Brave Deeds

by David Abrams

  “We’re wasting time. Make up your mind. Is it yes or no? Do I air-condition your head or do you go along to get along as my sergeant used to say?”

  Abernathy takes two and a half seconds to decide. Then he goes along to get along.

  He pokes his head—just his head—in the guard shack and says something in a low voice to Duncan. It’s down low enough so Fish can’t hear and that worries him, so he slips the barrel tip underneath the back lip of Abernathy’s helmet.

  And so the kid sells it. He sells it good to Duncan because all Fish hears is an “okay, whatever, dude” from the other guard. It’s said in the kind of end-of-shift-and-I-don’t-give-a-shit voice.

  Abernathy pulls his head back out and nods at Fish. He goes nice and easy to the driver’s side.

  “This is fucked up.”

  “No commentary, Abernathy. We’ve had a long day and we’re not in the mood.”

  Abernathy gets in. Fish gets in. Abernathy looks back at the rest of us. We have our weapons pointed at him.

  Abernathy goes, “They better have one big shiny medal waiting for me at headquarters.”

  “Oh, I never said you’d be a hero to higher, Abernathy.”

  “Who then?”

  “Us.” Fish smiles. “You’re our hero.”

  The guard looks over his shoulder again. We nod back at him.

  Abernathy catches sight of the woman. “Whoa whoa whoa!”

  “Take it easy,” Arrow says.

  “Who the fuck is she?”

  “She’s with us.”

  “Yeah, but look at her. Just look at her.”

  The woman’s legs are spread. Things are about to get serious. Cheever is wiping her forehead and Lamaze breathing with her.

  Fish says, “Don’t worry about her, Abernathy. We’ve got this under control.”

  “Yeah, but what’s her story?”

  “Never mind about her,” Arrow says.

  Fish goes, “Yeah, just drive. Unless you want to be the story. You wanna be a headline in tomorrow’s paper, Abernathy?”

  “Jesus Harvey Christ!” Now he’s seen O’s body and we want to butt-stroke him because he’s acting irreverent in the presence of the dead, but we need Abernathy to get us through Saro, so we let it pass—for now. There will be time enough for butt-strokes later.

  Then Arrow says, “Just get us to the church on time.”

  Abernathy frowns. “The church? What church?”

  “Oh yeah,” Fish says. “I guess I forgot to mention we have one little stop along the way.”

  54

  Memorial

  The chapel is straight off a Vermont postcard. But instead of blazing orange maples and red oaks, the church lies between a withered palm tree and an empty field pocked with craters from incoming mortars.

  Somebody wanted this chapel to scream: “Holy!” and “America!”

  It was built quickly, as if KBR contractors ordered it out of a Sears catalog, then assembled it from a kit here in Baghdad. Insert tab A into slot B, then glue the steeple in place, hallelujah and amen.

  There’s no one around, no cars parked outside the chapel.

  We check our watches. 1606. Sixty-six minutes late.

  Dammit.

  We’re deflated but not defeated. We made it, and that was the point. Success is reaching the end of the game with a high score and all your lives, right?

  Well, almost.

  We look at O. We can’t talk about him. Not now. Maybe later.

  Arrow goes, “Well, we’re here.”

  Drew goes, “Gee, that hardly took any time at all.”

  We stare at the chapel as we pull into the parking lot. It’s smaller than we’d imagined it would be. Just enough room for a platoon of grieving soldiers.

  We tell Abernathy to pull up next to the front door. He hasn’t said much the whole ride. We get the feeling he knows there’s something serious going on. He’ll shut up now and let us do our thing.

  We get out of the van. Two of us—Arrow and Park—reach back inside and lift O out. We’re the gentlest of pallbearers.

  We leave the woman inside. We wish her all the best, but she was never part of the deal.

  Cheever is still Lamaze breathing with her and we hate to pull him away, but we have to finish this together.

  When he sees we’ve arrived at the chapel, Cheever nods and gets out of the van.

  Arrow bends at the knees and pulls O across his shoulders. He’ll be the one to carry him these final steps.

  From her bed of flowers inside the van, the woman pants and groans. Cheever goes back for one last look. The woman’s hair has come loose and a thick strand is sweat-plastered across her forehead like a comma. She stares at Cheever and he thinks he knows what she’s trying to say.

  “You’re welcome,” he whispers. He turns to Abernathy. “Keep your eye on her.”

  “Okay. But you’re coming right back, right?”

  We ignore him and turn toward the finish line.

  Park carries Arrow’s rifle. Drew and Fish follow slowly. Cheever is still sympathy breathing with the woman. He’s so far out of himself at this point, he forgets to limp on his blisters.

  Arrow, bent beneath the weight of O, stops and turns to us. He goes, “Ready?”

  We go, “Ready.”

  We open the door. We enter the chapel.

  Hoover, the chaplain’s assistant, is the only one inside. Our company commander, our first sergeant, our fellow soldiers in mourning, they all left a long time ago. They’re already putting Sergeant Morgan behind them.

  Hoover is at the front of the empty sanctuary, folding cloths and packing them into boxes. At the sound of our boots, he looks up.

  He goes, “Holy mother of fuck,” soft as a prayer.

  There is nothing left of Sergeant Morgan’s memorial. Correction: there is one thing left—his boots. Correction: his boot—singular. The right one. It’s at the front of the sanctuary, on display at the center of a three-tiered pedestal that once held a rifle, two boots, and a photo of Rafe smiling at the camera. Now there is just a single empty boot. Hoover has packed everything else away.

  We walk up the center aisle single file, Arrow and O in the lead, then Park, then Drew, then Fish, then Cheever bringing up the rear. A sad parade of the footsore and heavyhearted.

  We advance and Hoover drops the cloths he’d been holding. He stammers: “You, you guys weren’t supposed to … Captain Bangor told us you were … You’re AWOL, and you …”

  We are deaf to Hoover. He could be explaining the Periodic Table of Elements for all we care. We hear nothing but our boot steps and the beat of our hearts.

  Arrow arrives at the front of the sanctuary first. He bends, shrugs O off his shoulders, then places him in a pew. He makes sure O stays upright, his hands in his lap, head tilted so he can see everything. Arrow has brought us this far, he’ll make sure everyone is there at the end. Dead or alive.

  With a wrench of our hearts, we realize we’ll be doing this all over again in a few days for O.

  We can’t think about that right now. It’s beyond what we can bear on this day.

  Hoover clears his throat. “If you’re here for Sergeant Morgan’s service, you know you’re too late.”

  At his name, we fall silent.

  Arrow goes, “Let’s do this, boys.”

  He thinks: Shit, I sound just like him.

  Arrow smiles. Then he remembers that last flicker he saw of Rafe from the corner of his eye—the way he bent and hugged those two little girls close to his chest. Arrow wishes he could be those girls. He would hold Rafe and never let go.

  Arrow elbows Hoover aside, then takes a knee. We surround him in a half circle and each take a knee as well.

  We stare at the lone boot on the pedestal at the altar. It is clean and the laces are neatly tucked inside.

  We’re silent with our thoughts about Sergeant Morgan.

  Behind us, beyond the open chapel doors, we hear a siren. We turn our heads. We see
Abernathy get out of the driver’s seat and run around to the back of the van. Then we realize that’s no siren. It’s the woman. The contractions are coming harder and harder now. She screams the baby into the world.

  We turn back and look at Sergeant Morgan’s boot.

  We each reach out a hand to touch this last part of Rafe that remains. Without warning, our breath bucks and pitches in our lungs and we release what has been in there all this time. We’ve held it for four days. That’s long enough.

  We’re all weeping now. Not loud, but not silently, either. We don’t care who sees our tears, our crumpled faces—not Hoover, not the absent Captain Bangor, not Rafe’s ghost, not even if every pew in the church was filled with our girlfriends, wives, sons and daughters, and George Bush himself.

  As we say our last good-bye, we cry, we cry, we cry.

  Acknowledgments

  On this novel’s long walk to publication, many people offered encouragement and to these I owe immeasurable thanks:

  My agent, Nat Sobel, who gave early pages of Brave Deeds a much-needed morale boost during lunch at the legendary Pete’s Tavern on East 18th St. in 2014. As the spirit of O. Henry (a Pete’s Tavern regular) watched over us, Nat said he saw great possibilities for what was then, in my mind, a mess of a manuscript. Among other things, Nat suggested I read a little-remembered novel first published in 1944 …

  A Walk in the Sun by Harry N. Brown proved, as all good war literature should, that courage is no walk in the park. An even larger debt of gratitude goes to Richard Bausch and his slim, masterful novel Peace (2008), which was always the brightest lamppost guiding Brave Deeds along its path.

  My Book Pregnant posse at Facebook, who held my hand and coached me through birthing pains as I carried this book baby to term long past its due date.

  Chris McCann, editor of The Arctic Warrior (the newspaper for US Army Alaska soldiers and families), who came to the Great Harvest Bread Company in Anchorage, Alaska, in 2013 for the very first public reading of Brave Deeds (an early draft of the first chapter) and unwittingly gave me the gift of christening FOB Saro.

  Rosalie Kearns for assistance with the Spanish language passages.

  My fellow warriors of the pen Benjamin Busch, Matt Gallagher, and Phil Klay, who were there with advice when I needed it the most.

  My brilliant copy editor, Paula Cooper Hughes, who asked all the right questions, stitched up plot holes, and helped me bring fuzzy characters into sharper focus.

  My editor Peter Blackstock and the entire Grove Atlantic team: bright stars in the literary galaxy, each and every one of them. Peter—my 3-W friend (wit, wisdom, and warmth)—brought this book across the finish line, cheering me every step of the way. He is my compass, my map, my headlights on a dark road.

  And last, but far from least, my beloved Jean. She may not be my first reader, but she is always the most important one.