Yellow Birds (16 page)

I went outside and walked around a bit. It was quiet. I dozed off under the bright sun in the mountains. I heard the rustling of a cloth as it was taken off some small monument in some small corner of America. I heard the soft rustle of other voices, too.

And then I saw Murph as I’d seen him last, but beautiful. Somehow his wounds were softened, his disfigurement transformed into a statement on permanence. He passed out of Al Tafar on the slow current of the Tigris, his body livid, then made clean by the wide-eyed creatures that swam indifferently below the river’s placid surface. He held whole even as the spring thaw from the Zagros pushed him farther downstream, passing through the cradle of the world as it greened, then turned to dust. A pair of soldiers watched his passage while resting in the reeds and bulrushes, one calling out to the battered body while the other slept, not knowing Murph was ever one of them, thinking that he must be the victim of another war of which they likely did not feel they were a part, and the voice rose softly through the heat, and it sounded like singing when he said, “Peace out, motherfucker,” loud enough to wake his friend, but the body that he called out to would have been, by then, little more than skeleton, Murph’s injuries erased to the pure white of bone. He reached the Shatt al Arab in summer, where a fisherman who saw him flood into the broad waters where the Tigris and Euphrates marry unknowingly caressed his remains with the pole that pushed his small flat-keeled boat along the shallow waters of the marshes. And I saw his body finally break apart near the mouth of the gulf, where the shadows of the date palms fell in long, dark curtains on his bones, now scattered, and swept them out to sea, toward a line of waves that break forever as he enters them.

This book was
primarily written alone. The process of turning those private efforts into what you have just read, however, required many people. Thanks are due, above all, to my mother and father for their endless patience. I’ve also had extraordinary teachers throughout my life, and many thanks are owed to Patty Strong, Jonathan Rice, Gary Sange, Bryant Mangum, Dean Young and Brigit Pegeen Kelly; your dedication, intelligence and kindness amaze me. I greatly appreciate the opportunity given to me by the Michener Center for Writers, and I’d particularly like to thank Jim Magnuson, Michael Adams and Marla Aiken for their guidance and encouragement. For reading drafts of this novel, and for their friendship, I am indebted to Philipp Meyer, Brian Van Reet, Shamala Gallagher, Virginia Reeves, Ben Roberts, Fiona McFarlane, Caleb Klaces and Matt Greene. Thanks to everyone at Little, Brown, especially Michael Pietsch, Vanessa Kehren, Nicole Dewey and Amanda Tobier. Thanks also to Drummond Moir and Rosie Gailer at Sceptre. I could not imagine a better group of people to entrust my work to, both at home and abroad. I am also grateful to everyone at Rogers, Coleridge and White for their tireless efforts in getting this book out into the world, especially to Stephen Edwards and Laurence Laluyaux. Lastly, to Peter Straus, it is a privilege. There is nothing else to be said. A complete list of those people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude would be impossible. For this fact alone, I consider myself very lucky.

Kevin Powers
was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served in the U.S. Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. This is his first novel.