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That never fails to make Chris smile, as much as he can.
It was what Chris always said when they went out on a mission, the two of them out there in the dust and heat against a world of ragheads for who knew how long, until the bullet was sent. Nice day for a white wedding. And Chris was awesome, because he could really snarl it just like Billy Idol. So, sure, Chris recognizes it, and he recognizes Jeremy too, and Jeremy dares anybody to tell him his buddy doesn’t.
In his life Jeremy has loved only a few people. He has loved his mother and father in Nevada; he has loved the young woman and the little boy who smile at him from the framed photograph he has propped up against the sink, to look at as he passes over; and he has loved Lance Corporal Chris Montalvo, his spotter. People outside the Glorious Green Machine couldn’t understand the kind of love he has felt for Chris. And that’s okay, because it’s a private thing, something he wouldn’t talk about with anyone except another Marine. Only someone who’d been there would understand it, the way you love your brother in the Corps, the way you depend on each other, you watch each others’ backs, you eat the same dust and smell the same blood and hope it’s always Johnny Jihad who’s lying there emptying out like a broken bottle. Once you hear the roar of hell with your brother at your side, and feel the fire lick your face, you are one person, indivisible, because that is the only way you are going to survive it.
So after things went wrong in Houston, Jeremy came to Temple to be near Chris, to go visit him every Wednesday and lean down to say Nice day for a white wedding and get that faint flicker of recognition. Maybe nobody else can see it, but Jeremy can. Any maybe Chris can’t talk, and won’t ever talk again, and maybe he just sits in the chair staring at nothing, but Jeremy knows his buddy—his friend, his loved one—is aware of him, in that room up high over the boulevard of flags. And he knows there was a reaction—just a movement of a corner of Chris’s mouth, as if forming a reply—when Jeremy told him what he was planning to do, that it was time he was going to find Karen and Nick, and that the doctors here were good people, they knew their jobs, and they would always take the best care of him. I’ll see you on the other side, Jeremy had said. I’m gonna go on ahead, and scout it out for you. Okay?
Jeremy had hugged Chris before he left, and he thought of how frail Chris was, how the bones felt as thin as a child’s beneath the papery flesh. Chris had been such a strong guy, with the neck of a bull. Had played linebacker in high school, and had liked to work alongside his Dad on his father’s vintage 1973 Pontiac Firebird. It was an incredible and fearsome thing, how quickly a human being could be wrecked. Jeremy had to stop in the men’s room to wipe his eyes with a paper towel, but then what he had dreaded was done and he was all right with leaving Chris, it was okay. He believed in God, and he believed that God was okay with it too.
He takes a long, deep breath, and releases it as a sigh. The pills and the Nyquil are working, sinking him deeper. He knows the box-cutter will hurt, at first, but he has been through pain and it has to be done. He is sorry, though, that Mr. Salazar will have to deal with the mess. With a heavy hand he picks up the blade. He places the cutting edge against his left wrist, where the life flows. He wishes he’d lit a candle or something for the moment, because the bathroom’s white light is way too harsh. He pauses a few seconds, the blade’s edge pressing into his flesh; this is where the old life ends, he thinks, and whatever’s next for me is about to start.
Help me across, he says to the woman in the picture, and then he pushes the blade into his wrist—a sharp, hot pain, but not too bad—and the blood wells up and trickles down his forearm, and he watches in a kind of hypnotic wonder as it drips into the water. He is creating his own crimson tide. He bites his lower lip as he presses the blade deeper, and then he begins to drag it across his wrist toward the veins, and he keeps his eyes on the picture of his wife and son because soon he’ll be meeting them on that road that reaches the Elysian Fields, just as Maximus was reunited with his family at the end of Gladiator.
But Jeremy’s hand suddenly stops, before the veins are severed. He pauses in his path to suicide, as the blood trickles down along his forearm and drips and drops into the water.
Something at the end of the hallway, in the other room, has demanded his attention.
In the chair that Jeremy had pulled up before the TV to watch the movie, a figure is sitting. It seems to be a man whose head is turned toward him, but whose face is a shifting mass of shadow. A hand is upraised, a finger crooked: Come here, is the instruction.
My God, Jeremy thinks, and maybe he’s said it out loud. For the angel of death has arrived at Number Eight, the Vanguard Apartments, southeast Temple, Texas.
Come here, the instruction repeats.
“Give me a minute,” Jeremy says, his voice slurred and hollow against the tiles. He intends to finish what he’s started, and he’s not really afraid of the death angel because in one way or another the death angel has been with him, riding shotgun, for a long, long time. So he says, “One minute,” just to make himself clear.
But in the space of time it has taken Jeremy to speak, the death angel has created for itself the face of Chris Montalvo, complete with crumpled skull and childlike eyes that gleam in the TV’s light, and the finger beckons Jeremy to come with an urgency that cannot be delayed.
Now, Jeremy knows he’s got a lot of Tylenol and Nyquil in his system, and he knows the blood is running freely down his arm, and he knows his head is not right and his time is running out, and he knows this visitation is not really Chris Montalvo but maybe a costume of Chris Montalvo worn over a figure fearsome for human eyes—even blurred and cloudy human eyes—to behold, but still…it wants him to get out of the tub and come in there. It wants him, right now.
“Shit,” Jeremy says, because it seems like such an inconvenient moment. It seems that for him to stand up and walk along the hallway into that room would be like rolling out of a bunk on the darkest oh-dark-thirty of his life, or reaching up and pushing away from a grave the stones he has nearly finished covering himself with. It seems like the hardest thing he could ever imagine doing, on this final night, yet with a gasp of breath, a strain of muscles and a wobble of belly fat he sits up, puts the box-cutter on the soap dish, and in a slosh of bloody water he steps out of the tub onto something resembling solidity.
Halfway along the hall he stumbles and crashes into the wall, and leaves a red streak there under the framed fake-oil painting of a desert scene that must’ve been the previous tenant’s eBay Special. His knees nearly buckle; he is staggering back and forth, on his uncertain journey from bathroom to chair where the figure with Chris’s face is sitting. He thinks how out of breath he feels, how lost he seems to be in this sack of skin. Use it or lose it, he thinks; five years ago he could run three miles in a little over eighteen minutes, do one-hundred crunches under two minutes and swim five hundred meters like Aquaman. Only thing super about him now was his appetite for junk food and the size of the junk he left in the toilet.
Oorah, motherfucker, oorah!
He makes his tortured way into the room. There the creature who occupies the chair turns its constructed Chris-face away from him toward the TV screen, and Jeremy hears a man’s voice speak.
“It’s about the war.”
He looks at the screen, and sees there a dimly-recognized figure dressed in black and wearing a black cowboy hat looking back at him. “Song’s called ‘When The Storm Breaks’, by The—” A hand is held up in front of the camera, palm out and fingers spread, and what appears to be an electric-blue flame ripples around the fingertips.
A few seconds of darkness appears, with small type down on the bottom left: “When The Storm Breaks” and underneath that, The Five.
Then what might be a flash of lightning or a camera’s flash pops, and as a drum beats and guitar chords start growling, the scene changes to a herky-jerky handheld camera and what could be five or six or seven soldiers in full battle-rattle are advancin
g down a street between broken concrete walls. The color is washed-out, grimy, the sick pale yellow of Iraq. But it’s not Iraq, and these fools aren’t soldiers, because Jeremy instantly sees that some of them are wearing imitation desert pattern MARPAT camo and others are wearing imitation desert pattern ARPAT camo. So they’re stupid fucking actors with pretend gear, and they’re not any good anyway because they don’t move with the caution of knowing your head could be blown off at any second, they’re all twisting around and looking every fucking whichaway, a picture of chaos instead of control. Meat for Mookie, Jeremy thinks. Come right on down the street like that, old ladies, and get your asses handed to you.
The scene jumps to a band set up in the street: long-haired punk playing lead guitar, bass player with tattooed arms, skinhead fucker with glasses playing a piano or something on metal legs, hippie chick with reddish-blonde ringlets working a white guitar and another chick with short-cut curly black hair pounding the shit out of a drum kit, the cymbals flashing in the sun. Then it goes up close to the punk’s face, right up in his angry baby blues, and he sings like a half-drunk black man whose throat has been worked over with a razor:
“I was walking on a street under a burning sun,
Put my visor down, thumbed the safety off my gun.
Heard a rumble, might be thunder in the sky,
Might be cannons or an F-18 fly-by.”
Visor, Jeremy thinks. His lip curls. Guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Now intercut with the singer’s face and glimpses of the band are scenes of a house and some young dude’s father showing him an old picture of a soldier, and in the background an American flag is flying from the front porch.
Then the punk goes again:
“I was raised to think my blood’s red, white and blue.
I was raised to do what I was told to do.
Somehow in all that time I never did ask why,
It’s the young men like me who go to kill and die.”
Yeah, well, shit, Jeremy thinks. Get a clue. He believes he needs to sit down, his knees are weak and his stomach feels like it’s got fish swimming in it.
With an explosion of drums, bass and guitar that sounds like a freight train crashing through a building, the scene goes to the face of one of the soldiers on the street and Jeremy sees it’s the kid from the house, and now the herky-jerky shit goes wild because ragheads are shooting from windows and smoke curls up and the supposed soldiers run into another building except for one who goes down on his belly and jerks his legs like he’s hit, and the singer goes:
“When the storm breaks and the rain falls down,
And the mighty laugh with a hollow sound,
We got money for oil, you got battles to fight,
And the heroes come home in the dead of the night.”
Jeremy realizes the chair is empty. As he sinks into it, he is aware that the disturbed air around him smells like the hospital.
He doesn’t know a whole lot about music, but this isn’t bad. It’s got a strong beat. It sounds muscular and hard-assed. The guitars sound like bands of sharp steel flying through the air. There’s a firefight going on between the buildings, and then there’s a blast of flame and tendrils of black smoke whirl up and that, right there, looks pretty real. Then another of the good guys gets shot and claws at his throat and Jeremy leans forward because the shadows in this part are dark.
Everything stops but the drums, and over their thud and rumble the punk growls:
“This was somebody’s child, this was somebody’s dream,
I hope they bury it where the grass is green.”
And a second time, while the drums speak:
“This was somebody’s child, this was somebody’s dream,
I hope they bury it where the grass is green.”
The music swells again, the bass and the guitars come up and so does a trembly organ part that is half tough snarl and half sad murmur. The young guy who’s the hero of the video has somehow lost his helmet, he’s got blood on the side of his face, and around him lie the bodies of his brothers. And then the singer goes:
“I’m not saying this world will ever get along,
Not saying everything is right when it’s so wrong,
But I do believe that war makes some men rich,
And too many of them love that wicked bitch,
When the storm breaks, and the rain falls down…”
And now the young dude has lost it and broken cover, and wild-eyed he crosses the street alone and kicks in a door and nobody’s in there except a figure on the rubbled floor who looks up at him, and the camera shows that it’s an Iraqi kid maybe twelve or thirteen years old, who lifts his arms and crouches against the wall as the soldier raises his rifle and takes aim.
“We got money for oil,
You got battles to fight,
And the heroes come home in the dead of the night.”
The camera backs out of the room and the soldier staggers from the doorway with an expression of shock on his dust-white, blood-streaked face, and he throws his rifle down and begins to run along the street in the direction he came from.
“This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,
When the storm breaks,
This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,
When the storm, when the storm, storm breaks,
This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,
When the storm, when the storm, storm breaks, yeah when it breaks,
This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream…”
And then the music stops and the punk’s face fills the screen and he sings, in his husky razor-burned voice: “I hope they bury it where the grass is green.”
Fade-in to what Jeremy realizes now is the Felix Gogo Show. He’s seen this a few times, has seen Felix Gogo up on the billboards. Felix Gogo is standing with the band—The Five, is that what they call themselves?—in a room of bright light and black shadows, and behind them on the wall is an American flag. He says they’re going to play at the Curtain Club in Dallas on Saturday night. As Gogo asks them questions, their names come up underneath their faces. Mike Davis talks about his tattoos, and then the camera briefly shows Berke Bonnevey but she doesn’t say anything, and Ariel Collier starts answering a question about how long she’s been a musician, and suddenly the screen breaks apart into multicolored squares like the cable’s about to go out, but the audio’s still going and through a hiss of digital distress he hears the hippie chick say, “I wanted to be a musician so I can tell the truth.”
“What truth?” Gogo asks, a distorted shape on the tormented screen.
“Like this,” she answers, and there’s a weird echo: this…this…this. “The truth about murder,” she says, her image washed-out in a mosaic of pallid green squares.
Then the screen comes back like it ought to be, everything’s fine, and Jeremy sees that Terry Spitzenham is speaking but now the audio is down and nothing is coming from his mouth. The screen ripples and breaks apart again, goes completely to black. The audio lets loose a burst of static and then picks up and the guy is saying, “…what this war’s about is training killers, just a training ground for murder. You know how many kids have been killed by our so-called heroes?”
“Don’t go there,” Jeremy says numbly, to the black screen. “Don’t you go there.”
“Ashamed,” says another voice, crackling with static. “They should all be ashamed, and they all deserve to suffer.”
The picture reappears but everything is gray and ghostly, and the ghostly image of Felix Gogo says in a voice that sounds high-pitched and indignant, “So you want to make people believe our soldiers are shooting kids over there? That for everything they’ve done for this country, every sacrifice they’ve made, you’re making them out to be child-killers?”
Another spirit image flickers in the gloom. Suddenly the picture clears and the singing punk is standing there with a fake smile on his face, a
nd underneath it is the name Nomad—what kind of fucking name is that, anyway?—and he says, very clearly, “We’re working on it.”
“Well, good luck with that,” Felix Gogo replies, and the way he’s said it makes Jeremy know that if Felix had a gun he might have shot that long-haired, smirking bastard on the spot.
Jeremy loses the rest of it, because he’s seen all he wants to see yet he does not have the strength to turn the set off. Where’s the remote, anyway? In the kitchen, or the bathroom? A wave of weary sickness washes over him; he smells his own blood, leaking from the blade-cut on his wrist, dripping into a dark circle on the tan carpet. Now that, he thinks, is going to be one bitch to explain to Mr. Salazar.
Wait a minute, he tells himself. Hold on. I’m leaving tonight. Going back in there and finishing what I started.
Yet he does not get up. Nor does he even try.
It occurs to him, somewhere far back in his brain like a distant voice shouting for him to put it in gear and move, that he ought to get this wound bound up while he can still walk.
This is a weird world, he thinks. When you try to climb up a ladder, it breaks underneath you; but when you decide to jump off a cliff, a hook comes out of nowhere and grabs your miserable ass.
He doesn’t fully understand this song and video, or why the death angel wanted him to see it. Death angel? Whose death? His, or…
He thinks the song was about rich men who never go to war making money off war, or maybe even starting wars to make money. Duh. Who didn’t already know that? And nobody cared, even if they did know it. It was how the world worked, and so what? Like, maybe, it was news back in the days of the Civil War or ancient history. Yeah, and like that band wasn’t trying to make some money off the war, too? Make me laugh.
But that crap about the storm breaking, and somebody’s child and burying it and everything. Maybe that was talking about what was going to happen when the soldiers came home, and started thinking about…what? Doing the jobs we were trained to do?
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