One September Morning (6 page)

Washington
Madison

A
s Ziggy waves a match over the ends of two cigarettes—one for him, one for Sienna—Madison lets out a sigh over the injustice of it all.

Why do her parents think she’s a criminal?

They always suspect her, the straightest, most cautious kid in the pack. They’re sure she’s dabbling in drugs and booze and sex, when the truth of the matter is she’s just a sixteen-year-old innocent.

Ziggy’s lower lip pokes out, releasing a stream of smoke that lifts the stringy hair over his forehead. “I can’t believe he wouldn’t sell me a pack of smokes.” He sulks.

It is a little surprising, since Ziggy looks about ten years older than he is, with dark circles under his eyes and a barrel chest that you’d figure more for a prize boxer than the leader of the high school marching band.

“Do you think your friend’ll score some for us?” Ziggy asks.

“Don’t even ask her,” Madison says, shooting a look over at Suz, who’s talking with some old man gassing up at the station. “She doesn’t want to contribute to your sick addiction. And you know the word will get back to my parents that I’m smoking. Which I’m not.” She waves a hand through the air, trying to fend off the smoke. “You’re disgusting.”

Sienna and Ziggy exchange a look and giggle.

“Pollyanna.” Sienna accuses with thinly veiled disdain. “It’s a good thing we like you.”

“Since when did this become about scoring cigarettes?” Madison holds up the sign in her hands, which reads:
NO MORE BUSHIT
—
GET OUT OF IRAQ
! “I thought we came here to launch a war protest, get the message out.”

“Whatever,” Sienna says in that sing-song tone she thinks is so clever but in truth is quite irritating.

Sometimes Madison has to ask herself why it is she hangs out with this crew. She is the only squeaky-clean freak here, despite her parents’ suspicions.

She has never been arrested.

She doesn’t do drugs, and the few times she tried alcohol it was in small doses in safe venues, at the houses of friends, none of whom would be so boneheaded as to get behind the wheel of a car after downing a beer or a few drinks of vodka and orange juice.

Madison is an A student, honor roll, National Honor Society, just one apple short of being teacher’s pet.

She’s a vegetarian, a runner, and she showers on a regular basis.

So what’s so incredibly wrong with me?

For her parents, it’s all wrapped up in her political activism, which could be summed up with the sign she’s holding up to block the blinding sun.

Get out of Iraq.

She really believes this. She wants her brothers home—J-Dawg and Noah-Balboa. She wants all those young guys and women home. All those poor kids, not much older than she is, from places like Alabama or Ohio, who enlisted because they had no other job choices.

Her mother says it’s wrong to hate anyone, but she hates the president. He claims that a soldier is obliged to serve his country without questioning decisions from a higher authority, but how can anyone not question? How can anyone not see how useless it is for our people to be dying, unappreciated and without gain, thousands of miles from home?

And how could one man—the president—get away with it? Signing off on a few documents, giving a few orders and—POOF!—we were at war. And suddenly thousands of kids and fathers and brothers are sent off to a strange place where the air is dryer than Mars and the roadsides explode in your face.

That’s what happened to Suz’s husband, Scott—a roadside bomb. One of Scott’s commanding officers wrote Suz a letter saying that the IED came out of nowhere, that Scott never knew what hit him, that he didn’t suffer. Which has to be a load of crap—the suffering part. And somehow, for a guy like Scott with a wife and baby at home, maybe he’d want a few minutes’ warning, a chance to say good-bye, to send last messages to Suz and Sofia.

Of course, Madison is not supposed to know any of this stuff because it is strictly AW—Adult World—but she’s always listening, and when her mother gets engrossed in her military wives’ network stuff, she forgets anyone else is around.

But Madison hears everything.

She heard her mother’s cry of outrage when the base commander announced there would be no more individual memorial services for soldiers killed in Iraq—because they couldn’t friggin’ keep up with it, that’s why. And she’s heard the endless stories, the families whose sons or husbands signed up for a stint in the National Guard, thinking they’d be called in during an earthquake or flood or something, but finding themselves shipped off to Iraq and returning in a body bag. Those stories hit all the papers in Washington and Oregon, though no one on base wants to talk about it because they have to believe they’re doing the right thing serving their country. Otherwise, they’d go crazy.

Un-fucking-believable, as Ziggy says when his head is screwed on straight. That would be when he’s not floating on a cloud of weed or trying to scrounge some money to cop some. Ziggy is one of those untapped geniuses. He’ll probably become an engineer, or a scientist who comes up with a cure for cancer, if he ever kicks the weed and survives high school.

Madison holds her sign up to passing motorists, motioning for them to honk if they support peace. Behind her, half the people she came with are already flaked out on the mall, and the other half seem to be dropping like flies, abandoning their march to sit in the grass, search for four-leaf clovers, and contemplate their navels. Ziggy and Sienna are working the edge of the gas station, bumming money from people who come in to fill up their cars. Cameron, Matthew, and Lily are stretched out, sunning themselves beside the
WELCOME TO GREENDALE
sign, but no surprise there. She knows they just came along to get in Sienna’s good graces and prove they can fly their freak flag whenever.

Suz comes up from behind her, her sign held high. She gets a passing motorist to honk in support, and both girls wave back.

“Thanks for doing this,” Madison says, feeling awkward. Every time she’s been with Suz, it’s been orchestrated by her mother, who’s in that group of ladies who intervene when a soldier dies, trying to cure grief with casseroles and coffee cake and conversation.

“No problem,” Suz says. “It’s a hell of a good cause, and I can think of a lot worse things to do with my morning off.”

Madison was happy to help Suz when her husband got killed, and Sofia’s a cute kid, no trouble at all. But this is weird. Madison is here to prevent other guys from getting killed the way Scott was. But still, when she turns to look at Suz, a sickening feeling soaks through her. It’s too late for Scott, right? He’s dead. And Sofia, their little kid with brown eyes as wide as buttons, who loves to sing the alphabet song and lace her fingers through yours, Sofia is never going to have a daddy. And that’s so wrong.

Madison’s cell phone chimes. When she sees that it’s her mother, she definitely does not want to answer, at least not until she considers the alternatives. What if Mom persists and then calls the school to leave a message in the office? What if they tell her Madison is absent for the day?

Suz is watching her hesitate when her cell phone starts ringing, too. When she snaps it open Madison decides to answer her mom. She’ll pretend she’s between classes or at lunch or something.

“Hello?” her mother’s voice sounds surprised, but she recovers quickly. “Honey, I’m on my way to pick you up,” she says. “You need to come home.”

Madison panics, thinking of her driving down the street, closing in on the school. “No don’t come,” she says quickly. “I’ll…I can drive myself. I’ve got the Jeep.”

“Then come right home,” her mother says emphatically.

“Mom—” Madison wants to argue, but something in her mother’s voice scares her. She’s shaken, not her usual self. “What is it?” Madison asks.

And then her mom lets loose. In a sobbing voice, she tells Madison it’s John. Something happened in Iraq. “Is he…?” Madison can’t say the word. Neither can her mom.

“Just come home,” her mother orders, her voice cracking.

And that’s when Madison knows the terrible reality.

John’s gone.

Goddamn George W! This is all so wrong, and now it’s too late. John is dead for no fucking reason.

There’s a hand on Madison’s shoulder.

“I’ll drive you home.” It’s Suz, her brown eyes soft with sympathy. Does she know?

“My brother…” Madison starts to say it but a huge knot in her throat chokes off the words.

“I know.” Suz pulls Madison into her arms, where the younger girl sobs against her lime green polka-dotted sweater.

“My J-Dawg cannot be gone,” Madison whispers against the petite woman’s shoulder. He can’t be gone. The world is not going to make any sense without him.

Iraq
Noah

H
e cannot speak.

If he opens his mouth the rage will spew forth, a roiling fireball of anger, bitterness, and contempt. Anger at his brother for leaving him here alone. Fury at John for selling him on the patriotic notion of signing up in the first place, his sweeping enthusiasm that brought Noah along for the ride, that led him to believe they could do something to make the world a better place. Hell, if you listened to John you’d think that the two of them could protect their country from nuclear war, intercepting the weapons of mass destruction like two star football players. The ultimate power play.

When Noah left the bungalow, where he was supposed to be getting rest, and set out into the windy desert without his helmet or flak jacket, he knew it was a foolish thing to do. But now, as he considered that the worst-case scenarios were death or court martial by the army, he calculated that there was so little to lose at this point. Life had suddenly become cheap and tenuous and fluid, like a splash of water that dripped through your cupped hands. So what if it was gone in seconds? It was just a fact of life…and death.

The temperature is bearable—maybe in the seventies—but a brisk wind blows dust and grit into his face. The Sharqi, a southeasterly wind that kicks up this time of year, can be unrelenting, and he reaches under his desert fatigues and pulls the neck of his undershirt up, stretching it over his mouth.

He passes the guard at the door of the Communications Center, then steps into the dimly lit, air-conditioned room, the only place on the makeshift Fort Liberation where soldiers have access to computers and the Internet. Sgt. Dawicki, or Sgt. Dweeb, as most of the men call the officer who runs the Communications Center, looks up from the eerie blue light of his terminal.

“Specialist Stanton,” he says, one eyebrow cocked as he sits back in his chair and rests his folded hands on his slight paunch. “What the hell are you doing in here at this ungodly hour?”

It’s one a.m. in Iraq, and most of the soldiers at Fort Liberation are either on duty or asleep in their quarters. “I need to use a computer.” Noah pushes out the words, only half lying, and he is relieved to see that the two PCs designated for use by soldiers are both free.

“Sign the log,” Sgt. Dweeb reminds him. “And sorry for your loss. Your brother was a fine soldier and a good man.”

My brother was a hothead,
he wants to say, but instead he just frowns as he signs the log book and takes his place at a terminal.

It takes less than a minute to insert the thumb drive and access it. And there, beaming at him from the monitor, is the list of files stored in the thumb-size drive that he shared with his brother. All of Noah’s files are titled with the initials NS, while John’s begin with JS.

Got ’em. Noah’s nostrils flare as he savors the victory. They had taken away John’s physical possessions, but he had access to his brother’s written legacy.

The need to view these files swelled inside him as he was scrubbing blood from his combat boots, worrying about the army’s wiping all memory and details of his brother clean. His brother’s body was barely cold when Colonel Waters’s goons were already in the quarters, confiscating John’s possessions, taking his photo of Abby, his letters from Ma. Christ, they even took the bottle opener Maddy gave him with the personalized “J-Dawg” nametag she’d made for him. The army’s voracious claim over all-things-John heightened Noah’s sense of loss and injustice. He wanted to tear John’s journal out of the M.P.’s hands, but then reason descended upon him.

You may own his body, his possessions,
Noah thought,
but you cannot own his thoughts.
And John’s rational arguments for peace would not be articulated in the chicken scratch of his journal; the polished debates would be on the computer.

They could hold John up as a hero, but in reality he was a vocal opponent of the way this war developed, an adversary of violence, an advocate of peace. Noah knows his brother wrote extensively to this effect, and he wants to have a copy of John’s writings—no matter how polished or rough they might be—so that no one can remake his brother into a dutiful soldier who followed blindly. He opens one of John’s files and finds a journal entry that might also be considered a call for peace.

John should have told Noah what to do with his essays, but then no one had ever guessed things could turn out this way. They’d had such high hopes when they’d signed up. To end terrorism by fighting Osama Bin Laden’s terrorists. To maintain peace by defusing Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

Only they got to this desert to find that there were no WMDs, only mortar rounds exploding in marketplaces and schools, homes and city streets. He and John came to stop death but landed in a world of fireballs and shrapnel and screams.

More death than Noah had ever imagined.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way; John wasn’t supposed to die. He wasn’t supposed to cut out and leave Noah alone here, fighting in a war he had never believed in.

Contempt burns in the back of Noah’s throat, contempt for the unseen war planners in the top brass, the strategists sitting in a command center somewhere who send down futile, meaningless orders for guys like him. Mission objective: break down doors of dark homes and apprehend insurgents. But no one tells you what an insurgent looks like, and no one can prepare you for the frightened faces of women and children huddled in windowless rooms, their eyes glowing in the green illumination of your NOD.

Or there’s always the order to “secure the perimeter,” another useless request.

“Orders from Oz,” John always used to joke. “The wizard wants us to reclaim the city block we secured and lost yesterday, but I say we click our boots three times and say ‘There’s no place like home.’”

Noah swallows past a lump in his throat as he opens another of John’s documents. This was not the way John planned to go home.

Rage flares in his chest. He wants to mourn John, wants to think benevolent thoughts, but whenever he thinks of him, Noah’s perverse mind goes to the negative things his brother has done. He can’t help but remember the times John bullied him as a kid, wrestling him to the ground and pressing marshmallows down his throat at a Cub Scout cookout. The way John ostracized him because he enjoyed growing things in their little plot of a garden, because he used to get a thrill out of nurturing a plant until it brought forth cucumbers or carrots or watermelons. Punching him in the jaw when he beat John in the Fourth of July race when they were kids. Sticking Noah with the blame when they got caught snooping in forbidden caves when their dad was assigned to Okinawa. Giving him a wedgie, slap-fighting behind their parents’ backs, embarrassing Noah in front of countless girls…

I hate him for all those things, and for the times that I was invisible, lost in the shadow of John Stanton.

Hatred is a sour taste in Noah’s mouth as he scrolls through his brother’s files, sure he is going to hell for thinking ill of the dead.

“I know your brother leaves a wife behind,” Sgt. Dweeb calls over in the conciliatory tone of a father. “A beautiful woman. Seen her picture online. Did they have any children? Any pets?”

“No.”

“Probably a blessing, given the circumstances.”

Noah nods, an image of John’s wife tugging at him, her dark eyes always full of questions and concern. Someday, he would share John’s writings with her but for now…now, he would just send the documents to himself as attachments, a way to have a backup in case anything happened to this thumb drive.

Noah’s chest feels lighter as he logs on to the Internet and starts sending John’s files into the electronic cosmos. At least, he would have this. The army could take his brother’s body, his clothes and worldly possessions, but these—John’s thoughts—would not be put under lock and key.

That,
Noah vows, picturing his brother handing out pencils to Iraqi school children,
is my promise to you.