The God of War

by Marisa Silver

  The silence that followed was profound, an emptiness so devoid of life that it was more terrifying to me than the bombs. It was broken by the grinding of car gears. Headlights of vehicles I hadn’t even realized were parked nearby snapped on, and the cars started traveling across the terrain. They were not like cars I’d ever seen. These buggies were jerry-built affairs, stripped of hoods and windshields. The back wheels were twice the diameter of the front, so that the cars looked like donkeys kicking up their legs as they bounced over the desert floor.

  “Rats coming out of their holes,” Richard said.

  Occasionally a car stopped and a man hopped out, grabbed something from the ground, threw it into the back of his vehicle, and drove on again.

  “Got himself a bomb fin there,” Richard said coolly, observing the scrapper.

  “Who are these people?”

  “Crazy guys,” Richard said, nodding. “Used to be more of them.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Dead. Or busted. It’s not exactly the easiest living you could think of.”

  “But there’s stuff out there?” I said, my excitement growing. “Bombs and stuff?”

  “Oh, yeah. Bomb fins, shell casings, napalm cannisters…”

  “You could make a hundred dollars a night I bet.”

  Richard smiled. “Hundreds. Depending on the market.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “No way, kiddo.”

  “Please.”

  “I’ve had my war. This is for the guys with a death wish. Some of those babies are live. They could blow your head right off. Even the inert bastards will crush you to death. Who do you think is going to win: you or a thousand pounds of metal?”

  “We’ll be careful.”

  “There’s no such thing as careful. There’s luck. Good and bad.”

  “C’mon.”

  “Do you understand what ‘no’ means?” he said, his usually quiet voice rising sharply.

  But I was too enraptured by the idea of the illicit treasure hunt to pay attention to him. This adventure seemed dangerous and foolhardy. But, after what had happened at the bar, I was no longer trapped in the life of the careful, guilt-ridden boy I had once been. I felt that I could do anything. I slid from my seat and jumped to the ground and ran into the path of the Jeep’s headlights. Richard yelled and swore at me, but I didn’t care. I ran toward something shining on the ground. I was sure I had found a bomb. I dropped to my knees just as the ground began to shake. Lights of oncoming planes obliterated the lesser stars.

  “Ares, watch out!” Richard yelled. He ran to me then grabbed me up like a hawk picking off a mouse and threw me down into a crater, falling on top of me just as the planes loosed their payloads all around us. I felt as if my body had turned inside out and my blood and bones were exposed. I thought I was dead.

  We stayed like that until well after the planes had disappeared from the sky. Richard was heaving; I felt his heart beating against my back. Finally he rolled off me and stood up. “You stupid little shit!” he yelled with all the force of his pent-up rage and fear. He climbed out of the crater and headed toward the Jeep. I scrambled to keep up. The ground was littered with white nylon from parachute bombs that shifted in the small breeze like jellyfish. My foot brushed against something hard, and when I looked down, I realized I was standing next to a bomb.

  “Richard?” I called weakly.

  “Move it, Ares,” he said, without turning back.

  “I can’t.”

  “Move your goddamn ass!”

  “It’s a bomb.”

  He stopped and turned. “Shit!” he said angrily, but when he grasped the situation, his manner changed. His voice became hushed and steady. “Okay,” he said, coming close. “Do not move. Just take it easy, okay? Nothing’s going to happen.” When he was near me, he looked down at the bomb and sighed visibly. “See the brown stripe? It’s a dummy. It’s not going to hurt you.” He reached out and pulled me to him.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, pressing myself into his body.

  “You can’t fuck around out here,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry’s no good when you’re dead.”

  I tightened my arms around his waist.

  “You dumb shit,” he said, but his anger was gone.

  When we returned to the Jeep, he started the engine but didn’t put the car into gear. He sat with his hands between his legs, his body bent toward the steering wheel as if he were praying. His bald head shone in the dashboard lights, and the veins above his temples throbbed. “What kind of an asshole does a thing like that?” he said to himself.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What kind of an asshole brings a kid to a place like this?”

  DURING THE DRIVE BACK TO the Slabs, he didn’t speak. Once inside the Airstream, he collected a blanket, a sheet, and one of the pillows from his bed, then laid them in the narrow space between the sink and stove and the small laminated table. “Get some sleep,” he said, lying down on the floor and arranging the blanket around his body. “And don’t trip over me if you need to take a piss in the middle of the night.”

  “I thought I didn’t get the bed.”

  “And flick that light off by your head.”

  I reached up and turned off the light. It was pitch black around me. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. “Richard?”

  “What?”

  “What did you do in the war?”

  “Kept bugs from crawling up my asshole.”

  “No, really. What did you do?”

  “Tried not to get killed.”

  “Did you kill anybody?”

  “That’s a dumb question.”

  “Do you think it’s wrong to kill people in war?”

  “I think if someone’s trying to kill me, I’ll try and kill him first. Once they start that game, you just follow the rules.”

  “It’s a game?”

  “It’s action and consequence. You think beyond that, you start worrying about right and wrong, and you’re dead.”

  He was quiet for a long time. I wondered if he had fallen asleep. Finally, he sighed deeply. “You know who comes out ahead in a war?” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The ones who believe in the story.”

  “What story?”

  “The one they tell you to get you to fight. It’s just like a fairy tale—bad guys, good guys. That’s not the way life is. But in war, you take a flying leap into fantasyland. People who do that make it the longest.”

  “I don’t believe in fantasies.”

  “Good thing you’re not a soldier.”

  We were quiet for a time.

  “Richard?”

  “Go to sleep.”

  “Did it ever rain in Vietnam?”

  “Rain?” he said, his voice slurring with tiredness. “Poured. Your boots would fill with water. Your feet would stink like something dead.”

  “Do guns work when they’re wet?”

  “Some do. The right kind of guns do.”

  “But some don’t?”

  For a while, he said nothing. “The look on the face of a guy whose equipment fails?” he said, finally. “That’s the worst kind of look.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Like he just saw the whole truth of everything.”

  The next day, he hooked the Airstream to the Jeep. He dropped me at the general store in Bombay Beach, drove back onto the highway, and headed north.

  WITH RICHARD GONE, LAUREL CRAWLED up inside of herself. She became so distracted that there were times I thought she forgot about us entirely. I knew what I had said at the bar made her despise me and I vacillated between a steely pride and despair at this turn of events. In the mornings, we got ready for school and she for work in a tense quiet that was punctuated only by Malcolm’s sounds. The trailer felt overcrowded as if the emotions that ran between my mother and me were extra people. When we passed each other, my muscles tightened as I trie
d to become small enough so that we would not touch.

  When the day arrived to return to Mrs. Poole’s, I was eager to go. I planned to get through my homework as quickly as possible so I could garden. I looked forward to the sharp nod of approval she would give me when she saw how well I did my job. When her front door opened, I nearly hurtled inside before I realized that the person standing in the doorway was not Mrs. Poole, but Kevin. I felt the reverse of what Laurel had instilled in me that made me never open the trailer door to strangers. I had the feeling that I had knocked on the door of someone who might hurt me.

  ELEVEN

  “Hey,” Kevin said, as if seeing me and Malcolm was commonplace. He wore a black Styx shirt. His arms emerged from the short sleeves like pale poles. He was barefoot, and his toes were as long as French fries. His hair had grown out slightly since I had seen him last, and he looked older and more knowing. His lack of interest in me was undeniable and compelling.

  “That kid is here!” he yelled as he slid back into the house and disappeared down a hallway.

  Malcolm ran inside, but I didn’t move from the doorway. Suddenly, the house felt forbidden. Every expectation I had of my peaceful time there and of a kind of future that had been forming in my mind in which I somehow belonged more in this house than in my own evaporated. Mrs. Poole appeared in the front hallway.

  “Kevin is back,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said, smiling uncertainly. “Don’t you have homework?”

  I went into the living room, sat down on my regular chair, and opened my backpack, but I couldn’t focus on work. Even though Kevin was nowhere in sight, I felt like he was watching me. At the back of the house a mystery was taking place: a door opened, a toilet flushed. I heard television laughter, and then a door closed and the sound dulled. I felt foolish sitting in the formal room, a place I knew Kevin would never choose to be. I couldn’t imagine that self-possessed and incurious boy taking an interest in the books, photos, or porcelain statues that had captivated me during the past months. His presence made my love for the house seem childish.

  I went and stood at the doorway between the living room and the kitchen. Mrs. Poole held Malcolm’s hand to her lips as she said the word “cookie.” Then she put his hand to his mouth and repeated the word. He said nothing, so she brought his hand back to her lips and started the exercise again.

  “He can’t talk,” I said.

  “Yes he can,” she said, without taking her eyes off him. “There are many ways to communicate.”

  Malcolm reached for the cookie she had laid out on the table as a reward. She covered the cookie and shook her head. “Cookie,” she repeated.

  “I finished my work,” I lied. “I can do the gardening now.”

  She sighed and turned away from Malcolm, who used the opportunity to take the cookie and stuff it into his mouth. “That’s Kevin’s job. We have another thirty minutes here please,” she said.

  I walked down the short, carpeted hallway toward the sound of the television. I ran my hand over the textured wallpaper, which was hung with paintings of forests. These were dark, secretive places so different from what I was used to, but I had the feeling these were places Mrs. Poole would have preferred to the desert that killed her vegetables and caused her to keep her shades pulled down even during the day. I heard Kevin moving in one room and I knocked lightly on his door. Just as I changed my mind and turned away, the door opened. His expression was sharp and suspicious.

  “Bathroom’s next door,” he said.

  “I don’t need to go.”

  The air in his room was close and warm and smelled locker-room sweet.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  “What are you watching?”

  He walked back into his room and turned off the TV. “Just some crap. What’s your name again?”

  “Ares.”

  “Oh right. Your parents are astrology freaks?”

  “Not really.”

  “At least they didn’t name you Cancer, right?” When he laughed, he looked younger than fifteen. Small dimples appeared in his cheeks, and his shoulders rose up around his ears. He seemed more like a boy my age whose body had got the better of him. He fingered items on his desk—a pen, a paperweight, a book. A bright white baseball sat inside a stiff mitt.

  “Do you play baseball?” I said.

  “I played baseball, you know, once, when I first got here, so they gave me this,” he said, touching the mitt. “I say, you know, kites are cool, and the next day there’s a new kite.”

  “You should say you like airplanes. Real airplanes.”

  Kevin’s smile was slow to come, not because he didn’t get the joke, but because he was deciding whether to give me the gift of his approval. “Or money,” he said. “I should say I like money. Lots of it.”

  The room felt as carefully planned as the living room, as if each piece of furniture and decoration had been arranged by a person thinking of what a child’s room should look like. A group of books stood at the back of the desk between bronze bookends shaped like horse heads. A framed map hung on one wall, a poster showing all the flags of the world on another. I recognized these types of posters from school.

  “This place is almost as bad as the center,” he said, following my gaze. “They won’t let me go out alone.”

  “How come?”

  “Trust is earned,” he said, making quotation marks in the air.

  “Are you home for good?”

  He smiled at a private joke. “I guess that’s up to me. That’s what they say, anyway. They talk about choices like you really have any. Like, was it my choice to go to the center? Like, would you go to school if you had the choice?”

  “I hate school.”

  “Exactly. You think it’s my choice to be here?”

  “You have a cool room.”

  “She cleans it too much. I think she looks through my stuff. You go to Niland?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Watch your back. I was there for a while. That place is fucked up.” He sat back down on his bed. “What’s wrong with your brother?”

  “He’s kind of…got something wrong with his brain.” I remembered Kevin swinging nimbly from ring to ring. Kevin would not have dropped a baby. “He bit a teacher at school.”

  Kevin’s laugh was a short, unhappy bullet of sound. “She probably deserved it.”

  “When did you get back?”

  “Two days and a million years ago. Got my learner’s permit, but they took it away. They took my bike, too.”

  “Will you get them back?”

  “Not for the probationary period,” he said, making the same quote marks with his hands.

  “You’re on probation?”

  “You ask a lot of questions.”

  In the kitchen, Malcolm screamed. Kevin raised his eyebrows. “She’s torturing him, too,” he said. Then he winced as if some invisible person had yelled at him, maybe one of the monitors from the center. “Nah,” he said, reversing himself. “Everyone does the best they can.”

  The kitchen chairs scraped against the floor. “We come once a week,” I said, quickly leaving the room.

  “Lucky you,” he said.

  THAT NIGHT, I WOKE TO the sound of a siren outside my window. Its hollow notes disappeared as they were swallowed up by the desert. My half-awake mind stumbled from one fragment of thought to another until I was fully awake. I looked at the clock: three-fifteen. I told myself not to think about it, but the memory had already arrived and was standing at the doorway of my consciousness, holding its bags, waiting to be invited in. There was the gas station on that hot day, there was my baby brother in my arms. I tried to confuse the story by thinking about Kevin, wondering why he had hit Mrs. Poole, what she had done to make him so angry. But the story of my own crime stood stubbornly behind the other thoughts, and I surrendered. Five years later, I could still feel Malcolm’s awkward weight and I reexperienced the disbelief I had felt when he lay on the ground and I did
not even understand yet that he had fallen. I grunted angrily, trying to chase away my thoughts. I turned my face toward my pillow and roared again and again until my throat became raw and I started to cough. I got up and left my room.

  The main room of the trailer was dark. Malcolm was asleep. The card curtain was closed, but the lamp by Laurel’s bed was lit, and a soft, amber light showed through the strands.

  “Baby?” her voice was thick and groggy. “Was that you coughing? Are you okay?”

  “I’m just getting water.”

  “Let me see you.”

  I drew the curtain to one side. A book lay open on her chest. Curls of hair were pasted to her forehead. She inched herself up so that she was half-sitting.

  “I can’t sleep these days. I can’t read either. I keep reading the same page over and over.”

  “I have to pee.”

  “I’m going to have a baby.”

  “What?”

  “That’s why I’ve been so tired and sick.” She smiled, looking down at her stomach. “You guys never made me sick. But this one is giving me a run for my money, I tell you.”

  I felt like a hundred people were yelling inside my brain.

  “How about that?” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “Huh?” She laughed, imitating my slow-witted response. “We’re going to have a new baby to love.”

  “When?”

  “A while yet. Early September, I think. You’re going to be a big brother all over again.”

  “Is Richard the dad?”

  Her smile disappeared. “Richard isn’t part of the story anymore. He made that crystal clear.”

  “Is that why he went away?”

  “Listen, you can spend a lifetime worrying about why things happen and in the end it doesn’t make a difference. All that matters is what you do next. And we’re going to have a baby.”