by Sarah Stark
Later, on other afternoons when the floors and walls around him became stained with different blood—from Americans and Sunnis and Shiites and Brits and Sri Lankans and Kurds, young kids of every color, each flag and faith contributing to the bloody irrigation of Iraqi sands—Jefferson perceived it as sad, yes, but also as an opportunity to recite the beautiful lines about José Arcadio’s blood running under the door and down the street and into his mother’s kitchen as she prepared to crack thirty-six eggs. It was a chance to pause within the chaos, and to thank God once again for the great writer, the man who had saved Jefferson’s life once more with his words.
28
The horchata struck Jefferson’s tongue as oddly alive and tart, but the Zacatecas plaza—lime trees, small children eating lollipops with their aunties, dogs, an early-December bustle—was reminding him of blood. The birds from outside Torreón had followed him, and roosted now in the trees and bushes nearby, clucking and croaking and cooing. Jefferson could now see that it was a mixed flock: grackles and sparrows and ravens and terns. Peacocks and martins and owls. Chickens. The pup had bounded off to roll in a patch of grass, and Jefferson was content to sip his drink and watch as a late-season mosquito helped herself to a long snack on his forearm. He hoped the heaviness would pass. The unreality of all these birds swarming around might help.
He did not know exactly how he had arrived at this spot in central Mexico, though it must have been by riding Nigel’s motorbike, which was parked a few feet away. He did not know what had happened to the beautiful twins with their hammocks. What he needed to decide was whether to spend the night here or push on another few hours to somewhere farther—San Luis Potosí possibly, but he’d heard that town might not be a good one in which to spend the night.
When the mosquito finished and flew away, one large drop of blood remained on his skin, a succulent leftover, and Jefferson stared at it, that virulent wet drop—what a deep, rich red it was—watching as it rested, with no desire to travel. He raised his hand in the air in front of him and watched as the drop fought gravity for a moment before dripping down in a neat line a few inches toward his elbow. Then he put his tongue to it, closed his eyes, and licked.
The taste of being alive.
It was late on the third day, and his body ached from gripping the handlebars and pressing against the wind. And though he felt a degree of relief over having passed the first several days of his trip, of being now that much closer to his destination, he was also beginning to experience moments of anxiety. What if he got all the way to Mexico City, and Gabriel could not help him answer the question Why?
The taste of the blood proved a healthy distraction. On his skin a diluted streak remained, and he watched it begin to dry, exposing the cracks of his skin below. Beautiful, the patterns of those cracks in his skin showing up in light brown relief below the red, like a network of electrical circuits. Like contemporary art on his own body. Life, so near he could touch it.
Up in the trees, the grackles and ravens were strangely quiet, as if waiting and witnessing. Chickens scratched nearby in the bushes. He sat and breathed with them now, holding their winged images in his mind as they shifted on the branches and scratched intently in the hard-packed earth, as they stretched their wings and breathed. It was an extraordinary combination of fowl, and as he sat and meditated on them, Jefferson began to feel some recognition. There were the three chicks hopping on the walkway, so clearly those little girls from the Toyota. There was the peacock who had so obviously grown up in New Orleans. The three ravens who were so obviously from New York City and Chattanooga and Hollidaysburg. There was the great horned owl, its feathers just visible from its perch way up high in the pine tree; that owl was from Albuquerque, Jefferson just knew it. He saw each face and remembered each hometown, although the names escaped him. It made perfect and beautiful sense that each of these had transformed and was now traveling the earth as a bird, and Jefferson found them a comfort as he sat in the plaza. For he was not alone, not in his current thoughts, not in his memories of loss, not in his recognition of the harsh beauty of life all around him.
As his gaze blurred in one direction on the sight of the dried blood, out of the other periphery he watched the approach of an old man under a tired straw hat, sweeping the stone walkway of the plaza.
The old man was intent on his job, he could tell; he might not see Jefferson sitting there on the ground under the lime tree. It seemed un-Mexican, this sitting on the bare ground, something in addition to his poor Spanish that announced his foreignness. But Jefferson stayed there in his spot and let the old man sweep. The sun was warm on his face, and the day, though reminding him of blood, seemed uncomplicated. He felt taxed by nothing, neither nausea nor regret, and he gave thanks for the mosquito and the birds and his pup, and he breathed.
When the old man reached the tips of Jefferson’s shoes with his broom, he looked into Jefferson’s face and smiled and spoke. “Buenos tardes, señor. Cómo está?”
Jefferson smiled and replied, “Hola,” looking into the man’s eyes.
The old man spoke again—“Bueno. Gracias, señor”—in a high-pitched singsong that transported Jefferson’s mind back to that open space by the sad trees, that old man and his goats, his high-pitched repetitive pleas, which RT had not heeded.
There was a moment’s pause, and then everything around Jefferson shifted. A streak of light struck his eyes, transforming the plaza into a sunbaked desert, and suddenly the old man’s voice had crossed boundaries of time and space. Jefferson peered back into the old man’s eyes, trying to decide if this miracle could really be true.
“You’re alive!” Jefferson said, his mind leaping toward the marvelous possibility before he realized the absurdity of his wish that it be so. He looked back up through the dancing sunlight and smiled the biggest smile he could manage at the old man. He smiled so hard it hurt.
“Sí, sí bueno,” the old man was saying, and then, as if to prove it, he propped his broom against a bush and bent low to show Jefferson a sore on the top of his left hand, possibly a burn, beginning to scab. The scab was a marvelous shade of deep purple, with flecks of rust scattered on the edges, where it was beginning to crust. Radiating out from it was an array of sunspots and veins, a complex pattern of purples and rusts and plum reds on top of his rich brown wrinkled skin.
“Horrible,” the old man said, shaking his head and then beginning to speak quickly, telling Jefferson what seemed to be the story of how his hand had been injured.
A small group of sparrows was hopping around his feet, and up in the trees the ravens were beginning to croak to each other. As the old man talked on, Jefferson’s eyes were open and his mind began to make connections and he realized it was all possible, and that he was not the only one being given a new chance to live in the highlands of central Mexico.
“I can’t believe you’re alive!” he said again to the old man, shaking his head before going on to touch the man’s scab and to compliment him on the beauty of his hands and the great good fortune that he was healing so well. “You are a strong man,” he said in English before spending the next several minutes trying to explain in mixed Spanish and English what he meant, using the words las manos and guapo and muy and artístico while he motioned back and forth between the man’s hands and the stone walkway, the broom, the lime trees and the bushes, and then, with a much wider arc of his arms, to the sandy hard-packed country beyond the great sea where he believed the two of them had last crossed paths, trying so hard to explain. But the old guy just stared blankly at Jefferson and then down at his own hands. It seemed that the old man, if indeed he had grasped any of Jefferson’s words, thought that he was merely complimenting his skin or the structure of his bones. It was possible that he had not recognized Jefferson—that was understandable, given how scared he must have been that day. And besides, Jefferson knew he himself had not been a hero to be remembered that day by the sad trees.
The old man moved back to his broom, and J
efferson’s mind searched for the right line, a line he could recite to honor this moment with the old man under the lime trees, the birds looking on. It did not take him long to think of the perfect line, one he’d sung many times over a period of several long weeks in Iraq, one he would never forget. Jefferson kneeled down on the gravel walkway and began reciting and then singsonging in the old man’s direction, hoping that he would somehow understand how sorry Jefferson was, how happy Jefferson was to see his wound healing. With his hand on top of his backpack where he could feel the outline of the book, Jefferson sang in what he thought of as a blues voice, raspy and slow and full of soul.
Oh, I do not understand.
No, I do not understand.
How I could go to war over something I could not touch with my hands?
Something I could not touch with my hands.
My hands.
Las manos.
Las manos.
He stayed in that spot until the late-afternoon light became dappled on the walkway, the suuvwp, suuvwp, suuvwp of the old man’s broom only a memory as the cooler air of the evening rushed in. The man had not slowed his work or even turned around when Jefferson began chanting, but later, before leaving the plaza, he’d doubled back to the place where Jefferson sat and once again swept the section of walkway near his feet. Then he had stopped sweeping for a moment and, looking hard at Jefferson, as if acknowledging an extraordinary communication, smiled and nodded. He began to point at various places around the plaza, speaking dramatically, as if telling Jefferson about the plaza and various things that had happened there. As if he had not told a story for many years. As if something had inspired him, like Jefferson, to overcome his shyness. He pointed toward the large climbing rosebush, one whose dried blooms looked as if they’d once been yellow. Perhaps the old man’s grandfather had planted that rose, Jefferson thought, or perhaps forty years ago the old man now before him had asked his sweetheart to marry him under its falling petals. Perhaps the old man was explaining what a lovely woman she had been to him, all these many years. Eventually the old man had finished his story. “Hasta luego,” he said, and Jefferson remembered the expression from ninth-grade Spanish. Until we meet again. It was a good thing to say to another human being. Jefferson was going to remember that saying, in both Spanish and in English, and he was going to add it to his list of things to begin saying to other human beings when the time was right. Hasta luego. Until we meet again.
Eventually the old man packed up his broom and his dustpan and left the plaza, walking eastward. Jefferson watched him until the shadows of the coming dusk and the bend in the road made it impossible to see him anymore.
29
The plaza was swimming with dogs and the hour was late and Jefferson needed a shower. Everyone, it seemed, had gone to bed except for the unseen people enjoying music and drinks in the bar at the end of the street, where Christmas lights shone out into the night. But now a pack of hounds and labs and sweet scruffy mutts had begun to congregate around Jefferson’s bench, as if they’d all gotten some message. The pack seemed at first interested in Remedios, who, thankfully, was a social beast and so leaped to the ground and began a good-natured rough-and-tumble with some of the dogs. But after a few minutes of this most of them returned to Jefferson, clearly in search of food. He counted seven dogs in addition to his own.
He’d gone on to San Luis Potosí in the dark of night, his misgivings eventually overcome by his need to move on. It was late by the time he left, since he’d had a bit of trouble finding Remedios and getting her in the cart. Once he’d cornered her on a far end of the plaza under a café table, he’d spoken to her as if she were his child, a beautiful being for whom he was responsible, and who because of her young age did not always know what was best for her. It would be fun to drive on to San Luis Potosí, he’d reasoned; there would be more playmates there for her; she would enjoy new adventures.
And here they were, these seven dogs proving him true, politely taking the few scraps of a sandwich he had to give them, sharing these as he’d never before seen dogs do, and then running laps around the plaza with Remedios, jumping from benches and rolling on the hard-packed earth and barking greetings and playful taunts.
“Shhh,” Jefferson said to them, “not so loud.” He didn’t want to wake the town.
As the dogs played on, Jefferson thought of his warm bed, the pink-tiled bathroom with its warm water, and for a moment he wished for home. It was cold, and he didn’t want to spend the night outside again.
Just then, he saw a dog—a new dog, the eighth—up the street, approaching the plaza from the direction of the bar in an off-kilter hop. As the dog approached, Jefferson could see that it was a hound—mostly basset, he guessed, going by its long, loppy ears—and that it had only three legs. On its way toward Jefferson, the dog stopped momentarily to sniff a patch of dirt and then to watch at a distance the play of the other dogs, diversionary techniques that did not fool Jefferson. Knowing that the dog was a hound, knowing that it was maimed, knowing how the magic of the universe worked when his eyes were open, Jefferson had no doubt that the dog was headed his way, that it had spotted him and smelled him and known him from afar. He knew that the dog was pacing himself on an inevitable trajectory that must end at Jefferson’s feet.
Though Jefferson had guessed that Remedios contained a trace of hound in her blood, at the shelter he’d purposefully avoided any of the dogs that seemed predominantly hound. He had too many traumatic memories when it came to that breed. Like scorpions and the sight of his peers staring off into the distance with scared, sad eyes, the sight of a hound awoke in him an instant melancholy. And that was nothing compared to the feeling that washed over Jefferson when he heard a distant baying carried on the wind at night. “Why, oh why?” he muttered aloud to himself as he watched the hound’s sure approach—it was now just fifteen feet away, and closing in—couldn’t war just be a bad dream? Why couldn’t it be real, the apparatus to make a man forget his bad memories?
It had happened the day he backed over the hound dog in the Humvee. It had been fresh in his mind when he’d heard the poor dog scream. At the time Jefferson’s heart was so heavy that he could hardly register any additional losses, but nonetheless he had put his head against the steering wheel and sobbed when he realized what had happened to the dog.
Jefferson must have erased some of the details from his mind; he could not remember why he’d been walking on that deserted Iraqi village street on that particular day. It was a Thursday afternoon, late in 2008. If he tried to think about it, he knew he must have been scared. Lost, maybe? He thought it had happened in a town far from Anaconda, though he had no idea why he’d been there. And why had he been alone? He was never supposed to be alone—he knew that. He was certain his heart had been racing, his hands shaking. He could see now the hard lines of sunlight slicing through the narrow gaps between buildings, buildings two and three and four stories tall. It was a city, then, somewhere in that vast hard-packed desert, a place he’d never been before. He didn’t know why he’d been there at all, why he’d been alone.
He remembered a sudden screeching of tires and car metal, a sudden confluence of screaming and radio signals, breaking into his feeling of being all alone in a distant land. Up ahead his way was blocked by cars, several rough-looking men standing next to them, talking into cell phones, so he’d turned down a side street, hoping for help. He began to run.
His hands shook with the sudden realization that he had a pistol in his belt, that he was prepared if it came to that. The street was narrow, too narrow for the sun to reach it now, and he was alone and scared and running. Behind him, he thought he heard cars closing in, trapping him in that narrow passage, and his heart pounded. He hoped it was all a dream, that he would soon wake, but the men were running after him and he was sure he had been left in this walled city and then he turned up yet another narrow alley, one final attempt to get away, and there was the guy three feet in front of him, screaming at him—h
e had a gun, he would shoot. But Jefferson was ready, his hands shaking in their preparations, waiting to do the thing he did not want to do. And the guy was screaming and Jefferson was alone and scared, and so he pulled the trigger. A quick movement that changed his life.
Not much later Jefferson had learned that the guy, only a kid, just seventeen years old, had been on his way home with groceries for his mother. Jefferson had fallen in a heap on top of the boy’s body, next to the boy’s shrieking mother, and he had not heard anything the other members of his unit were telling him about where they’d been and why he’d found himself all alone and scared and running. Instead he had lain with the boy and his mother, singing words he knew to be true of himself, words that had been inspired by Gabriel and had made him wonder why more than ever.
War has made me a killer of good people.
A killer of good people.
Worse than the worst.
Worse than the worst.
The boy had died immediately, though the hound had not. Its death was a slow march to an end that was inevitable as soon the heavy tires and steel rolled over its bony body. It chose as a final resting place a spot somewhere within earshot of Jefferson’s bed, and so he had no choice but to listen to each of its solitary yelps toward death.
After that, Jefferson hadn’t been able to face the idea of traveling home, even though he’d been due a visit, though he’d e-mailed Esco that he’d be taking leave soon. The killing of the boy and the killing of the hound all in one day had killed too much within him. Going home would not be possible.
Seeing this Mexican hound had brought all that loss back, but now, even as he registered the pain, Jefferson also glimpsed some degree of hope. For this inspired creature, with its glistening sable coat and its ears that nearly swept the ground, was using its three good legs in a perfectly synchronized motion—a triumphant motion it seemed to Jefferson—as he approached. This hound had prevailed over its fate, and for that, Jefferson was thankful. Maybe, he thought, what he needed was not an apparatus to make him forget his bad memories, precisely, but rather one that could shift the past’s dark horrors into memories of perseverance and light. This was the fiction he needed to be real.