Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  “Wow. Faggy,” said Battle Zero.

  “It’s Liberace.”

  “He’s dead,” said Danny.

  “No wonder,” said Battle Zero.

  “Your mother’s a genius,” Danny said. But I was too busy reading the rest of her letter:

  “ . . . and if we, the rich, white world, stopped being so selfish and donated more of our culture to those unfortunates who don’t have it (instead of trying to make a profit off it), this world would all be one big happy family . . .”

  “This is brilliant,” Danny said. And for some reason, he really meant it.

  “. . . And so if you let them hear the musical genius of Liberace, which Albert has so generously downloaded for you, those Talibans will almost certainly want to be your friends, and . . .”

  . . . And what, Annabelle?

  Yes, what? All the gentle lacerations that never heal with Annie Boo? The ones frozen in the aspic of the People magazines that you send? Her and Hef? Her and (fill in celebrity blank here)? Her from a million paparazzi angles destined to flash through the zipline of our collectively deteriorating attention span? Is that why you’re sending me People, Us, National Enquirer, and all the rest of the air candy we dine on in our endless banquet? Or maybe—just maybe—is it because Annie is the You that never happened?

  And if so, what the hell does that say about me?

  Signed: yr lving son.

  • • •

  That night, the Apache gunships roaring into the air to take out whoever was mortaring our south perimeter kicked up enough of a downdraft to knock poor Liberace over. That life-sized, prancing poster of him dressed in those tighty-whiteys and all that fringe was spun against the tent, but he suffered no grievous injuries and, once righted, was still frozen in his leg-kicking pose with that megawatt smile.

  But the attack had a soundtrack, just like in Hollywood. Liberace’s “Moonlight Sonata” was ending when we heard the distinctive crummp! mortar sound that preceded the explosions. They were perfectly timed to synch up with “Beer Barrel Polka,” which cut loose as something blew out beyond the wire.

  For Danny, this mortar business was just some annoying irritation. He was fixated on Liberace—his showing up was a sign, he just knew it. Liberace was some sort of cosmic messenger and Danny wanted Constance to tell him what it all meant. Crummmp! He redialed her number on the sat phone. “Answering machine,” he said. “Five times.”

  Crummmp! And then a distant thump! thump! thump! as the Apaches let loose with their 30mm guns. Like in horror films, the night tends to expand your imagination when scary stuff is involved.

  “Leave a message.”

  “It’s too complicated.” A mortar hit somewhere closer in. Whoever was shelling us was bracketing. “Watch out for Liberace.”

  For most of his allotted ten minutes on the reporter’s sat phone, Danny just dialed, listened to the message, hung up, waited a few minutes, dialed again, and repeated the whole exercise. “These Hollywood people,” he said. Somewhere, in his mind, ten thousand miles away in California, a woman was watching the phone ring and not answering it. Because maybe it was not cool to answer your own phone in Hollywood.

  Finally, when he was about eight minutes into his sat phone allotment, he left another breathless message. “Hello? Constance? It’s me again. Danny. In Afghanistan. Listen I’m sorry to bother you. I don’t know what time it is over there in California, but it’s eight o’clock at night here in Afghanistan and I really need to talk to you. See, I know this sounds weird, but Liberace has sort of shown up here. And I know it’s a sign because I’m trying to find my girlfriend, Ariana, who was kidnapped and taken over here by her family, especially Omar, her brother, who used to be my best friend but now is trying to kill me before I kill him and if there’s one thing that would send him around the bend, make him absolutely bat-shit crazy, it would be Liberace, because—”

  Crummp! He abruptly stopped talking and stared into the phone. “It cut me off,” he said at almost the same instant that something exploded on the packing crates—you could almost hear the fins on the mortar round rotating, it was so close, sending Liberace pinwheeling into the next tent. After we lurched to our feet again, Danny ran to pick up Liberace. Dusting him off, he said, “We need him.”

  “For what?”

  “To get Omar.”

  “Liberace is going to bring down Omar?”

  “Of course,” he said. He was looking at me as if the answer was utterly obvious.

  • • •

  From the LZ, we left the platoon we’d flown in with and walked through a small valley, through fields and villages with no one visible, usually a sign that the Taliban were nearby. The silence of those mud-brick structures came from some different age, from some other place than the one we knew. The stillness alone made your skin crawl. The slightest sound was amplified in your mind. A cloth banner, flying raggedly over a grave, made a snapping sound that sounded like gunfire by the time it got through to my brain.

  Farther up toward the mountains we saw a woman collecting scraps of firewood from the goat-ravaged trees. Dressed from head to foot in a light-blue burqa, she turned, probably startled as we approached—I say probably because there was no way of telling—she was encased in that burqa like it was a shroud. She stared for an instant through that heavy mesh opening across her eyes. Then she fled across the mountain like a sky-colored ghost.

  Danny stopped, swaying under the eighty pounds in his rucksack until I thought he was going to fall over. “Aw man.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That woman. She could have been twenty—she could have been sixty. Who knows what was underneath that thing. She was erased, man. Erased! That’s what they do. That’s what they’re trying to do to Ariana. But she won’t let them.”

  “Are you trying to convince me? Or are you—”

  “Don’t even go there.”

  “Break! Break! Break! Gabriel Three—” The radio crackled with our call sign. Coordinates were relayed quickly back and forth. Two of our guys were dead and another wounded after a Ninja RPK light machine gun opened up on them, daisy cutting the terrain on the other side of the mountain. They couldn’t get to the wounded guy because of the fire from that machine gun with its two-hundred-round drum.

  Danny and I pushed ourselves up through more map contour lines than I wanted to know about, climbing maybe fifteen hundred meters straight up. And then we had a view of the problem. One of the Americans was lying on a plateau way below us, slowly bleeding to death from a major leg wound. Every time one of the Rakkasans tried to go to his aid over the ridge line, the RPK would blister the ground in front of him.

  I glassed the other side of the plateau and found the RPK on an overhang on the other side. Two Taliban fighters manned the machine gun, one firing, the other preparing to load. The one firing had a black turban and a full beard. The other one wore a flat, round, pakol cap and played cheerleader, yelling whenever the machine gunner fired.

  Instantly, we were all business: doing a laser check on the guy with the turban who was firing the machine gun; it came up with 1,920 meters. Then calibrating the remnants of a cooking fire behind them, which yielded a calculation of about four minutes left for the drifting smoke; then dialing that windage into the scope; checking and rechecking the notations in the logbook that Danny carried: altitude, elevation, temperature, trajectory, and velocity. And finally crawling, ever so slowly, to get to the place where that single round of 173-grain ammunition would not be deflected by the barrel of the machine gun.

  That was what we did. Those were the fierce, intense moments we needed to get the mil dots in the scope lined up right below that black turban and beard.

  But really?—that was not what we were doing.

  Not even close. Only later did I realize it.

  What we doing was avenging Ariana. And whatever she was going through.

  As we crawled through the scrub brush, Danny whispered the whole time about Ari
ana. About how Omar and he were both here in these mountains. About their brother. Their father. Whispering, inching ahead. About Zadran, who would be protecting Omar. And still whispering as he lined up to fire. And again as I murmured recalculations: One thousand eight hundred and ninety-two meters . . .

  The whispers were about how Ariana’s family hated music. Music was the work of Satan. The Prophet had said so. And how Omar had talked to his father, who was fleeing after 9/11 and had issued his own decree: No music. Especially no piano music. Piano music was evil.

  And so, Liberace was now our fiercest warrior. The piano player. Liberace would wreak havoc on Omar.

  Exhale, Danny. You are in another world now. A world where time slows down. Ex-hale. Softly. And feather that trigger with that crooked finger, eye to the scope, pulling back oh-so-gently, and—

  A mile and more away, the black turban flew into the air as a fine red mist exploded from the machine gunner’s chest.

  And a second or two later, the cheerleader also lay dead, and the Rakkasans scrambled onto the plateau toward their wounded comrade.

  “Ariana,” was all Danny would say.

  • • •

  Later, toward nightfall, Danny again unfolded the life-sized poster of Liberace. He took it out to where the groove in the mountain pass ascended for perhaps three thousand feet like a vast scar in the looming granite.

  In the face of the gathering clouds, he strode to the highest point of ground, a tall, shaggy-haired kid with Oakley wraparound sunglasses, baseball cap, the beginning of a blond beard, headphones with a radio mike, desert camos, T-shirt, and a Glock or two, all of it accessorized by the deshmal, the warriors’ fashion statement, the brown-and-white checked Afghan kerchief that draped over his shoulders. A rifle hung at his side in one hand as he planted the poster with the other hand so that Liberace faced the mountain, beaming and prancing into the darkness as if that smile alone could light up the night.

  Then he implemented Annabelle’s Theory of War. He took Albert’s downloaded disk and inserted it into the CD player. From two portable speakers, Liberace, prancing in that frozen pose, belted out “Polonaise in A-flat Major,” and the Afghan mountains ricocheted with his music. Such nice music! Liberace’s tinkling, bouncy notes filled the passes, blasting through caves, bouncing off the rock faces, and soaring into the cold mountain heights.

  “ARIANA!” Danny yelled into the mountains. His voice came back to him in waves of echoes.

  “Omar,” he said quietly. “We’ll know Omar’s out there when someone attacks Liberace.”

  Whatever concerts Liberace gave or pranced through while he was alive, the response was nothing compared with this, his most fervently attended performance. Because, from somewhere in the gathering clouds jostling against the highest reaches of the mountain, the glint of tracer bullets flew out, arcing toward us. They lacked the trajectory, and sank into the void below Liberace, who was now arm in arm with Danny, waving into the distant gunfire.

  “Omar!” Danny yelled. “What’s the matter, Omar?” Omar Omar Omar the echoes responded. “Let me see Ariana!”

  Another burst of tracers raced through the gloom as Liberace pounded out something called “Mexican Hat Dance.” Danny stood beside the cardboard standup poster, bracing it against the wind that had whipped up. The bullets came closer but could not reach what must have looked like two friends enjoying the view.

  Toronto

  13

  Omar had become so tall and physically strong that the phys ed teacher approached him, looking for a linebacker for the football team. Omar had to ask Danny what a linebacker was and when he found out how long the daily practices were, he decided on a carefully laid-out plan. “I’ll do it just long enough to destroy that prick Jerry.”

  Jerry was the enemy. Ever since he’d wrapped Freddie’s parents’ car around the telephone pole on the Lakeshore, thereby ending Bonus Night forever, Jerry had been dickhead, fart face, and ass wipe. It didn’t matter that he was supposed to be the football star of the upcoming season. Or that he was poised for whatever greatness such things bring to someone who vacationed in California every March break. Even Sue Chapman’s three weeks in traction after the accident did not diminish the luster of what lay ahead for Jerry.

  “I’m g-g-gonna crush him” was Omar’s pronouncement.

  “Forget it,” said Danny, staring into the furrow that Omar got between his eyes whenever he was seized by some anger over something that made no sense to anyone listening. Danny had started to decode Omar’s fits of fury. They were always about something else than what he was talking about. Danny saw it mostly when Omar was talking about having to go to the mosque out in Scarborough, the one his father took them to. They were increasingly accompanied by a slight stammer as he exploded his way through whatever sentence he grappled with. And usually the fits ended up with some comment about his father. “Fucking di-dictator.”

  “Jerry’s not such a bad guy,” Danny said as Omar’s brow furrowed into that knife-edge of emotion he sometimes showed. “He’s just a lucky guy who’s got it all.”

  “Guys like that? They’re a fucking fraud, man.” Omar’s pronouncements about Jerry were often made in front of Dorothy, his new girlfriend after Bonnie Frangilatta, who was practically slandering him to anyone who would listen. Now, whenever he encountered Bonnie in the halls, Omar wouldn’t look at her, and twice he shoved guys around him, especially after she asked, “Fucking the mirror are we, Omar?”

  “Dorothy’s better, man,” he would say. “Way b-better.” Which didn’t really make any sense to most of them because Bonnie practically dripped lust and Dorothy wasn’t exactly loaded with the same juices.

  Dorothy had been Sue Chapman’s closest friend, the one who would usually get drunk whenever they went out. But that didn’t bother Omar. “You just like undressing me when I’m passed out,” she giggled once when Danny was driving and she was between them.

  The following Friday night in Kenny Brunton’s house, Danny descended from upstairs, where the singles were acting like it didn’t matter what was going on in the basement, where the near darkness was filled with writhing, groping, and breathless whispers from a dozen couples. He could barely see across a candle’s flame as Omar stripped most of the clothes off Dorothy, who mumbled and giggled in a vaguely vomitous way. Omar stared down at her, running his hands across her breasts. “Yes,” she mumbled. “Yes.”

  The stairs creaked under Danny. Omar looked up across Dorothy’s nakedness to where Danny stood. For a moment, neither of them said a word.

  “Jerry doesn’t know what he’s in f-for.”

  “You okay?”

  Omar only spent four days on the football team. None of the coaches had ever seen anything like it. This Paki kid, they called him. Even in the practice sessions he was blasting through the offensive line and cutting down blockers like they were so much Styrofoam. And crushing the running backs with scythe-like tackles aimed below the knees. There was no half speed, no let’s-just-walk-through-it for Omar. It was annihilation or nothing. No matter how much the coaches tried to explain, no matter how much he nodded as if he understood it was just a practice session, he still came crashing in like some heat-seeking missile programmed for one thing only.

  “It’s a game, asshole,” screamed Jerry after he stopped throwing up, crawling on hands and knees across the field after Omar had driven his helmet into his ribs, a kind of human pile driver. Omar went back to his position, with those eyes peering over the facemask. The kid who played defensive tackle swore he looked like Hannibal Lecter. Which he didn’t. It was just all that concentrated energy, perfectly focused in a way that no one else on the team could even approach.

  Two days before the game against Runnymede, when Bonnie Frangilatta was on the sidelines leading the cheerleading practice, Omar disregarded the playbook that called for a no-contact-zone defense and crashed in past the offensive tackle, a blur of vengeance for some wrong that no one could identify, cutting do
wn Jerry on a draw play, flying at his knees with such force that the snapping sound caused the cheerleaders to stop in mid routine and turn toward the agonized screaming on the field.

  Two days later, Runnymede won by five touchdowns.

  Jerry was in hospital and Omar never showed up for the game. The following day, frustrated confrontations by the coaches were met with a stare that made them step back. “Why would I care about a game?” Omar said, almost whispering in a way that made them turn around and walk away, shaking their heads. None of them could figure out what had happened.

  But Danny knew.

  • • •

  Not long after the Runnymede game, Omar phoned Danny. Little Big Horn was on, he told him. That was what they called the paintball fights they had, where one side was Custer and the army and the other side was the Indians. Omar had announced he was an Indian. Not the kind from India, he made clear. The other kind. And he was Crazy Horse. Enlisting Freddie and Brunton and a couple of dozen others, they had staged what Omar called warm-up fights, blasting away in the more secluded hills of High Park until the police chased them out.

  But now Little Big Horn was on. Tonight! It had to be tonight. “I don’t know if we can get all the guys on such short notice,” Danny said.

  “You have to.”

  “I have to?”

  “You know what I mean. C’mon, man.”

  “I’m busy, Omar.” Danny was looking across to Ariana, who sat on the couch, rocking ever so slightly back and forth. She would look up at him for a moment, brushing the cascade of shiny black hair away from her eyes. And then look away whenever he replied.

  “I’m coming over, man. I need to get it going.”

  “Don’t come over. I got homework.” Ariana flashed a look, her dark eyes widening. Danny reached out, putting his hand on hers. All she could hear was her brother’s voice crackling distantly in the phone Danny was holding. It was an urgent, loud voice. “Omar, what the hell is that all about?”