Granta 122: Betrayal (Granta: The Magazine of New Writing)

by Неизвестный

  Her fingers find a knot underneath this river and begin to pull outward. Out of the blue – so to speak – Sergeant Zeiger begins talking.

  ‘The tattoo artist’s name was Applejack. But everybody called him “Cuz”. You ask him why, he’d tell you: “Just Cuz.” Get it?’

  Well, that was a mistake, Applejack! Beverly silently rolls her knuckles over Zeiger’s shoulders. With a birth name like ‘Applejack’, shouldn’t your nickname be something like ‘Roger’ or ‘Dennis’? Something that makes you sound like a taxpayer?

  ‘Cuz is the best. He charges a literal fortune. I blew two disability cheques on this tattoo. What I couldn’t pay, I borrowed from my friend’s mom.’

  ‘I see.’ Her knuckles sink into a cloud over Fedaliyah. ‘Which friend?’

  ‘Arlo Mackey. He died. That’s what you’re looking at, on the tattoo – it’s a picture of his death day. April 14, 2009.’

  ‘His mother . . . paid for this?’

  Under the oil the red star looks smeary and dark, like an infected cut.

  ‘She lent each of us five hundred bucks. Four guys from Mackey’s platoon – Vaczy, Grady, Belok, me, we all got the same tattoo. Grady draws real good, and he was there that day, so he made the source sketch for Applejack. After we got the tattoo, we paid a visit to Mrs Mackey. We lined up back to back in her yard in Lifa, Texas. To make a wall, like. Mackey’s memorial. And Mrs Mackey took a photograph.’

  ‘I see. A memorial of Arlo. A sort of skin mural.’

  ‘Correct.’ He grins, perhaps mistaking her echo for an endorsement of the project.

  ‘That must be some picture.’

  ‘Oh, it is. Mackey’s mom decided she’d rather invest in our tattoos than some fancy stone for him – she knew we were his brothers.’

  The sergeant’s head is still at ease in the headrest. Facing the floor. Which makes it feel, eerily, as if the tattoo itself is telling her this story, the voice floating up in a floury cloud from underneath the sands of Fedaliyah. As he continues talking, she pushes into his muscles, and the tattoo seems to dilate and blur under the oil.

  ‘She circled our names in his letters home – Mackey wrote real letters, not emails, he was good like that – to show us what he thought of us. He loved us,’ he says, in the apologetic tone of someone who feels they are bragging. ‘Every one of us shows up in those letters. It was like we got to peel back his mind. She said: You were his family and so you’re my family, too. Grady told her all the details of the attack, and then she said: We will join together as a family to honour Arlo. She said, Now, I want you boys to put the past behind you – that was her joke.’

  ‘My God. That’s a pretty dark joke.’

  His shoulders draw together sharply.

  ‘I guess it is.’

  Thanks to the tattoo, every shrug causes a fleeting apocalypse. The ‘V’ of birds gets swallowed between two rolls of blue flesh, springs loose again.

  ‘And – stop me if I’ve told you this – Mackey’s ma had another kid. A girl. Jilly. She’s a minor, so Mrs Mackey had to sign a piece of paper to let Applejack cut into her with his big power-drill crayons.’

  ‘His sister got the tattoo? Her mother let her?’

  ‘Hell, yes! It was her mother’s idea! Crazy, crazy. Fifteen years old, skinny as a cricket’s leg, a sophomore in high school, and this little girl gets the same tattoo as us. April 14. Arlo in the red star. Except, you know, scaled down to her.’

  His head shakes slightly in the headrest, and Beverly wonders what exactly he’s marvelling at, Jilly Mackey’s age or the size of the tragedy or the artist’s ingenuity in shrinking the scenery of her brother’s death day down to make a perfect fit.

  He waits a beat, but Beverly cannot think of one word to say. She knows she’s failed because she feels his muscles tense, the world of Fedaliyah stiffening all at once, like a lake freezing itself.

  ‘Plenty of guys in my unit got tattoos like this, you know. It’s how the dead live, and the dead walk, see? We have to honour his sacrifice.’

  Pride electrifies the sergeant’s voice. Unexpectedly, he gets up on his elbows on the massage table, cranes around to meet her eye; when he says ‘the dead’, his long face lights up. It’s like some bitter burlesque of a boy in love.

  ‘What does your own mother say about all this, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  He laughs. ‘I don’t talk to those people.’

  ‘Which people? Your family?’

  ‘My family, you’re looking at them.’

  Beverly swallows. ‘Which one is Mackey? Is this him, in the palm grove?’

  ‘No. That’s Vaczy. Mackey’s burning up.’ Zeiger pudges out a hip bone.

  ‘He’s – this red star?’

  ‘It’s a fire.’ The sergeant’s voice trembles with an almost childish indignation. ‘Mack’s inside it. Only you can’t see him.’

  The truck has just run over a remotely detonated bomb and exploded. Still burning inside the truck, he explains, is Private Arlo Mackey.

  Why on earth would you boys choose this moment to incarnate? Beverly wonders. Why remember him – your good friend – dying, engulfed?

  ‘You were with him on the day he died, Derek? You were all together?’

  ‘We were.’

  And then he fills in the stencil of April 14 for her.

  At 6.05 a.m., on April 14, Sergeant Derek Zeiger and a convoy of four Humvees exited the wire of the FOB, travelling in the northbound lane of Route Roses, tasked with bringing a generator and medical supplies to the farm of Uday al-Jumaili. The previous week, they had driven out to Fedaliyah to do a school assessment and clean up graffiti. As a goodwill gesture, they had helped Uday al-Jumaili’s son, a twelve-year-old herder, to escort a dozen sweaty buffalo and one million black flies to the river.

  Pfc Vaczy and Sgt Zeiger were in the lead truck.

  Pfc Mackey and Cpl Al Grady were in the second vehicle.

  From the right rear window of the Humvee, Sgt Zeiger watched telephone poles and crude walls suck backwards into the dust. Sleeping cats had slotted themselves between the stones, so that the walls themselves appeared to be breathing. An orangish-grey goat watched the convoy pass from a ruined courtyard, heaving its ribs and crusty horns at the soldiers. At 6.22 a.m., a click away from the farm in Fedaliyah, the lead truck passed a palm grove within view of the Diyala River and the wise-stupid stares of the bathing jammous. Zeiger remembered watching one bull’s tremendous head disappear beneath the dirty water. Perhaps fifteen seconds later, an IED tore through the second Humvee, in which Pfc Mackey was the gunner. Sgt Zeiger watched in the mirrors as the engine compartment erupted in flames. Smoke blindfolded him. On his knees in the truck he gagged on smoke, its oily taste. Incinerated metal blew inside the vehicle, bright chunks raining through the window. His head slammed against the windshield; immediately, his vision darkened; blood poured from his nostrils; a tooth, his own, went skidding across the truck floor.

  ‘This front one is a fake,’ he tells Beverly, tapping his enamel. ‘Can’t you tell? It’s too perfect.’

  He remembered picking up the tooth, which was a shocking, foreign white, etched in space. He remembered grabbing the aide bag and the fire extinguisher and tumbling from the truck and screaming, directing these screams nowhere in particular, down at his own laced boots, then skyward – and then, when he got his head together, he remembered to scream for the intervention of a specific person, the medic, Specialist Belok. He saw the gunner from the third truck running over to the prone figure of Corporal Al Grady and followed him.

  ‘Well, OK: the bomb was a ten-inch copper plate, concave shape, remote-detonated, so when it blows there’s about fifty pounds of explosives behind it. I heard over the radio: “There is blood everywhere,” and I could hear moaning in the background. The blast shot Corporal Grady completely into the air, out of the vehicle – and Grady is 6’5”, Beverly . . .’

  Beverly pulls at the wispiest clouds along the cords of his neck.


  ‘Where’s the trigger man? Are we about to get ambushed on the road? Nobody knows. There’s no one around us, there’s no one around us, and do you think maybe Uday al-Jumaili came running to help us? Guess again. His house is dead quiet, it’s just our guys and the palm grove. Behind the truck, the jammous are staring at us. Three or four of them, looking as pissy as women, you know, like the attack interrupted their bathing plans. Grady is responsive, thank God. The door is hanging. Mackey is screaming and screaming, I’m kneeling right under him. Some of his blood gets in my mouth. Somehow even in my state I figured that one out: I’m coughing up Mack’s blood. And whatever he’s screaming, I don’t understand it, it’s not words, so I go: Mack, what you’re saying, man? What are you saying? I cut his pants to see if the femoral artery was severed. I remove his IBA looking for the chest wound. I wrap the wound to his head and his neck with a Kerlix . . .’

  Zeiger’s head is buried in the cushion – all this time, he hasn’t looked up from the floor. Jigsaw cracks spread through the tattoo where his muscles keep tensing.

  ‘Hours later, I’m still hearing the screaming. That night at the DFAC – the chow hall – we’re all just staring at our food, and I’m telling people: “I didn’t catch his last words. I lost them, I didn’t catch them.”

  ‘And Lieutenant Norden, I didn’t see him standing there, he goes: “Hey, Zeiger, I’ll translate: goodbye. He was saying: bye-bye.” Norden’s like a robot, no feeling. And I almost get court-martialled for breaking Norden’s jaw, Bev.’

  ‘Bev,’ he says, like a strand of hair tucked behind her ear. Incredibly, in the midst of all this horror, she can still blush like a fool at the sound of her own name. She’s terrified of setting him off again, knuckling down on the wrong spot, but at no point during his story does she halt the exploratory movements of her hands over the broad terrain of Zeiger’s back.

  ‘So now we all hump Mackey around like turtles. That day, April 14, it’s frozen for all time back there.’

  ‘Well, for your lifetimes,’ Beverly hears herself blurt out.

  ‘Right.’

  Zeiger scratches at a raw spot on his neck.

  ‘You know,’ she says, adjusting the pressure, ‘I think it’s a beautiful thing you’ve done for your friend –’ She traces the ‘V’ below the tight cords of his neck. Silent birds migrating into the deeper blues. ‘You’re giving him your, ah, your portion of eternity.’

  Portion of eternity. Christ, where did she get that one?

  ‘No, you’re right.’ He laughs sourly. ‘I guess I’m only good for a short ride.’

  A long silence follows. Fedaliyah heaves and falls.

  ‘How long do you think, Bev?’ he asks after a while. ‘Fifty, sixty years?’

  Beverly doesn’t answer. After a while she says: ‘Are you still being treated at the VA down the road?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes –’ His voice grows peevish, seems to scuff at the floor under the headrest. ‘For PTSD, the same as everybody. Do I seem traumatized to you, Beverly? What’s the story back there?’

  Instead of answering his question, Beverly lets her hands slide down his back. ‘Breathe right here for me, Derek,’ she murmurs. She eagles her palms outward, pushes in opposite directions until she gets a tense spot above his sacrum to relax completely. Beneath the sheet of oil, the tattoo’s colours seem to deepen. To glow, grow permeable. As if she could reach a finger into the landscape and swirl the jammous into black holes, whirlpools in the tattoo . . .

  Soon Zeiger is snoring.

  She works her fingertips into the skin around the fire, and she can smell the flowery scent of the oil becoming more powerful; just briefly, she lets her eyes close. Suddenly the jasmine smells of her room are replaced by burning rubber, diesel. Behind her closed eyelids, she sees a flash of beige light. Spidery black palms, a roadside stand. A pair of heat-blurred men waving at her as if from the other end of a telescope. Sand ticking at a windshield.

  Beverly hears herself gasp like someone emerging from a pool. When her eyes fly open, the first thing she sees are two hands, her own, rolling in circles through the oil on the sergeant’s shoulders. She watches, astonished, as her hands continue the massage on autopilot, rotating slickly all the way down the man’s spine. She feels a disorientation that is very close to her childhood amazement during the ghostly performances of her uncle’s player piano: the black keys and the white keys depressing in sequence, producing music. Sergeant Zeiger moans happily.

  What just happened? Nothing happened, Beverly, she hears in the no-nonsense voice of her dead mother, the one her mind deploys to police its own sanity. But her nostrils are stinging from the burning petroleum. Her eyes are leaking. Tentatively, Beverly strokes the red star again.

  This time when she shuts her eyes, the flashes she gets are up close: she sees the clear image of a face. Behind the long windshield of a Humvee truck, a sunburned, helmeted soldier smiles vacantly at her. ‘Hey, Mackey –’ someone yells, and the man turns. He is bobbing his chin to some distant music, drumming his knuckles against the stiff Kevlar vest, uneclipsed.

  Beverly has to stop the massage to towel her eyes. Where are these pictures coming from? It feels like she’s remembering a place she’s never been before, reminiscing about a face she’s never seen in her life. Somehow a loop of foreign experience seems to have slotted itself inside her brain. Zeiger’s song, spinning wildly through her. She wonders if such a thing is possible. A ‘flashback’ – that was the word from the VA literature.

  Beverly tries to concentrate on her two hands, their shape and weight in space, their real activity. If she closes her eyes for even a second, she’s afraid that Humvee will roll into her mind and erupt in flames. She forces herself to massage Zeiger’s shoulders, his buttocks, the tendons of his neck. Areas far afield of the red star – the fatal fire, rendered down. The star seems to be the matchstick that strikes against her skin, combusts into the vision. And yet, in spite of herself, she watches her hands drawn down the tattoo. Now she feels she has some insight into the kind of trouble that April 14 must be giving Sergeant Derek Zeiger – there’s a gravity she can’t resist at work here. Her hands sweep around the red star like the long fingers of a clock, narrowing their orbit. Magnetized to that boy’s last minute.

  At the end of the massage, she pauses with the oily towel in her hand.

  Her eyes feel as if there are little heated pins inside them.

  A truck goes rolling slowly down Route Roses.

  ‘Wake up!’ she nearly screams.

  ‘Goddamn it, Bev,’ Zeiger grumbles with his eyes shut. He opens them reluctantly. Under her palms, his pulse jumps. ‘I was just resting my eyes for a sec. You scared me.’

  ‘You fell asleep again, Derek.’ It’s an effort to ungrit her teeth. ‘And it seemed to me like you were stuck in a bad dream.’

  At home, Beverly licks at her chalky lips. Her heartbeat is back to normal but her ears are still roaring. Is she lying to herself? Possibly the flashback is really nothing but her own projection, a dark and greedy way to feel connected to him, to dig into his trauma. Perhaps all she is seeing is her own hunger for drama spooling around the sergeant’s service, herself in hysterics, a devotee of that new genre, ‘the bleeding-heart horror story’. So named by Representative Eule Wolly in his latest rant on TV. He’d railed against the media coverage on the left and right alike: prurience, pawned off as compassion! The bloodlust of civilians. War-as-freak-show, war-as-snuff-film. ‘All the smoky footage on the 7 a.m. news to titillate you viewers who are just waking up. Give you a jolt, right? Better than your Folgers.’

  Was it that? Was that all?

  That week, Beverly sees her ordinary retinue of patients: a retired mailman with a herniated disc; a pregnant woman who lies curled on her side, cradling her unborn daughter, while Beverly works on her shoulders; sweet Jonas Black, her oldest patient, who softens like a cookie in milk before the massage has even begun. By Friday the intensity of her contact with Serg
eant Derek Zeiger feels dreamily distant, and her memory of the tattoo itself has gone fuzzy, that picture no more and no less real to her than the war accounts she’s seen on television or read. Next time she won’t allow herself to get quite so worked up. Dmitri, who is working with several referrals from the VA hospital, tells her that he can’t stop bawling after his sessions with them, and Beverly feels a twist of self-loathing every time she sees his puffy face. No doubt his compassion for the returning men and women is genuine, but there’s something else afoot at Dedos Magicos, isn’t there? Some common need has been unlidded in all of them.

  What a sorrowful category, Bev thinks: the ‘new veteran’. All those soldiers returning from Fallujah and Kandahar and Ramadi and Yahya Khel to a Wisconsin winter. Flash-frozen into citizens again. The phrase calls to mind a picture from her childhood Bible: THE RAISING OF LAZARUS! The spine of the book was warped, so that it always fell open to this particular page. Lazarus, looking a little hung-over, was blinking into a hard light. Sunbeams were fretted together around his forehead in jagged green and yellow blades. His sandalled pals had all gathered outside his tomb to greet him, like a surprise birthday party, but it seemed to be a tough social moment; Lazarus wasn’t looking at anyone. He was staring into the cave mouth from which he had just been resurrected with an expression of sublime confusion.