The war was a crack in the ground, and the Iraqis were the Mogred, pouring out. Then somehow he and his buddies had become Mogred. Then it was nothing but Mogred all around, clawing and killing. Bill glanced at the guy sitting across from him; that was no Mogred. No way.
“I can't tell you what I see,” said Jim. “And what I see you will never see. Because I have been touched by God.” There was a wheel of colors spinning in his mind, gunfire and music playing. A little ragged boy ran down the street, a colored pinwheel in his hand. A ragged little boy tried to crawl away, and was stopped by a bullet. Laughter came out an open window. “You never hurt a little animal,” his foster father said.
Unseeing and unhearing, she stared impassively in his face. “By Jesus, you mean?”
He felt himself smile. “Not by Jesus, no. Lots of people have been touched by Jesus. But I have been touched by God.”
Unfeeling spread through her face like ice, stilling the warmth and movement of her skin. With unfeeling came her authority “How'd you get to skip Jesus?” she asked.
“If I told you that, we would have to be talking all day and all night. And then you'd be like me.” He smiled. Ugliness bled through his smile, the weak, heartbreaking ugliness of the mentally ill. Dear God, could they really have sent this man into combat?
When his daughter was a little girl, sometimes she would ask him to tell her a war story, her eyes soft and shining with trust, wanting to hear about men killing one another. But he never told her about killing. He told her about the time he was standing guard one night, when he thought he heard an enemy crawling through the brush to throw a grenade; just before he squeezed the trigger, a puppy came wiggling into the foxhole with him. He told her about the time in Italy, when he and his buddies saw a tiny woman carrying a great jug of water on her head, and he'd said, “Hell, I'm going to help that woman!” He'D stopped her and taken the jug off her head and almost collapsed, it was so heavy; his buddies had fallen about laughing. …
“Were you in the National Guard?” she asked. “Were you a reservist?”
“Naw,” he said. “I was active duty”
“Well,” she said. “I really appreciate talking to you. But I have to get back to my work now.”
“All right.” He extended his hand across the seat.
“And thank you for your service,” she said. “Even if I don't agree with the cause.”
This pitiful SOB had been in Iraq? That was one fucked-up piece of information, but it made all the sense in the world, thought Carter Brown as he took the ticket stub down off the overhead. They deliberately went out and got the dumbest, most desperate people for this war—them and kids like his nephew Isaiah who were in the National Guard so they could go to school. Isaiah, who got A report cards all through community college and who would be in a four-year school now if he wasn't busy being shot at. He tapped the spooky-looking white guy on the shoulder maybe a little too hard to let him know his stop was coming up and—hell, everybody on this train was nuts—the man just about jumped out of his seat.
Perkins was relieved to hear her finally become respectful. Even if the guy was half-wrapped. At least liberals had changed since Vietnam. Everyone had changed. His daughter, who used to fight him so hard about Vietnam, supported this war less equivocally than he did. She told him about attending a dinner for a returning soldier who, when he got up to speak, said, “I'm not a hero. I'm a killer. But you need killers like me so that you can go on having all the nice things you have.” Some of the people at the dinner had been disturbed, but not her. She'd thought it was great. She'd thought it was better than platitudes or ideals; she'd thought it was real.
He looked at his watch. When they got to the station, he'd go to the bathroom for another smoke.
One night when there was a full moon, out in the field across from the house where his wife and child slept, he remembered his first night in Iraq. He remembered how good he'd felt to be there. There had been a full moon then, too, and its light had made a luminous path on the desert, like something you could walk out of the world on. He remembered thinking, We are going to do something great here. We are going to turn these people's lives around.
“Your stop, comin’ up.”
Now there was the man across the aisle, talking to himself and nodding. Now there he was in the dark field, holding a loaded gun pointed at nothing. There were all the people criticizing him for not getting a job, for being cold to his wife, for yelling at his son, for spending so much time looking for a dead dog. He put away his iPod, shouldered his pack. They didn't get it, and he didn't blame them. But alone in the field or in the woods, looking for his dog, was when he could feel what had happened in Iraq and stand it.
The train was pulling into the station; people were getting up with their things; conductors were getting ready to work the doors. The silent soldier stood up with his pack and briefly clasped hands with the crazy soldier. Perkins fingered his packet of cigarettes.
He had been a returning hero; then people forgot the war had ever happened. Then war was evil and people who fought it were stupid grunts who went crazy when they came back. Then people suddenly went, “Hey, the Greatest Generation!” Then just as suddenly, they were the assholes who couldn't even shoot their weapons. No, not even assholes, just nice boys who didn't know what was real. These guys now—some people said they were killers, some said heroes, and some said both. What would they be in fifty years?
When people got off the train, Jim got up and wandered away, and for a moment Jennifer thought he'd gotten off. But then she saw him wandering toward the back of the car, apparently talking to himself as well as to other people as he went. She tried to pay attention to the short essay she had been working on before her conversation with him. It was by a novelist who was in love with a vegetarian and who had gone to great lengths to pretend that he was even more “vegan” than she was in order to impress her. It was light and funny, and she felt too bitter now to appreciate those things.
Coming out of the bathroom, Perkins noticed the couple, the woman first. She was black, and normally he didn't like black, but she was beautiful and something else besides. Her soft eyes and full presence evoked sex and tenderness equally, and he could not help but hold her casual gaze. Or he would have, if she hadn't been sitting next to a giant of a man with quick, instinctive eyes.
Old white fool look away quick—good. Shouldn't have looked at all, and wouldn't if they were anyplace else. Chris put one hand on Lalia's arm and worked the game on his laptop with the other. He wasn't mad; old man couldn't help but look. Lalia was all beauty beside him, shining and real in a world of polluted pale shit. He killed the dude crawling at him in the street, then got the one coming out the window. He moved down her arm and put his hand over hers; her fingers responded as if linked to him. His feelings grew huge. Dudes came rushing at him in the hallway; he capped ‘em. He was looking forward to tonight, to the hotel room he'd reserved, the one that was supposed to have a mirror over the bed and a little balcony where they'd drink champagne with strawberries in chocolate. He killed dudes coming out the door; he entered the secret chamber. He wanted it to be something they would always remember. He wanted it to be the way it had been the first time with her.
It was humiliating to be old, to shrink before the glowering eyes of a stronger man. But just mildly. He understood the young gorilla— you'd have to protect that woman. He thought of Dody, when she was young, how it was to go out with her; he'd always had to be looking out for trouble, for some idiot wanting to start something. You always had to watch for that if you were with a good-looking female, and it could become automatic. Sometimes it had made him scared and sometimes angry, and the heat of his anger had gotten mixed up with the heat in her eyes, the curves of her small body, the heat she gave off without knowing it. That was all gone now, almost. They still kissed, but not with their tongues, just on the lips. Still, he remembered. …
It took a long time to get with her, years, but when i
t finally happened, it was like the song his aunt used to listen to when she sat by the window, her glass of Bacardi and juice tilted and the sunlight coming in, her knees opening her skirt—the song that made him run and hide in the closet the first time he heard it, because it was too much of something, something with no words, but somehow living in the singer's voice and words, high-voiced sweet-strong words that made him remember his mama, even though everybody said he was too young to remember. If I ever saw a girl / That I needed in this world / You are the one for me … The words were like the poems on cheap cards, like the poems nerds wrote to get A‘s in class—but the way this singer said them, they were deep and powerful, and they said things no words could say, things his mama said with her hand, touching his face at night, or his aunt, just brushing against him with her hip. … A trapdoor opened; the secret chamber was flooded with dudes wearing masks.
Oh, my little love, yeah … He had her every way, with no holding back, with his shirt over the light to make it soft. She was a quiet lover, but the warm odor that came off her skin was like a moan you could smell, and though she moved like every other woman, she said things with her moves that no other woman said. When they finished, she turned around and pushed the hair off her dazed eyes, and—oh, my little love—took his face in her hands. Nobody ever touched his face, and the move surprised him so that he almost slapped her away. Then he put his hands over hers and let her hold his face.
He remembered that when the war ended, the Italians invited the victorious Americans to come see a local company put on an opera. They went for something to see, but it was mostly boring, too hot, everybody smelling bad up in the little balcony, the orchestra looking half-asleep, flies swarming—but then there was this one woman singing. He made his buddies quit horsing around, and they did; they turned away from their jokes and listened to the small figure on the stage below, a dream of love given form by her voice and pouring from her to fill the room. When he and his friend Bill Steed went backstage to meet her, it turned out she was older than they'd thought, and not pretty, with makeup covering a faded black eye. But he still remembered her voice.
In the essay Jennifer was editing, the writer claimed that sometimes whom you pretend to be is who you really are. He said that sometimes faking was the realest thing you could do.
“Bitch! What you think you doin’, bitch!”
Her heart jumped; she looked up, to see a huge black man looming over somebody in the seat behind him, yelling curses—oh no, it was him. He was yelling at Jim. A woman stood and grabbed the huge man's shoulder, saying, “Nuh, nuh, nuh,” a beseeching half word, over and over. She meant no, don't, but the big man grabbed Jim, lifted him up, and shook him like a doll. The woman shrank back, but she said it more sharply, “Nuh, nuh!” Ignoring her, the man stormed down the aisle to where Jennifer sat, holding Jim up off the ground as if he were nothing. Jim was talking to the man, but words were nothing now. She felt the whole train, alert with fear but distant, some not even looking. She stood up. The man threw Jim, threw his whole body down the aisle of the train. She tried to speak. Jim leapt off the floor with animal speed and put his arms up as if to fight. She could not speak. Next to her, an old man stood. “Ima kill you!” shouted the big man, but he didn't. He just looked at the old man and said, “He touch my wife's breast! I look over and see his hand right on it!” Then he looked at her. He looked as if he'd waked suddenly from a dream and was surprised to see her there.
“It's all right,” said the old man mildly. “You stopped him.”
“It's not all right,” said the young man, but quietly. “Nothin’ all right.” He turned and walked the other way “You ruinin’ my vacation ,” he said as he went. “Pervert!” He didn't look at his wife on his way out of the car.
The old man sat down. Jennifer looked at Jim. He was pacing back and forth in the aisle, talking to himself his face a fierce inward blank.
There's no God, no face, you weak, lying—you lying sack of shit! There is just the woman and the roaring and the world and the pit. Jim fell into the pit, and as he fell, all the people in it screamed things at him. Teachers, foster parents, social workers, kids, parents, all the people he'd ever known standing on ledges in gray crowds, screaming at him as he fell past. He landed hard enough to break his bones. He was under an overpass, standing with his backpack and crying while his father drove away, with his mother yelling in the front seat and his sister crying in the back, looking out with her hands on the window. Paulie sat next to him with no head and blood pouring up. His uncle said, No, I cannot take those children. Paulie fell backward and blood ran from him. Dancing children lay in pieces; guns shot. The woman and the child ran, fell, ran, far away. His foster mother opened the door and let in the warm light of the living room; the bed creaked as she sat and sang to him. The trees shivered; the giant fist slammed the ground; they shivered. The long grass rippled in the machine-gun fire. The pit opened, but Jim stayed on the shivering ground. He did not fall again. His sister came to him and held him in her arms. La la la la la la la la la means / I love you. He closed his eyes and let his sister take him safely into darkness. She could do that because she was already dead. He didn't know it then. But she was.
The door between cars exploded open and they came rolling down the aisle, two conductors and a human bomb, the bomb saying, “And we on our honeymoon! In Niagara Falls! The only reason we even took the train is she's afraid to fly—and this happens?”
“I know just the one you mean.” The black conductor sighed. “I know just the one.”
“And she's pregnant!”
“Don't worry, we'll get him off,” said the white conductor. “We'll have the cops come get him. He won't bother you no more.”
Carter had no pleasure in putting the man off the train. He could barely look at his sad, weak-smiling face. He even felt sorry for the blond woman sitting there with her dry, pale eyes way back in her head, looking like she'd been slapped. He got the clanking door open, kicked down the metal steps, handed down the man's bag, and thought, Cheney should have to fight this war. Bush should have to fight it, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden should fight it. They should be stripped naked on their hands and knees, placed within striking distance of one another, each with one foot chained to the floor. Then give them knives and let them go at it. Stick their damn flags up their asses so they can wave ‘em while they fight. “Utica,” he yelled, “this stop, Utica.”
He didn't seem to mind being put off the train; he was even pretty cheerful about it. Jennifer looked out the window to see what happened to him once he got off, and saw him talking to two policemen who stood with folded arms, nodding politely at whatever it was he was saying. She heard the big guy up ahead of her, still going over it. “I heard him talking to you,” he said to someone. “What was he saying?”
“Crazy stuff,” replied a woman. “I was real quiet, hoping he'd go away, but he just kept on talking.”
“Why did he do that?” asked the big man. “I don't usually do nobody like that, but he—”
“No, you were right,” said the woman. “If you hadn't done something, the next person he grabbed might've been a little girl!”
“Yeah!” The big man's voice sounded relieved. Then he spoke to his wife, loudly enough for Jennifer to hear him several seats away “Why didn't you say anything?” he asked.
Because he like my brother. I could feel it when he touch me. My brother grab a teacher's butt in the sixth grade; he do it for attention, it's not even about the butt. I can't talk about it here, Chris, with all these people listening; I can feel them, and this is too private. But my brother coulda turned out like this man here. Kids beat on him when he was like six, he had to be in the hospital, and for a long time after, he talked in this whisper voice that you can hardly hear, like he's talking to himself and to the world in general, talking like a radio with the dial just flipping around, giving out stories that don't make sense, but all about kicking and punching and killing people. He gets
older and anything anybody says to him, he's like, “Ima punch him! An then do a double backflip and kick him in the nuts! An then in the butt! An then—” It so annoying, and he still doing it when he gets older, only then he talks ‘bout how somebody does this or that, he's gonna pull out a gun and shoot him. He talks like he a killah but he a baby, and everybody knows it. My brother now, he works as a security guard in a art museum, where he sits all day and reads his books and plays his games. But he coulda got hurt real bad—and looked at one way he talk so stupid, he almost deserves it. But look the other way, Chris. You do that, you see he lives in Imagination, not the world; shit don't mean for him what it do for us. You see that and you wanna protect him even if he is a damn fool, and also I don't want you into any trouble over me; our baby is in me, and it is our day. I love you; that's why I don't say nothin, Chris—
She put her hand on his arm and felt him withdraw from her without moving. Her heart sank. She looked out the window; they were moving past people's yards. Two white kids, just babies, were standing in wet yards with their mouths open, looking at the train, one with his fat little legs bare, only wearing shoes and a hoodie. Her heart hurt. Please come back, she said with her hand. I love you. Don't let this take away our beautiful night.
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