Yellow Birds (8 page)

He lowered the rifle. His mouth was open. He closed it, then spoke. “I don’t know, man. He’s got a fucking body.” Murph looked at me, wide-eyed. “And he’s not smiling anymore.”

Clouds spread out
over the Atlantic like soiled linens on an unmade bed. I knew, watching them, that if in any given moment a measurement could be made it would show how tentative was my mind’s mastery over my heart. Such small arrangements make a life, and though it’s hard to get close to saying what the heart is, it must at least be that which rushes to spill out of those parentheses which were the beginning and the end of my war: the old life disappearing into the dust that hung and hovered over Nineveh even before it could be recalled and longed for, young and unformed as it was, already broken by the time I reached the furthest working of my memory. I was going home. But home, too, was hard to get an image of, harder still to think beyond the last curved enclosure of the desert, where it seemed I had left the better portion of myself as one among innumerable grains of sand, how in the end the weather-beaten stone is not one stone but only that which has been weathered, a result, an example of slow erosion on a thing by wind or waves that break against it, so that the else of anyone involved ends up deposited like silt spilling out into an estuary, or gathered at the bottom of a river in a city that is all you can remember.

The rest is history, they say. Bullshit, I say. It’s imagination or it’s nothing, and must be, because what is created in this world, or made, can be undone, unmade; the threads of a rope can be unwoven. And if that rope is needed as a guideline for a ferry to a farther shore, then one must invent a way to weave it back, or there will be drownings in the streams that cross our paths. I accept now, though in truth it took some time, that
must
must be its own permission.

Forgiveness is an altogether different thing. It can’t be patterned, as a group of boys can become a calculus for what will go ungrieved, the shoulders slumping in the seats of a chartered plane, the empty seats between them, how if God had looked on us during that flight back home we might have seemed like fabric ready to be thrown, in the surrendered blankness of our sleep, over the furniture of a thousand empty houses.

I’d been looking out the window for a glimpse of the ocean ever since the plane’s wheels left the ground. A dull cheer rolled from the first-class cabin back to the rear of the plane where the enlisted men sat. The huff of breath that exited our bodies became a grasp at joy when the plane dipped into the air and separated from the earth. The officers and senior enlisted men turned over the backs of their broad chairs, waved their hands and yelled, and we began to yell and smile, slowly, as if our bodies were underwater.

The plane reached cruising altitude. The flight from Germany to the States was relatively short. The Atlantic Ocean was our last obstacle to home, the land of the free, of reality television, outlet malls and deep vein thrombosis. I woke with my head against the window, unaware that I’d been sleeping. My hand went to close around the stock of the rifle that was not there. An NCO from third platoon sitting across the aisle saw it and smiled. “Happened to me twice today,” he said. I did not feel better.

I looked at the battalion scattered throughout the plane. How many didn’t make it? Murph. Three specialists from Bravo company who’d been killed by a suicide bomber in the chow hall. A few others scattered over the year. One from HQ company killed by a mortar on the FOB. Another I didn’t know but had heard was killed by a sniper. Ten more? Twenty?

Those that remained were dark against the blue seats and thin squares of blanket covering them. They twitched and grunted and rolled within the confines of their business-class chairs. I looked out the window and saw that it was not yet night despite the fact that my body had sensed its coming a few hours before. We traveled with the sun, uncoupled from its dictates of light and dark for a little while. I watched the broad ocean spread out beneath me after the clouds thinned. I focused for what seemed like hours on crests becoming troughs, troughs tilting to become whitecaps, all of it seeming like the breaking of some ancient treaty between all those things that stand in opposition to one another.

A group of clerks who remained awake had taken to ringing their assistance bells incessantly so that the attendants would be forced to make their rounds and lean into them, the smell of lilac and vanilla descending heavily from their tanned chests. The older ones performed this task by rote, pushed wide their shoulders, showed skin like browned wax paper.

The clerks must have tired of their game after a while because it grew quiet. Only the deliberate hum of the engines filled my ears. I began the same thought over and over as we breached the sand and rock and thistle of the coast, but could not complete it. I want to go…I want to…I want…I…and then the coast greened as we flew farther inland. The earth was pocked with blue pools, the brown squares of ball fields and mazes of houses arrayed like strange reproductions of themselves. And green. It was impossibly green. There seemed to be trees growing out of every inch of the land. It was spring and some bloomed and from this height even the blooms were green and it was so green that I would have jumped from the plane if I could have, to float over that green briefly, to let it be real and whole and as large as I imagined. And as I thought of my descent, how I would take in that last breath of green before I scattered over the earth, I remembered the last word—home. I want to go home.

“Wake up. We’re here,” the LT said. I looked out the window and saw a sign left open to flap and tatter in the wind outside the terminal. It thanked us for our service and welcomed us back to the States.

That was it. The doors opened and we lurched down the gangway toward the bright shine of the airport. It glowed on the inside, and the curl of small neon letters against white walls and white floors addled my thinking. My mind clouded over. I saw a nation unfold in the dark. It rolled out over piedmont and hillock and fell down the west face of the Blue Ridge, where plains in pink dusk rested softly under an accretion of hours. Between the coasts, an unshared year grew like goldenrod and white puffs of dandelion up through the hardpan.

We filed in through a special gate and stood in the cold wash of the artificial lights and listened to them buzz and hum. A few last words from the officers and senior enlisted men and then we would be released. The usual had become remarkable, the remarkable boring, and toward whatever came in between I felt only a listless confusion.

The LT gave a safety brief. Standard stuff: “Wrap it up. Don’t drink and drive. If your old lady is pissing you off, remember…”

We answered in unison, “Instead of a slug, give her a hug.” We’d stood tightly in formation until the first sergeant barked “Dismissed,” but we did not scatter in all directions at once. Instead, the remains of our unit dissolved slowly, scattering from its center the way a splash of oil might over water. I saw confusion in some of the other soldiers’ eyes. I even heard a few say, “Well, what now?” It crossed my own mind, too, but I put my fingernails into my palms until the skin broke, and I thought, No way, no goddamn way, something else now.

The ghosts of the dead filled the empty seats of every gate I passed: boys destroyed by mortars and rockets and bullets and IEDs to the point that when we tried to get them to a medevac, the skin slid off, or limbs barely held in place detached, and I thought that they were young and had girls at home or some dream that they thought would make their lives important. They had been wrong of course. You don’t dream when you are dead. I dream. The living dream, though I won’t say thanks for that.

I made my way to the only open bar in the terminal and sat down on a stool that looked as if it had been brought from the factory that night. Everything about the bar and the airport was new and sterile. The tiles on the floor were clean and I saw where minute trails of remaining dust were left in my wake as if to guide me back. I ordered a beer and put my money on the bar. It was light wood lacquered to a mirror shine and I saw my face in the strange piney reflection and scooted my stool back a bit. A janitor swung a mop down the long tile path between the gates, and I took a swallow of my beer and glanced at the fine particles of dust I’d left on the floor in my wake.

“Hey, boss,” I said.

He was older, but not old, and he dragged the mop over to me and folded his arms across the end of the pole.

“I hate to bug you, but would you mind if I ran that mop across the floor there.” I started to get up to take the mop across the streak I’d left on the floor when I saw him look down.

“Why…there’s nothing on that floor, son. Don’t worry about it.” He reached out to pat my shoulder, but I turned back to the bar and grabbed my beer and finished it. I pointed to the bar and put more dollars on top of the ones the barman had not yet collected.

“I’m sorry. I just thought…,” and I must have drifted off because I did not see him move. I saw instead the mop head swaying across the floor in narrow arcs where I’d been pointing. He walked off dragging the dirt gray of the mop’s fringes down the concourse behind him.

The bar was polished to a mirror shine and even the windows that looked out onto the runway cast our reflections back on us because of the strange way the yellow light filled the airport. I kept drinking.

“Coming from or going to?” the bartender asked.

“Coming from.”

“Which one?”

“Iraq.”

“You going back after?”

“Don’t think so. Never know,” I said.

“Y’all watching your backs over there?”

“Yeah. Doing our best.”

“Damn shame, if you ask me.”

“What’s that?”

“I just hate that y’all have to be over there.”

I tipped my beer up to him. “Appreciate that.”

“We ought to nuke those sand niggers back to the Stone Age.” He started to wipe down the bar. I finished my beer and put five bucks on the bar and asked for another. He set it down in front of me. “Turn the whole place into glass,” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“Whole place is full of savages, is what I hear.”

I looked up at him. He was smiling at me. “Yeah, man. Something like that.”

My flight was one of the last of the night. I heard the loudspeaker announce that the Richmond-bound plane was taxiing into place. The pile of money was still on the bar. “I owe for the beers,” I said.

He pointed to a yellow ribbon pinned on the wall between a signed eight-by-ten glossy of a daytime soap star and a faded newspaper clipping of a man with a giant catfish splayed over the hood of a red Ford pickup with a rusted front quarter panel.

“What does that mean?”

“On me.” He smiled. “It’s the least I can do.”

“Forget it. I want to pay.” I didn’t want to smile and say thanks. Didn’t want to pretend I’d done anything except survive.

He reached out to shake my hand and I picked up the money and handed it back to him and turned and left.

The pilot made an announcement when all the passengers had taken their seats. Said how honored he was to be giving an American hero a ride home. Fuck it, I thought. I got four free Jack and Cokes out of the deal and a little extra legroom. Then, late in the night, as we flew through a black starless sky above the Eastern Seaboard, as planes carrying other soldiers took off with their noses pointed toward high school friends and eighteen-year-old girls, toward field parties and the banks of streams and ponds, along which young boys would pace out hours in silence after taking the freckled shoulders of those girls into their hands, their hands feeling skin beneath a flip of red or blond or brown hair, and not knowing what to do, those same hands folding as if in prayer, praying without even knowing they are praying, “God, please don’t let the world be always slipping from me,” and leaving the bright fires and laughter, leaving the rings of cars in fields, passing through the center of the circles that the headlights made, stumbling into the underbrush where they’d feel the balled fist of their loneliness grip some bone inside their chest like it was the slightest and most brittle bone God ever made, after all this, I dropped into a drunken sleep. I dreamed of the wood planks on my mother’s porch, the warmth of the sun they held long after sunset, lying there on the warm wood in the cool air thinking only of the sound of the bullfrogs and cicadas on the water, hoping I would dream only of that sound.

And then I was there, simply and without qualification. I sat with my cheeks in my hands out by the smoking area, distracting myself by counting the wads of chewing gum that dotted the concrete, when the sound of a motor approached. I did not raise my eyes. It took her hands on my face to rouse me from my preoccupations.

She pressed hard into the hollows of my cheeks and then stepped back. “Oh, John,” she said. Again she advanced and grabbed me hard around my waist. Her hands pushed and rubbed my body. She patted down the front of my uniform and brought her hands back to my face and she pressed down again. I could see that her hands were a little more wrinkled than I recalled, thin bones seen even from the palm side. Had it only been a year? Her grasp was firm, and she touched me hard as if to prove I was not a fleeting apparition. She touched me as though it was the last time she might.

I pulled her hands from my face and held them together out in front of me. “I’m fine, Ma,” I said. “Don’t make a scene.”

She began to cry. She didn’t keen or bellow, she just said my name over and over again, “Oh John, oh John, oh John, oh John.” When I took her hands from against my cheeks she wrenched one loose and slapped me hard across the mouth and tears welled up in my eyes and I laid my head on her chest. I had to reach down to do it because she was small. She held me there and kept repeating my name, saying, “Oh, John, you’re home now.”

I don’t know how long we stood there like that, with me hunching down to be embraced, but I forgot the sounds of the motor and the people walking past, I forgot the travelers who called out their thanks to me. I was aware of my mother and of her alone. I felt as if I’d somehow been returned to the singular safety of the womb, untouched and untouchable to the world outside her arms around my slouching neck. I was aware of all this, though I am not sure how. Yet when she said, “Oh, John, you’re home,” I did not believe her.