In Valley of the Sun

by Andy Davidson

  He tightens the belt. One notch. Two.

  “TIGHTER!”

  As tight as it will go.

  He comes in her, and her hands are pressed tightly against the glass of the window, her body spasming, and he thinks at first that this is what happens when it happens for girls, but after he pulls out and falls away against the steering column, slick with her and wilting, she turns round in the seat, flailing her arms, and her face is red and her eyes are bulging and he sees that she’s in trouble, that she is dying, and he stares at her for a handful of seconds, mesmerized by what he’s done—his thing stiffening again at the sight of her—and then he moves and loosens the belt, and she falls on the seat, gasping, crying.

  He tries to hold her, but she shoves him away.

  She tries to speak but she can’t. It’s just as well, he figures. She probably wouldn’t say very nice things.

  Clothes are buttoned and snapped and little is said. They roll the windows down and let the fresh night air blow through. He drops her at the trailer park where she lives and they say good night to each other in a half-hearted way with no kiss. He pulls into his own drive with the headlamps dark just after midnight, hoping the old man isn’t laying for him since it’s hours past curfew. He walks into a darkened house, all lights extinguished, and thinks he’s lucky. The old man’s asleep.

  He slips into his bedroom and out of his jeans and shirt and boots. He draws the belt out of the jeans and curls it into a tight ball. He places it on his nightstand so he can read the letters of his name, the T, R, and A, the rest curving out of sight. He thinks of the girl’s expression of wide-eyed terror—somehow a wise, knowing look—and remembers his mother, her wild laughter, blood streaming down her face. There’s a secret in death, he thinks. He falls asleep atop the covers of his narrow bed, his window open, drapes rustling in the cool fall breeze.

  In the predawn hour, his father bursts into his room and drags him out of bed by the arm and slams him against his bedroom wall. He’s barely awake when the old man’s fist clips his left ear, a sting like a wasp. The elbow at his throat, pressing the air out of his lungs.

  “What have you been up to? There’s blood on the seat of my pickup. Blood, Travis. What have you done?”

  “It’s a girl, just a girl, Daddy.”

  “What did you DO?”

  “Nothing—we just—we just—”

  But the air won’t come.

  “Just a girl,” his father says.

  Travis blinks.

  “Just a girl.”

  The elbow lets off, and Travis slides down the wall, coughing and spitting. His father steps back, sits on the edge of the bed. He sees, on the nightstand, the country boy belt the girl bought Travis at the fair. His father looks at the belt, at his son’s name on the band. He takes it up and folds it in his hand.

  “You did that with a girl,” he says. “In my truck.”

  Travis sits on the floor, his legs splayed before him. “We didn’t mean to. It just happened.”

  His father answers: “People always mean to, boy. You always mean to do a thing like that. She always meant it.”

  Travis knows what’s coming next. He knows. He draws his bare legs up against his chest and turns his head away from his father.

  Bedsprings creak as the old man gets up, and the belt lands once, twice, three times across bare legs.

  The third time leaves a welt that bleeds.

  “You remind me of her sometimes, you know,” the old man says. “You remind me of her something awful.” He drops the belt on the floor and leaves the room.

  Later, when he’s sure the old man isn’t coming back, Travis climbs into bed from the floor, throat swollen, legs on fire, chest sore from crying. He lies in his narrow bed, the walls of his room still postered with cowboys and dinosaurs and also pictures of the planets and this galaxy and all the galaxies beyond, so small and pointless in their never-ending spirals.

  1968

  The smoke clears and the morning rises over the ridge and they come down out of the mountains and into a village abandoned. A ghost village. They’ve seen these before, and so they move slowly, each bootfall a calculation, fingers near triggers, some with M-16s low against their hips like cowboys with Winchesters. One of them actually has a Winchester, had it shipped to him by his old man from North Dakota. The men call him Tex, though Travis is really the only man in this outfit born and raised in Texas. The men call Travis Travis. He’ll never earn a name for himself like Tex or Big C. He doesn’t want to.

  Big C is from Cincinnati. Huge and black and glistening. They cut this nigger out of volcanic glass, Big C says, usually in the mornings when he’s shaving by a creek. The razor makes a scrape across his jaw like the drag of a blade across a rock. He’s cut things into his arms with that knife, the blade taken red-hot from a bed of coals. Shapes and symbols, a wolf’s ragged head. Shaped carefully, lovingly even, in the long, dull hours of waiting. “We are becoming more than what we were meant to be,” he tells them all. His arms are like the pillars of some great stone temple where primitives sacrifice women and babies.

  Big C goes in front, always, igniter ready to cook. They used to have a lieutenant, a quiet man with reading glasses who designated other quiet men as points, but he’s gone now. Where, no one knows.

  Anyway, Big C says, that was all before—before they had traded orders for purpose.

  No orders now. Just order. The order that we bring.

  Some of the others have let Big C burn the wolf’s head into their flesh, too, and Travis worries. He worries that soon his own arm will have to burn, else Big C might just cut it off and roast it.

  Out of the mountains and across the rice paddies, every man slapping at mosquitoes and gnats and cursing the day God made insects and this fucking country. They move low and slow, the village ahead quiet. No alarms. No screams. Just them and the rustle of the long rice-grass and the suck of mud against their boots. Travis keeps both hands on his rifle, barrel angled slightly up from the dirt.

  They slide through the village like a school of silent fish.

  A kettle of rice still cooking over a fire outside a hut.

  A pig sliced open on a table, ready to roast, guts in a heap on the ground and drawing flies. One of their company hunkers down beside the gore, holds a hand above it like it’s a smoldering fire. This is Jenkins from Boston.

  They still call themselves by names, the men. Soon, they won’t.

  Soon, names won’t matter anymore. They’ll all be one, one body, one head.

  Chewing through the land.

  “Still warm,” Jenkins says. He moves his finger closer to the trigger, looks around at the huts and porches and houses on stilts, and they all move on a little slower, a little quieter.

  Chickens scatter in the red clay mud.

  So far from home, some of them are thinking. So far from home where the skies are lit by the distant glows of cities, or the towns have signs and billboards that welcome everyone, or the open fields are dry and the rain comes on expectedly, just as the weatherman predicted. Where life has a pace, an order. Where highways connect and mountains are things to climb for sport and tattoos aren’t made with the tips of hot branding knives but with needles and ink. Others are wondering at the strange silence of it all. Ambush, they’re thinking. But Travis isn’t thinking anything. The silences here in this hot, wet place overwhelm thought.

  The ranks ahead come to a sudden halt as Big C lifts his hand.

  A girl has wandered out of the jungle at the far end of the village. She stands perfectly still between two straw-topped huts. Like a deer wandered out of the woods into a hunter’s sights. She’s young, maybe fourteen, and she’s naked. Her breasts are small, her nipples dark like pennies. A thin, adolescent thatch of pubic hair. She stands erect, her arms quivering. Her face expressionless. Dark hair, long, past her shoulders. Her ribs like washboards beneath her breasts.

  “What the fuck,” someone says. Maybe Jenkins from Boston.

>   “Don’t anybody fuckin move,” Big C says.

  “Holy shit, I got a boner,” someone else says.

  Big C says, “Shut the fuck up, Crews.”

  The day goes even stiller, and every man feels it, the electric thrum in the air, the buzz before something bright and loud. The jungle in the hills around them throbs with insect silence.

  The girl walks toward them.

  The heat shimmering behind her.

  She could be a mirage.

  A siren.

  Travis can’t help it. None of them can. They’re watching the lift and fall of her breasts with each step. Even Big C is helpless to speak. How long’s it been, most of them thinking. God, so long. Travis imagines the warmth of that small, bird-like breast against his cheek, the welcome slick heat between her legs that would swallow him whole, burn him alive like Big C’s thrower. The only other breast he’s ever touched has a heart beating beneath it somewhere back home, he thinks, across the ocean. But there is nothing tender or silly about these breasts. They’re sharp. Deadly, somehow.

  She walks at a slow, steady pace, a slight wobble to each step, the unsteady footfalls of a newborn creature.

  He watches with the fear and awe of a man confronted with a thing beyond his reckoning.

  The girl walks into their midst.

  The men part for her, move a few steps back, her coming like a sinkhole opening beneath them.

  Travis remembers, later, the gentle brush of her shoulder against his fatigues.

  The greatest silence in the world has descended upon them.

  Even the insects in the hills are silent.

  She stops at the center of the platoon.

  The man nearest her is Tex. He lowers his Winchester, pushes his wire rims up on his nose, and offers her a shy smile.

  She opens her mouth and says something loud in gook.

  Big C opens his mouth to scream.

  The girl explodes.

  Blood and parts of her. Blood and parts of her all over. An ear on the shoulder of the man nearest. A hand plops into a woven basket, too big and hairy to be the gook girl’s. Blood and parts of everyone. Travis can’t hear. The world is smoke and blur. He can see the men with their open mouths, yelling, their lips forming each other’s names. He shakes his head, looks down, and sees in the dirt at his feet a breast, small and round and torn, not unlike a baby bird fallen from a nest. He can’t even hear himself when he begins to scream.

  They burn the village to the ground, first turning out every hut where the gooks are hiding beneath straw mats and planks in floors and herding them all into the center of the town, where Big C cooks them alive and Tex cracks shells from his Winchester into the ones who flee. They’re mostly women, some kids. The men are all gone. Fled to the hills to send little girls stuffed with C-4 back as booby traps.

  They kill everyone, even the chickens.

  Travis wanders through it all, rifle at his side. He doesn’t lift it once. When everything’s done and a new, more permanent kind of silence has settled on the valley, his clip is full. In the end, seven of their own are dead, in so many pieces they can’t put them back together right to make any one of them whole again. No one knows which parts go where.

  “I think this is Crews,” someone says, holding up an arm, a hand.

  “How can you tell?” someone else says.

  “His finger smells like pussy.”

  Laughter. Someone’s weeping around the corner of a hut. A rooster crows. They can’t call in a chopper. They haven’t had a radio or a man to operate one in weeks. Even if they did, Big C might have torched it, because now they’re all beyond the reach of any command save his. Today will change them, Travis knows. Soon, they’ll all carry Big C’s wolf in their flesh, moving as one body over the land. It is upon them now, this great inevitable madness. Travis decides then, as the others search out what’s left of their buddies, he’ll let Big C do it when the time comes. He’ll let Big C cut his arm because it doesn’t really matter what symbols mark him. He will never be that thing. Because he is already something else.

  I am something else, he thinks.

  They wrap the wounded as best they can. They move on near dark when everything’s a smoking hole, Big C in the lead, tip of his torch to light the way.

  They camp on a ridge where the jungle hasn’t reached, the night sky lighter than the dark world around them. They lie on their backs and look up in wonder. Tex used to say the world was like a barn at night someone had shot the roof through with a million holes, and each of the stars above was a hole letting light in. Travis had always liked this because it hoped for another world beyond this one, where there was more light than dark. But now Tex is dead, he thinks, blown apart by a fourteen-year-old girl with a bomb in her cunt. They use words like cunt and snatch to talk about the girl, to make her a thing without a heart and a mind and a spirit so they’ll one day be able to lie next to a woman again and trust her not to kill them when they roll over and touch her.

  Travis stays silent on this point. Words are no armor, he thinks. His mother said so many words, after all, among them “love.” But the only time he really felt love from her were the times when words didn’t play a part, at least not hers. The music, he thinks. The music was everything. He closes his eyes and tries to remember the music, the gentle rhythms, the way they grew lost in each other’s footsteps and shadows, but all he can hear and see is the gook girl’s loud nonsense scream, the sudden explosion, the girl pulled apart like cotton candy, red and sticky, the world-ending silence that followed.

  Big C rises up, tall and black in the firelight, and begins. He tells the men about all the things they have to do now, how this is a point of no return for each every one of them, that they’re no longer just some outfit with a number. He holds up a ragged stump of a hand that once belonged to Crews and kisses it, tosses it into the fire. “We are changed, brothers,” he says, and the rest of the men, they all agree. “It’s time,” Big C says.

  Worlds away, Travis thinks, later that night, forearm burned and cut by the tip of Big C’s knife. He’s looking up at the stars. On the other side of the sky, the light beyond the dark. That’s where the music is now.

  In the morning they hump on down the ridge. Travis spares one glance back at where the village rises out of the trees in a column of black smoke. It reminds him of something, but it’s early and the sun is already blistering, and he can’t think, for the world, what it might be.

  V

  The Way of Blood

  Friday

  October 17

  He lost his way in the desert, the road washed out by the rains. He drove in fits and starts down tracks that dead-ended in galvanized gates and barbed wire, rocky cul-de-sacs and deep canyons rushing with rainwater. The storm was far away to the east now. The water had stirred up the antelope and jackrabbits, the occasional coyote, all of these caught by or seen fleetingly through his headlights, their eyes shining with their own intent purpose.

  The blood ran from his wounds and down his leg and into his left boot, and soon the working of the clutch made a wet, sopping sound. The windows fogged over with his breath, and he grew weary of wiping them. He saw doubles of cacti and scrub brush in the high beams. When at last he found a road that was wide and graded, he steered the shambling, creaking pickup and cabover onto it and kept as straight a line as he could, until finally, no other lights or signs of people as far as the horizon, he let his boot slip from gas to brake and drifted onto the shoulder. The truck rolled to a stop. He put it in park and cut the engine and the lights. He reached to open the door, thinking to make for the camper, but when he shifted in the seat, pain speared his hip and side, made his vision swim. He slumped sideways and the world went away, night enfolding truck and camper and driver like great black wings.

  When Travis woke, the seat beneath him was slick with blood. He turned his head and saw, through grimy glass, dawn stealing across open fields to the west. The truck was parked slantwise in the shadow o
f a low scarp face, and the gently rolling scrub outside lay cool and pink beneath the morning light. Travis licked his lips. His head hurt. He blinked through gummy eyes and felt the pull of a scab beneath his shirt and remembered.

  He sat upright and took the wheel, wincing at the dull ache in his side and leg. The leg was so stiff and heavy he could barely lift it to settle the flat of his boot on the clutch. With his right hand, he straightened his hat upon his head, the brim crumpled by the angle at which he had slept.

  He watched the light creeping over the fields and knew, soon, he would have to drive out into it. Into blue sky and sun. He looked down at the blood that had pooled and thickened in his floorboard, and he thought, I do not want this to be the end.

  Fearing he lacked the strength to fetch his wrappings from the cabover, that he would collapse on his stoop and cook in the sun, he looked over at the seat beside him, where the dead girl’s crumpled denim jacket lay. He wrapped it whole around his head, almost gagging on the scent of her perfume. Then he started the Ford and drove onto the graded road, and it was not long before he came to blacktop, where he rolled to a stop and idled. He looked right, to the west. He looked left, to the east. He turned west and drove with his back to the sun, somewhere ahead: a home away from home.

  Annabelle woke that morning and made Sandy’s breakfast and walked down to the motel to wait with him for the bus. They sat in the shade of the portico on the old pump island.

  “You’re quiet,” she said.

  He wore his backpack and picked at a thread that had come loose on the strap.

  She put her hand in his hair, ran it down the back of his neck. Settled on his shoulder. “Didn’t eat much either.”