War, p.10
War, page 10
The hawk was lower. Or the water was higher, but history was happening, and I was the one caught in between.
“R.,” I shouted, sitting up, not yet ready to be crushed. No answer. The deer head took its last gulp and sank. R. wasn’t where he had been. Maybe his strokes had pulled him ashore. I began to mimic the same. Freestyle, freestyle, I reminded myself. Breaststroke too slow, backstroke too perpendicular, butterfly too fucking hard. Freestyle. The water tasted of iron and wine. I suddenly wanted to tilt the world and drink the battlefield dry. One gulp told me that wasn’t the solution to finding my leader. I gagged out the drown like a child on ipecac.
Suddenly getting out of this flow was more important than breathing. I needed a hard surface. R.’s bitter eye (the one good one) laughing at me as I crawled out of the muck. Or the dead gleam of an overturned truck with the seats torn out. A fort. A pile of sand. Anything not wet.
I threw a sideways glance and there the hawk hung, its wings as open as church doors. “Point me,” I spit at my hawk. And then I trusted. With each stroke I felt stronger. The sting in my leg had subsided to a dial tone, and my arms felt exactly as powerful as they were. Stroke, another, third one brought my face out of the water. Find the hawk. Follow the hawk. There he was. Good. Swim.
I was going so fast that my last pull with my right shoulder plugged my arm into wet earth up to the elbow and skidded me to a halt. Water tugged at my waist, but I was able to left-hand my body forward inch by inch until I was up onto a tiny rise and out of the flood. I breathed as quietly as I could, waiting, waiting to hear R. lambaste me. Nothing. I pivoted like a mermaid, torso only, the pain in my leg surfacing like tiny, jagged flowers. All thorn, no rose. The hawk was gone, too. I scanned the sky, a child who’d lost his kite. “Shit,” I said. Lovely, I thought. Everyone keeps leaving.
Then, suddenly, the bird, quiet as sleep, was perched on my leg. He stood just below the wound, my exposed ankle as perch. “Where’s R.?” I asked the hawk, fully expecting an answer.
His response hurt like hell.
Beak into flesh, the hawk hammered down into my wound. And only into my wound. Again. Again. Blood splashed out in miniature waves, wine spilled from a glass. Again. The pain was spectral, diamonds of sweat jumping from my pores. It was as if I was being disassembled one nerve at a time. The hawk paused every six or seven attacks, looking at me as if to reassure himself I wasn’t going to reach down and strangle him, which I was close enough to do, or claim my leg back. He sensed I’d given it to him, the way I’d trusted his navigation.
I saw a painting in my mind, bright and bold as the moment my ex had described it to me. We were in a museum, and I was blind again to enjoy her description. The painting was of a man, chained by circumstance, wearing little but his helpless scowl and a beard she described as “imp or tant.” And yet this man with the important beard was being attacked by a cruel creature. A bird who tore into his flesh with razored precision and sought to pull from him whatever hid beneath the skin.
“Why are you telling me this?” I complained, eyes squeezed tight.
“Because it’s true.”
My hawk dipped in again, then paused. Though I was still, the earth trembled around me, as if to frighten off the bird I had failed to dismiss. His beak and face were chocolaty with blood as he opened his mouth and dropped a tiny glowing pellet. It played melon green against the hard night background. And the pellet joined more than thirty others, still phosphorescent, on the ground. The hawk surveyed my injury again, shopping for another pellet but not digging in. The wound now clean of the metal tracers the bomb had injected me with, my hawk flew away. Circling. Keeping an eye until the air erased him from the page of night.
I pushed myself away from the water and the shrapnel as if both might jump back into my leg and finish the job. “Mc. would have liked that story,” I said out loud. “He would have known it was true.” But there was no reply. No R. over my shoulder like the bad guy in a movie. No hallucination of my ex spreading a picnic blanket, telling me an olive was a blueberry when she popped it into my mouth. Then laughing when I spit it out because it’s not how a thing feels, it’s what we expect it to feel like. No. Nothing. No partner to lie down with. Only the angry gape of my leg to remind me where I was. Or that I was even alive. “A fuckin’ hawk,” I laugh-shouted into the air.
And then there were arms under me, no, through me, through the space between my pits and my ribs. Strong arms yanking me backward at rescue velocity. The sky had lit up again with sulfur scores and wasted flame painting corners of the morning canvas. Tracers whizzed by my feet and face. Heat from an explosion passed over us hot as August. I was thinking us without knowing who my other half was. I was being dragged too rapidly to turn back and identify him. And the noise from the largest firelight I’d encountered since leaving the hotel made conversation moot. Whoever it was cared more for my safety than his own, willing to be target for so long just to hump my wounded self to possible safety.
“Soldier. The leg.” His voice finally threaded through the space between dimensions. “Can it go?” For a flash, I thought he was suggesting amputation.
“It goes,” I shouted, trying to bend it to show off dexterity. Had it curled up, almost boot to butt, when he let me go.
“Follow,” he spat, and I was up. Tearing after this fatigued hero toward a cinder-block building, rather, a pile of cinder blocks, nearly fifty yards away. I was stunned at how much I could see. The landscape was its brightest, morning plus bombs making for a generous display of light. And the hits were coming from three directions. Rocket launchers, mortar rounds, the invisible slash of old-school machine-gun bullets, all raining the air in a constant assault of triangles.
“Who’s firing?” I yelled, but hero was ahead, gesturing like a man late for a train. I didn’t want to be in this stranger’s control. Even if it was toward safety. I wasn’t ready to be carried, even though I needed it. Should’ve opened my eyes by the water’s edge, I thought, my mouth open in lifeless retreat. Should’ve played dead.
Like hero did. In front of me. Only he wasn’t playing. Bullets like bees stung him into a circle. He pirouetted once, then knees, then face into the ground. I pulled him out of the muck, his mouth a soup of blood and earth. Did my best arm hoist and began pulling him toward the cinder blocks. My back burned like my flesh was being tightened. But he had pulled me at least this far. I was going to make it, to see what was so goddamn great about these cinder blocks. What made them worth dying to see.
The road became bumpy. Seemed a lot of soldiers had spent their final moments scrambling for the cinder blocks. My path became a slalom between bodies posed like statues. Unbronzed. Unremembered. I heard a corpse’s ribs crack like peanut shells as I sought footing over a small beam.
I slipped in oil from a former truck, its naked frame making it look let down by the rest of the assembly line. The oil seeped into my shirt, cheap perfume, but I never lost stride. Hero was getting where these other slow-foots hadn’t. Even if it was going to be his grave. I needed to be in that truck, not just dragging past it. I needed the revolution of wheels, a motion I had always taken for granted. Like a teenager in a fifties beach flick, I needed wheels. Or something even simpler. A wheelbarrow.
We had a wheelbarrow in our garage growing up, the hell for. But it did spend one summer as little brother’s and my favorite mode of transportation. At ten I was too young and short to even attempt to steal dad’s car, and at five my bro fit so ideally inside the damn barrow, it seemed to have been custom built for the little guy’s transport action.
I took him on races up and down Victory, versus invisible foes to guarantee a win. “Another victory on Victory,” I’d celebrate. And his arms would shoot up like tiny goal posts.
“Victawy!” (Someone should bottle how a little kid talks. Save the world.)
We wheeled down to the corner after the ice cream truck had passed in front of our house. We liked to see if we could reach the last stop sign before he turned right and gone. If we didn’t make it, we figured we didn’t deserve the treat. Twice we raced it down the front stairs inside the house. First time brother went flying into the coatrack, saved only by Dad’s bearskin jacket and ridiculous matching hat. Softest thing our father ever did for either of us. Second time, it left wheel prints in a perfect mud-strip pattern down the seventeen beige carpet stairs. “We could say it’s new,” I offered to my mom. And for a moment, impossibly, she seemed to be entertaining the idea. Then the car in the driveway, and soon the carpet wasn’t the only part of the house with a new imprint on it.
I managed to hide that the wheelbarrow was the culprit (a bike was blamed, and quickly interred), and this prolonged the summer of rickshaw-esque joy. We used it so often, my mother became worried about her youngest losing his ability to walk. So we showed her that he could push me as well. About three feet, but still. Next thing, Mom’s in the barrow with two sons serpentining her down the backyard slope like drunk coal miners late with a delivery.
I needed a wheelbarrow that day. I needed to be pushing hero, not pulling him. I could have navigated us to any destination with grace and wily speed. Known when to duck, to swerve, to screech to a halt, only to roll on again. But yanking him backward, blind in all but one foot, and this destination promising only because he was rushing me this way. What if there wasn’t even a nook to hide behind? What if the enemy had already taken it? Who the fuck was the enemy? So I stopped. In protest of not understanding anything at all, I stopped. The bullets did not. I dropped down beside my clearly deceased hero and used him as one hundred ninety pounds of blockade. He looked like me, only a few battles older. Even in death, his face seemed tense. Lived. Scars railroaded across his chin, lips, and cheek. He was American. Standard issue uniform, top to bottom, though roughnecked by the proceedings. I managed to open his rucksack, take ammo and his sidearm. Last bit of water I used for a quick swig, then to wash the blood and mud off his face.
“Thank you.” I said it, but it felt like it was coming from him, too. Such minuscule tenderness, always too late, was a comfort in the knowing and the doing.
A bullet tore into his dead legs, stopping an inch short of mine. I could see the nub of the slug nosing out of his pants. As far as protection, the cinder blocks had to be better than this. I placed my hand on his chest as good-bye and leverage, then low-sprinted as fast as I could. The blocks were only twenty feet away, and I dared to believe that I deserved at least that much. If I had succeeded in not dying yet, then reaching this arbitrary yet necessary way station somehow seemed fair. When survival seemed impossible, nothing surprised me. But this close to being able to hide was a tease. So I dreamed myself bulletproof until the cinder blocks could make it so.
I hugged the first block so hard as I swung around behind it that I took a layer of skin off my face. And it felt good. I smiled. Looked around to find someone to show it to. The white of my teeth. The fresh aliveness of my injuries. Look at me. I’m a soldier.
But no one had made it that far. I was alone. And I suddenly realized that all the dead around me hadn’t been miming toward this construction. They’d been sprinting away from it. The bars that had separated the cells now lay as splayed and crooked as old car parts. The bomb that tore open this prison at the impact point was now molecularized into the metal-hard dirt.
There were a few odd survivors. A porcelain toilet bowl, sideways but proudly intact. Half a sink, looking like the faucet had frozen in middrip. But it was only the stretched metal of the melted faucet itself. One wall was nearly unmarked, with chains and hoops and makings that indicated this was the torture chamber. Of course, the one thing to outlive all is the means of torture. In the end it’ll just be two big guns aimed at each other, dreaming of a living thing able to pull the trigger.
The triangle of attack had slowed enough that I could try to do a little inventory. My leg wound was still wide as a child’s shovel and raw to the sight. But it hurt far more when I looked at it than when I didn’t. It was going to live. I did a routine bone check, as they’d taught us at the hotel. Adrenaline was a great masker of pain, and men had been known to be running on a fracture until the bone interrupted the skin like a white exclamation point. Nothing broken. All joints operable. I checked hero’s handgun. Loaded. My hands were quivering, but I willed them to stop. For the first time since I’d lain down in the church, a sense of calm visited, even as the fighting stirred beyond my prison.
Were these military prisoners? Was this a holiday pen for civilian suspects awaiting trial? In a war-torn country, anything was possible. Shoplifters would get tortured under the right regime. So there was no way of knowing who had been incarcerated without crawling back into the crossfire and examining who had died fleeing the coop. Not. Quite. Yet. I was enjoying, nearly luxuriating in the privacy of these two and a half walls. The crater invited a deeper sense of protection. But all because, once I reached the jail, not a single round came anywhere near me. No wonder hero had been racing us here. Perhaps he’d been encouraged, safe and waiting, when he binoculared a fellow grunt pulling himself up onto the unannounced beach. And, as heroes do, he ran and grabbed me with only one oath in mind. I couldn’t say I was feeling similarly inspired. I had had my fill of looking. It was a relief not to be checking every angle for possible demons and daredevils, snipers and fiends. I needed sleep. The sleep R. had stolen from me at the church. I did make a pact with myself that, exhausted or not, an R. sighting would prompt a hurried rescue, or at least a signal to make a run for this concrete haven. But with my eyes dropping like bank windows, seeing anything but black seemed remote.
Extreme fatigue is like an illness. It steals the limbs first, like frost climbing up a lawn deer. Then, the heart, so slow it feels packed in gauze and encircled by closed chambers, asleep in its own bed. The mind goes somewhere in between. Static. Clarity. Tears. Terror. Peace. In the moments before unconsciousness, there is only gratitude and anger, fleshed together, antitwins. And then, in a white flash of slumber, everything is, no, everything seems OK.
In my dream, the dead prisoners surrounded me like buddies at a poker game. They explained where they were from, how tall they were in high school, what had led them to this visible end. They were of every ethnicity and bore no markings of the damage death had pounded into them. Ranging in age from twenty to fifty, in demeanor from sullen to self-righteous. Their uniforms were neat, with only the identifying flags torn off the shoulders. As if dying was a disgrace to their country.
“No country dishonors their dead soldiers.” I complained to them. My voice felt trapped and gummy, like a sparrow on a tar roof.
“This is no country.”
I had a thousand questions to ask, but there was no time between their memories. They overlapped each other’s stories, looming from one to the next with the thinnest strands of color as a bridge. But they held. What language were they speaking? Was it mine, or me understanding theirs? Were they even using words at all? Yet I seemed to know the ending of almost every tale: Money lost down the sewer? The smallest dog in the neighborhood lowered down with tape on his paws. Cut from the freshman basketball team? Needed to get a job, couldn’t honor the time commitment, make all the practices. Liar. Scrape on the neck from a father’s too-rough punishment? Ran into a clothesline in the dark.
Even in the dream, I put my hand to my throat.
The men’s faces had something else in common. They were all listening intently. To their own stories and to each other’s, like orchestra members reading unseen sheet music. There was a rhythm to their entries and exits. Not a word was accidental, not a gesture unnecessary. And then, without warning, each began to tell his neighbor’s stories. The amber-haired square-jaw with at least forty years lived told the memory of the twenty-year-old boy-man with hair as long and thin as spools of floss. As the older man spoke, he watched twenty to make sure he was getting the story right, waiting for the approving nod, which gently came.
Then a man with a nose that honored his head began repeating the words of the stallion-faced thirty-year-old across from him. He did it with the rigid assurance of a trial witness. But the story was intact, and the orchestra continued. They were all playing different instruments now, but the music of the remembrance seemed to vibrate even deeper once they had taken on each other’s fables. They were now caretakers more than orators. Poets. Beseechers. They held the new stories in the cradles of their tongues and raised the sentences up until they were full-grown. Alert. Alive.
When they had finished this gifting, their mouths closed. Then their eyes. Finally, their hands, folded onto their laps. They had accomplished their task. They were silently, reverently waiting for me. To tell them everything I’d heard. To let them furl into whatever’s next now that they knew their stories were all vouchsafed with me.
I tried to signal them that they were mistaken. That I could only recall their courage and the familiarity, but not the words themselves. I could never be trusted to share a syllable of all their victories. Their yearning, waiting, their inbetweenness. “Wait,” I yelled, my voice still weak, then weaker, “I can’t remember … all of this.” They opened their eyes. “Any of it,” I continued, hoping my face would say the rest. Doubt, worry, apology. Need.
“You were the one,” twenty said, “who wanted to meet us.” No, I thought. I never wanted to know any of this. I hated my own stories. Why would I want to collect theirs?
“These aren’t our stories,” a new man in the circle said. It was hero, a bullet hole clean through his cheek. “These are yours.”
Wake up. Wake up! Asshole, wake up! I said it loud enough to make my circle disappear. They receded or vanished or dusted, each in his own way. But I was still asleep. I could not wake myself, despite being terrified of the circle speakers returning, and this time disappearing me off with them.
