Bill didn't answer because the smell of shit and garbage was up in his nose. The feel of sand was on his skin, and he had to try not to scratch it, or rub it in public like this crazy ass would surely do. Funny: The crazy ass—he should have some idea of what it was like, even if he was just supply. But even if he did, Bill didn't want to discuss it with him. All the joy you felt to be going home; how once you got home you couldn't feel it anymore. Like his buddy whose forearm had been blown off, who still felt his missing arm twitch—except it was the reverse of that. The joy was there, almost like he could see it. But he couldn't feel it all the way. He could make love to his wife, but only if he turned her over. He could tell it bothered her, and he didn't know how to explain why it had to be that way. Even when they lay down to sleep, he could relax only if she turned with her back to him and stayed like that all night.
“But that don't look like the arm or the leg. That look like the lake. Know what I'm sayin’?”
Bill looked out the window and put on his headset. It was Ghostface Killah, and he turned up the volume—not to hear better, but to get his mind away from the smell and the feeling of sand.
Like it says in the Bible, you know what I'm sayin? The white guy across the aisle laughed when he heard that, a thick, joyless chuckle. Puerile, thought Jennifer Marsh. Like a high school kid. Probably racist, too. Jennifer had marched against the war. She didn't know any soldiers; she had never talked to any. But she was moved to hear this guy, just back from war, talking so poetically about rivers and lakes. I should reach out to him, she thought. I should show support. I'll get up and go to the snack car for potato chips, and on the way back, I'll catch his eye.
The idea stirred Jennifer, and made her a little afraid. Afraid that he would look at her, a middle-aged white woman, and instantly feel her to be weak, artificially delicate, a liar. But I'm not weak, thought Jennifer. I've fought to get where I am. I haven't lied much. Her gaze touched the narrow oval shape of the soldier's close-cropped head, noticing the quick, reactive way it turned from aisle to window and back. Sensitive, thought Jennifer; delicate , and naturally so. She felt moved again; when the soldier had stood to shake hands with the guy across the aisle, his body had been slim and wiry under the ill-fitting clothes. He looked strong, but his strength was wiry and tensile—the strength of a fragile person made to be strong by circumstance. His voice was strange, and he blurted out certain words with the harshness of a sensitive person trying to survive the abrading force of the world.
See me comin’ (blaow!) start runnin’ and (blaow! blaow!) … Phantom limb, phantom joy Music from the past came up behind Ghost's words; longing, hopeful music. Many guys have come to you … His son, Scott, had been three when he left; now he was nearly five, healthy, good-looking, smart, everything you would want. He looked up at his father as if he were somebody on TV, a hero, who could make everything right. Which would've been great if it were true. … With a line that wasn't true …“Are you going to find Jack tonight, Daddy?” asked Scott. “Can we go out and find him tonight?” … And you passed them by …
“The lake is bigger—but wait. You talkin’ ‘bout the ocean?”
Jennifer's indignation grew. The soldier's fellow across the aisle was deliberately ignoring him and so, stoically adjusting to being ignored, he was talking to himself, mimicking the voice of a child talking to an adult, then the adult talking back. “The ocean is bigger than the lake,” said the adult. “The ocean is bigger than anything.”
He hadn't meant to look for Jack; the dog was getting old, and if he hadn't come back after two weeks, he must be dead or somewhere far away. But Wanda had done the right thing and put up xeroxed flyers all over their town, plus a town over in every direction. He saw Jack's big bony-headed face every time he went to the post office or the grocery store, to the gas station, pharmacy, smoke shop, office supply, department store, you name it. Even driving along back roads where people went for walks, he glimpsed Jack's torn, flapping face stapled to trees and telephone poles. Even though the pictures showed Jack as a mature dog, he kept seeing him the way he was when he got him for Christmas nine years before: a tiny little terrier, all snout and paws and will to chew shit up. He greeted Bill every day when he came home from school; he slept on his bed every night. When Scott was born, he slept in front of the crib, guarding it.
Jennifer tried to imagine what this man's life was like, what had led him to where he was now. Gray, grim pictures came half-formed to her mind: a little boy growing up in a concrete housing project with a blind face of malicious brick; the boy looking out the window, up at the night sky, kneeling before the television, mesmerized by visions of heroism, goodness, and triumph. The boy grown older, sitting in a metal chair in a shadowless room of pitiless light, waiting to sign something, talk to somebody, to become someone of value.
The first time he went out to find Jack, he let Scott go with him. But Scott didn't know how to be quiet, or listen to orders; he would suddenly yell something or dart off, and once Bill got so mad that he thought he'd knock the kid's head off. So he started going out alone—late, after Scott and Wanda were in bed. They lived on a road with only a few houses on it across from a stubbly field and a broken, deserted farm. There was no crime and everybody acted like there could never be any But just to be sure, he took the Beretta Wanda had bought for protection. At first, he carried it in his pocket with the safety on. Then he carried it in his hand.
Jennifer grieved; she thought, I can't help. I can't understand. But I can show support. This man has been damaged by the war, but still he is profound. He will not scorn my support because I'm white. As if he had heard, the soldier turned around in his seat and smiled. Jennifer was startled by his face—hairy, with bleary eyes, his mouth sly and cynical with pain.
“My name's Jim,” the soldier said. “Glad to meet you.”
Jennifer shook his proffered hand.
“Where you headed today?” he asked.
“Syracuse. For work.”
“Yeah?” He smiled. His smile was complicated—light on top, oily and dark below. “What kind of work?”
“I'm giving a talk at a journalism school—I edit a women's magazine.”
“Yeah? An editor?”
His smile was mocking after all, but it was the sad mocking men do when the woman has something and they don't. There was no real force behind it.
“I heard you talk about being in Iraq,” she said.
“Yeah, uh-huh.” He nodded emphatically, then looked out the window as if distracted.
“What was it like?”
He looked out the window, paused, and began to recite: “They smile and they say you okay / Then they turn around and they bite / With the arrow that fly in the day / And the knife in the neck at night.”
“Did you make that up? Just now?”
“Yes, I did.” He smiled again, still mocking, but now complicitous, too.
“That's good. It's better than a lot of what I read.”
Did you make that up? Just now? Stupid, stupid woman, stupider than the drunk nigger she was talking to. Carter Brown, the conductor, came down the aisle, wishing he had a stick to knock off some heads with, not that they were worth knocking off really. That kind of white woman—would she never cease to exist? You could predict it: Put her in a car full of people, including black people who were sober and sane, hell, black people with Ph.D.'s, and she would glue herself, big-eyed and serious, to the one pitiful fool in the bunch. He reached the squawk box and snatched up the mouthpiece.
“To whoever's been smoking in the lavatory, this message is for you,” he said into it. “If you continue to smoke in the lavatory, we will, believe me, find out who you are, and when we do, we will put you off the train. We will put you off, where you will stand on the platform and smoke until the next train comes sometime tomorrow. Have a nice day.”
Not that the sane and sober would talk to her, it being obvious what she was—another white jackass looking for the truth in other
people's misery. He went back down the aisle, hoping against hope that she would be the smoker and that he would get to put her off the train.
“Did you talk to the Iraqis?” she asked.
“Sure. I talked to them. I talked mostly to kids. Id tell ‘em to get educated, become a teacher. Or a lawyer.”
“You speak their language?”
“No, no, I don't. But I still could talk to ‘em. They could understand.”
“What were they like?”
“They were like people anywhere. Some of them good, some not.”
“Did any of them seem angry?”
“Angry?” His eyes changed on that word, but she wasn't sure how.
“Angry at us. For tearing up the country and killing them.”
She thinks she's the moral one, and she talks this way to a soldier back from hell?
Mr. Perkins, sitting behind, could hear the conversation, and it filled him with anger. Yes, the man was obviously not playing with a full deck. No, the war had not been conducted wisely, and, no, there were no WMD. But anyone, anyone who knew what war was should be respected by those who didn't. Perkins knew. It was long ago, but still he knew: The faces of the dead were before him. They were far away, but he had known them. He had put his hands on their corpses, taken their personal effects: Schmidt, Heinrich, PFC, 354th Fortress Artillery … Zivilheruf. Oherlehrer. He remembered that one because of those papers he'd kept. God knows where they were now, probably in a shoe box in the basement, mixed up with letters, random photos of forgotten people, bills and tax statements that never got thrown out. Schmidt, Heinrkh. His first up-close kill. He'D thought the guy looked like a schoolteacher, and, by Christ, he had been. That's why he'd kept the papers—for luck.
Yes, he knew, and obviously this black man knew—and how could she know, this “editor” with her dainty reedy voice? More anger came up in him, making him want to get up and chastise this fool woman for all to hear. But he was heavy with age and its complexity and anyway, he knew she just didn't know better. As an educated professional, she ought to know better, but obviously she didn't. She talked and talked, just like his daughter used to do about Vietnam, when she was a seventeen-year-old child.
“Angry?” said the soldier. “No. Not like you.”
She said, “What do you mean? I'm not angry.”
The soldier wagged his finger slowly, as if admonishing a child. “The thing you need to know is, those people know war. They know war for a long time. So not angry, no. Not like you think about angry”
“But they didn't—”
The finger wagged again. “Correct. They don't want this war. But they know. … See. They make a life. The shepherd drives his animals with the convoy The woman carries water while they shoot. Yes, some, they hate—that's the knife in the neck. But some smile. Some send down their good food. Some appreciate the work we do with the kids, the schools. …”
He could walk for hours, every now and then calling the dog and stopping to listen. He walked across the field and into the woods and finally into the deserted farm. When he walked, he didn't think of Iraq always. He thought of Jack when he was a pup, of wrestling with him, of giving him baths, of biking with the dog running alongside, long, glistening tongue hanging out. He thought of how patient Jack was when Scott was a baby, how he would let the child pull on his ears and grab his loose skin with tiny baby fists.
But the feeling of Iraq was always underneath, dark and liquid, and pressing up against the skin of every other thing, sometimes bursting through: a woman's screaming mouth so wide, it blotted her face; great piles of sheep heads, skinned, boiled, covered in flies; the Humvee so thick with flies, they got in your mouth; somebody he couldn't remember eating a piece of cake with fresh offal on his boot; his own booted foot poking out the doorless Humvee and traveling over endless gray ground. In the shadows of the field and the woods and the deserted farm, these things took up as much space as his wife and his child, the memories of his dog. Sometimes they took up more space. When that happened, he took the safety off the gun.
Like, an angry, cripple, man, don't push me! Ghost's voice and the old music ran parallel but never touched, even though Ghost tried to blend his voice with the old words. Sad to put them together, but somehow it made sense. Bill took off his headset and turned back toward the guy across from him, feeling bad for ignoring him. But he was busy talking to the older blonde behind him. And she seemed very interested to hear him.
“And the time I went out on the convoy? See, they got respect, at least those I rode with. ‘Cause they didn't fire on people unless they know for a fact they shot at us. Not everybody over there was like that. Some of ‘em ride along shooting out the window like at the buffalo.”
“But how could you tell who was shooting?” asked Jennifer. “I hear you can't tell.”
“We could observe. We could observe from a distance for however long it took, five, sometimes maybe even ten minutes. If it was a child, or somebody like that, we would hold fire. If it was an enemy …”
If it was an enemy, thought Bill Groffman, he would be splattered into pieces by ten people firing at once. If it was an enemy, he would be dropped with a single shot. If it was an enemy, she would be cut in half, her face gazing at the sky in shock, her arms spread in amazement as to where her legs might've gone. If it was an enemy, his or her body would be run over by trucks until they were dried skin with dried guts squashed out, scummed-over eyes staring up at the convoy driving by. Oooh, that's gotta hurt!
“Still,” said Jennifer. “I don't see how they could not be mad about us being there.”
Oooh, that's gotta hurt! Six months ago, he would not have been able to hold back. He would've gotten into it with this woman, shut her up, scared the shit out of her. The war was stupid, okay It was probably for oil. But it was also something else. Something you could not say easily with words. There was enemy shooting at you and then there was the thing you could say with words. There was dead squashed enemy and there was the thing you could say with words. There was joking at squashed bodies and nothing else to be said.
“Here,” said Jim. “Let me ask you something now.”
“Okay,” said Jennifer.
“Do you ever feel guilty?”
“What?”
“Do. You. Ever. Feel. Guilty” He smiled.
“Doesn't everybody?”
“I didn't ask about everybody. I asked ‘bout you.”
“Sometimes,” she said. “Sometimes I feel guilty”
“Good. Because guilt is not a bad thing. Guilt can instruct you; you can learn from guilt. Know what I mean?”
“I think so.” She felt something, but she didn't know if it was manipulated or real.
He smiled. “So here's what I want to say Guilt, you can live with. But you can't live with regret. Can't learn from it, can't live with it. So don't ever feel regret.”
The thing was, Perkins could not really understand this man, either. He didn't know if it was because he had forgotten, or because war was different now, or because the man was black, or because … well, the man was not right, that was obvious. But you heard things about a lot of them that didn't seem right. You supported them, absolutely; you wanted to be proud; what happened after Vietnam should never be allowed to happen again—but then you read someplace that they didn't care about killing civilians, that it was like video games to them. Stuff about raping young girls, killing their families, doing sex-type things with prisoners, taking pictures of it—and then you'd read somebody sneering that “the Greatest Generation” couldn't even fire their guns, while these new guys, they liked to kill.
“Now I have another question. Is that okay?”
“Yeah.”
“When you look out that window, what do you see?”
Jennifer looked and thought; even though he was crazy, she wanted to give a good answer. “Trees,” she said. “Sky. Water. Plants, earth.”
He smiled. “All of that is there. I see it, too. But that is
not all I see.”
“What do you see?”
In his head, Bill saw a horror movie. It was one he'd seen a long time ago. It was some kind of fight between good—or maybe it was just normalcy—and evil. Evil had gotten the upper hand, and good was going to lose. “We can't stop them now!” cried the scientist. But then by mistake the evil people woke up something deeper than evil. They woke things underground called Mogred or some shit, things who knew only destruction and didn't care who was destroyed; they made the earth come open and humanoid monsters without faces came out the crack. They weren't on anybody's side, but because evil had annoyed them by waking them up, they attacked evil.
Jim saw trees and shining water. He saw lake water, river water, sewage water. He saw the eyes of God in the water, and they were shining with love. In the eyes of God, even the sewage water in the street was shining. In the eyes of God, a woman came out on the street, moving very quick. She pulled up her robe and walked into the shining sewage and pulled a child out by the hand. She led the child and looked at Jim, and the mouth of God roared.
Outside the train window, the mouth of God was silent. It was silent and it was chewing—it was always chewing. That was okay; it needed to eat to keep the body going. And the eyes of God were always shining with love. And the nose of God—that was something you grabbed at on your way to the chewing mouth. Like those people in the old television movie climbing on the giant presidents.
The war was like the crack in the ground that let the Mogred out. The crack in the ground had nothing to do with arguments about smart or stupid, right or wrong. The crack in the ground was even sort of funny, like in the movie with shitty special effects, the monsters pouring out the hole like a football team.
Who told anybody they couldn't shoot their weapons? That's what Perkins wondered. If the American army couldn't shoot, who killed all those Germans and Japanese? True: Straight off the ramp, chest-deep in the ocean, fighting its sucking wet muscle toward the shore with machine-gun fire hammering down around you and shells slamming your eardrums, pushing on floating corpses as you got close—you couldn't see what to shoot at then. They hadn't been chasing a ragged Third World army with inferior weapons and they hadn't been wearing body armor. They came out of the ocean into roaring death, men exploding like bloody meat, and all of it sucked into the past before memory could grab on to it or the nerves had time to react. At least that must be why he could not recall most of it as anything but a blur.
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