Yellow Birds (6 page)

“Yes, fine.”

I was still quite drunk and my head was foggy. I went behind the bar and found a whiskey bottle. I sat on the floor and looked out the window and drank the rest of the whiskey. The sun came up over a small canal across the street. I was very tired, looking out over the narrow band of water, wondering if it was cold.

The light was graying when I opened my eyes. The streetlights were still on. There was a bitter taste in my mouth. I looked around to get my bearings. My head pounded. My hands were very cold, and I realized I was lying facedown on the bank of the thin canal with my hands dangling in the water. It was flat and glassy and the only motion on the water was where my hands moved in it slightly. I pulled them out and sat up and began to rub my hands together to get the feeling in them back. God, what time is it? I thought. The house was across the street. The women stood like tired caryatids on the porch, each one leaning against one or another of several warped and peeling columns. They did not move, and I stood up and turned toward them, and they remained that way, as if in some raw tableau.

“Where is the girl?” I hollered.

They stood the way they had been for another moment, and then they turned and filed through the door. It was quiet inside or seemed to be, and I stood there staring at the house until I realized it must have been close to dawn.

When I got back to the base, the LT was angry. He didn’t yell, he just said, “Wash up, Bartle.” I did and when I was finished I changed into a clean uniform and pulled a field jacket over my shoulders and fell asleep on a bench in the terminal. Only a few MPs and officers were still awake.

I was woken by a nudge on my shoulder, then by a harder shake. I rolled over, and Sergeant Sterling whispered to me, “I covered for you.”

“Thanks, Sarge,” I said groggily.

“Don’t go thinking we’re finished, Private.” He walked away. Outside in the dark it had begun to rain again. I was almost home, I thought, almost gone.

Through the daylight
hours we took turns on watch, sleeping for two hours and nodding off behind our rifles for one. We saw no enemy. We made up none out of the corners of our eyes. We were too tired even for that. We saw only the city, appearing as a blurred patchwork of shapes sketched in white and tan beneath a ribbon of blue sky.

I woke for my shift as the sun set into a wadi. It snaked off beyond the orchard, cut into the foothills and disappeared. The fires in the orchard had gone out, but Murph and I did not notice their absence until we heard the thin crackling of embers gently smoldering in the distance. The shadows of the outbuildings reached down and covered everything and we didn’t notice it was happening and then it was night.

We’d gotten lax. The LT rarely asked us to dig in, and we hadn’t dug in there, just laid our packs and rifles against the lurching clay-mud walls that separated that cluster of buildings from the field we’d been fighting over for the last few nights. The LT had a small antenna radio, and a green mosquito net hung between an open window and a half-charred hawthorn tree. We waited for him to tell us something, but he had his feet up on a field table and seemed to be sleeping so we let him rest.

A runner from battalion headquarters brought us our mail after chow. He had on thick glasses and smiled at us and took great care to duck below walls and trees, which looked, to him, like cover. His uniform was very clean. When he whispered out Murph’s name, Murph thanked him and smiled up at him and opened the letter and began to read. The runner handed me a small package, and Sergeant Sterling stood up from behind his cover, a stack of sawed-off trunks of pear trees that some long-vanished family must have placed there, stacked up to be ready to burn through the cold nights of winter where the plains met the foothills of the Zagros and it sometimes snowed.

Sterling called the runner over to him. “Private,” he barked, “where’s my mail?”

“It doesn’t look like you got any.”

“Sergeant,” Sterling muttered.

“Excuse me?”

“Relax, Sterling, give the kid a break,” the LT said, awake now and pausing from his conversation on the radio. It was the only sound. The runner pushed his body toward the lowering dark in silence, seeming to float above the packed dust as he moved back the way he came.

Murph took a photograph from his helmet and placed it over the letter, using it to cover the words that would come next, giving each line its due attention, the way that old men do when reading obituaries of friends, learning late the small measures of their lives and wondering how it was they came to not know these things. It was too dark to see the picture from where I sat. I didn’t remember Murph ever showing it to me. I wondered how we’d gone that long through the war without my having seen it. He rested his back against the wall, and the low-hanging branches of the hawthorn tree reached down to him in the quiet wind. The reds of the setting sun had washed out and the last soft hint of pink disappeared behind the city.

“Good news?” I asked.

“News, anyway,” he said.

“What’s up?”

“My girlfriend’s going to school. Says she figures the best thing is…well, you know.”

The radio continued to buzz softly. The LT’s voice draped down over our whispers, saying, “They’re good boys. They’ll be ready, Colonel.”

“Jody’s got your girl?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“You all right?”

“Yeah. Don’t matter, I guess.”

“Sure?”

There was no sound between my question and his answer. I thought of home, remembering the cicadas fluttering their wings in the scrub pines and oaks that ringed the pond behind my mother’s house outside Richmond. It would be morning there. The space between home, whatever that might mean for any of us, and the scratched-out fighting positions we occupied, collapsed. Soon, I looked out over the water. I smiled. I remembered late Novembers. Needles browned by the warm Virginia air collecting like discarded blankets on the shore. Taking the warped steps down from the back of the house on the cusp of morning, the sun slouching behind the tallest trees on the hills above the draw where our house sat. The light strong and yellow and thin, appearing to raise itself out of the earth, invisible, up from some higher plane where as a child I imagined there must be fields of cut grass and thistle that glowed until the day had again assured them of its presence, and my mother reading on the porch so early in the morning, seeming not to notice me as I walked past, my feet making a pleasant noise as they slid through the orange and yellow leaves. It would be too dark for my mother to see me. Out all night after I enlisted. I recalled telling her just like that. Trying to sneak into the backyard through the gate in the post fence my brother built, how she called out softly, not waiting for her breath to catch up to her voice, and it took me a minute to hear her, as the bullfrogs bellowed through their last darkening songs. A little wind came up and scattered those birds that always seemed to gather in the far cove beneath the willows and dogwoods that claimed that corner of the bank’s good brown earth. When they flew, they broke the water with the tips of their spanned wings, and the light from the house and a few stars like handfuls of salt thrown out appeared to break as well, and the ripples on the pond wavered as though the lines across the water were plucked strings. But I wasn’t there. All that had happened a long time before. I’d walked up in the dark under the awning of a few trees and she’d said, knowing somehow the way mothers always seem to, “My God, John, what did you do?” And I’d said I joined up. She knew what that meant. It wasn’t much longer before I’d left. I couldn’t remember having a life at all between that day and where I sat beneath a wall that ringed a field in Al Tafar, unable to reassure my friend, who would soon be dead. He was right. It hadn’t mattered.

Murph paused. “Everything’s just so goddamn funny.” He had the letter folded in his lap, and he bent his head backward, and the outline of his face was oriented toward the sky. He made a childish connection, but a beautiful one, and his face, looking through the thin fingers of the hawthorn that rose out of the dust, seemed to connect the long black veil of sky above us, a few stars in its stitching, to whatever sky his girl sat beneath. And yes, it was full of naïveté and boyishness, but that is all right, because we were boys then. It makes me love him a little, even now, to remember him sitting beneath the hawthorn tree, sad that his girl had left him, but without anger or resentment, despite being only a few hours removed from all the killing of the night before. He sat there in the dark. We spoke like children. We looked at each other as if into a dim mirror. I remember that part of him fondly, before he was lost, before he surrendered fully to the war, twisting through the air, perhaps one beat of his heart remaining as they threw his tortured body from the window of the minaret.

I put out my hand and gestured for him to hand me the picture. It was a Polaroid of Murph and his girl. They stood on a dirt track. The earth rose behind them, up out of the picture toward its promontory. The mountain was covered by beech and magnolia, white ash and maple, tulip trees, and all the colors of the flowers were bright and definite in the rays of light that settled down through the upper branches. She wore a dress of blue-dyed muslin that had been worn thin, and the light in the picture passed through the thin fabric slightly, revealing the shape of her body. Her hair was brown and a little stringy and in the picture a few strands came to rest on her high, pink cheeks. Her mouth was closed. She did not smile and her eyes were gray and warm above a hand that looked as if it was captured on its way to brush stray hairs from her face.

Then Murph next to her. His hands in the pockets of his blue jeans. Her other hand on the small of his back. Alive. There was an expression on his face that I have never seen before or since. I have convinced myself that this was the expression of one who knew, but he could not have. There was something fleeting in the picture, though I didn’t know it then. He had an easy half smile, and his eyes squinted in the light. What was there of permanence in the picture? I wondered if the girl would ever stand on that spot again. If she did, would she reach for the small of his back?

“Who took it?”

He squatted on the back of his calves, pulling a rub out and putting it in his bottom lip. The smell was sweet and pungent and filled the calm air. “My mom did, summer before last. I guess we were sixteen, almost seventeen in it. Marie’s a good girl. I can’t say I blame her. Too smart to stick with me.”

Sterling had been listening to us talk. He loped over out of the dark on the other side of the tree. “I’d kill a bitch,” he interjected. “You’re not really gonna take that shit, are you, Private?”

“I guess I figure it’s not my call to make no more, Sarge.”

Sterling put his hands on his hips and seemed to be waiting for Murph to say something else. It was as if that line of words had been hung up in a place Sterling couldn’t reach, so he just stood there, disregarding, waiting to be readdressed. But Murph did not respond. Neither did I. We just looked at him, half leaning against the wall. Behind us a streetlamp came on. It was the only one to survive the battle, and it illuminated the field where the dead lay scattered and it shined its light briefly into the scarred earth where the mortars had fallen. It flickered. In the intermittent light Sterling seemed to flicker also, appearing and disappearing. The light went out for a short stretch, and Sterling walked away.

I want him to resist now, as I remember it. Not like Sterling suggested, but to resist nonetheless. It wasn’t that I thought he should have hoped that his being abandoned could be changed, but I wanted something that I could look back on and say, yes, you were fighting too, you burned to be alive, and whatever failure or accident of nature caused you to be killed could be explained by something other than the fact that I’d missed your giving up.

Murph looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. I handed him back the picture of Marie, and he took his helmet off, resting it between his legs in the dust. He took out his casualty feeder card from a ziplock bag under his helmet liner and put the picture behind it. He held the card and the picture and looked at them in the unsteady light, and I read the sections of the card that Murph had already filled in.

At the top of the card, in the appropriate boxes, Murph had written the requested information. His name: Murphy, Daniel; his social security number; his rank; his unit. Below that were other boxes, left blank in case the need arose to record an assortment of information with a quick X in ink. There was a box for Killed in Action, for Missing in Action, and for Wounded in Action (either lightly or seriously). There was a box for Captured, and for Detained, and for Died as a Result of Wounds. There were two sets of Yes or No boxes, one each for Body Recovered and Body Identified. There was a space for witness remarks and for the signature of the commanding officer or medical personnel. Murph had placed an X in the box for Body Recovered. “Just in case,” he said when he caught me looking. Both of our cards were signed already.

Murph folded the picture up with the card and put them both back under his helmet liner. I cut open my package and pulled out a bottle of Gold Label sent by one of my high school buddies. I shook the bottle gently back and forth, saying, “Look what we got here.” He smiled and put his helmet to the side and he slid along the wall to get a little closer to me. I put my hand out with the bottle and he waved me off.

“I believe you have the honor, sir.”

We both laughed. I took a long pull of the whiskey. It burned inside my nose and down my throat and down into my stomach. I had to wipe the back of my hand across my mouth because we were laughing. Murph took the bottle and took a long swallow. For a moment we forgot our predicament and were just two friends drinking under a tree, leaned up against a wall, trying to muffle our laughter so we would not get caught. Murph stifled his laughter until his body was racked with deep spasms that caused his armor to rattle, grenades to softly tinkle against one another, until all the accoutrements of battle jingled slightly and he had to stop himself, repeating, “All right, I’m good,” with a mock stone face until he had regained his bearing. When he handed me back the bottle he sighed deeply. “Look out over there.”

Murph pointed to the low hills around the city. Small fires had sprung up in the distance. A few city lights and the fires on the hillsides burned like a tattered quilt of fallen stars. “It’s beautiful,” I whispered. I was not sure if anyone heard me, but I saw others point their fingers off into the darkness.

We stayed like that for a while. The night grew cool and the smell of the fires burning was bright and clean and cut through the air like a spring wind out of season. I started to feel a little drunk as we traded the bottle back and forth. We rested our chins on our arms and our arms on the top of the low mud-brick wall and we watched the little fires the citizens made speckle the hillsides in every direction.

“It must be the whole city out there,” Murph said, and I thought of the line of people who rode or walked or ran out of Al Tafar four days ago, how they waited patiently for us to leave, for the enemy to leave, how when the battle was over they would come back and begin to sweep the shells off the roofs of their houses, how they would fill buckets of water and splash them over the dried, coppery blood on their doorsteps. We could hear a soft keening while we watched the low hills and desert glimmer in the darkness.

It was barely perceptible, that noise. I still hear it sometimes. Sound is a funny thing, and smell. I’ll light a fire in the back lot of my cabin after the sun goes down. Then after a while, the smoke settles down into little ruts between clumps of pine. Wind whips up through the draws nearby and courses over the creek bed. And I can hear it then. I was not sure if it really came from the women around the campfires, if they pulled their hair crying out in mourning or not, but I heard it and even now it seems wrong not to listen. I took off my helmet and placed my rifle on top of it and allowed my ears to adjust to the ambient sounds in the night. There was something out there. I glanced at Murph and he returned a sad and knowing look. The LT put the radio down and sat in his chair with his head in his hands rubbing the strange mark on his cheekbone. We all listened to it awhile, watching the fires burn against the night. My chest tightened. There was something both ordinary and miraculous about the strange wailing that we heard, and the way it carried to us on the wind that began inside the orchard. Later in the night two of the lights in the distance began to brighten, then another two, and then another. The LT walked to each of us and said, “The colonel wants to see you guys. Get ready.”