“Sure, Achilles. What do you want to talk about? What’s on your mind?”
The two little girls screamed by, waving their doll parts overhead. The queue billowed and in their wake resettled into a looser, lighter, chattier arrangement.
“Can I help?”
She asked him to carry a few boxes, wheel an old lady home, move a few more boxes, and each time he finished, she said, “Thank you, Mr. Conroy.”
As the sun set, people bunked where they could, in the yard, in the garage, in the basement. Achilles followed Ines up the stairs to the maid’s quarters in which she now slept, having given her bedroom to a young family with children. She stopped him at the landing, a purgatory in view of both the room above and the hall below.
“Where can I sleep, then?”
“At the condo. Isn’t that where all your stuff is?” said Ines.
“You can’t stay here alone with all these people.”
“I don’t need your protection from these people. I don’t need a soldier.”
“You can’t be—”
“Achilles,” Ines said, cutting him off, “I don’t need a soldier. I need a man. You can’t always be in soldier mode.” She handed him a business card. “If you want to soldier, see these people, they came by looking for local guides.”
“Can we talk? Please?” he whispered.
A stranger at the base of the stairs called up to them, “Is everything all right, Ms. Ines?”
He looked to be in his mid- to late thirties, tall and thin with a beer belly. He had the light skin and green eyes common among so many local men, or Creoles as they called themselves. His hair was slicked back, his shirt tucked in, and pants rolled up neatly and evenly on each leg. He probably thought himself a lady’s man. “Mind your own business, asshole,” said Achilles. “Or do you want to come up here and find out for yourself?” Achilles held his arms out in invitation, itching to beat him black, and then blue.
“Achilles!”
“Okay, is everything all right, Ms. Ines?” said Achilles.
“Yes. Thank you, Raymond,” she called down, and stormed upstairs, Achilles behind her keeping cadence.
When they were in the maid’s quarters, he shut the door behind him. “Raymond? Raymond?”
“Who’s Kevin Wexler?” she asked.
“That’s different,” said Achilles.
“Very. Very different. He probably doesn’t sneak out after you fall asleep and come back to treat you like a dog.”
If that was what this was about, he had it handled. Like Wages said, a woman would always forgive you if she loved you. “I’m sorry, baby.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“That’s different, then,” said Ines. “That changes everything. Do you want to fuck me in the ass again now, or should I close my eyes first?”
“Let me explain,” said Achilles. As he tried to think of something to say, the sound of the girls playing drifted through the window only to be drowned out by a helicopter, that wobbling noise soon giving way to the vibrato of a small plane.
“I’ll help you.” One by one, finger by finger, she enumerated his sins, starting with the first and greatest: There was no obituary for Kevin Wexler, no information on Kevin Wexler at any morgues, or viewing or services for Kevin Wexler at any funeral homes anywhere in Atlanta. Then there was the matter of his despondency, remove, and callous behavior in Atlanta. You hit a man for no reason. Then there was sneaking out in the middle of the night and using Sammy as cover. Sammy wouldn’t admit anything, but she knew he was lying. Achilles smiled to himself at the revelation that Sammy could be trusted. He’d do something special for the kid the next time he saw him, if there was a next time. She demanded to know about the scratches on his arms. He said he was mugged. She demanded to know why he slipped out in the middle of the night. He said he went to see off a friend who was in town for Wexler’s funeral. She demanded to know why couldn’t she go too, if that was the case.
For that he had no answer.
“Don’t you get it? My mother didn’t evacuate. Achilles, I went to Atlanta to be with you, to support you. Don’t think I didn’t trust you. I didn’t want to check up on you, but you were acting strange, and you sounded funny, so I was looking for ways to help you bear the loss of your friend. But I should have been clued in by that phone call you got. Your grieving voice sounds exactly like your lying voice.”
My grieving voice sounds like my lying voice. This felt true to him, revelatory even, like an apt description of his life from the outside looking in, but not an insult. It certainly wasn’t a reason for complaint.
But it was the crux, the center of Ines’s frustration. In the end, they’d had rough sex, but she hadn’t used the safe word. There’d been no obituary, but she didn’t doubt that someone had died (no one would lie about that). She even admitted, reluctantly, that Sammy, though a bad liar, was never prouder than when covering for Achilles.
“He grins, screws his mouth to the side, looks down, rocks back and forth, and babbles about the May weather. Sometimes I ask him what you did just to amuse myself. But this,” she points to him, her hands grazing his wounds, the sticky fingers skipping across his skin. “This, Achilles, is too much. Can’t you see that? It’s like a regression. You’ve got that hulking, brooding war thing going on again and I don’t know why. I don’t know when you’re joking anymore, or who you are since that trip to Atlanta. I feel like we’ve just met for the first time and you’re not the person I’ve known.”
But he is that person, isn’t he? The medivan volunteer-blood-donor-progessive-liberal-bleeding-heart soldier. The person who cares about social justice and fairness and equity. It’s her list, but he insists that he is that person, the person she thinks he is, and then it hits him full on, like being barely missed, just barely, and knowing it, the way it wakes you in the middle of the night for confirmation, it hits him, that he is really that person to her, that Ines was never slumming. Just like he thought she was someone else, she was only dating the person she thought he was, the person he had to be.
“That is me!” He is that person he insisted, reciting her list and banging the wall to punctuate each word. This is the first time he has raised his voice at her. Ines has backed across the room, eyes wide, eying him suspiciously, an unrecognizable look on her face, one he has never seen before but if pressed would describe as a mixture of fear and disgust. Was this the same way Bethany looked that minute before Wages grabbed her? He felt like those kids who charged headlong up the water tower and once up there freaked and froze, terrified of that one misstep on the way down.
To Achilles, she said, “I’m sorry. There are many soldier modes.” She pointed to the dent he made when he punched the wall. “This just isn’t the one I need now. Maybe you should call those people who need guides.” He leaned in to kiss her, but she turned away.
“Does this mean you’re not coming home?”
Ines walked to the window. “I’ve thought about this for a long time. You know I care about you—”
“But not enough to come home?”
“That’s not it.”
“Not enough to be with me. Not enough to want to be with me. You mean you care about me as a friend? Like a charity case? Or the way you care about Mabel and Bud. Is that it?” He stood and pounded his fist for emphasis as he said each name. “You care about me the way you care about the Harpers or Dudley.”
“That’s mean, Achilles. That’s not right,” said Ines, her hands on her hips.
“That’s how it sounds to me.”
“I mean about Dudley. You know Dudley’s dead.”
Achilles sat back down, shaking his head. “Mabel said … Fuck. I don’t know what the fuck is going on here. She said he was at home. If she won’t tell the truth, I’m not responsible.”
“That’s it, Achilles,” said Ines, pointing, her finger trembling before leveling out like a divining rod pointed straight at his heart. “That’s it. The anger. The vi
olence. You need to see somebody. You’re in a space where you attract trouble if you’re left on your own. Like the mugging in Atlanta.”
“That’s my fault?”
“People attract what they deserve. No. I mean we attract what we … deserve. Yes. Anger, hate, love. We get back what we give, nothing more and nothing less.”
“I haven’t given you anything. So you won’t come home?”
“That’s not it. You’re carrying stuff with you that you obviously don’t want to tell me about, and I understand that. But you have to tell somebody. You have to face whatever is eating at you so you can be here.” She put her hand on her chest, “Present in your own heart, in your own life. You can’t be a community of one.”
He’d had a response prepared, but she said “community” as Wages had said “community,” as Levreau had said “community,” and he forgot what he wanted to say. “I have a community. I’m a soldier.”
“Isn’t there more than one way to be a soldier, Achilles? More than one way to be brave? Isn’t facing yourself the best way to be brave? Getting back to your community. Maybe you need time to think. Maybe it would be good for you to be with Charlie 1, to be with other soldiers.” She touched the card in his hand. Her fingers were sticky with the juice she’d been handing out, and she smelled like cookies and soap and deodorant.
He tore up the card and intertwined his fingers together tightly, so tightly his nails turned pink. Remember to breathe. Did this mean they were breaking up? Him without her. Her with someone else. Both ideas horrified him. Merriweather once said, “I don’t hit women. That’s not power. Besides, that’s what a lot of them want. That’s how their daddies showed they cared, or didn’t. Some of them will try to make you angry enough to hit them. They’ll talk shit about you, about men in general, about your dick, whatever. I don’t fall for it.” Achilles had blown that off, never believing a woman might want to be hit, or understanding why a man would hit a woman. But he thought he understood now, and Merriweather was wrong. There was power in force. He could grab Ines and take her out of this house, make her go.
That’s all it took.
One quick smack to shock her, but only on the butt, not the face. The face reddens on its own, the smile—she loves that he loves her ass—becoming a look of confusion as the sting traveling from her ass to her brain gains in intensity and she realizes it’s not a love tap. Get your fat ass downstairs, break a right on Tchoupitoulas Street, and don’t fucking stop stepping until you reach the condo, he demands, his hand clutching her jaw so tightly that when he releases her face it takes moment for the blood to return. Hup! Hup! Hup! He barks like a drill sergeant as she fumbles with her bag. Leave it! You can come back for that shit. He ushers her out the door into the stairwell. Hup! Hup! Hup! He chops the air, his hands flashing like tracers. Go! Go! Go! He stomps. Flustered, fluttering, her hands at her neck and then at her sides, no time to think with everything happening so fast, no time even to cry, breathing heavy, her eyes wide and crotch growing wet. Like a buck pushed to charge a stronghold, unable to make sense of the calm voice in his earpiece amid the confusion of the flares and mortars and charges and rockets and grenades and gunfire and random screams, unable to distinguish north from south or friend from foe or up from down until he trips, winding himself, eating a mouthful of dirt on that next ragged inhale; like a newbie belly-crawling to cover when he feels something wet kiss his face as his friend is shot three feet away (their gazes locked in that moment when there is nowhere to hide from the fact that there is nothing to do about it); like a boy in the morgue realizing how much his brother and father resembled each other in death; wanting only for the terror to end, Ines is out the door and down the street before she even realizes what the fuck is going on, and if you ask her tomorrow what happened, she won’t actually be able to tell you, the images again clouding her vision, the memory filling her body with adrenaline and her mind with confusion as surely as if it were happening again—if, and only if, he is that kind of person.
Wages did it and Bethany didn’t go anywhere. But did she jump when a pot fell or a plate broke? Did she stay only because of the baby? Did she walk on a tightrope, thinking, If I fuck up, Kyle will kill me? Hadn’t Achilles been more desperate to please his father after the night Troy first came into their house? Hadn’t his mother hidden Bibles and crosses for decades? Achilles could be on Ines before she knew what had happened. Wages had said, “A woman will always forgive you,” right? “Shoot her in the ass with the cat pistol.” He had come for her and would leave with the prize, right? There were always the stories of guys killing their girlfriends and themselves, of preferring obliteration to isolation. He sympathized with them. They refused to concede what they had worked so hard to earn. They refused to surrender the battle of wills. They understood that you could never regain lost respect, that psychological war was not like a ground war, that you could not regain lost ground except through virtual annihilation, and I won’t let it come to that, Wages had said. But he had. He had. Even the psychological war required occupation—wasn’t that the lesson?
Ines was looking alternately at the floor then at him. She turned to look out the window when she heard children laughing. Her hair was tied hastily behind her head and tucked into her shirt, as it had been when they met, as it often was when she was working.
“I’m going home,” he whispered.
She turned to face him. “I wasn’t ignoring you. I just heard children laughing so hard, I had to look.”
He stood beside her in the window as the wind combed water over a crest in the asphalt like a submarine rising. Achilles would have told her not to apologize for turning her back on him, that in fact he wanted to thank her for it, but for that to make sense, he felt he would have had to explain everything that had just gone through his head, and no one would understand that sudden confluence of vulnerabilities, the room of mirrors that became an emotional kaleidoscope, where for a moment everyone he knew seemed to merge into one person. She could turn her back on him as often as she pleased. He reached for her hand, and she let him take it.
Many streets were passable only by boat, except in the French Quarter and Uptown. People, mostly black and brown, remained stranded on rooftops and highways. The marooned city pumps sat surrounded by still water. Traffic signals and streetlights were inoperable, most homes uninhabitable. Wages’s house and the burned-out camelback were underwater, St. Augustine half submerged. Bodies, again mostly black and brown, floated down the street, their skin stretched to bursting. Merciless heat, abandoned buildings, sporadic gunfire. In this disaster zone racked by utter confusion, this Injun Country, Achilles felt right at home.
There were people to rescue, food to distribute, and, best of all, looters to detain.
To aid in the relief, the army deployed National Guard and Reserve units, several of which were assigned local police officers or military personnel as guides. Achilles embedded with Charlie 1, which included two newbies, in immaculate uniforms, named Bryant and Wilson, and two vets, a white Mississippi farmer named Vodka and a black guy from Oakland who called himself Daddy Mention. The sole survivors of their squad’s last Iraq deployment, Vodka and Daddy Mention had one month earlier loaded ten friends into a brand-spanking-ass-new APC. Achilles felt for them—the heat rash, Jackson’s grip, Troy’s skin, cold as clay—when Daddy Mention said, “That’s how we learned irony. After nine months, the APCs show up just in time to be used as hearses.”
Achilles enjoyed being embedded with a squad at first. It took his mind off of everything. Every morning at sunrise, Charlie 1 received orders—those divine instructions—from the temporary HQ at the Convention Center, trucked over to their makeshift dock, a former grocery store tractor-trailer loading ramp, and then spent most of the day on a boat. Vodka piloted, Achilles navigated, Bryant and Wilson acted as spotters, and Daddy Mention kept them laughing. Daddy Mention had Merriweather’s sharp eyes and baritone voice, and like Merriweather, he maintained a running comment
ary on their progress throughout the day.
Achilles had a level of comfort that he now realized his Afghan guides had never felt. Charlie 1 swapped bullshit stories, made heroic plans, and commiserated about the food. They also shared pictures of girlfriends and wives, except Wilson, so Daddy Mention gave him one to carry in his wallet. After seeing Ines’s photo, Daddy Mention teased Achilles for having a skylight, and claimed to have several of his own. As he put it, “Back home, I trade bitches like baseball cards. That’s why they call me Daddy Mention.”
Achilles waited for the rest of the explanation, but it never came. Daddy Mention just extended his hand, offering Achilles some dap. Bryant, though, wasn’t as chipper, and said little. Whenever Achilles asked “What’s up?” Vodka explained, “His pussy’s bleeding.”
The first day, they coasted wakeless down Claiborne Avenue through the ghost town that was the Seventh Ward. Some streets were passable; on others, houses had washed out into the middle of the road. Their priority was the stranded and infirm, aka gate bait, but they took a few pedestrians back to the Superdome that first day. According to Vodka, the senior of the two vets, watching people wade though the water just wasn’t Christian, especially in this hot shit.
And there was a lot of hot shit. Alligators gnawed bodies, dogs floated at the end of their leashes like buoys, and the occasional corpse cruised by, hair fanning behind. Bryant wanted to make a skiff and bring the bodies in. After Vodka said that it wasn’t their job, Bryant went back to sulking. People begged for water and food, pleaded for them to take their children. A man in a wheelchair rolled right off his roof trying to get their attention. Everyone stood at the edge of the boat and watched the murky water bubble. Finally Achilles and Daddy Mention jumped in. The old man clung to Daddy Mention’s legs and they both would have drowned if Achilles hadn’t managed to unbuckle the man from his wheelchair.
Henry, Henry, Henry was distraught about his wheelchair. To reassure him, they said his name constantly during the trip to the Superdome, where they chair-carried him up to the triage tent. The stadium had been converted into temporary housing and an emergency hospital. From the raised entry platform they could see for blocks. Achilles had been to the roof of the school across from Wages’s house, the top of Jax Brewery, the upper levels of One Poydras Place. The view was always the same. It had to break Ines’s heart. The trees at City Park: no more. The café where they went to lunch with Margaret: no more. Seaton’s Diner: no more. Was this what it was like to host a war? To stand at the edge of a town and see your very memories in ruin? The city was an archipelago, and they stared in silence. Even Daddy Mention was quiet, though he was of course the first to speak, saying, “That bitch just lifted her skirt and horse-pissed on this motherfucker.”
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