And it was pity Jackson had shown. Oh how Achilles burned as they trundled off with Jackson strapped to the roof, baking like a fucking potato, someone screaming for Wexler to shut his whiny vaginy, Merriweather murmuring “We don’t get down, we get even,” and Troy chastising Achilles for breaking protocol to stay with Jackson instead of pushing into a defensive position, whispering, “Asshole! You could have been shot. For fuck’s sake, Keelies, don’t start trying to be a hero.”
With each passing day he wondered how to tell Ines, knowing this deceit amounted to infidelity. He would be branded, and Ines would be forced to wonder: if ever their lives diverged, was she also in danger of being psychically killed off, of being denied the emotional afterlife deserved by all those with whom one once shared a bond of affection—thumbed photos, the random wistful sigh, the occasional mention. She would have to ask, If you could kill your family, where does that leave me? God, would she be upset. When Achilles told her that his mother had died, Ines cried so hard you would have thought she knew Anna, and she never forgave herself for being out of the country when it “happened.”
He hadn’t planned it this way. He’d only wanted to protect their relationship from the bad luck haunting him like a phantom limb. Everybody liked freaky white girls, and he couldn’t be blamed for having been turned on by the dreads and dashiki. He couldn’t be expected to walk up to a woman and say, “Hi, I’m Achilles. I was adopted by white parents because mine didn’t want me and my brother’s missing.” He had often asked himself what he would have done differently had he known Ines was black, or at least had black relations. He had just as often answered, Nothing, even though he had been quick to tell Naomi under the cover of night, in a raspy murmur, wondering if he would die before knowing who he really was, and afterwards swearing her to secrecy.
Besides, if he didn’t find Troy, he would have to bear Ines constantly asking, “Have you heard from your brother?” Even if he could persuade her not to ask that directly, he would still see the question reflected in her eyes during family gatherings, in church, and whenever one of them received the piece of king cake with the baby in it.
Wages would understand, but he called Wages less and saw Ines more, until his life was riven into the old friends who would never know who he had become and the new friends who would never know who he was. Everyone, truly everyone—his mother included—had tacitly agreed to stop mentioning Troy on the phone except for the brief awkward pause at the beginning of calls when each waited to hear if the other had news. The less he spoke to old friends, the better he felt, until some days he could believe that normal was all he’d ever known. He had always clerked at Boudreaux’s firm. He had always eaten boudin with breakfast, and spent Saturday mornings seated on the carpeted floor leaning back on the sofa, reading the comics aloud while Ines rested her legs on his shoulders. He had never been given up for adoption or gone to war.
Not that he wasn’t proud of serving his country, it was just that no one else cared. Iraqi and Afghanistan vets weren’t spat upon like Vietnam vets, but they certainly weren’t greeted with ticker tape parades. He’d seen a commercial where returning soldiers were applauded as they walked through an airport. What a joke.
Vets didn’t exist. It wasn’t as much a war as a campaign issue, a mere budgetary concern, and if so many had died, and continued to die, it was only because no one had accurately forecasted the ultimate cost. The nonwar had continued so long without him it didn’t seem like the same war. But he knew it was the same war, officially or not, “Mission Accomplished” or not, whenever he spoke with recently returned vets. They understood that after digging out of the dirt overturned by mortars, the sand in your mouth tasted like sugar. He refused to discuss Afghanistan with anyone else, especially the voyeurs. There were the morbidly inquisitive, people who thought they could comprehend, secondhand, how death trumps reason, as if they could understand how often the dead appear to be grinning, or that if you stare too long a dead friend looks more and more like a stranger, while a dead stranger looks increasingly like a long-lost friend. There were the gung-ho civilians who couldn’t point out Kabul on a map, but swore that if it wasn’t for fallen arches or tennis elbow, they would zip right over there and singlehandedly cap every towel head. (When he wasn’t around, did they say sand zigger?)
Republicans patted his back, hawks strutting like pigeons, as if inviting him to award them a medal. Weepy Democrats said, “You should have never even been over there,” and apologized for the terrible things “you must have been forced to do.” As if there were someplace in the world where, when people shot at you, you didn’t duck and, if armed, shoot back.
Worst were kids like Ines’s little cousin Sammy, who regarded him with such awe, when Achilles knew it wasn’t a matter of bravery, skill, or grit. He was simply lucky—lucky that Geary’s Humvee caught the IED on the Khyber Pass, lucky that Howser’s chute malfunctioned over the Kurdish airstrip, lucky that Merriweather was assigned to point that day. Lucky to have been shot with nothing more than a camera.
He occasionally looked at his old photos to remind himself that he had done something that mattered. He’d come to understand how Wages felt, how it demeaned you to take orders from a fat coward. Some days, when Ines wasn’t home, he took his old battered black ammo box out on the corner of the condo deck, where he could feel the sun on his toes and watch the ships travel their steady courses while thumbing through old photos. He had three favorites: one in the ’Stan, one in New Orleans, and one in Maryland.
In the ’Stan: Achilles, Troy, Merriweather, Wages, Wexler, and Jackson stand shoulder to shoulder in the shadow of the Herc that will shuttle them to Dubai for a little R&R. Their faces are gaunt, pants loose, smiles brazen. Even in the shade they squint, except Wexler, who, with one eyebrow raised and a left dimple deep enough to swallow sunlight, flashes the look that earned him the name Sexy Wexy. They’ve all casually slung their M16s over their shoulders, except Merriweather, who stands with his rifle butt to the ground, leaning on the barrel as if it is a cane. Troy’s face is a bit smudged, but for once he is nearly as dark as Achilles, who remembers the date and time of the snapshot; Chan, the PFC from Kansas City who took it for them; and feeling like he finally belonged.
It’s a favorite photo because Wages is sober; Merriweather is happy, eager to see his first beach; Wexler—with his long, slim neck—does look like Prince; and Achilles and Troy finally look like brothers. Achilles locks the ammunition box whenever he begins to drift upriver, following the tugboats headed upstream, wondering how different their lives could have been, and if different meant better, and if better meant normal, like life with Ines, the star of his favorite photo from New Orleans.
It’s an informal shot taken at Ines’s cousin’s wedding reception. Mrs. Delesseppes has hastily herded the wedding party into the center of the parquet ballroom at Gallagher Hall. Ines wears a strapless red satin gown and her dreads are woven into three thick braids like a gold headdress. Again, and over and over, Achilles watches other men watching Ines, window-shopping, and swells with pride. He waits until a cluster of two or three men direct their common attention at her, then walks over and runs his palm down her back, and she stand as straight and tall as if in formation. He feels equally officious in his tuxedo, the first since his prom. Ines insisted he purchase one because men don’t rent clothes. Achilles and Sammy wear matching cummerbunds. In the photo, Sammy stands between Achilles and Ines. Simultaneously, as if instinctively, as if magnetically, Achilles and Ines reach for each other to hold hands behind Sammy’s back. This is the moment the shutter winks: everyone else is staring at the camera, but Ines and Achilles have eyes only for each other.
Later, she didn’t so much as frown after missing the bouquet, but she glared when the garter dropped like a scud missile, the impact scattering men across the parquet halls, the echoes of their footfalls fading into awkward laughter, the tone of embarrassing relief surprisingly similar to the chatter in the wake of a near m
iss. On the drive home she said nothing at all. It was the first of three weddings that summer, and Achilles tried dutifully to appear to be dutifully trying to catch the garter at the next two weddings. Weeks passed before he finally understood that reluctance to catch a garter is considered natural, but sprinting across the room like someone has yelled “Fire in the hole!” appeared a reluctance to be with her for the duration. The duration. She often speaks of the duration. She never utters the word marriage.
Instead, she says, “We’ll be your family.”
“We’ll make beautiful milk-chocolate babies.”
“Uncle Boudreaux will gladly give you away.”
And he replies, “Yeah! The old BB is just dying to give me away. But you know, men aren’t given away. We run shit.”
She says, “You wish. You know what I mean.”
And he does, not that she ever utters the M-word, nothing closer than that Morse code, the double dashes that appear after, lost in concentration, she bites her lower lip. No, no M-word. Instead, she claps at cans clattering behind cars. Near bridal shops, her purposeful steps shorten to a saunter. And whenever a home makeover or newlywed show comes on, she yells, “Hurry honey, come here.”
He says, “Will those chocolate babies be yummy or bittersweet?”
“Will they be solid or hollow?”
“I can’t even spell marriage.”
Her laughter, ignited by a snort of disbelief, is explosive. She commands him to be serious!
“I am,” he says. He really can’t spell marriage, that’s not his name. And he leans in to taste her smile, biting at her lips, as red and ripe as plums, marking them with two short dashes of his own.
And slowly, like an incantation, she says, “IDC, IDC, IDC, Ines Delesseppes Conroy.”
Ines Delesseppes Conroy! Mrs. D would like that even less than A-sheel. “Not to worry,” she said. Her mom would come around. “I promise you that.”
PART 3
SUMMER 2005
CHAPTER 13
FOR OVER SIX MONTHS, ACHILLES HEARD NO NEWS OF TROY. THEN, LATE one evening, while in bed with Ines watching a home decorating show, he answered his cell phone to hear Kevin Wexler say, without even a hello, “I saw Troy.”
Hearing Wexler’s voice, he went out onto the balcony, which stretched across the length of the condo and overlooked the Mississippi. Once outside, with both French doors safely shut behind him, he asked, “Are you still in Atlanta?”
“Yes.”
“At your sister’s?” asked Achilles.
“Yes.”
“You sure?” asked Achilles.
“When I called his name, he ran.”
Achilles snapped his phone shut just as Ines turned on the bedroom light, something he constantly asked her not to do when the heavy drapes were open. One night, he’d even marched her down to the street below their balcony to prove how much a burglar, or rapist, or any other psychopath would see through those sheer curtains she so adored. He stressed that any criminal of opportunity recessed in the darkness could see them, case the condo, or take a potshot. Achilles shook his head as she crossed the room, the hem of her T-shirt caught in her underwear. He moved to the dark end of the balcony.
A bellowing air horn drew his attention to the Mississippi. He heard the waters shouldering their banks, but what he could see of the river under the full moon was nearly flat, a field of shallow black bowls with silver brims. He leaned against the rail and ran his fingers across the balusters while a black tugboat with a shiny hull and one broad, chalky stripe glided by, the dark water betraying little hint of its passing, only a few silver rims of water wriggling into ribbons. The tug was headed toward Algiers, the twinkling lamps across the river. In the moonlight, the coiled chain on the aft deck was a glistening black wreath and the anchor at the rear of the boat a wink of light. Achilles spun on his heels and went back into the condo, past the waist-high vases of dried larkspur and emerald hydrangeas in the living room, past Ines’s favorite print, a life-size rendering of Kali, and stopped at the bedroom. Everything was as he’d left it. The light was off. Ines was in bed looking at television, and even Ricky, the stuffed koala, stood balanced between her feet. Achilles pointed to the phone in his hand as if it were a witness and began, “A guy from my unit … a funeral.”
“Oh no. Who?” asked Ines, turning down the volume on the TV.
He thought about it for a moment before answering, “Kevin Wexler.”
“Were you close? What was he like?” asked Ines.
“He was fine. I told you. We don’t have a pack of secrets about some crazy mission where we slaughtered a village of retarded babies or something and ran around with their heads on pitchforks. We don’t know all the secrets the news doesn’t tell you or the government keeps away from you.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” said Ines, turning the volume back up.
“I don’t mean that you did. I’m sorry.” Achilles sat beside her on the bed, taking her hands in his. They’d never had a major argument, and he wouldn’t be able to leave if he thought she was upset with him. All the stares she got. What might she do for revenge? “We got a shitty hand. It’s like you said about your three months in Kabul. ‘The crazy thing about a war isn’t that none of the stereotypes are true, it’s that all of them are.’”
“I understand.”
Achilles patted her hand, but knew she didn’t. She couldn’t. She was the most intelligent person he knew, and it was true she had, in her words, a heart the size of the Hindenburg. That had taken some research to confirm, but he knew it to be true. Nonetheless, volunteering in the ghetto wasn’t the same as being from the ghetto. Volunteering in Goddamnistan wasn’t the same as being posted there. What would she say if he told her about Jackson, or that Afghan kid defiant to the end, smiling as he hit the ground clutching his neck, or Merriweather, putting his blade away without even wiping it off, as casually as zipping up? Would she think he had deserved to lose his foot? What about Wexler running into a minefield, and Troy going after him?
He was on the road within an hour. He carried little: the carry-on Ines had loaned him for the suit he’d almost forgotten, a rucksack he kept stuffed with a few pairs of underwear, and the black hooded sweatshirt he wore as urban camouflage. Ines had packed almond butter and honey sandwiches, pomegranate juice, a gift for Sammy the Stargazer—whom she foisted on Achilles whenever Sammy came home for a three-day weekend—and a card addressed to Naomi Wexler in perfect script, the letters as fluid as water, cursive that belonged on the Constitution.
He was on the twin spans, just beyond the New Orleans city limits, when the rain struck, sudden and vengeful like a prophecy, and he hydroplaned. He drove slower after that. He had promised Ines he would drive carefully and call her when he arrived, no matter the time. And before that, that he didn’t scare easily, and after that, that he wouldn’t fuck other women. His father had made him promise to look out for his younger brother. And before that, that he wouldn’t cry when he was lost, and before that, that he would take a punch from someone else before kicking himself for running away. His mother had made him promise to return alive, at all costs, telling him squarely, “Son, don’t be a hero.” And before that, “Never go into Pennsylvania without an adult.” And before that, “Hold his hand and look both ways.” And after that, the army made him promise to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies; to bear true faith and allegiance, etcetera, etcetera; to obey the orders of the president, etcetera, etcetera, et-fucking-cetera. He had promised Wages to deliver a package to his mother and Bethany, if circumstances warrant. And after that, after Merriweather overdosed on crunch, Achilles, Wages, and Wexler stood in the ratty linoleum hallway of Walter Reed Memorial Hospital, somber as pallbearers, and declared that if any of them saw any one of the others going down the slippery slope of addiction, they were to forcibly intervene, no questions asked. Their hands clasped, his arm one of the three spokes in that wheel, itself a s
ilent promise. They hadn’t survived all that shit just to come home and get hooked on this shit. Still, Achilles felt odd about showing up at Wexler’s house at four a.m. Surely Wexler had expected this when he called, but during the drive from New Orleans to Atlanta, Achilles’s fear that he wouldn’t find Troy, now missing for almost a year, was slowly eclipsed by the fear that he would.
He made good time, pushing himself, driving like he was on convoy, moving at a constant speed and stopping only when necessary. Finding his way through downtown to Grant Park, where Wexler’s sister lived, was easy. Barely a month had elapsed since he and Ines drove to Atlanta to visit her nephew Sammy the Stargazer, but the city seemed taller, surging skyward in a frenzy of construction. Cranes perched over skeletal skyscrapers, their pulleys lost in the mist. Downtown, a web of repaved roads: slick, black tongues of tar studded with orange barrels. In the rain, expansive concrete foundations gleamed like giant slabs of melting ice. Even in Wexler’s neighborhood, new brick homes with antique touches dwarfed historic clapboard duplexes, and mere blocks away a glassy new midrise condominium sparkled like a gem. The city was shedding its skin.
Wexler lived with his sister in a craftsman-style bungalow in Grant Park, a historic neighborhood, according to the sign. The house was old but well maintained, a row of potted sunflowers standing sentinel over the porch. Even at night, the mustard trim around the windows and the violet balusters lent the house a warm, feminine air. Achilles parked in the driveway behind a fancy four-door sedan. Before he had extinguished the headlights, Wexler was clomping across the porch like those G.I. Joe action figures Achilles played with as a child, articulated only at the hips and shoulders. A thick scar ran across the side of Wexler’s neck where the landmine had lodged a children’s toy, one of the die-cast ambulances passed out to establish rapport with the local kids. Achilles had expected that by now, over a year later, Wexler’s movements would be natural. Watching him lumber down the stairs, gripping the handrails and almost imperceptibly feeling his way with his feet, step by step, Achilles told himself, again, that there was a difference between bravery and stupidity, and that running into a minefield was stupidity. He quickly grabbed his bag, wanting to meet his friend halfway.
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