The Seas (11 page)

“Not stolen. It flew to me,” he says and laughs a little.

I feel like I have to explain myself to him, so I say, “Grandpa, I wasn’t trying to kill myself. I just thought that if I went back into the water that then Jude wouldn’t have to die, that then Jude could meet a nice girl from the dry land and marry her and he’d stop drinking.”

My grandfather nods his head. He can hear when he wants to. “That’s one way of seeing it,” he says.

My grandfather and I only disagree based on misalignments or misunderstandings from his age to mine. For instance he might yell, “Damn broken caps!” And I would think he means his bulbous red nose’s broken capillaries. So I would say, “Well you shouldn’t have drunk so much your whole life.” But then he would look at me puzzled. He would be holding a piece of type, a capital B and the bottom curve has broken off. “Into the hellbox with you,” he would say to the B, but I would think he means to me, too.

My grandfather has told me he remembers a time before longitude and latitude. That would make him older than I believe physically possible, but he insists that he remembers the headline: Tiny Lines Circle The Globe! More on page 24.

These longitude lines can cause problems for map printers—spreading a round thing, like the globe, to flat distorts the truth of what’s between the lines. Mercator Projection makes up solid land that’s not actually there so that molehill Greenland makes a mountain. That made-up land, made-up sea near Greenland is not too far away from where I live.

Jude runs his hand through his hair, but this town is flat and the space between each line of text, each strand of Jude’s black hair, stretches out so that what I read is more than one width of truth. He runs his hand through his hair and the Mercator Projection makes my ground shake. His fingers and his hair stretch like the longitude lines in my head so that his molehill, “You’re too young,” makes my mountain, “Rope, knife, gun.”

My grandfather takes down an old map from the Constantinople Press while my mother walks into the kitchen. He spreads the map out before me while she looks over my shoulder. He points to Greenland. “This is how a nineteen-year-old girl sees a man like Jude,” he says. “The Mercator Projection. It’s making Jude look a lot larger than he actually is. The truth is Jude’s a drunk from a very small place who doesn’t say much because there’s nothing to say.”

I shake my head no. “Look at my map,” I say, but I don’t have a map.

“What are you talking about?” my mother asks, and while I think of how I can explain to them just how much I love Jude, she says, “Just don’t get stuck here because of him. Don’t get stuck like I did.” She tucks her chin and starts to cry again. When she does this I can see the back of her head. There’s something there, something gross. She has a clump of seaweed stuck in her hair. It has dried there, like marooned debris that waits and waits and waits in the rocks for an extremely high tide to come sweep it back out to the ocean. It waits and rots and stinks.

“I have to go, you guys.”

“That’s what I am trying to tell you.” My mother bites at her lip and my grandfather rolls his map. “It’s dangerous to stay here,” she says and stands up, coming towards me. But I feel scared. I back myself up against the countertop and wrap my arms across my chest for protection. Fear creeps up my back, and it is a fear so loud I find it difficult to hear my thoughts. My mother opens her arms to hug me, but I am so scared that I don’t uncross my arms. She hugs me and speaks right into my ear in a whisper, “The water—” she says and then, “This is a small town,” she says and then interrupts herself again, “You should get out now.”

I stand still sort of hugging my mother, wondering does she mean this instant, now, or soon, within the month or year? I stand still, thinking about that, and she stands still hugging me, petting my neck and ear. We are so still that I can hear the sound of waves in the basement again. I can hear waves breaking on our cellar stairs, lapping higher and higher, coming closer. In that instant the fear in my spine, the water in the cellar, unleashes a screaming word to my brain, an answer, one simple word, and it’s, “Now!” I kiss my mother. I kiss my grandfather and run.

I keep running. At first I think of running to the police station, but Jude once dated a woman who works there and I remember that the night she met me she said, “Ah, what a cute girl. Isn’t it after your bedtime?” I don’t know what to tell the police anyway. If I said, “I am a mermaid, but a good one. I don’t want to kill anybody. But my father, that’s another story,” they might lock me up. I run to Jude’s. If the water’s coming to get him at least I can try to protect him.

He lets me in and for ten minutes we don’t talk. I haven’t seen him since I got home from the hospital. He just waits while I catch my breath. Finally he says, “Listen. You’ve got enough trouble without me.” He is very serious about it. He pulls a bottle of Canadian whiskey down off the refrigerator. “We’ve got to stop seeing each other.”

“Why?”

“Well something seems to be pulling you apart, and I don’t want it to be me. Your mother, well, she thought you were acting a bit delusional.”

“Oh, my mother called me delusional? Well, where does she think that came from?”

“She just wants something different for you.”

Jude pours us both a small glass of whiskey and as he places my glass on the kitchen table in front of me he leaves a wet print on the spot where his hand touched the tabletop, not whiskey, water. Jude has a seat and sips his drink. He shakes his head with the burn of the first swallow and from the tips of his hair droplets of moisture hit my face.

“Did you just get out of the shower?” I ask.

“No,” he says, and folds his eyebrows down the middle of his forehead.

“But,” I say, and then bite my tongue. Drops of water are making a puddle beneath him wherever he touches. Jude is melting. “What’s happening?” I ask.

He fills his glass again and wipes his forehead. “When the war was ending,” he says but I interrupt him.

“What’s happening here I mean.”

It takes him a moment but he says, “I think this is about what’s happening here. Eventually. Sorry. Listen.” The rain begins to fall outside.

“There was a boy from Galveston, Texas, in my battalion,” he says. “The boy really was just a boy, eighteen, a real slight guy. He had two or three wiry, billy goat hairs growing from his chin, but not enough to start shaving yet. This kid was quiet and didn’t fit in with the other soldiers so well, like me, so we were often lumped together at meals or on night patrols. He had a girlfriend back in Texas who he missed so badly that sometimes he’d howl like he was a wolf. And whenever I asked him, ‘Why the hell are you howling?’ he said it helped him get all the longing inside him on the outside. So I let him howl. I didn’t tease him about it, though some of the other soldiers would. I thought the wolf-boy was fine because lots of people had strange reactions to the war and what they saw. A lot of us started to wonder why we were there at all. So being a wolf didn’t seem so bad, not nearly as bad as what some of the other soldiers did.”

Jude fingers the hairs on his arm. Where he touches melts some more. A pool of water forms on the table.

“But the wolf-boy,” Jude says, “after some time in the desert, he started to forget the boy side of his personality. He started to become all wolf, and it was a little bit disturbing to the other soldiers. It was really disturbing to me because we were friends sort of. I still went on patrol with him, but the boy had stopped talking all together. In fact, the boy had stopped walking on two legs when he didn’t have to. He’d carry himself on all fours, with his head bent low to the ground as if he were trying to catch a scent of something. But even then I still tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, ‘Well, he just misses his girlfriend. He’ll be all right,’ I thought. And I continued to think that until the day a group of us, wolf-boy, me, and twelve other soldiers, were sent on a mission into a town that had been all but destroyed by our missiles. The Iraqis had mined it up pretty good, too, so it wasn’t a very safe place to be.

“The town was small and all we found there were twenty-three dead people and a radio that was picking up music from a station all the way in Kuwait. The radio music was creepy since the rest of the town was so quiet. I picked my way through the town alone because I didn’t really trust the other soldiers to not trigger a mine. Our job there was to dig a grave large enough to fit the twenty-three bodies we had found and to cover the bodies up, because the bodies weren’t the bodies of soldiers but civilians and they’d been sitting there for a while, a couple of days.

“So after searching the town we began to dig, and the digging took far longer than we had thought it would because the heat was too much in all the gear we had to wear. We decided to wait for the sun to set. Then we didn’t have enough shovels, which happened all the fucking time, not having enough tools for the job, and so we had to dig in shifts.

“After about an hour on duty I gave my shovel to another soldier and walked away to get some peace. But all the while that damn radio was still playing. I walked outside the light of the soldiers’ lanterns to try to see the stars ’cause in the desert the stars were the only thing that reminded me that I was still here on Earth. But I couldn’t see shit that night because the town was still smoldering and the smoke was thick between me and the sky, like it was gelatin.

“I walked through the paths in town that passed between homes which no longer had roofs or walls. I was touching the warm walls that were mostly ruined. I was thinking about the land mines. I thought about the triggers on the mines, and I was so lonely that the mines’ triggers made me think of a woman’s clit,” Jude said, and looked up sheepishly, his brow soaking wet with melt. “In the dark I thought of all the hidden clitorises and pressed myself up against the wall that was still warm from the day and the fires. I thought of the land mines like girls. I shut my eyes and imagined I heard myself fucking the mine. I heard skin against metal skin, a slapping, a slobbering, a huffing. I was fucking a land mine in my head and it felt good. It was so real that I could hear it. But then I opened my eyes and the sound was still there. I listened. The sound was real. It wasn’t the radio. Someone was there, slobbering and huffing. I crouched. I thought there might be an Iraqi or a wounded soldier. On my knees I crept along the wall until I saw a light and heard the noise grow louder. So fucking slowly I looked through the door from where the light was coming. It was the wolf-boy. He was huddled over an Iraqi girl who had been dead for two days. Her head had been raised up on a rock like a pillow and in her hand she was still grabbing a slip of paper. I guess it was something she’d been holding when she died and she was still holding it. The wolf-boy was licking her face and neck with his tongue. He was slobbering, huffing on her as if to lick the girl clean and whole again.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ I asked him and tried to run toward him, but there were broken bricks and all manner of shit between us. I grabbed at him though I didn’t know what I was going to do if I caught him, but it didn’t matter anyway because the wolf-boy kind of reared up and his mouth was just sick with blood. He howled and he pointed his fucking pistol at me, not too much like a wolf. He turned and he ran away on all fours, only one of the four was holding a fucking gun.” Jude demonstrates this with his fingers on the table. “The wolf boy ran straight out to a dry field of crops growing beside the town. The field really was dry, it was burnt so there was nothing growing in it except for these land mines buried there and the wolf-boy touched one of the mines and then I did see stars even though the night was too smoky for stars.”

Jude wrings his face and hair. Drops of water fall on the kitchen linoleum.

“Shit,” I say. He’s never told me anything like this before. He’s never told me anything about Iraq really.

Jude continues, “I spent the night walking through the town. The roads were clear and there was a grid pattern to the streets, but the blocks surrounded by the grid were nothing but piles of rubbish, no more buildings. When the sun started to rise I came across some of the guys from my battalion. They were huddled by a pile of rocks,” he says. “The rocks looked like they had been particularly assembled, like a grave site or some sort of memorial. So I asked the soldiers, ‘What have you got there?’ There were five of them and each one was younger than me, closer to your age I’d say, nineteen or so. ‘It’s a well,’ they said, and stared at me until one of them laughed. ‘Let’s have a drink then,’ I said. I was so tired and wrecked. The soldiers were smirking like smart asses so I didn’t want to tell them about the wolf-boy. One soldier passed me the rope and said, ‘Go ahead.’ He turned to look back at the other soldiers and each of them began to laugh. I threw the rope down, dipped the bucket and started pulling it back up.” Jude again demonstrates how he pulled the bucket up, turning away from the table to do so, and I stare as moisture drips from his forearms. “I could taste how cold the water would be coming up from so far down. I was ready for a nice long drink but when I got the bucket up into the sunlight, I could see the well wasn’t filled with water at all.” Jude stops the pulling motion and turns to me. “It was filled with watery blood that smelled of rot. I dropped the bucket and could hear it clang against the stones inside the well. The soldiers were laughing, but I think it was just ’cause they were scared by what was in the well. The one I had been talking to said, ‘At first we thought something religious was happening.’ See some of the soldiers were religious, even fundamentalist,” Jude says. “And so they always thought religious things were happening because they were nervous. They were breaking the Ten Commandments so close to where they thought the Garden of Eden was supposed to have been. There was an Army chaplain who told them, ‘No, no. It’s not Thou Shalt Not Kill. It’s Thou Shalt Not Murder. You boys are OK.’ But they didn’t believe him.”

Jude shrugs and takes a sip. “So the soldier told me, ‘But it’s not religious. Here,’ he said. ‘Look,’ and he shone his flashlight down into the well. It was filled with bodies. Maybe a family of them.” Jude stops and looks at me. “Then the soldier, he said, ‘We figure they must have jumped down in there when the bombing started. That or else someone dumped them there,’ he said. I looked down into the well until I recognized what I was looking at and from the tangle I picked out the pale under part of one body’s arm. Then, I remember, one of the soldiers said, ‘Idiots,’ and he started kicking at the side of the well.