evolutionary beauty in his competence. His carriage seemed different only by a matter of degree from the way our other sergeants and officers acted. I noticed the way his whole upper body moved in concert with his rifle on field exercises, pivoting against the backdrop of the snow in the branches of the hardwoods, his legs propelling him purposefully forward, where he’d stop in a clearing and kneel. The way he’d remove his helmet slowly, showing his cropped blond hair, his blue eyes scanning the brush at the wood line. And he’d listen and I’d watch and we’d wait, the whole platoon, for him to make some determination. We would trust him when he pointed and told us to move on. It was easy to follow him wherever he was going.

Murph and I walked to Sterling and stood at parade rest. “All right, little man,” he said, “I want you to get in Bartle’s back pocket and I want you to stay there. Do you understand?”

Murph looked at me before he answered. I tried to make a face that would clearly communicate the need for his answer to come quickly, and for it to be directed toward Sergeant Sterling. But he didn’t answer, and Sterling smacked him on the side of the head, knocking his cover to the ground, where little drifts of snow sketched the December wind.

“Roger, Sergeant,” I said. I pulled Murph toward the awning of the barracks door, where a cluster of guys from second platoon were smoking. As we walked, Sterling called behind us, “You guys seriously need to unfuck yourselves. None of you people get it.”

We turned to look at him when we got to the door. He had his hands on his hips, and his head was tilted skyward. His eyes were closed. It was getting dark, but he didn’t move. He waited, as if waiting for whichever last shadow would cause evening.

Murph and I got up to our eight-man room on the third floor of the battalion barracks and I closed the door. Everyone else was milling around base on an evening pass. We were alone. “You got your bunk and locker?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s down the hall.”

“Swap your shit out and get a rack near me.”

He left the room with a shuffle. As I waited for him I thought about what I would tell him. I’d been in the army a couple of years. It had been good to me, more or less, a place to disappear. I kept my head down and did as I was told. Nobody expected much of me, and I hadn’t asked for much in return. I hadn’t given a lot of thought to actually going to war, but it was happening now, and I was still struggling to find a sense of urgency that seemed proportional to the events unfolding in my life. I remember feeling relief in basic while everyone else was frantic with fear. It had dawned on me that I’d never have to make a decision again. That seemed freeing, but it gnawed at some part of me even then. Eventually, I had to learn that freedom is not the same thing as the absence of accountability.

Murph came back into the room with a kind of waddle under the weight of his gear. He looked a lot like Sterling in some ways, the blond hair and blue eyes. But it was as if Murph was the ordinary version. Where Sterling was tall and trimly muscled, Murph was not. He wasn’t fat, it was just that he seemed almost incorrectly short and squat by comparison. Whereas Sterling’s jawline could have been transferred directly from a geometry textbook, Murph’s features were nearly imperceptibly askew. Whereas Murph’s mouth fell comfortably into a smile, Sterling’s did not. Maybe all I noticed was a condition of reality, applicable everywhere on earth: some people are extraordinary and some are not. Sterling was, though I could see at times that he bristled at the consequences of this condition. When he first came to our company, the captain introduced him to us by saying, “Sergeant Sterling will be put on the fucking recruiting posters, men. Mark my words.” When the formation broke, I walked past them and overheard Sterling say, “I will never ask anyone to do this, sir. Never.” And I noticed as he walked away that he wasn’t wearing any of the awards on his Class A’s that the captain had rattled off with such poorly hidden envy. But wars need ordinary boys, too.

After we put his gear in his locker I sat down on a bottom bunk and Murph sat on the one across from me. The room was bright from the sheen of fluorescent paneling above us. The shadeless windows looked out onto night and snow, circles of lamplight and the red brick of other barracks. “Where are you from?” I asked.

“Southwest Virginia,” he said. “What about you?”

“A little shithole town outside Richmond.”

He looked disappointed by my answer. “Hell,” he said, “I didn’t know you was from Virginia.”

Something about that fact irritated me. “Yeah,” I said smugly. “We’re practically related.” I regretted saying it immediately. But I didn’t want to be responsible for him. I didn’t even want to be responsible for myself, but that wasn’t his fault. I began to lay out my gear. “What’d you do down there in the sticks, Murph?” I took a wire brush to all the metallic components of my equipment, the small buttons and the hooks for straps, cleaning off the tarnish and oxidation of lying in the snow while preparing to fight in the desert. As Murph began to answer, the thought crossed my mind that something can only be absurd if enough people take it very seriously. When I looked back over at him, he had started to list facts about himself on the fingers of his small right hand. He hadn’t yet moved to his index finger before pausing. “Yeah, I guess that’s about it. Not much.”

I hadn’t even been listening. I could tell he was embarrassed. He hung his head a little and grabbed his gear from the locker and began to mirror my actions. For a while we were alone. The sound of the wire brushes roughing against green nylon and little pieces of metal settled into the room with a low hum. I understood. Being from a place where a few facts are enough to define you, where a few habits can fill a life, causes a unique kind of shame. We’d had small lives, populated by a longing for something more substantial than dirt roads and small dreams. So we’d come here, where life needed no elaboration and others would tell us who to be. When we finished our work we went to sleep, calm and free of regret.

Days passed. We came closer to our ship-out date, which was still being kept a secret by the higher-ups. But we felt it looming. The war had become a presence in our lives. We were grooms before a marriage. We trained in the snowy fields. We left the barracks in the morning, went to classrooms for briefings on the social structures and demographics of the unnamed towns that we’d be fighting for. We’d leave the classrooms at night with the sun already fallen as if by accident, somewhere to the west beyond the base’s barbwire fencing.

The last week we were in New Jersey, Sterling came to see us in our room. We were packing up all of our gear that we knew we wouldn’t need. The higher-ups had told us we’d have a pass soon and that our families would be able to see us for a last visit before our battalion’s movement. The only thing left was a final range day, put in place as the result of a suggestion Sergeant Sterling had passed up the chain of command. When Sterling stepped through our door, he waved off our somewhat lazy effort to rise to parade rest.

“Sit down, guys,” he said.

Murph and I sat down on my bunk, and Sterling sat down on the bunk across from us, rubbing his temples.

“How old are you two?”

“Eighteen,” Murph answered quickly. “My birthday was last week,” he said, smiling.

I was surprised he hadn’t told me and a little surprised by how young he was. I was twenty-one then, and eighteen had never seemed so young until I heard the number said out loud. I looked at Murph sitting next to me on the bunk. He had a pimple on his chin, but otherwise his skin was smooth. It dawned on me that he’d never even shaved. The soft down on his cheekbones beneath his ears glowed whitely under the panel lights. I heard myself say, “Twenty-one.” And now, as I remember it, I can feel how young I was. I can feel my body before it was scarred. I can reach to my cheek and for a moment remember how the skin was unblemished, then torn, and then healed below my eye like a wadi in miniature. “Twenty-one,” I’d said, and I was as full of time as my body would allow. But looking back from where I am, almost thirty, old enough, I can see myself for what I was. Barely a man. Not a man. Life was in me, but it splashed as if at the bottom of a nearly empty bowl.

And so we looked at Sterling, distraught, and he said, “Fuck,” and I knew that when he told us his age it would not be much more than ours. “All right, look,” he said. “You guys are my guys.”