The Running War

by E. L. Carter

  When I played the harp I also did other things that I don’t do anymore. I followed orders, kept my knees together, obeyed, and produced. I was a good little soldier. I could leave my body at will and hover somewhere near the light fixture anytime it seemed possible I might talk back. Dad paced at home, tight with hard liquor, stopping only to stand at attention to a superior none of us understood. He was full to overflowing with a story he couldn’t lay to rest. It almost never spilled out, but some days he would relent, something about an order to kill anything that moved, about the jungle and a dead family and a little girl who ran at him. But it was never clear enough to pull all the details together because he only let it out when he was too drunk to talk straight. Who was I to him then? A part of his memories maybe, mixed into the cocktail with a maraschino cherry. An angel at the harp, come to redeem his past. So I did the only thing he’d taught me how to do, which was throw it all away: baby, bath water, strings, and stool.

  You can call me the ghost on River Street. You can call me the wallpaper flower, seventies vintage, still lurking around the dark parts of the kitchen. I like to sit on the landing in front of my apartment door with my tea, and watch through the railing. The occasional car, once or twice a week a biker. A middle-aged woman in matching sweats and New Balance walkers, on the clock at 8:47 every morning. Across the street is a bridge over the river, original stonework like all the others in this town. It takes the sun most of the morning to find me, and when it does it comes halfhearted, like someone in a stale government job, punching a time card and dreaming of the tropics.

  Monday, my day off. Tea on the veranda. Why don’t I get a chair! For the same reason that Kris never did. We live in a temporary world, can already see each quantum of time become memory as it happens; we’re watching it disappear before it’s even made sense. A couple of pages of Kris’s journal, my little day-off project. Out the side window I can see the walnut tree leaning over me, immovable as rock. A fly has come in from the front and now it smashes itself repeatedly against the window pane, unable to believe the invisible strength of glass.

  At least I’m not the only one. And you thought you were in charge too, didn’t you, Kris? If you had gone to Las Vegas instead of college, they would’ve kicked you out of Caesar’s Palace: every time you pulled the lever, money poured out. One day a high school dropout and the next an ivy leaguer on scholarship. Sure, you were lucky, but mostly just brilliant. Do you remember that day at your dorm? I went lots of times between adventures, a trail of men bleeding behind me and there safe, like Switzerland. But this was the time I skirted the laundry (because you had no dresser) and the linens (you had no bed) to put some cheese and bread in the fridge (you never had food) as an offering to health, and I was shocked to find it was full. Then I saw that it was only little cardboard pyramids made out of cut-up cereal boxes and milk cartons, inside Ziplocs with wet paper towels.

  You showed up way after dark—after I had gone ahead and eaten the cheese and bread, after I had found your sleeping bag in the closet and unstuffed it on the floor, after I had lain down and seen your butterfly net behind the door. It was the net you’d made in fifth grade, on a school night too, out of muslin, an uncoiled wire hanger, and a dowel. Now look at you. A legendary butterfly catcher.

  “Hey,” I called out as you came in, lying on my back on the down bag, my legs crossed.

  “Hey.” You pulled your courier bag off your shoulder and dropped it on the floor. I could hear the thud as the heavy books hit the wood. “And what brings you to my study tonight?” I could see you clearly in the light, your eyes circled in dark rings, your hair half wild. If I hadn’t known better, I would have been worried, but instead I felt a flood of pride.

  “I don’t know. Just felt like visiting. What the hell is in the refrigerator?”

  “My little beauties. Want to help me set them free?”

  “What? Letters to lovestruck grad students?”

  We both laughed, because we knew you were intent on your goal, which had nothing to do with romancing graduate students. Women didn’t approach you, not because of looks but because you bore such an air of indifference, completely focused on your work. And I knew the indifference was something else too—the cover job for shame, a voluntary exile.

  “They’re sleeping butterflies.”

  I got it then. “What, are you the White Witch?”

  You snorted. “I had two labs I couldn’t miss. So you do what you can and save the rest for later.”

  We both rolled off our places on the floor at the crack of ten thirty. Before coffee or anything, we went to the edge of campus, to one of many places where you, guerilla gardener, had recently planted lupine and milkweed on the sly, in an effort to reseed your corner of New England and make for better research opportunities. We sat down in the tangled early fall grass and weeds. A few precocious leaves had already fallen around us. We began to pull the butterflies out of their cardboard cages, releasing them from the spell of the refrigerator.

  You matter-of-factly pressed stickers onto each hind wing while they sat, half awake, slowly fanning the air in a little cluster. Suddenly one of them took off. It ignored your spindly milkweed clones and headed straight up to the level of the treetops. By some hidden signal—one that we in our ignorance could only guess at—the rest of the butterflies rose in unison, following the leader, and soon they were all gone, vanished into the clear blue sky.

  I look at the fly in the window again, then stand and use my hand to sweep it back toward the door. After it disappears into the open air, I check my phone. I almost delete the e-mail. Benjamin Brown? Who’s that? But he isn’t trying to sell me Vicodin. His subject line: Kris.

  He says, Sorry for the delay. Have a new baby. Lots of love, no time. Can’t think of what the gift might be right now. Sorry, I’ll think on it some more.

  I hope you’re doing OK.

  Benja, Kris’s staff sergeant, cried the whole way through Kris’s funeral, and now he’s done. I can close my eyes and see him: he’s living in a little cement-block house in San Jose, his two daughters in one room and he, his wife, and the baby in the other. A bright pink bougainvillea spills over the fence between their bungalow and the neighbors’. No one wants to control it so it mounds itself over the wire, reaches its tendrils for the house, and the color erases one bad memory each time he looks at it. Benja drives to work in the morning along the sun-cracked highway and at night he studies for his bachelor’s degree.

  Can’t think of what the gift might be—he throws the emptiness in his hands back at me like it’s light as air. But it’s not; it’s full of the lead in Kris’s wounds. Just for the satisfaction of knowing something, I pull the photo of the little girl from Kris’s journal out of my pocket, take a picture of it, and send it to him. Do you know who she is?

  December 19, 2003

  Scheherazade, because I don’t have a girlfriend and she sings to keep me from dying. Scheherazade: eight million of a kind. First performance (staccato, allegretto, forte fortissimo): South Vietnam. 39.6 inches long, 7.8 pounds without magazine. Features safe mode, semi, and 3-round burst. Point target 600 yards. Area target 875. Bullet speed 31,000 feet per second. 700-900 rounds per minute. Construction: steel, alloy, plastic, and polymer. She likes to be clean, like a cat. When she gets under your skin, she’ll make your insides explode. She’ll drain one end of your body so fast that the other end gets nerve damage.

  She can fuck you up.

  Scheherazade, fast-forward evolution, brainchild of engineers who like to kill. She fits my hands, sleek and scary. She looks like she belongs in the movies. I feel her when she recoils into my shoulder. I feel it when I carry her with a full magazine. She hangs with me everywhere—when I eat, when I shit, when I sleep. I know her better than family.

  When I look at my gun, a jumble pours out of me: horror, pride, relief. I don’t think she is the emissary of world peace. When I hold her, I don’t think I am either.

  What will Scheherazade s
ing next? The king has her at gunpoint for a good one.

  December 20

  I’m getting all gay for Benja.

  It’s not just me. Women fall over each other trying to get close to him in a bar. But he just jerks his chin up at them. He’s married and he means it. No one fucks with him. When I’m with him no one fucks with me either. He’s twenty-five like me. But the man’s a staff sergeant, almost a career soldier. Unlike me as hell.

  There’s always been electricity between us, even in training back home when he tried to scare the shit out of me b, pretending the dummy with the gun was real, billowing in the New York wind, half in shadow, Shoot Kris, Shoot! Trying to give me real adrenaline so I would know what it’s like when you’re here, in hell, with real bullets in your gun and only Kevlar between you and heaven. And I popped my eyes out and went at him as fast and precise as a sharp shooter, so he started to put me on point, and still I hit the mark every time. When he gave me shit for being scrawny, I didn’t give him shit back, I didn’t hit the target that time; I showed him what peace is like. I said I’m not big but I don’t need to be, and I don’t choose my reading material based on the girth of the spine, or publisher’s blurb either. He knew what I meant, and that’s when I fell in love with him. He was so fierce it was scary, but he didn’t stay on the testosterone-coaster and punch my arm and call me a white boy he looked me in the eyes and held his tongue.

  That’s how it is with us. We’re brutes and warriors, thugs who rip down doors and snarl and snap like dogs, and we’re philosophers who sit in the evening breeze with a cup of tea to try to understand how to take this war by its roots and wrench it free.

  Benja has a perfect smile, white and straight, and it turns his face on like a halogen light. His pecs and abs are perfect: not WWF material, not steroid balloons, just rock solid and strong. I love him. That’s the beginning and the end. I love the man.

  Today the convoy ahead of ours gets hit by an IED. Disabled Humvee, no serious casualties. We head out quick, over the canal full of mud toward the farmland, and on the other side we find where the wire ends: a trigger made from a doorbell. A smashed-up can of Pepsi and six dirty cigarette butts. Fresh footprints. We follow them along the edge of the field, absent of green swaying innocent food, a dust bowl, the occasional date palm, a farmhouse made of cement but the color of dirt. Open the door, faces with mouths open but no sound, eyes the color of fear. A man lifts his arm and points. Eric guards the front and me, Kareem, and Benja go to the back.

  Kareem disappears inside the door and I hear him yell, “Hey!” and then a little kid starts to cry

  Benja next. “Fucking drop it!” and the clatter of a machine gun hitting the deck.

  Now I’m inside. Kareem has his M-4 trained on a teenage boy. The Kalashnikov has slid a little way across the floor away from him. Benja has his gun pointed at the MAM with one arm and a little kid behind him. The girl can’t stop crying. Benja looks at me, stern, arrest that motherfucker. Lets his gun drop and picks up the girl, props her on his hip like a mother. “Hey,” he says, soft this time. “We gotcha. We got your back.”

  I love that man.

  December 21

  Yesterday we saved children from insurgents. Today is almost better, because I found a new bug. Periplaneta americana, winter warrior, ancient admirable species: I’ve had enough of you. The new one was under a piece of metal on the ground at the edge of the compound. A scarablike beetle, its elytra a beautiful iridescent green and the hindwings bright yellow. I think it’s a kind of Jewel Beetle, of the family Buprestidae. The first interesting species for my book.

  BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005

  Raed says, “You don’t eat the food I bring, do you?”

  “How can you tell?”

  I look at him there, framed in the white doorway, his eyes inscrutable, his long, tired-looking face almost blank as he replies, “I can just tell.” He shifts on his feet and says, “I went to the neighborhood you’re looking for. It’s very dangerous there right now. I asked around about your people. Finally one man told me that they left the area.”

  “Did you ask him where they went?”

  “Of course, miss. Of course I would ask.” He gives me a look that could be the hatred I’m expecting but could be something else, simple condescension.

  “And?”

  “He told me where he thinks they are. It’s to the south, near Dora.”

  “Can you go there?”

  “If I’ve done what I need to for CIIN.”

  I get out my laptop and type an instant message to my contact at the NGO, a spirited woman about my age who laughs at everything and who procured a visa for me—a minor miracle—with what seemed like the snap of a finger. “Here with Raed. The people I’m looking for are south of the city. Can I send him tomorrow?”

  She messages back right away. “How long would it take him?”

  “How long would it take?” I ask Raed.

  “Ten minutes to an hour each way.” He shrugs. “It depends on traffic. You know.”

  “Ten minutes each way,” I write.

  No response for a minute. Then, “Tell Raed he needs to get the new volunteers from the airport tomorrow and set them up with you in the hotel. After that he’s free to go.”

  I look at Raed. He touches the gun he wears under his clothes, an American gun that would get him killed if people saw it, a sign that he works for the enemy. I close my computer and say, “The new people fly in tomorrow. Then you can go.”

  He shifts on his feet, hand still over the hidden gun. “Ready to go, then?”

  “You’ll go there?”

  “I told you. I already told you.”

  “Okay.” I sigh. “I’m ready.”

  NEW JERSEY—JUNE 2005

  Mrs. Bird has gotten little matching pillows for the couch. They are the same burgundy as the couch, with edging the color of the roses. I sit on the edge and rest my elbow against one while she fiddles with the silver pot.

  She hands me the tea, and I relish this little gift, the warmth on my hands and the pillow against my side. I feel like a little girl and she’s my mother. After I have sipped, I ask, “Did you ever resent it? The four girls, that life?”

  “Resent?” She gawks. “I loved changing every diaper. Chasing a babbling toddler down little hills. Who could resent Mother Goose and a child in her lap? I loved helping with homework. I loved the coming-out parties, and holding a brokenhearted teenager’s hand. I even loved seeing them off to college.” She smiles when she talks, the way some people smile when they have chocolate in their mouths.

  “Didn’t you want something just for yourself? I mean, I would want to hide in the closet, just to catch my breath.”

  “Funny.” She closes her eyes for a minute, still with that chocolate look. “I didn’t. At least I don’t think I did. I never wanted a nanny. Not even when my husband, Nels, was away on business and I was taking care of them alone. If I had had a nanny, I would’ve missed all the little things. I would’ve missed their metamorphosis. I know your generation might see it differently.”

  “Yeah, we tear apart everything. Looking for truth underneath the old customs, throwing out babies with bathwater.”

  “I don’t blame you. It all started with us anyway. After the war we didn’t know anything anymore. The ones who came home came home broken. Nels—everyone. They either lost their bodies or they lost their faith. It might sound like old news, but that war was barely yesterday.”

  There’s an ant in my chocolate, something wiggling at the edge of my mind trying to come in. Something about the way Dad looked at me when I played the harp, the taste of blood in my mouth, and the way Benja held that little boy. I say, “It didn’t end, did it?”

  “After all the protests in Washington, all the flowers, all the hope … now we call them peacekeeping missions. I don’t know why it’s so hard, but it is: to let horror be horror, and not turn it into something—anger, hope, confusion—to just feel it. Or to let go of being
right. I guess horror and surrender are just hard to face.” She smiles a little half smile. “It helps if you’ve given birth.”

  I don’t tell her my story. I stay perfectly still.

  “There’s no question with a child in your arms,” she continues. “No question of your political agenda, or whether it was worth it.”

  Now I twirl my saucer around in my lap, a slow rotation like a planet in space. “I think you know that’s not true in my family. I think you know no vows of peace were made over a bassinet.”

  “You mean how your family treated your grandmother.” Mrs. Bird gives me her curious look.

  I stiffen. “My grandmother had a baby in her arms and she threw it away. That’s how war goes on.”

  Mrs. Bird is looking at me hard. “It’s a very complicated story.”

  “Oh, right. She’s your friend.”

  “Yes. And to be honest, I became her friend because I felt sorry for her. But I stayed her friend because I learned to respect her. She told me the truth, you know. She told me things I’ve never felt comfortable sharing with anyone else, not even your mother.”

  “And you still respect her now, after all is said and done?”

  “Yes. I still respect her. And I do because that story is not all said and done.”

  “Okay,” I say slowly. “Okay, then who is going to tell it?”

  In response to my challenge, she goes back to the teapot and pours us each a cup. When we have drunk from the cream-colored porcelain, our lips kissing the ring of flowers on the rim, she begins to talk.

  “I was your grandmother’s friend. And now I’m yours. All those years, no one asked any questions. No one asked for the truth.”