The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

  The bomb had missed Gul Mohammed’s compound by fifty meters and landed closer to the neighboring residence of a certain Iqbal, with whom Gul Mohammed maintained a lengthy feud over the disputed ownership of a well equidistant from both properties. This patriarchal hostility had not stopped their children from playing together by the river when they were young and remaining friends as adults. Iqbal’s compound was now completely demolished, and the powerful force of the impact collapsed the roof and most of the walls of Gul Mohammed’s house as well.

  Hadji Khan felt and heard nothing but a profound ringing in his ears as he regained the bit of dwindling consciousness. His eyes cracked open and for a brief instant he saw nothing but sand and dust, until a gust of wind carried it away revealing a wealth of stars shining down from the cloudless empyrean. He had witnessed this night sky his entire life, thinking nothing more than how it reflected Allah’s ineffable greatness. The approach of certain death focuses a man’s thoughts: for Hadji Khan, the sky timelessly distilled the sum of his life’s accomplishments recollected and judged in his final fleeting moments. He decided that soon he would be a martyr and find his rightful eternal peace after a life dedicated to holy war. His head turned toward the rubble, his eyes drooped, and his final gaze settled upon a crooked doorframe blown wide open with colorful folds of fabric of blue and silver, red and orange fluttering in the wind.

  BROWN BIRD

  by Shannon Huffman Polson

  It started the day the bird hit the window. Tina was just finishing her report, hands resting on her new ergonomic keyboard from IT: new accounts, monthly revenue—for the staff meeting in ten minutes. Arvo Pärt seeped from the computer speakers, the music she had listened to ever since her friend Molly had introduced it to her on deployment. She liked it for its connection to Molly, and for its disconnection from everything else, its faith in something better. She adjusted the cover on the lamp she used to avoid the overhead fluorescent lights, unconsciously straightened the box of tissue paper on her desk, and exhaled with the deep fatigue she hadn’t been able to shake since she’d come back. She straightened her shoulders, willing herself to draw strength from the life she had so carefully constructed around her, hoping it might hold her up. Ten months after leaving her uniform behind for good, a strict attention to order and organization had kept her intact. Looking over her spreadsheet on the monitor, she moved her left hand to rest on the one thing out of place on her desk, a smooth, flat oval stone her father had found for her on their last trip to the cabin, the place where all her happy memories lived. She’d worn the stone smooth over fifteen years, though she knew where she could still find the rough places.

  She felt Steve’s presence before she saw him stop at her door on his way down the hall. “See you at the meeting, soldier?” he said. He was always so nice, though she didn’t like being called soldier by someone who had never been one himself. “Division’s coming today.”

  “I know. I’ll be just a minute,” she said, only glancing up. She placed the stone up against the lamp, hit enter on the last cell of the spreadsheet, and the numbers turned over and over and stopped.

  The bird hit just after that.

  She knew without looking which one it was. The female house finch she’d been watching on the bird feeder all month, the one hanging next to the benches and the boulder and the neat rows of barberry and Japanese mountain grass lining the clean cement sidewalks. The male came too but only on occasion. This was the female.

  Tina stood up from her computer with a jerk, knocking the stainless steel coffee cup onto the floor. She stepped over the pooling coffee and started to run, down the hall and out the glass doors beside the reception desk where a new receptionist sat. Once outside Tina slowed down, the fresh air reassuring. She’d be all right, the bird. Maybe she didn’t hit hard. It was a cool morning. A few minutes to recover, and she’d fly away.

  Just below her office window Tina found the bird. She was lying on her side on the carefully manicured wood chips, beak opening and closing in time with the brown and white flecked chest moving in small determined gasps. Her small dark eyes blinked. Tina knelt in grass still wet from the morning sprinklers, ignoring the wetness spreading across the knees of her grey wool slacks.

  She picked up the little brown body—so soft! So warm!—and held it in her palm, the tiny feathered face looking up at her. The bird’s head seemed strangely loose.

  “Shhhhh, shhhhhh.” Her finger stroked the flight feathers.

  The tiny beak opened and closed more slowly and Tina watched, hoping her eyes might somehow impart life. The bird was just stunned. She’d be okay.

  Then the small chest stopped moving, and the beak too.

  Tina waited. The life-brightness faded from the small eye in an instant, as though it had never been there at all, the reflection receding into the soft feathers.

  It is true that Tina did not remember her meeting. Steve would ask her later when she returned, silk blouse and wool pants wet and face and hands smeared with mud, if she needed help. There was a new group for vets he would be happy to refer her to. She looked at him and thought of the bird and thought of Molly lying on that open dusty desert road with her eyes open but not seeing, mustard colored dust on her face, her skin, and the dark blood too reaching out from under her body onto the road. The dust made Molly more a part of the ground than the smile she had worn the moment before they’d hit the IED.

  Tina knew that Steve could never see what it was she saw, and she said no thank you, she was fine. She put the rock in her pocket and she walked out while the new receptionist stared and she didn’t come back.

  Outside, Tina looked around for the trees, for the forest, but her new building was in the middle of the campus. She saw only benches and the sometime Japanese maple. She held the bird in her hand and she walked along the winding concrete sidewalks, past blocks D and J and S. It wasn’t far. She stepped off the path, cut through the lawn directly toward the woods, her heels punching into the wet grass.

  She reached the woods. Doug fir and aspen and alder with a thick undergrowth of salal and new ferns uncoiling into the spring. Against the campus of Spectrum Incorporated, the ordinary woods looked wild as a jungle. Her steps quickened, her lungs bringing in new wilder air. She did not slow but walked straight in. Her blouse snagged against the barbed leaf of an Oregon grape but she pressed on until she found a small clearing.

  Tina knelt among the leaves. She set the bird to the side. The dirt was wet and consolidated from the rain. She broke a branch from a snag and stabbed at the dirt, opening space. An ant climbed onto the leaves where the bird lay, and she swiped at it with the stick. She kept digging. The hole was ten inches, eighteen inches. The ant came back.

  “Dammit!” she screamed. She picked up the ant between her thumb and index finger and crushed it, wiping its body against a stump. She kept digging.

  Twenty-four inches. Her digging slowed, and Tina looked at the tiny bird.

  She pulled off new leaves from the spring salal and lay them on the bottom of the hole. She made a bed of small sticks placed next to one another. Then another layer of salal. She lay the tiny brown flecked body on the leaves, and covered it with another layer of leaves, and then added a handful of dirt, and then another. To add dirt by the handful took time but she did not hurry. She added dirt until the hole was full. Then she patted it down and added more. She spread the old leaves back out and over the ground. She stood up and away and lay twigs across the leaves until she could not herself see that she had been there. She looked at the clearing wild and disturbed and returned to wild and she said, “Now rest. Now, you can rest.”

  Once she had left, and taken her stone, she got in her car and she drove out past the manicured streets past the school the post office the mall until she steered her car onto the highway to drive. The leaving, the shedding of the structures she had so carefully constructed, filled her with both relief and a sense of danger and this feeling grew inside of her but she did not pay i
t any mind. After ten minutes she’d left behind the carved underpasses and muraled concrete highway walls and mowed ditches. The highway took her toward the mountains and she felt the swell of trees on either side, the darkness of tree and trunk standing like friends, like she had found a place she could try to trust, though this freedom did not guarantee her safety. She let her foot relax on the gas pedal and set the cruise control, her body curving into the seat while her eyes breathed in deep green on either side.

  Darkness settled with reluctance, she thought, though she had not kept track of time. She grimaced at the fuel low light, its harsh insistent brightness. She’d always filled the car at half a tank, never let the fuel go down so far. Her chest constricted. She reminded herself to take deep breaths. This was something that never went away, the unbearable tension, the rubberband-taut awareness.

  A sign appeared in the headlights as Tina forced in breath against the tightness in her chest. She let the car move toward the exit lane. Turned left across the overpass toward the bright station sign. She filled her car at the pump, then pulled up to the glaring lights of the store, turned her car off, and walked inside. She pulled down a Diet Coke, picked up a granola bar.

  When you clear a room, you line up outside the door. One person enters weapon first . . . she remembered the training lanes, the strangely high voice of the instructor.

  “Miss, miss?” The man behind the counter looked at her from underneath a tightly wrapped black turban. His voice was high, the way the instructor’s had been. “Cash or charge?”

  She looked up with a start. Her hand lay on the box of granola bars and she realized with embarrassment that she had been staring straight ahead.

  “Yes,” she heard her voice say.

  “Charge!” he’d said. Not the instructor, no. It was not the instructor, it was the sergeant leading the patrol, it was the sound of the bomb, it was all the sounds together and they would not be disentangled from the sticky aural web.

  She brought the granola bar to the counter and pulled out her purse. The man did not look at her again but scanned each item. “Three dollars and sebety-sik cent,” he said.

  Tina looked up at him as she handed four worn singles from her purse.

  The day she had seen the woman, spoken with her, seen her dark eyes intent with a particular kind of terror, tried to protect her from what surrounded them, the sergeant screaming, his own brutal fear forcing its way out through anger in his wild eyes. The barrel of his M16 bobbed up and down. Tina felt the world narrow until she stood alone with the woman in a cloud of dust, the sergeant’s screams echoing outside. It was just the woman’s deep brown eyes, the eyes looking out of and through the dust. Tina had pointed the woman back inside of her house, and thought if she looked at the woman hard enough she might save her still.

  One word, one movement, meant life, or death. What did life mean then anyway? How hard life tried to make it through, push through the fear and all that lay ruined.

  Tina put away her purse and began to walk toward the door.

  “Miss? Miss?” the man’s voice again.

  “Miss, change, tenty-fur cent.”

  She looked back at the man and met his eyes without recognition, her own eyes wide and raw still seeing things beyond him, and she turned away and walked through the glass doors, glass smudged and dirty, back to her car and she turned the key and began to drive.

  The story of the woman; that had been Molly’s story, not hers. But they shared all their stories. The stories made up who they had become and one could not be separated from another. A thing had happened, they had been in this thing and how they had come into it was not the same way that they would leave it. They went into this thing and thought maybe they would do something good and instead this thing had changed them and one day, one moment, you suddenly knew that you had been changed, though you hadn’t felt it happen.

  She set her cruise control one mile per hour below the speed limit and held the steering wheel with her knee as she opened the Diet Coke in the darkness, listened to the slow escape of gas into the air. Until then she had driven in silence, the thoughts of her own head too loud to hear anything else. Now she pushed the CD into the player. She took a long swig of carbonated brown water into her mouth, felt it force its way into her throat. Her CD spun, the inner mechanics of the player grinding but the music won and strains of Arvo Pärt began to play.

  Arvo Pärt had disappeared himself once, she remembered. He had delivered these large and complex masterpieces, and then gone away for eight years. No one knew where he had been. When he reemerged his music was more spare, ethereal. No one understood him. Truth might come only after time, and in a quiet way. But in this music she heard a faith in something else she wanted to find. Whatever it was, it was beautiful, more beautiful than she thought she would be able to see. She wanted it. She yearned for it.

  What did Pärt find in those years away? Why did he go? Had he known what he was seeking? Did it change things?

  She turned off the interstate onto a two-lane state highway, watching the darkness in front of her, the small spot of moving asphalt lit by her headlights shiny in a steady rain. Her cruise control blinked off. The country road was darker, and in the darkness the forests on each side pressed in, or rather grew until she knew she’d been absorbed with a growing sense of mixed relief and fear. Far ahead a light appeared and grew, lights of an oncoming car.

  Tina tightened the cap back onto her Diet Coke and placed it in the seat next to her. Her right foot pushed smoothly down, accelerating, watching the light growing into two lights, so bright. She put both hands on the wheel, gripping firmly but not hard. The lights grew larger, exposed another row above them. It was late for a semi to be on this highway. She watched the lights now instead of the road, imagined the shape of the crew cab, and . . . did she allow her car to drift, or did she turn? A strange calm came over her, the mechanical rhythm of the wipers cleaning water from the windshield, the lights large now, blinding, immense

  The scream of the horn sounded the reflections of her own headlights in the shiny grill the cab wrenching away.

  She turned too but did not remember, must have jerked the wheel, must have pulled herself and car away, but she did not remember, and her lights shone lonely on rainy blackness that also did not remember, the mad swerve of red taillights receding in her rear view mirror. She did not stop until she saw only darkness on all sides again.

  Just ahead there would be a pull-off. The bridge over the gorge. The place they had always stopped when she was a little girl. The place you could feel the spray of the waterfall rising from the gash in rocks below.

  The sign emerged from the darkness. She pressed her brakes, pulled onto the roadside.

  Rain fell heavily now. Tina turned off the car to feel the darkness, hear the hard drops of rain drumming on the roof. She opened her door, the sound of the rain less loud but as insistent on the asphalt and magnified in the trees around her. She walked to the edge of the bridge, the form of the thigh-high railing made of stone just visible through the wet and dark. Tina pushed herself up onto the wall, letting her feet hang over the edge toward the waterfall she could not see but only hear. The water roared, spray mixed with rain far below in the blackness. Water soaked through her pants, plastered her hair, ran down her neck, her blouse clung to her body.

  Tina put her hands on the cold wet stone. She listened to the road, looked into the darkness, felt the cold and wet. She leaned forward, closing her eyes and lifting her face toward the darkness and heard the roaring grow, began to feel it inside of her. If you listened too long to the roar, it would overcome you, she thought. She arched her back, lifting her face to the rain and the darkness. Her center of gravity shifted, the slightest shift she felt all the way through her body and for an instant she thought she would fall, thought she would let herself fall. She recoiled, as though she’d been punched, felt her eyes open in the blackness with terror bathed in relief at her own fear. She pulled her legs up from
over the edge, pulled them in close to her and did not notice that she was crying until she felt her body shaking from the sobs, took in a hard breath and tasted the wet cold of rain and coughed and cried until she was done and she sat with her arms holding her legs bent against her and lay her head on her knees and felt the rain hitting the side of her neck and her face until it was numbing and then it soothed her and in the darkness the rhythm became a song.

  No, she said, aloud. No. It is enough.

  She did not know how long she sat there. It had taken no time to be soaked through, and the bigness of the sound and feel of water falling from dark mountain and dark sky filled up what she perceived so that when she got up and climbed into her car and saw it had only been twenty minutes she was surprised it had not been much longer. As she turned the key, the car convulsed with a lurch toward life. Tina let the engine run until the rhythm smoothed, then backed up and turned again onto the highway. She pulled the stone from her pocket, felt its smoothness, and set it on the small ledge in front of the speedometer, where she could see its shape by its absence, blocking out the instrument lights behind it.

  She pulled back onto the state highway and drove.

  Twenty miles later she turned off the highway onto a country road. She slowed her speed, and opened the granola bar wrapper, eating the bar in tiny bites like a child, or an animal. The rain stopped and she saw the glint of moon against the torn edge of cloud and stars coming through. The trees thinned as the road climbed and then leveled out again, her headlights picking up the sharp shadows of bushes accustomed to the dry side of the mountains. She drove into the darkness, only the lights illuminating static shapes without color.