“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.
It wasn’t a particularly long ride home in her old Chrysler over the interstate. Half an hour or so. In that time I found myself making strange adjustments to the landscape. We passed over the World War II Veterans Memorial Bridge, which spanned the James, and I stared out at the broad valley below. The sun coming up and a light the color of unripe oranges fell and broke up the mist that hung in the bottomland.
I pictured myself there. Not as I could be in a few months swimming along the banks beneath the low-slung trunks and branches of walnut and black alder trees, but as I had been. It seemed as if I watched myself patrol through the fields along the river in the yellow light, like I had transposed the happenings of that world onto the contours of this one. I looked for where I might find cover in the field. A slight depression between a narrow dirt track and the water’s edge became a rut where a truck must have spun its wheels for a good long while after a rain and I saw that it would grant good cover and concealment from two directions until a base of fire could be laid down which would allow us to fall back.
“You all right, hon?” my mother said. No one was in the field. Certainly I was not. Her voice gave me a start, and I fell back into myself as we reached the other side of the bridge.
“Yeah, Ma, I’m fine.”
I let the green blur of trees along highways and side roads lull me into some approximation of comfort until we turned down our gravel driveway. The yard had not been mowed in a long time.
“What’s the first thing you want to do, sweetie?” she asked excitedly.
“I’d like to shower and then…I don’t know, sleep, I guess.”
It was almost noon and it was spring and the pond behind the house was quiet. She helped me bring my duffel inside the house, and I went into my room. “I’m putting breakfast on, John, your favorite.” Bright sunlight fell between the wood-slatted blinds. I shut them and pulled the curtains o
ver. I shut the light off and pulled the chain dangling from the ceiling fan. The hum of the blades muffled the cars’ engines on the street and the soft rattle of pans in the kitchen. I smelled the grease and the unmowed grass. I smelled the clean house and the wood-frame bed. It was all filler. The noise, the sound, they existed just to take up space. My muscles flexed into the emptiness I still called home.
The room was dark and cool. I was tired. I folded my cover and put it on the bedside table. The blouse came off next. Then the belt, hung over the bedpost. I sat on the bed and reached down, unlacing the right boot first, then removing the right sock. In the muddy dimness, the dog tag strung into the laces of my left boot shone. I fingered it and sat upright.
I was disappearing. It was as if I stripped myself away in that darkened bedroom on a spring afternoon, and when I was finished there would be a pile of clothes neatly folded and I would be another number for the cable news shows. I could almost hear it. “Another casualty today,” they’d say, “vanished into thin air after arriving home.” Fine. I leaned down and finished unlacing the boot and strung the dog tag back around my neck and let it lie against the other. Left boot and left sock off. Pants off. Underwear off. I was gone. I opened the closet door and stood in front of the dressing mirror. My hands and face were tanned to rust. The rest of my body, pale and thinned, hung in the reflection as if of its own accord. I sighed and crawled beneath the cool sheets.
My mind and body waxed and waned under the fan. The sound of motors trilled as they moved toward our house, then lulled off into the distance as they rolled past. A train in the cut beyond the wood line made its shift as well, high-pitched and seeming to hurtle toward my single bed, as if falling toward me, as if I’d become some mass attracting the noise of metal and the metal itself. My pulse fluttered up into my eyes. I exhaled hard whenever the noise rolled past, off toward some other target. I don’t remember what I dreamed, but Murph was there, Murph and me and the same ghosts every night. I don’t remember what I dreamed, but finally I slept.
6
SEPTEMBER 2004
Al Tafar, Nineveh Province, Iraq
When we neared the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn’t been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the ruddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid. I smelled copper and cheap wine. The sun was up, but a half-moon hung low on the opposite horizon, cutting through the morning sky like a figure from a child’s pull-tab book.
We were lined along the ditch up to our ankles in a soupy muck. It all seemed in that moment to be the conclusion of a poorly designed experiment in inevitability. Everything was in its proper place, waiting for a pause in time, for the source of all momentum to be stilled, so that what remained would be nothing more than detritus to be tallied up. The world was paper-thin as far as I could tell. And the world was the orchard, and the orchard was what came next. But none of that was true. I was only afraid of dying.
The orchard was quiet. The lieutenant waved his arm from side to side until he had the attention of the sergeants and corporals. When he saw that he did, he made one long sweeping motion in the direction of the orchard and scrambled up out of the ditch. We followed. The only sound was the padding of forty or so boots in the dust, neither running nor walking, and our breathing, which grew louder when we ducked to meet the first low branches and the softness of the orchard floor.
I kept going. I kept going because Murph kept going and Sterling and the LT kept going and the other squads would keep going and I was terrified that I would be the one who did not. So I ducked down under the low-hanging branches and followed the platoon inside.
When the mortars fell, the leaves and fruit and birds were frayed like ends of rope. They lay on the ground in scattered piles, torn feathers and leaves and the rinds of broken fruit intermingling. The sunlight fell absently through the spaces in the treetops, here and there glistening as if on water from smudges of bird blood and citrus.
The squads moved out in an arc, hunched over like old men. We stepped carefully, looking for trip wires or any sign that the enemy was there. No one saw where the fire came from. For a moment it seemed to come from far away through the trees, and I caught myself staring in amazement at the shadows cast by the sunlight falling through the branches. When the first round snapped by my head, I was still thinking that the only shadows I had seen in the war had been made of angles: hard blurs of light falling on masses of buildings, antennas, and the shapes of weapons in tangles of alleys. The bullet came so quickly that the time it took to push that thought out of my head was imperceptible, so that before I even noticed, the other boys were firing back. I began to fire, too, and the noise of the rounds exploding in the chamber pushed in my eardrums and they began to ring and the deafness expanded as if someone had struck a tuning fork at perfect pitch, so that it resonated and wrapped everyone in the orchard in his very own vow of silence.
We didn’t see where the fire came from when it came. We saw only the leaves as they flicked about and the small chunks of wood and pieces of earth that danced around us. When the ringing of the first shots subsided, we heard bullets, sounds like small rips in the air, reports of rifles from somewhere we couldn’t see. I was struck by a kind of lethargy, in awe of the decisiveness of every single attenuated moment, observed in minute detail each slender moving branch and the narrow bands of sunlight coming through the leaves. Someone pulled me down to the orchard floor, and coming out of it I dragged myself on my elbows behind a withered clump of trees.
Soon there were voices calling out, “Three o’clock, fucking three o’clock!” and though I had not seen anyone to shoot at, I squeezed the trigger, dazzled by the flashes from my muzzle. What looked like an obscene photography began, followed by the shimmer of spent casings as they bounced against the bark.
Again, quiet. Scattered fire teams lay prone all over the beaten earth of the orchard floor. Wide, unblinking eyes exchanged up and down the line became a kind of language. We spoke in whispers, great huffs of breath gone monosyllabic and strangled of volume. We got up, resumed our prior pace.
As we walked on line through the ragged grove, we began to hear a sound from our front. At first it sounded like humbled weeping; closer, a bleating lamb. We moved faster as we were called forward and saw the enemy dead strewn about a shallow ditch: two boys, sixteen or so, their battered rifles lying akimbo at the bottom, had been shot in the face and torso. Their skin had lost most of its natural brown, and I wondered if that was because of the light flickering through the low unkempt canopy or because their blood had congealed in pools at the bottom of the ditch.
The medics had a private from third platoon on the ground, his blouse removed, his teeth chattering, mewling like a lamb. He was gut-shot and dying. We tried to help as much we could, but the medics shoved us back, so we watched and softly said, “Come on, Doc,” as they tried to put his insides back in his body. He was a pale shape. The medics were covered in his blood and he shook in his delirium. We stepped away and formed a circle under the light falling through the leaves. His lips turned dark purple in the light and quivered. Snot ran onto his upper lip and the shaking of his body threw small flecks of spittle over his chin. I realized he had been still for a while and he was dead. No one spoke.
“I thought he was going to say something,” I finally said.
The rest of the company fanned out. A couple of guys from the other squads in second platoon moved out of the circle. Murph sat with his feet swinging in one of the shallow ditches, cleaning his rifle. A few acknowledged that they’d been waiting for him to say something, too. When he only died, their faces became downcast and surprised. They moved aimlessly away.
Sterling stubbed out a cigarette near the boy’s body with his toe and a thin rail of smoke rose toward the tattered leaves and dissipated. “They usually don’t,” he said. “I only heard it once.”
An embedded photographer snapped pictures of
it all: a private snaking his barrel in a ditch, the dead boy, as yet uncovered, gazing thinly toward the blue sky that had cleared itself of clouds high above the orchard. I thought that he had no regard for the significance of what he saw. But now I think maybe he did. Maybe his regard was absolute.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“Who?” Sterling said.
“The KIA. What did he say?”
“Nothing really. I was holding his hand. Freaked the fuck out, you know? Fire was still coming in. I was the only one there. Doesn’t matter.” He paused. “I didn’t even know the guy.” Sterling grabbed at the collar of his vest and closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. He nodded to the photographer and they began to pick their way through the debris; the branches and torn rinds, the dead and the living.
“What did he say?” I asked again.
He turned back. “Bart, you’re just gonna make it into something bigger than it was. You ought to go check your boy and quit worrying about that shit.”
I turned and saw Murph kneeling next to the body. His hands were on his thighs. I could have gone to Murph, but I did not. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be responsible for him. I had enough to worry about. I was disintegrating, too. How was I supposed to keep us both intact?
It is possible that I broke my promise in that very moment, that if I’d gone to comfort him a second earlier, he might not have broken himself. I don’t know. He didn’t look distraught, he looked curious. He touched the body, straightened the collar, put the boy’s head in his lap.