Yellow Birds (4 page)

“Roger, Sarge,” we said.

“Our AO just came down from higher. It’s gonna be a goat fuck. You guys have to promise to do what I say.”

“OK. Sure thing, Sarge.”

“Don’t give me that shit, Privates. No ‘sure thing’ this time. Tell me you’ll do what I say. Every. Fucking. Time.” He beat the notes with his fist into the palm of his left hand.

“We’ll do what you say. We promise,” I said.

He took a deep breath and smiled. His shoulders sagged slightly.

“So, where is it, Sarge?” Murph asked.

“Al Tafar. Up north, near Syria. Like a hajji proving ground up there. Gets real fucking heated sometimes. I wasn’t supposed to tell you yet, but I need you to understand something.” He was slouched beneath the bunk above him. It caused him to lean slightly forward toward us and across the white space of the buffed tile floor.

Murph and I looked at each other and waited for him to continue.

“People are going to die,” he said flatly. “It’s statistics.” Then he got up and left the room.

Somehow I slept, but fitfully. I’d wake from time to time and look out to see how the frost had gathered on the windowpanes. Murph called to me once, in the small hours before daybreak, and asked me if I thought we’d be OK. I kept looking out the window, even though the night had covered it over completely with a small layering of ice. A streetlamp glowed with a pale orange through the opacity. The air was cool and crisp in the room and I pulled my rough wool blanket tight around me. “Yeah, Murph. We’ll be OK,” I said. But I didn’t believe it.

In the morning, before first light, we dragged ourselves over the sides of the company’s deuce-and-a-half trucks and convoyed to the range. The snow had changed to rain overnight and we pulled our hoods over our helmets as far as we could. The rain was cold, percussive. The drops slid down the backs of our blouses and jackets, each one seemingly on the cusp of freezing. No one talked.

When we got to the range, we circled in the grayish snow for our safety briefing. I was tired and had a hard time focusing. The voices of the range cadre barked out through the mist like an unpracticed choir. I watched the rain fall onto the dead leaves, causing a kind of shimmer in the nearly naked branches. The sound of magazines being loaded by the range detail carried over the thin winter air from the dilapidated ammo shed. The white paint peeling off the sides reminded me of a country church I’d passed on my way to school as a boy. The noise emanating from the shed was strange and mechanical and droned in my ears until I couldn’t hear a word the safety officers said. Sterling and Murph had taken their places in line to be rodded onto the range. Sterling glared at me, then cupped his rifle into the crook of his elbow and pointed at his watch. “Waiting on you, Private,” he said.

Sterling was attentive in his marksmanship instruction. Murph and I both had our highest qualification scores ever. Sterling was pleased with us and seemed to be in a good mood. “Anything less than forty out of forty is operator error,” he said. We moved to a small hill that sloped down from the firing line. We relaxed and sat at his feet as he reclined on the hill, oblivious to the snow. “I think y’all might be all right.” For a while we didn’t speak. It was enough to be satisfied with his approval. The sun was still high over the berm at the end of the range when Murph started talking.

“What’s it like over there, Sarge?” Murph asked sheepishly. He was sitting cross-legged in the snow, his rifle over his lap like he was cradling a doll.

Sterling laughed. “God, that fucking question.” He had begun gathering rocks and tossing them into my upturned Kevlar.

Murph looked away from him.

He spoke firmly. “They aren’t gonna pop up and wait for you to shoot them. Remember your fundamentals and you’ll be able to do what needs to be done. It’s hard at first, but it’s simple. Anybody can do it. Get a steady position and a good sight picture, control your breathing and squeeze. For some people, it’s tough after. But most people want to do it when the time comes.”

“Hard to imagine,” I said. “You know, whether we’ll be one or the other?”

He paused. “Better get to fucking imagining.” He started to chuckle again. “Just gotta dig deep. Find that nasty streak.”

I listened to the crack of rifles on the line. Saw branches lift and shake off snow when birds took flight, startled at the sound. The sun was small and bright in the sky. The rain had let up to a noisy drizzle.

“How do we do that?” I asked.

Sterling feigned frustration, but I could tell our solid performance on the range had given us some latitude. “Don’t worry. I’ll help.” He seemed to catch something spilling out of himself and corrected his bearing. My Kevlar was full of rocks.

“Shit,” said Murph.

“We just gotta train it up. Practice, practice, practice,” Sterling said. He laid his head down on the ground and put his feet on my upturned helmet.

Murph started to say something, but I put my hand on his shoulder. “Yeah, we get it, Sarge,” I said.

He stood up and stretched. The whole back of his uniform was wet, but it didn’t seem to bother him. “It was their idea,” he said. “Don’t forget that. It’s their idea every time. They ought to kill themselves instead of us.”

I wasn’t sure who “they” were.

Murph was looking at the ground. “So…so what are we doing?”

“Don’t worry so much, ladies. You two just hold the tail. Everything’ll be cool.”

“The tail?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he responded. “Let me fuck the dog.”

The reports of rifles disappeared. Our last task was over. We loaded back on the trucks, anxious for a pass and time with our families. I thought about what Sterling had said. I wasn’t sure he wasn’t crazy, but I trusted that he was brave. And I now know the extent of Sterling’s bravery. It was narrowly focused, but it was pure and unadulterated. It was a kind of elemental self-sacrifice, free of ideology, free of logic. He would put himself on the gallows in another boy’s place for no other reason than that he thought the noose was better suited to his neck.

And then we celebrated. There were banners and folding tables in the base gymnasium. Our families watched as we stood in formation while the battalion commander gave a rousing, earnest speech about duty, and the chaplain injected humor into somber tales of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And there were hamburgers and French fries and we were glad.

I brought a plate to my mother and sat across from her, a small distance away from the throngs of mothers hanging on their sons’ shoulders, the fathers holding their hands on their hips, smiling on cue. She’d been crying. She rarely wore makeup but it ran down into the hollows of her eyes that day. It smudged on the back of her wrist where she’d rubbed the tears away while sitting in the barracks parking lot in our ancient gold Chrysler.

“I told you not to do this, John,” she said.

I clenched my jaw. I was still young enough then for the weak mannerisms of rebellion. I had practiced them from the time I turned twelve until I left our house, when I got fed up with nothing and called the only cab that had ever graced our long gravel driveway. “It’s done, Ma.”

She paused and took a deep in-breath. “OK. I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. Let’s have a nice time.” She smiled and patted the back of my hands where they sat on the table and her eyes welled a little.

And we did have a nice time. I was relieved. As I sat up listlessly the night before the range, I’d run through all the possibilities that lay before me. I became certain that I’d die, then certain that I’d live, then certain that I’d be wounded, then uncertain of anything. It had been all I could do to keep from pacing the cold tiles, looking out the window for some sign in the snow or the lamplight. I remained uncertain. But I settled on the fear that I would die and my mother would have to bury a son she thought was angry. That she’d take the flag and see me lowered into the brown Virginia dirt. That she’d hear the salute of rifle shots roll in quick succession through the air, the whole time thinking that they sounded like the door I slammed when I was eighteen and she was in the backyard picking honeysuckle off the fence.

I went outside to smoke and see my mother off. I kissed her on the cheek and surprised myself with the force of my lips. “You need to quit those things,” she said.

“I know, Ma. I will.” I stubbed the cherry out beneath my boot. She hugged me and I could smell her hair, her perfume, my whole life back home. “I’ll write as soon as I can, OK?”

She stepped slowly away from me, raised her hand to wave and turned and walked toward the car. I remember following her taillights as they turned out of the parking lot, watched them grow smaller as they passed the PT field and turned again toward the guard shack at the base’s exit, where they disappeared. I lit another cigarette.

Most of the families had gone by then. Most but Murph’s mother and a few others I didn’t know. I saw Murph leading her by the hand throughout the gymnasium, investigating each small cluster of remaining people briefly, then moving on. I didn’t realize they were looking for me until Murph turned in my direction and I saw him mouth something to his mother. I got up from the chair where I’d been sitting and waited for them to cross over the painted lines of the basketball court that had been used for our festivities.

Mrs. LaDonna Murphy hugged me tightly when I met her. She was small and frail-looking in a weathered sort of way, but younger than my mother. She smiled broadly when she looked at me, still wrapping her arms around my waist, looking up and showing me teeth slightly browned by smoke. Her hair was a faded blond worn in a bun, and she had on jeans and a blue button-up work shirt.

“Five more minutes, men,” one of the NCOs called.

She released me from her embrace and said excitedly, “I’m just so proud of you guys. Daniel’s told me so much about you. I feel like I know you already.”

“Yes, ma’am. Me too.”

“So y’all are getting to be good friends?”

I looked over at Murph and he gave me an apologetic shrug. “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “We room together and everything.”

“Well, I want you to know if y’all need anything, I’m gonna take care of you. Y’all will get more care packages than anyone.”

“That’s really kind of you, Mrs. Murphy.”

Sterling called Murph to help another private sweep up red, white and blue confetti from around the three-point line of the court.

“And you’re gonna look out for him, right?” she asked.

“Um, yes, ma’am.”

“And Daniel, he’s doing a good job?”

“Yes, ma’am, very good.” How the hell should I know, lady? I wanted to say. I barely knew the guy. Stop. Stop asking me questions. I don’t want to be accountable. I don’t know anything about this.

“John, promise me that you’ll take care of him.”

“Of course.” Sure, sure, I thought. Now you reassure me and I’ll go back and go to bed.

“Nothing’s gonna happen to him, right? Promise that you’ll bring him home to me.”

“I promise,” I said. “I promise I’ll bring him home to you.”

Sterling caught me later as I was walking back from the gym to our barracks. He was sitting on the front stoop and I stopped to smoke a cigarette. “It’s kind of nice out tonight, huh, Sarge?”

He stood up and started pacing back and forth. “I overheard you talking to Private Murphy’s mother.”

“Oh, right. That.”

“You shouldn’t have done that, Private.”

“What?”

He stopped and put his hands on his hips. “C’mon. Promises? Really? You’re making fucking promises now?”

I was annoyed. “I was just trying to make her feel better, Sarge,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

He knocked me to the ground quickly and hit me twice in the face, once below the eye and once directly in the mouth. I felt his knuckles fold my lips under my teeth. I felt my front teeth cut into my top lip, the blood running hot and metallic into my mouth. My lips swelled immediately. My cheek had been cut by a ring he wore on his right hand, and that blood gathered into runnels and ran down my face and into the corner of my eye and onto the snow. He stood over me with his feet on either side of my body, just looking at me. He shook the sting out of his hand in the cold air. “Report me if you want. I don’t even fucking care anymore.”

I lay in the snow for a while longer, picking out the constellations bright enough not to be obscured by the artificial light pouring out from the barracks windows and the streetlamps lining the nearby avenue. Saw Orion, saw Canis Major. When the lights went out in the barracks, I saw other stars, arranged as they had been a million years ago or more. I wondered what they looked like now. I got up and dragged myself up the stairs and into our room. Murph sat up, but the lights stayed off. I took off my uniform and threw it in my locker, then slid under the tight folds of the sheets.

“Tonight was good,” he said. I didn’t answer. I heard him turn in his bunk. “You OK?”

“Yeah, I’m good.” I looked out the window, through the tops of the evergreen trees arranged in rows between the barracks. I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn’t mind. The world makes liars of us all.

It wasn’t long
after I left Al Tafar that I began to feel very strange. I first noticed it on the highway between the air base and the town of Kaiserslautern. The trees outside the window of the taxi made a silver blur, but I could clearly see the green buds of spring as they untethered themselves from the remains of winter. It reminded me of the war, though I was only a week removed from it, and unbeknownst to me at the time, my memories would seem closer the farther I got from the circumstances that gave birth to them. I suppose, now, that they grew the same way other things grow. In the quiet of the taxi, the thin trees made me think of the war and how in the desert our year seemed like a seasonless thing, except in fall. There was a sharp disquiet in the way days passed into other days and the dust covered everything in Al Tafar, so that even the blooming hyacinth flowers became a kind of rumor.

I imagined it would be easier then, to arrive in a temperate place so obviously passing from winter into spring, but it was not. The wet, cold air of March in Germany shocked my skin, and when the LT said we wouldn’t get a pass even though we couldn’t leave until the next day, just wait it out, I decided I’d earned one anyway.

I’d had to walk a half a mile or so to get out the security gate and another two until the first row of buildings appeared on my left. The sky was now less brightly lit, and there was a steady, fine mist that hovered in the air. In the plane, the sun had a kind of buoyant dominance, but it had hidden itself away beyond clouds that appeared like pale, soot-colored sketches of themselves. The buildings were more colorful than I thought buildings could be, with light pastel trims, and rich creams and yellows thickly painted on the stucco walls. I walked toward the town, past softly lit cafes emitting deep, hearthy smells, past solitary people walking on the street, the collars of their slickers pulled tightly around their necks, their eyes pausing to evaluate me. Without fail, they turned toward some other ending for their travels.

It made me feel fine to be walking alone in the rain that day, alongside the tall, ordered rows of pines and birches, and I began to feel a kind of calm when I passed the townspeople. I couldn’t have placed it then, but now, looking back, there was peace in the absence of talk. We passed, and our eyes would meet briefly, the sound of my boot heels amplified by cobblestones or alley walls. Then they would fall away from one another, our eyes, and they would know me by my skin, tan and sun-beat to linen, an American, no reason to speak, he will not understand the words, and I thought, Thank you, I am tired and do not know what to say. By then, in every instance, we had passed each other. And it felt good, somewhere behind my breastbone, to sense that this separation was explicable, a mere failing of language, and my loneliness could proceed with a different cause for a little while longer.

I reached a traffic circle where a pair of silver cabs idled. I tapped on the first one’s driver-side window. The cabbie, a man with large eyes and a small, almost lipless mouth, sat up. He rolled his window down and leaned his head out ever so slightly. My hands were in the front pockets of my jeans and I leaned in to him as well. “K-town,” I said quietly. For a moment we were very close, almost touching, and he said something that I didn’t understand. “No sprechen,” I said. He sighed and smiled and waved his hand toward the backseat of his taxi and I got in.

And that’s when it began, on that short ride in to Kaiserslautern. We rode in silence, without pleasantries, and the radio stayed off. I leaned my head against the window and watched as my breath condensed on it. I took my finger and made rudimentary lines in the fogged-over glass; first one, then another, until I had made the shape of a square, a smaller window inside the window. As I looked out onto the trees that edged the road, my muscles tensed and I began to sweat. I knew where I was: a road in Germany, AWOL, waiting for the flight back to the States. But my body did not: a road, the edge of it, and another day. My fingers closed around a rifle that was not there. I told them the rifle was not supposed to be there, but my fingers would not listen, and they kept closing around the space where my rifle was supposed to be and I continued to sweat and my heart was beating much faster than I thought reasonable.

I was supposed to be happy, but I cannot recall feeling much of anything except a dull, throbbing numbness. I was very tired and the blur of the silver trees on the side of the road became a comfort that described both newness and continuity at once. I wanted to get out and run my hands along the bark. I was sure that it was smooth and although it was still raining in the odd hovering way that it had been, I wanted to go out in it. To let it fall on my dark neck and hands, to feel it.

We rode the rest of the way into town like that, in silence, a few trembles held just so in my hands. He dropped me on a wide street. The sun hovered half hidden above the pale buildings in the rain. A few streetlights were on and gave off a thin glow through the gray afternoon, and after I paid the driver for the trip I began to walk toward the edge of town. I passed in and out of circles of light made by the sun through the clouds and the useless lamplight. By the time I reached the end of Turnerstrasse, the lights had adopted their own rhythm. My passage through them became more regular, something firm to which I could commit myself. I figured Sterling and some of the other guys would worm their way out to the bars to raise hell. I hoped I wouldn’t see them, and not just because I’d gone AWOL. The mere thought of him made bile well up in a kind of raw, acidic burn at the back of my throat.

I passed a large cathedral on my right, and there was a dull cold in the air so I slipped inside. The interior of the cathedral was lit in a fashion that reflected the pale light outside its doors. I found a pamphlet in the foyer that gave the history of the church in German and in English, and I spread it out as wide as I could in an attempt to hide behind it. I ducked into a pew in the back of the church’s transept. An after-school tour had started and although it was conducted in German, I tried to follow along as best I could from the pamphlet I held.

The cathedral was old. The sun had moved so that its light through the reds and blues of the high stained glass did not wash over the marble floor. It seemed to meet from both sides in the apse and in the nave, high up among the vaults and the old, carved capitals. The children’s feet kicked dust into the air with little shuffles, and the dust hung in the light the special way it sometimes does.

In the far end of the church, behind the altar, a priest prepared for some ceremony. I watched him as he gathered candles and incense and arranged the items neatly on a small table behind him.

The tour guide stopped her group of children. She gestured to her mouth, then to her ears, then to her eyes. It was as if she had kissed her voice, her hearing and then her sight. We were all very still, the tour guide, the children and me, and the priest seemed to notice us because of the stillness. The children began moving along the walls, most giggling and playing grab-ass while others oohed and aahed at the portraits of the saints. I read the names of the saints from the pamphlet as the children walked, and I tried to imagine myself as a small child being introduced to them.

There was beautiful Sebastian, the arrows dangling from his chest. The blood from his injuries appeared like spattered candle-wax, hardened and congealed in a way that might allow a man to hang from a church wall unchanged and perpetually dying for a thousand years. There was Theresa, moaning like a woman brought to climax by the fire of her wounds. And there was Saint John Vianney, the incorruptible, the soldier who ran from Napoleon’s army and heard confessions for twenty hours a day, whose heart rests separately in Rome, unadorned in a small glass case, undecayed and whole but for its absent beat.

In the cold interior of the cathedral the children oohed again. Their breath rose in one opaque breath, as it had risen in one small voice that hung above our heads briefly, obscuring the altar and the faint rose light that fell through the stained glass, and disappeared. I listened to the clicking of their small heels against the stone. I looked up toward the vaults, at the saint’s picture frames, at the fine filigree that seemed to run like untended ivy through the place and read, “All that you see that is gold is truly gold.” I said it to myself. I said it aloud. I looked down to read more, but there was nothing else. The pamphlet closed with those words.

As I read, the priest moved from his place behind the altar. I was surprised to see him standing over me when I folded the pamphlet down. He was small and wore wire-frame glasses and he looked at me and smiled with his mouth closed, the kind of smile that can be either empathetic or patronizing, depending on the person doing it. “You can’t smoke in here,” he said.

“What? Oh. Shit. Sorry.” I hadn’t even realized I’d lit up. The tip glowed red in the dim light until I snubbed it out on my boot and put it in my pocket.

“Can I help you with something?”

He must have thought my presence was an oddity. “No. I was just looking around. I’m on a pass,” I lied.

He pointed to the pamphlet. “An interesting history, no?”

“Yeah. Yes,” I stuttered, “it sure is.”

He put his hand out. “I’m Father Bernard.”

“Bartle. Private Bartle.”

He sat down at the end of the pew, chuckled a bit and smoothed out the front of his pants. “I’m sort of a private, too, in a way.”

I paused. “Oh, right,” I said.

“Can I be honest with you?”

“Of course.”

“You look troubled.”

“Troubled?”

“Yes. Burdened.”

“I don’t know. I think I’m all right, I guess.”

“I have some experience, you know. We could talk if you want.”

“About what?” I asked.

“I thought you could decide that. I could listen.”

I noticed I’d been cracking the knuckles on my left hand over and over again. “I don’t know, Father. I don’t really know how that stuff works. I’m not Catholic or anything.”

He laughed. “You don’t have to be Catholic. I made a promise that people could tell me things they didn’t want to tell other people, that’s all.”

I had scratched the lacquer off a thin strip of the pew next to me. “I guess that’s a good thing to do. What you do, I mean.”

“They have an old saying about situations like this.”

“What’s that?”

“You are only as sick as your secrets.”

“They got a saying about everything, don’t they?”

“It’s true.” He smiled again.

I thought about it awhile. “You mean, like, I should make a confession or something.”

“Well, not a, not a…just…talking.”

“I just made a mistake is all.”

“Everyone makes mistakes,” he said.

“Nah,” I said. “They don’t. Not really.”

The children and the tour guide had filed out of the cathedral. Light no longer fell through the windows and they looked like dark holes below the ceiling of the church in the dim lamp and candlelight.

I sat back in the pew and he sat at the end of the pew a little away from me and I thought how strange it was to be here, with the lights flickering, cold and wet. I felt foreign, acutely and overwhelmingly foreign. I felt an urge to run but didn’t.

We both paused awkwardly. “I appreciate it, but I’d better be on my way. Thanks for your time, Father. If I’m not back soon I’ll catch hell. Well, you know what I mean.” I turned and began walking out of the transept and toward the large wooden doors at the front of the church. There was no noise other than my footsteps when the priest called out, “Do you want me to pray for you?”

I thought about what the priest asked and I looked around the cathedral. It was a beautiful place, the most beautiful I’d seen in a long time. But it was a sad kind of beauty, like all things created to cover the ugly reason they existed. I took the pamphlet out of my pocket. The entire history of the church was written there, three pages for a thousand years. Some poor fool had had to decide what was worth remembering, had had to lay it out neatly for whomever might come along to wonder. I had less and less control over my own history each day. I suppose I could have made some kind of effort. It should have been easy to trace: this happened, I was here, that happened next, all of which led inevitably to the present moment. I could have picked up a handful of dirt from the street outside, some wax from a candle on the altarpiece, ash from the incense as it swung past. I could have wrung it out, hoping I might find an essential thing that would give meaning to this place or that time. I did not. Certainty had surrendered all its territory in my mind. I’d have just been left with a mess in my hands anyway, no more. I realized, as I stood there in the church, that there was a sharp distinction between what was remembered, what was told, and what was true. And I didn’t think I’d ever figure out which was which.

“No, sir. That’s all right.” I appreciated the gesture, but it seemed obligatory and somehow therefore meaningless, as all gestures come to seem.

“A friend, perhaps?”

“I had a friend. I have a friend you can pray for.”

“Who is he?” the priest requested.

“Daniel Murphy. My battle. He got killed in Al Tafar. He died like…” I looked to the wall where the paintings of the saints hung. “It doesn’t matter.” The whole church was dark except for a few spheres of light that welled up from glowing candles and a few dim lamps.

Still, there went Murph, floating down toward that bend in the Tigris, where he passed beneath the shadow of the mound where Jonah was buried, his eyes just cups now for the water that he floated in, the fish having begun to tear his flesh already. I felt an obligation to remember him correctly, because all remembrances are assignations of significance, and no one else would ever know what happened to him, perhaps not even me. I haven’t made any progress, really. When I try to get it right, I can’t. When I try to put it out of my mind, it only comes faster and with more force. No peace. So what. I’ve earned it.