Achilles had driven Sammy into the city, and they were walking along Highland Avenue. They turned down a residential street where all the trashcans were lined up like parade spectators, or Katrina victims, thought Achilles. Sammy wanted pizza and cheerfully pointed out every neon sign, whether it said pizza or not. It was amazing how quickly kids rebooted. They came to Johnny’s Pizza on Highland, where a bum was collapsed on the sidewalk near the door. Achilles lifted Sammy to his shoulders, stepped over the bum, and went inside.
“You’re strong.”
Achilles grunted his thanks, preoccupied with how to fill his appointed role as positive black male role model. Could he say anything positive because he was black? Or did he need to say something black and positive? He had a beer while they waited. It was a new-old restaurant, with black marker scribbles scrawled on the wall to give it character. The cashiers and waitresses had jagged haircuts designed to look accidental. Beside the oven, a guy with Boss tattooed on his neck assembled pizzas with the slow, gruff movements of a mechanic, dropping everything from six inches above the counter, like army cooks. They’d ordered a pizza with everything except broccoli. Sammy didn’t like broccoli, unlike Troy, who’d loved the stuff. They had to keep his hands out of the basket in the grocery store because he gulped it down at every opportunity, pretending to be a giant eating trees.
At the table next to them, a little girl with a clear view of the front window kept tugging at the father’s sleeve and asking, “Soon?” Her father would answer, “Yes, honey.” A baby dressed in blue slept in a car seat beside the mother.
Sammy drained his soda.
“You know your auntie I didn’t mean anything by all that commotion in the hotel room,” said Achilles.
“She sure seemed mad,” said Sammy.
Achilles fought the urge to laugh. Wasn’t Sammy supposed to say yes? “I mean, sometimes we hurt people we love and we don’t mean to. We hurt them because they’re the only ones in striking distance. She wasn’t mad at you. She was mad at other people.”
“But she pulled my hair.”
Achilles chuckled. The girl at the next table tugged her father’s sleeve again.
“She was very, very mad.” Sammy chuckled too. “She pulled my hair very, very hard. My cheek burns. I feel like one of those duckies at the carnival.”
Achilles laughed so hard his belly ached. “Sam, your auntie I wants people to get along better than they do. She wants people to care more than they do. She wants the world to be a better place than probably it ever was or will be. She believes these things strongly. She believes we’re all …” Achilles paused. We’re all what? We’re not all the same. We’re not all equal. She was irrational on that point. The world had never been peaceful, fair, just. A quick history of warfare proved that. The little girl at the table beside them started sobbing softly and was soon inconsolable. As her parents tried to calm her she only grew more upset, shaking her head, her pigtails bouncing with each sob. She started talking loudly, but her words were hard to understand. Achilles could only tell that a promise had been broken, and she could not abide it. Achilles slid Sammy’s soda to the dark end of their booth. “Your auntie I wants us to get along.” Achilles interlaced his fingers for effect. “She wants us to be better people.”
“Is this like when the guy at the museum said we’re all related and we all come from the same particle before the Big Bang explosion?” asked Sammy.
“Exactly.”
“Or like when Auntie I says if you think of the whole world as a prison, there’s no such thing as a cage-free egg?”
Achilles took a second to sort that out. “That’s what your auntie I believes, that everything is connected.”
“Then why don’t we help them if they’re not bad?” asked Sammy.
“Who?”
“The people in New Orleans,” said Sammy.
“I don’t know, Sammy. I don’t always know what your auntie I means.”
“So, we’re all part of the same particle, except them?” asked Sammy.
“Them too. We’re all like family. Family looks out for each other, right?”
“Cain killed Abel,” said Sammy.
“What’s that?”
“When I ask for a brother, my mom says Cain killed Abel.”
Achilles wasn’t ready for kids. He’d pictured Ines pregnant, but he wasn’t ready for kids. He always imagined them as receptacles. He never imagined them asking so many damned pointed questions. “I’m pretty sure that was an accident.”
“No it wasn’t,” said Sammy. He looked like that kid in the video, the one stuck at the edge of the cliff. It was the expression, as if he wanted to believe but needed a little help.
“Okay, so it was on purpose, but he didn’t know any better. They were the first brothers, like a dry run.”
“Was he angry? My teacher says anger is one letter away from danger!”
“Is that Mrs. Babcock?”
Sammy nodded.
“What happened that last time you quoted her?”
“I said the flood cleaned the city up, then Auntie I went into a rage and started squeezing and slapping, and I was running and kicking and getting away, and she pulled the drapes down for everyone watching to see her pulling my hair, and—”
Achilles put his hand up. “Enough, Sammy. I was there.”
“I also quoted you. Some people are in the wrong place—”
Achilles put his hand up again. “Sammy, don’t repeat everything you hear, and don’t share everything you think.”
The waiter brought the pizza to the table next to them but the little girl wouldn’t eat. “You said you called them and they were going to come get him, and he’s still there, and he might be dead now, or runned over by a car.” She started crying again.
Her parents maintained their poise, but the way the father cut his eyes made it clear he blamed his wife for allowing a scene he wouldn’t tolerate at home. The little girl wailed again, this time waking her brother, who joined her.
“I called them, Ingrid. You hear me?” The father sounded exasperated. Achilles and the father briefly made eye contact. The father offered an embarrassed grin, but scowled with his eyes. “The ambulance will be here any minute.”
“It might be too late. A car might have run him over.”
Achilles realized they were talking about the homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk outside the restaurant. Achilles couldn’t eat because he couldn’t avoid wondering how long she would care so deeply and what would eventually cool that heart of fire. Would the frustration and the fear and the impotence of this afternoon be the first step to saying, Fuck it? That was the way of the world. You bought cigarettes from a kid; the kid bought more. It was like you were always placing a losing bet, but kept gambling pieces of yourself away in the hope the house would eventually slip up. Maybe it was easier to care about things you couldn’t fix, like world peace, than to care about people who were present and needed you.
The waitress came over wearing her best smile and asked if she could get someone another soda. That didn’t work. Achilles leaned toward their table and said, “Ingrid, he’s only sleeping. I talked to him when I came in. He’s just very tired.”
Ingrid looked up for the first time. She sniffed twice, so quick and hard that her nostrils clapped. “Really?”
“Yes, really. He’s only resting.”
She sat up, clapped once, and grabbed a big slice of pizza. The mother whispered her thanks. The father smiled, genuinely this time, and gave him a thumbs-up. Achilles felt guilty about covering the father’s lie, but the little girl was so happy. Besides, it was no worse than lying about Santa Claus. As they left, Sammy looked up at Achilles and asked, “That’s what Auntie I means, right?”
“What’s that, Sammy?”
“What you told the girl,” said Sammy.
“Thanks.”
“What’s for dinner?”
“You just ate.”
“I like to plan ahead.�
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“How about upside-down day?” asked Achilles.
“Like pancakes for dinner? Really?”
“Really,” said Achilles.
“Can I put jelly between them and roll them up?”
“You can do anything you want, Sammy, but isn’t that for kids?”
“I am a kid.”
After Sammy buckled himself in, Achilles yanked his seat belt to ensure that it was properly latched. Sammy tapped him on the hand. “Do you have a brother?”
“What’s up, Sammy?” asked Achilles.
“I don’t have a brother. I’d like you to be my brother,” said Sammy.
“Oh yeah. I said that the other day,” said Achilles.
“I mean for real, not a bribe for keeping a secret,” said Sammy.
Achilles snapped his fingers. “Okay. Bang! It’s official.”
“You don’t sound like you mean it.”
“I do, Sam my man. I really do.”
They found Ines checking the drawers, slamming each hard enough to shake the TV. The television blared, voices distorted. Her eyes red and puffy, she pointed at the TV. “They’re killing us. They’re saying shit like the flood is cleaning up the city. They won’t let the survivors cross the bridge to Gretna.”
“Flak jacket, babe,” he said.
“The Gretna police have set up a roadblock, a fucking barricade—Sammy cover your ears—and are threatening to shoot anyone who tries to cross the bridge. They’re saying—Sammy!—fuck you. Die! They survived a natural disaster to die now. Do you know how long it takes someone to dehydrate?”
He knew exactly how long it took someone to dehydrate or drown or asphyxiate, as well as bleed to death from a stomach wound or severed carotid.
“Not now.” Ines continued, “We know some of these people Achilles. We know they’re not all criminals. And the few who are, can you completely blame them? For five centuries told they don’t deserve to be alive.” She felt that was the crux of being black in America: it was a crime to assert your humanity, to speak your mind. According to her, it had been like this since slaves demanded their freedom, and even now a black person couldn’t speak their heart and mind without white people feeling threatened. “And it culminates at this moment, when it’s a criminal act to cross a bridge that leads from certain death to safety.” She pointed to the TV as if to say, Behold!
The city was waist-high in water, but he could see enough landmarks to guesstimate the location of St. Jude, the house where he’d been ambushed, Wages’s home, the school across from Wages. He wondered where Wages was, but knew he was okay wherever he was. Wages certainly wouldn’t be among the people stranded on the overpasses. He wanted to look away, but they cut to a wide shot and the Superdome appeared, like a capsized ship, and behind it a sodden city center. Jesuit High School sat midscreen, and though he couldn’t see it, he knew that meant that Wages’s little duplex was underwater. Of course Wages would have gotten out. As the camera panned across the city, across the water coffin, he saw the burned-out camelback, Jax Brewery, the new St. Jude, Charity Hospital, where the morgue was located. Surprisingly, he felt angry.
Ines crouched on the bed, butt to haunches, looking like a statue of a lion, regal, or one of those weird winged tigers, the pose reminding him of the difference between the two of them. He wasn’t sure about the image, but if he asked, she would know. Looking at the evacuees, he remembered that day at St. Augustine when he wondered why so many of them wore jackets and coats in the heat, not realizing they simply had no safe place to leave them.
The people on the bridges and boats and roofs looked like all the people he had worked with in the last few months in the shelters and stores and movie theaters. He’d always thought America’s poor weren’t really that poor. They didn’t live three generations deep in one stone apartment. They had running water and electricity. Their schools and nurseries weren’t bombed out. America’s poor had cars with stereos and phones with cameras. America’s poor had cable TV. America’s poor had credit. They had opportunities and choices. But looking at the TV, it appeared that while America’s poor had a better standard of living, they were largely the same as the poor elsewhere in the world—powerless to decide the basic direction of their lives. Like when the KPT tells an Afghan village, Sorry, road come this way.
“I’m going back now,” said Ines.
He’d often faked the funk with Ines, like mumbling the lyrics to unknown hymns. But this, he agreed, this was too much. Even so … “You can’t help everybody.”
“Everybody I help matters. Like the starfish.”
She loved to tell the story of Loren Eiseley walking along the beach, throwing starfish into the surf. A man tells Eiseley, Why bother, this beach is strewn with stranded starfish. You can’t help them all. Eiseley tosses another starfish into the sea and says, Helped that one. Achilles liked that story, but this was different. “The city is closed. You can’t get in. It’s impossible.”
“Impossible? Where is my Achilles?” She held her arms above her head. “We’ve got to try. That could have been us.”
“You evacuated. You took precautions.”
“I could. Not everyone had the choice.”
Achilles nodded. He had so little time to do what needed to be done. “Let’s leave in the morning.”
She initially scoffed at that suggestion, accepting only after much pleading on his part. He tried to explain that while people were evacuating they shouldn’t have to fight the stream of rescuers coming in. And it was late afternoon already. It would be better to drive during the day because they didn’t know the extent of the damage to the power lines. Ines packed and set their suitcases by the door. In the morning, all they would have to do was shit, shower, shave, and hit the road, dropping Sammy off on the way. After they’d agreed to wait, Achilles excused himself to run an errand.
Marcus wasn’t working, and the attendant on duty was locking up when Achilles reached the morgue. But it didn’t take much persuading; Achilles merely explained that he’d received a phone call. The man unlocked the door and ushered Achilles into the morgue. The shooting victims were gone, as were the other bodies he had seen. The kid destined for Potter’s Field was still there, but Troy was gone. Achilles checked each drawer twice.
“My brother was here three days ago,” said Achilles. “Where is he?”
“Claimed?” the attendant said, his patience wearing thin.
“He couldn’t have been claimed. No one knows he’s here.”
“He’s here, he’s claimed, or he’s waiting to be transferred to Potter’s Field.”
“Where are they held for that?”
The attendant lead Achilles down a series of narrow halls into a section of the morgue that was a bit warmer. Being underground, it wasn’t hot, but it clearly wasn’t air-conditioned like the other section. After sorting through a series of keys, he unlocked a door leading to a small room no larger than a walk-in closet.
The shelves were lined with wax-coated gray cardboard boxes the size of magazine holders. Each one had a single white label in a metal frame, and the shelves were labeled by month, like an archive. Achilles ran his fingers along the labels, high and low, scanning the dates. He found one dated the day Troy would have been brought in, but as he removed it from the shelf, he noticed one beside it with the current date. “Is … Is this the day …”
“It’s the date they’re cremated. We bury them once a year.”
“God, how do you know who is who?”
The attendant shrugged, “They’re unclaimed.”
“How many this week?”
The attendant shrugged again.
Outside, Achilles called his mother, holding his breath as she answered and immediately started complaining about the county’s decision not to repave the local road, the taxes going up for the dump, and the speed demons who had taken over the highways. That off her chest, she asked Achilles how he was doing. Before rushing off the phone, all he dared say was, “Been better.
” As much as he’d dreaded the sorrow he expected to hear in her voice, this was worse.
He and Troy had argued the day before Troy enlisted, Achilles calling him a coward. He thought nothing more of it until the next day, when they were supposed to go to a movie. Troy didn’t show. Achilles checked the fridge, where the family left notes for each other, but there was nothing but the running grocery list: bread, Velveeta, butter … He never guessed that Troy was at the recruitment office, but when he returned to the hotel and found Ines gone, he didn’t need a note to know where she had gone.
Sitting on the bed in that empty hotel room, as the sun faded and the shadows crept across the floor, across his feet, then up his legs and chest, at last swallowing his head, a new sensation settled over him, one he couldn’t name.
Were it only so easy to have never been, or vanish, to really be invisible, singed, the pink of his muscle showing where the charred skin had cracked off, Achilles bleeding out with Jackson holding his hand, murmuring heartfelt but pointless reassurances; Achilles’s parachute burning out over the airstrip—at that height, even water is a solid surface—a hole where his Adam’s apple had once been; Achilles falling in Kurdan, one clean shot catching him in the middle of his favorite song; Achilles drowning in the Khyber Pass; Achilles asphyxiating in that camelback; Achilles trapped in Wages’s attic; Achilles incinerated by the foo gas at Mosul; Achilles ambushed in Logar; Achilles’s vehicle hit by the RPG in Konar, one remaining hand carefully bagged by Private Kevin Wexler; Achilles in the Black Hawk that crashed in Qalat; Achilles falling to hostile fire in Zakel; Achilles in that accident in Marjah; Achilles electrocuted in Jelewar, the smell hanging in the air for three days, being disturbingly enough not unpleasant, if you didn’t know what it was; Achilles struck by indirect fire in Kheyl; Achilles shot by that sniper on Paktika; Achilles killed by the suicide car bomb in Tagab; Achilles killed by the accidental discharge at Camp Bulldog; Achilles killed by friendly fire in Gardez; Achilles killed by a satellite-guided bomb at Takur Ghar; Achilles killed by a fall in Shkin; Achilles catching the brunt of the suicide bomber in Helmand, the makeshit bomb in Zhari, the missile in Zabul; Achilles decapitated by the flying door, his arm torn off by a .50-cal round, the limb accidentally misbagged, which no one notices until Mrs. Henry Lee receives her husband’s remains, finding among them Private Henry Jones’s arm; Achilles blinded by a Browning as it stovepipes; Achilles walking into a minefield with Troy nowhere near; Achilles killed by a self-inflicted wound in Deh Chopan, in the latrine; Achilles no more, like the rest of them, in less than the time it took to light a cigarette, open a beer, unlock a door, cock a gun, rally up. If only it were so easy.
Hold It 'Til It Hurts Page 31