Yellow Birds (15 page)

I looked at Sterling and shrugged. He shrugged back and called to the hermit from the side of the road, his voice echoing heavily over the short distance in the heat of late morning. Our shoulders hung limp against our sides.

The hermit called back, and as he did, the interpreter related what he said with a precise delay, which added to the confusion, their voices echoing in a way that gave me momentary déjà vu.

“He says that he has come through this place already and does not wish to walk the same way again.” The voice of the man slightly distant fell off before the last words of Pidgin English came. We looked quizzically at the interpreter and he said, “Check over there,” pointing to a patch of vegetation beneath the minaret.

Sterling motioned to the interpreter. “All right, get the fuck out of here. Head back to the others.”

“I don’t know, Sarge. Something ain’t right. This seems off,” I said. “Feels like a setup.”

He looked at me with extraordinary calm. “C’mon, Private, I figured you’d know by now. ‘Ain’t right’ is exactly what we’re looking for.”

I waited.

“Ah, fuck it,” he said. “Only one way to find out.”

We had looked for him hard, this one boy, this one name and number on a list. As the man pointed, our fears had become facts, our hopes smothered and mute. We had, in a strange way, surrendered. But to what, we did not know. The sound of gunfire could still be heard periodically in the distance. The city would be covered with brass casings. Battered buildings would have new holes. Blood would be swept into the streets and washed into gutters before we were through.

We looked at the old man in the field reclining peacefully beneath the shade of the tree and saw for the first time the depth of his age and his black eyes and the mysteries housed in them. His white shift fluttered and he laughed and swatted away a few bees with his hand. We turned and walked toward the copse of trees and bushes that ringed the tower.

At the base of the tower the trees and flowers were thin and tinder-dry. The tower itself rose upward and was slung out precariously over the river. Sterling and I circled the base of the tower in the heat of the nooning sun, its mass appearing out of the dirt and dead flora like some kind of ancient exclamation. We found Murph, finally, covered in a patch of lifeless hyacinth, resting motionless in the shade of the grass and low branches.

Laid up hard and broken-boned in the patch of vegetation that was his journey’s end, his body was twisted at absurd angles beneath the pink and shimmering tower. We moved the brush that either wind or passersby had scattered over him. We uncovered his feet first. They were small and bloody. A supply sergeant could have looked at them and said size seven, but he would not need boots now. Looking to the top of the tower, it was clear that he fell from a window where two speakers had been set up to amplify the muezzin’s call.

Daniel Murphy was dead.

“Not so high up, if you really think about it,” Sterling said.

“What?”

“I think he was probably dead before he fell. It just isn’t that great a height.”

It was truly not a fall from all that great a height: broken bones were broken further, no resistance or attempt to land was made; the body had fallen, the boy already dead, the fall itself meaning nothing.

We pulled Murph free from the tangle of brush and laid him out in some shadow of respectability. We stood and looked him over. He was broken and bruised and cut and still pale except for his face and hands, and now his eyes had been gouged out, the two hollow sockets looking like red angry passages to his mind. His throat had been cut nearly through, his head hung limply and lolled from side to side, attached only by the barely intact vertebrae. We dragged him like a shot deer out of a wood line, trying but failing to keep his naked body from banging against the hard ground and bouncing in a way that would be forever burned into our memories. His ears were cut off. His nose cut off, too. He had been imprecisely castrated.

He’d been with us for ten months. He was eighteen years old. Now he was anonymous. The picture of him that would appear in the newspaper would be of him in Class A’s in basic, a few pimples on his chin. We’d never be able to see him that way again.

I took my woobie out of my pack and covered him. I couldn’t look anymore. Most of us had seen death in many forms: the slick mess after a suicide bomber, headless bodies gathered in a ditch like a collection of broken dolls on a child’s shelf, even our own boys sometimes, bleeding and crying as it became apparent that the sound of a casevac was thirty seconds too far in the distance. But none of us had seen this.

“What should we do with him?” I asked. The words themselves seemed incomprehensible. I drifted in and around the significance of the question, first reckoning with the fact that the decision would be ours. Two boys, one twenty-four, the other twenty-one, would decide what should happen to the body of a boy who had died and been butchered in the service of his country in an unknown corner of the world. We knew that if we brought him back, there would be questions. Who found him? What did he look like? What was it like?

“Fuck, little man. You didn’t have to go out like this,” Sterling said to the body at his feet. He flopped down on his butt into the dry grass and took his helmet off.

I sat next to Murph and began to tremble, rocking back and forth.

“You know what we got to do.”

“Not like this, Sarge.”

“It’s what we do. No matter what. You know that shit, Bart.”

“It’ll be worse.”

“We don’t decide. That’s way above our pay grade.”

“Sarge, you gotta trust me. We can’t let that happen.”

We both knew what that was. There are few real mysteries in life. The body would be flown to Kuwait, where it would be mended and embalmed as best it could by mortuary affairs. It would land in Germany, tucked into a stack of plain metal caskets as the plane refueled. It would land in Dover, and someone would receive it, with a flag, and the thanks of a grateful nation, and in a moment of weakness his mother would turn up the lid of the casket and see her son, Daniel Murphy, see what had been done to him, and he would be buried and forgotten by all but her, as she sat alone in her rocking chair in the Appalachians long into every evening, forgetting herself, no longer bathing, no longer sleeping, the ashes of the cigarettes she smoked becoming long and seeming always about to fall to her feet. And we’d remember too, because we would have had the chance to change it.

He stood up and started pacing. “Let’s just think this through a minute,” he said. “Let me get a smoke.”

I gave him one and lit one for myself. My hands were shaking and my lighter wouldn’t stay lit in the wind and the wind blew the woobie and uncovered what was left of Murph’s face. Sterling stared at the empty sockets. I put the blanket back. Minutes ticked into the past. A few birds darted in and out of the brush and sang. The sound of the river became clearer.

“You better not be wrong about this.”

I couldn’t think. I wanted to take it all back. “This is so fucked, Sarge.”

“Chill out, man. Just chill out, all right,” he said, and then paused reflectively. “Here’s what we do: you get on that radio and tell the terp to send over the hajji with the cart. Tell them we didn’t find him.”

I took a minute and collected myself. Sterling went on, “We’re gonna have to fix this like it never happened. You know what that means, right?”

“Yeah. I know.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

We waited. A strange peace took shape between us. The sun muted the periphery into a mere abstraction of color and shape. Everything we did not look at directly became a blur in the corners of our eyes. We watched the hermit come, tapping lightly at the haunch of his mule. He walked slowly in the heat and all that was clear in our vision was the man and his lame mule emerging out of a hazy mirage, everything else vague or inverted or duplicate. The mule treaded lightly on its tinkered foreleg, and the man patiently guided it toward us. As he came closer we saw that the two mutts from before loped along behind him. The hermit approached and looked each of us in the eye as if we were lined up for an open-rank inspection, and finally said, “Give me a cigarette, mister.” I gave him one and he lit it, inhaled deeply and smiled.

Sterling reached for Murph’s legs and tried to lift him up. We didn’t have the chance to take it back. We had never had the chance, not really. It was as if we had already done it in another life I could only vaguely remember. The decision had been made. I moved to where Sterling was and grabbed Murph by the arms. I shuddered quickly. My heart beat recklessly. We picked Murph up and brushed the dancing flies from his skin and tried not to look into his empty sockets as we laid him in the back of the cart among the clay and stone and the figurines of straw.

“We’ll take him to the river,” Sterling said. “We’ll leave him there. Give me your lighter, Bart.”

I did. He lit the Zippo and left it burning and dropped it into the dry brush at the base of the tower.

“Let’s go,” he said.

It was not far from the river, and we walked behind the hermit as he led the mule into some approximation of a trot. We followed behind this odd coterie of man and mule and dog for a half a klick or so, until we saw the banks of the river. Water lapped the edges and bulrushes swayed gently in the shallows at the banks.

Sterling tapped on my shoulder, pointed behind me, and I saw the minaret in flames from the dried brush burning at its base. Burn it. Burn the motherfucker down. The tower lit up like a flickering candle as the sun began to descend from its brutal apex. I thought for a moment that we might burn down the whole city for that one tower. I was briefly ashamed, but quickly forgot why.

Sterling looked at me and whispered, mostly to himself, “Fuck ’em, man. Fuck everyone on earth.”

Amen. We floated behind the cart down the broad avenue leading to the edge of the river. The street was lined with poplars and the bodies from our search; opaque shades of brown, all ages and species. We walked past many things in flames. The thin and knotty trees and flowers soaked up the fire and lined the avenue in the descending sun like ancient guideposts, all flaming and circling a little light on the scattered bodies, breaking up the dark.

We floated past the people of the city, the old and childless hovel dwellers who wailed some Eastern dirges in their warbling language, all of them sounding like punishments sung specifically for our ears. Daniel Murphy’s body in the cart reflected the orange glow, the only color on his thin and parchment skin was the flickering palette of the fire. The shadows danced on his pale form and only the listing of the broken mule and tottering cart made his body appear to move like something other than a canvas for this burning scene.

We walked the body in the cart down to the edge of the river. The hermit walked around to the rear of his cart, stroked the mule’s flank and then embraced Murph, lifting him out of the flat carriage. Sterling and I each grabbed a leg and we walked the last few steps to the river and laid him in. He floated off quickly in the steady current, and in the water past the bulrushes little pools formed where his eyes had been.

“Like it never happened, Bartle. That’s the only way,” Sterling said.

“Yeah, I know.” I looked at the ground. The dust blowing in fine swirls around my boots. I knew what was coming.

Sterling shot the cartwright once, in the face, and he crumpled to the ground. No time to even be surprised by it. The mule began to pull the cart, unbidden, as if by habit. The two dogs followed it into the coming night. We looked back toward the river. Murph was gone.

Then it was
spring again in all the spoiled cities of America. The dark thaw of winter fumbled toward its end and passed. I smelled it reeking through my window during that seventh April of the war, the third and last of my confinement. My life had become as ordinary as I could have hoped for. I was happy. The prison was only tier II, for convicts serving terms of five years or less, a Regional Confinement Facility, which all the Joes called “adult day care.” It made me laugh.

I had been pleasantly forgotten about by almost everyone. The staff allowed me to check out books from the moderately well run prison library. I learned that when I finished reading them they could be stacked on the metal desk that jutted out of the cell wall and I’d be able to look out the window, which was large enough to let in light but far too high to see out of without the aid of something else to stand on. I had a fine view of the exercise yard and the tree line past the concertina fence, which more or less marked the limit of the base’s prison grounds, for as long as I could balance on the ever-weakening bindings of whatever stacks of books allowed my looking. Beyond the tree line the dull world that ignored our little pest of a war rolled on.

My first few months inside, I spent a lot of time trying to piece the war into a pattern. I developed the habit of making a mark on my cell wall when I remembered a particular event, thinking that at some later date I could refer to it and assemble all the marks into a story that made sense. I still remembered what some of them meant for a long time afterward: that long chalky scratch below the mirror next to “FTA” stood for that kid whose head Murph cradled in the orchard as he died. The one above my bunk reflected an instant of thought I’d had in an alley in Al Tafar, in the heat of that first summer when the shade of webs of power lines were little blessings as we passed beneath them, and a corner was turned by whoever had been on point that day, and I saw Sterling as he turned around and waved for me and Murph to cross into the open road, and it occurred to me that Murph had had a choice, there were two paths he could have taken and I was one of them, and I asked myself if I could be worthy of that task, and wondered if that is what his mother meant when she asked me to take care of him, and is that why she asked? As I made my mark, if I remember right, the chalk broke and the mark became much shorter than I could recall intending, and what did it mean that this choice was an illusion, that all choices are illusions, or that if they are not illusions, their strength is illusory, for one choice must contend with the choices of all the other men and women deciding anything in that moment? I’d made that mark into a kind of flash, an explosion in chalk dust on the light green painted concrete of my walls. Who could ask to have their will be done against all that? And what about the choices we don’t ever get to, like Murph’s, which was not and will not be gotten to because he died, like me being that which was not gotten to? It seemed silly, but I remembered that mark and what it meant. Eventually, I realized that the marks could not be assembled into any kind of pattern. They were fixed in place. Connecting them would be wrong. They fell where they had fallen. Marks representing the randomness of the war were made at whatever moment I remembered them: disorder predominated. Entropy increased in the six-by-eight-foot universe of my single cell. I eventually accepted the fact that the only equality that lasts is the fact that everything falls away from everything else.

Sometimes the staff would come by my cell and see a new collection of marks. They were never able to distinguish new marks from old ones, but a few of the guards had a sense of what the volume was before they’d gotten their forty-eight hours off, or gone on vacation, and they recognized, if nothing else, when the randomness expanded. Now, I understand why they would have seen this as a pattern, and perhaps there was a pattern there after all, for I confess myself that had I been confined for another year or two the walls would have been full, there would have been no marks at all, just a wash, a new patina whitening the walls with marks of memories, all running together as if the memories themselves aspired to be the walls in which I was imprisoned, and that seemed just to me, that would have been a worthy pattern to have made. But it was not to be. Everything disrupts. The guards seemed to understand that my marks had meaning, so surely they can be forgiven if their error was one of interpretation.

They’d ask, “Getting near to your earliest possible release date, right?”

“Sure,” I’d say. “Seems like I must be.”

“Ah. You’re a shoo-in for early release, a model prisoner.”

“We’ll see, I guess, but thanks.”

“How many days you got down?” they’d ask, pointing to the marks on the walls, what I then would realize could appear to be an accounting of the passing days.

“Must be nine eighty-three, nine ninety, right? Almost a thousand?” they’d say and smile.

 “Must be,” I’d say, thinking of Murph, who was not counted for a while, wondering what his number would have been if I hadn’t lied about it all.

His mother came to see me once, that spring before I was released. I could see that she’d been crying as she waited for me to come into the visiting area.

“Y’all can’t touch, but I can get you coffee if you want,” the guard said.

I didn’t know what to say to her at first, but it seemed unfair that she had to bear it like this, to be responsible to start, so far away from any comfort or understanding. And if she should accuse, then I should be accused. His absence from the family plot was my fault. I had left him in the river. I had feared the truth on her behalf and it had not been my right to make that choice for her. But this was not her way. Her grief was dignified and hidden, as is most grief, which is partly why there is always so much of it to go around.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” she said.

I didn’t know how to respond.

“Just needed to see, you know?”

I looked down at the linoleum.

“No. Course you don’t.”

She began by telling me that back in that December, a black sedan had driven slowly through town. One of her friends had called her to tell her it was coming. The woman had seen the dress uniform of the man in the passenger seat and she told Mrs. Murphy that the men in the car seemed lost, but that they’d be there soon.

I tried to imagine Mr. and Mrs. Murphy watching from the kitchen window. Snow surely fell as it had fallen all through the evening, over the eaves of the porch and over the hills and lining the branches of the trees. The world clean and obtuse. No angles, nothing hard. The car coming around the last bend in the road, unacknowledged, as if it had not been seen.

Mrs. Murphy and her husband saw the car, to be sure, but some part of it did not register. They stood by the window as if struck by some strange palsy. They were mute and nothing changed in the scene but the snow falling a little harder and the black stain of the car becoming larger as it moved through that blank canvas. And yet they stared. Even when the car stopped in the small turnaround of their driveway—the idle of the engine soft but undeniable—they did not move. Nor did they move from the window when the captain and chaplain removed their covers and knocked on the door. And despite the fact that the gentle rap of their knuckles asserted the fact that they were truly, wholly real, Mrs. and Mr. Murphy remained looking out the window at the car as if it were one of God’s unknowable mysteries.

When the two men gently forced the door open, Mr. Murphy had kissed his wife and put on his hat and coat and left the house out of the back door. When they said to her, “We regret to inform you that your son, Daniel, was killed,” she only looked at them with her arms crossed as if waiting for some unseen third party to elaborate. None did. The men, fulfilling their obligation with all the grace and deference that men could be asked to, finally left a card in Mrs. Murphy’s hand that gave the address of the rooms they’d rented while they waited for a break in the weather. It had a number to call if she had any questions.

As she spoke, I thought of where I had been at that exact moment, but I could not calculate the time difference, nor could I distinguish between all the cold predawn patrols that marked my tour after Murph had died. She said that she’d stood in that same spot for hours. So long in fact that the heat of her body had affected the way the snow collected on the window, leaving the small outline of her figure cleared in the iced-over glass. When she did finally move, it had almost been evening. She walked outside through the still-open back door and found Mr. Murphy there, cross-legged in the snow, which swirled in drifts sometimes up to his waist and collected on his hat and shoulders like a shroud. They sat there together like that in silence. Night began. More fell.

By the time she finished telling me about that day, the coffee had gotten cold, the steam spread out and dissipated above the passing hours. Mrs. Murphy took our mugs and absentmindedly dumped the dregs into a third cup and handed it to me.

 “I didn’t mean for it all to happen like that,” I said.

“Well, what you meant can’t do anything now.”

“No. You’re right.”

The army had given up on her eventually, her fight for truth and justice, to know how it was he’d gone from MIA to dead so quickly, why the explanations never fit. But they knew that if they waited long enough people would forget about her pain, and finally a cost-benefit analysis was done and it reached the conclusion that she could now be done away with cheaply. The story of her fight had long since passed from the TV news to tabloid rags, the headlines gaudy and absurd, with pictures of her sitting on a rocking chair, a cigarette dangling from the thin line of her lips. She’d settled for an increase in her SGLI payout and my imprisonment when everyone stopped listening to her, when America forgot her little story, moving as it does so quickly on to other agonies, when even her friends began to smile at her with condescension, saying, “LaDonna, you just gotta find
your
truth in all of this.”

That’s what she told me anyway. “As if mine’s supposed to be different from yours, like you got one and I got another. What the hell’s that mean,
your
truth?” she said.

I didn’t know. Neither of us said anything for a while and it seemed OK.

“I just wish he hadn’t left home,” Mrs. Murphy said. She looked at me for a moment. “What about you? You got big plans for getting out?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I had never really paid attention to where I might end up, which is what I could control, and what mattered. I’d like to think I could choose well if given half a chance. But I had always done something else, always looking back instead on the nothing that remained in memory. I never got it right. All I knew was that I wanted to return to ordinary. If I could not forget, then I’d hope to be forgotten.

I was glad she came. Not because there was any unexpected reconciliation, but because she was tolerant and seemed to want to understand what happened to her son, why I’d made her read a letter that wasn’t real, standing in the snow, as I had. I was the last witness to her son’s irrevocably human end. He was now just material, but I hardly knew what to make of that. I guess all the words I used to try to explain it to her were like so much straw compared to what I’d seen. But I appreciated the way she reacted to my explanation, as roughly as I told it to her, the connections failing as they did daily on the walls of my cell. I can’t quite say what her reaction was exactly; her face still had the dull glow of loss, faded from a feeling always felt toward something else that she would now be forced to measure. Even after talking for six hours straight I couldn’t swear to any visible relief. She hadn’t offered forgiveness and I hadn’t asked for it. But after she left, I felt like my resignation was now justified, perhaps hers too, which is a big step nowadays, when even an apt resignation is readily dismissed as sentimental.

All of that was a long time ago. My loss is fading too and I don’t know what it is becoming. Part of it is getting older, I guess, knowing Murph is not. I can feel him getting farther away in time, and I know there are days ahead when I won’t think of him or Sterling or the war. For now, though, they’ve let me out, and I’ve allowed myself the gift of a quiet quarantine in a cabin in the hills below the Blue Ridge. Sometimes I will smell the Tigris, unchanged forever in my memory, flowing just as it flowed that day, but it is soon replaced by the cold clear air coming down the mountainside between the mezzanines of pines rolling ever upward.

I do feel ordinary again. I guess every day becomes habitual. The details of the world in which we live are always secondary to the fact that we must live in them. So I’m ordinary, except for a few peculiarities that I will probably always carry with me. I don’t want to look out over the earth as it unfurls itself toward the horizon. I don’t want desert. I don’t want prairie and I don’t want plains. I don’t want anything unbroken. I’d rather look out at mountains. Or to have my view obstructed by a group of trees. Any kind would do: pine, oak, poplar, whatever. Something manageable and finite that could break up and fix the earth into parcels small enough that they could be contended with.

When Murph’s mom came to visit she brought me a map of Iraq. I thought it was an odd gesture when I first began to look at it, folding and unfolding it in my cell, struggling with the arrangement of the arbitrary lines that it would fold itself along when I went to put it up at night. Within the map there was a section magnifying Al Tafar and its surrounding landscapes. It stopped being funny after a while. The grid seemed so foreign and imprecise. Just a place scaled out of existence on a map.

The first day in my new cabin I unpacked and laid out a few things on the old olive drab cot I’d bought from the army-navy store outside the base that housed the prison. I didn’t have much: some clothes, the map that Mrs. Murphy had given me. I put some tape on the corners and flattened it as best I could against the wall, but the lines of the folds remained. I remember rubbing my finger along one of the creases that ran straight along a very small section of the Tigris. It was the part of the river that ran through Al Tafar. I dug in my bag and found one of my medals and I stuck it in as near as I could figure to the place where we had left him. That map, like every other, would soon be out of date, if it was not already. What it had been indexed to was only an idea of a place, an abstraction formed from memories too brief and passing to account for the small effects of time: wind scouring and lifting the dust of the plains of Nineveh in immeasurable increments, the tuck of a river farther into its bend, hour by hour, year by year; the map would become less and less a picture of a fact and more a poor translation of memory in two dimensions. It reminded me of talking, how what is said is never quite what was thought, and what is heard is never quite what was said. It wasn’t much in the way of comfort, but everything has a little failure in it, and we still make do somehow.