The Yellow Birds

by Kevin Powers

  I had to know. “C’mon, Sarge. Just tell me.” He looked at me. I could see that he was as tired as I was. That surprised me.

  “Well, he was crying,” said Sterling. “And he was all like, ‘I’m fucking dying, right?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, probably.’ And he kept crying harder and then he stopped and I was just waiting for him to keep talking, or whatever. You know, like in the movies or some shit.”

  “Well?”

  “He goes, ‘Hey, man, check if I shat my pants.’ Then he was dead.” Sterling clapped his hands together as if to signal that he was done with it, had struck it from his mind.

  I turned away, overwhelmed and dizzy, and vomited until I had nothing left in me. But still the bile came out in sickly yellow ribbons. I rose from my stomach to my knees and I wiped it from my mouth. “What the fuck, man? What the fuck?” is all I could think to say as I spit into the ditch, then turned and walked away to the sound of a shutter clicking.

  A few hours later we linked up with the rest of the company. The reserve platoon secured a perimeter. We were supposed to sleep. The day was not over for us. Murph and I found a hole and tried to nod off but couldn’t.

  “You know what, Bart?” Murph said.

  “What?”

  “I cut in front of that kid in line at the DFAC.”

  I looked around. “What kid?”

  “The dead kid.”

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s cool, man. Don’t sweat it.”

  “I feel like a dick.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I feel fucking crazy right now.” He had his head in his hands. He kept rubbing his eyes with the base of his palms. “I was really happy it wasn’t me. That’s crazy, right?”

  “Naw. You know what’s crazy? Not thinking that shit.”

  I had thought the same thing, how glad I was not to be shot, how much it would have hurt to be there dying, watching all of us watch him die. And I too, though sad now, had said to myself, Thank God he died and I did not. Thank you, God.

  I tried to cheer him up. “Got to be at least nine eighty, right?”

  “Yeah. Something like that,” he said.

  It didn’t work. It was a shitty little war.

  We moved on. A lark or finch called as I planted my tired footsteps into the dust. I looked over my shoulder and reinforced that I had been and was still going. My footsteps marked my passage. I made more, more firmly planted in accordance with my training. I held my rifle in accordance with my training. Through this I gained strength and purpose. I have leafed through heavy manuals and have found only these things to be certain in accordance with my training.

  The empty city smoldered. We wore it to the bone with our modern instruments. Walls crumbled. Blocks composed of halves of shelled buildings allowed warm breezes to sweep up trash and dust and send them swirling in little cyclones as we walked. We took breaks for water, smoked where we pleased, reclined in chairs behind unoccupied desks. Empty shops with wood-fronted booths still stocked with wares from times at once ancient and obscure filled the bazaars. We placed our feet on the desks, as the soles of our boots could not offend the dead.

  We walked in alleys. Saw the remnants of the enemy where they lay in ambush, pushed them off their weapons with our boots. Rigid and pestilent, the bodies lay bloating in the sun. Some lay at odd angles with backs curved slightly off the ground and others were wrenched at absurd degrees, their decay an echo of some morbid geometry.

  We walked through the city, down pockmarked valleys of concrete and brick that bore the weight of old cars burning, seeming to follow the destruction as it spread rather than spreading it ourselves. No one around but an old woman. I caught glimpses of her, briefly, a shuffling gait as she floated out of sight. As we turned corners she was turning opposite and I had no solid picture but her form receding, shawled in an old quilt that gave her shapeless comfort.

  We stopped at a corner. A parade of rats crossed the street, weaving through the detritus. By force of numbers they shooed a mangy dog away from the corpse that it fed upon. I watched the dog as it loped off down an alley with a mangled arm clenched tightly in its jaws. Soon the dog was out of sight and the lieutenant raised his hand to signal to the platoon to stop near a bridge that crossed over the Tigris and the sparsely wooded banks below. A spare quiet and the river flowing softly nearby. A body sprawled in the center of the bridge. His head was cut off and it lay on his chest like some perverted Russian doll.

  “Oh fuck,” the lieutenant whispered.

  Someone asked him what was going on. I could see on his face, as he peered through his binoculars, the unmistakable look of recognition.

  “Body bomb,” he said. All stopped. It was impossible to know who the man was or what brought him to that place, and it was hard to fathom because a moment is never long enough to account for tragedy when you are in it. Grief is a practical mechanism, and we only grieved those we knew. All others who died in Al Tafar were part of the landscape, as if something had sown seeds in that city that made bodies rise from the earth, in the dirt or up through the pavement like flowers after a frost, dried and withering under a cold, bright sun.

  An interminable silence passed. As a group we were on a knee, looking out at the body, wondering what should be done. The lieutenant stood and turned to us, but before he could utter a word we were overtaken by blindness, as if the sun had fallen out of the sky. We were covered in dust and deafened before any sound could reach us. I lay groggy on the ground and my ears rang and buzzed loudly and as I looked up I saw the rest of the platoon moving on the ground, trying to get their bearings. Sterling was covered in black dust. His mouth moved and he gestured to his rifle, pointed out what he saw and began to fire at it. In alleys beneath us, closer to the riverbank, and in windows above us, we saw the tips of rifles and hands. The buzz in my head was oppressive, and I couldn’t hear the bullets as they passed, but I felt a few as they cut the air. The fight was hazy and without sound, as if it was happening underwater.

  I moved to the edge of the bridge and began firing at anything moving. I saw one man fall in a heap near the bank of the river among the bulrushes and green fields on its edges. In that moment, I disowned the waters of my youth. My memories of them became a useless luxury, their names as foreign as any that could be found in Nineveh: the Tigris or the Chesapeake, the James or the Shatt al Arab farther to the south, all belonged to someone else, and perhaps had never really been my own. I was an intruder, at best a visitor, and would be even in my home, in my misremembered history, until the glow of phosphorescence in the Chesapeake I had longed to swim inside again someday became a taunt against my insignificance, a cruel trick of light that had always made me think of stars. No more. I gave up longing, because I was sure that anything seen at such a scale would reveal the universe as cast aside and drowned, and if I ever floated there again, out where the level of the water reached my neck, and my feet lost contact with its muddy bottom, I might realize that to understand the world, one’s place in it, is to be always at the risk of drowning.

  Noctiluca, I thought, Ceratium, as the tracers began to show themselves in sifted twilight, two words learned on a school field trip to the tidewaters of Virginia that appeared as I was shooting at the man, paying no attention then to the strange connections made inside of any mind, the small storms of electricity that cause them to rise and then submerge, then rise again. A fleeting thought of a young girl sitting beside me on a dock, back there the twilight coming on, the crack of tracers as I shot and shot again, the man crawling from his weapon until he stopped and his blood trickled down into the river in its final ebbing tide, brief as bioluminescence. Sterling and Murph came over and sat next to me and we took out more magazines and fired those into his body and his clothes were awash in blood and it ran down the low bank and flowed into the river until it all had been exhausted.

  “Now you’ve got it, Privates. Thorough, thorough is the way home.”

  I stopped firing and put my head in my ha
nds. My rifle slung in my lap. I had taken it as far as I could. I looked over at Sterling. His face was serene. I wondered what he could do beyond this. No, what could I do beyond this? Where would he take us?

  We regrouped. A head count revealed no casualties except for a few broken eardrums from the blast. We returned to the spot where we had been previously and waited for the QRF. There was a wet spot where the body had been and its remnants were scattered in pieces, some small and some large, others appearing infinite like the pieces we found near our feet: a piece of skin and muscle, entrails. Others were larger, an arm and bits of legs closer to where he’d been. No one said a word but in the silence we re-created the last few moments of his life in our minds. We saw him struggling and begging and asking Allah to free him, then realizing he would not be saved as they cut his throat and his neck bled and he choked and died.

  The man had been made an unwilling weapon. They’d captured and killed him and eviscerated him and stuffed his abdominal cavity with explosives, detonated him when they were sure we had recognized him, then attacked. As the QRF arrived, we were told that the bridge had to be cleared.

  Sterling called out, “Murph, Bartle!”

  We took grappling hooks and tried to snag the larger pieces of the body. We yanked on them until we were sure they were free of explosives and posed no further threat. Murph threw the metal implement from behind a low wall and pulled until the chunks of the body resisted, then jerked hard on the rope. He looked at me when he had tugged hard on his piece, and then it was my turn. After we repeated the process several times, an officer got out of his vehicle and declared the bridge cleared.

  As we continued through the city, people began returning in twos and threes and set about the task of burying the dead. I heard the muezzin call and the sun went down purple and red, painting the city softly.

  7

  AUGUST 2005

  Richmond, Virginia

  That spring whole days and weeks were slept through and swept into the afternoons, never seeing a soul. I woke at random intervals to hear the school bus down the street loading and unloading different grades and ages of children, telling me the time based on the pitch of their chattering voices.

  I had deteriorated more than one might expect in the short time I’d been home. My only exercise was the two-mile round trip I made every afternoon to G.W.’s country store for a case of beer. I avoided roads, opting instead for the train tracks that passed by our house on the other side of a long, low berm. The hardwoods canopied above me provided shade, and the light fell through the green branches unceremoniously. The heat had gathered throughout the spring and now became a dense murk in the trellised pathway of the train tracks. Atlantic heat: muggy, thick with mosquitoes. It was quite unlike the heat in Al Tafar, which had the surprising effect of reducing one to tears in an instant, even after having spent hours broiling in it already. This heat was somehow more American; it confronted you immediately on your stepping out in it. Your breath warmed intolerably and it seemed you needed to push through it like a swimmer.

  Sometimes, when I reached G.W.’s, I’d wait just inside the wood line until whatever old pickup turned its last rusted quarter panel down the road, and I’d walk into the chime of the double doors through the dust it had left in its wake. I can’t really explain what that feeling was like. Shame, I guess. But that wasn’t all of it. It was more particular than that. Anyone can feel shame. I remember myself, sitting in the dirt under neglected and overgrown brush, afraid of nothing in the world more than having to show myself for what I had become. I wasn’t really known around there anyway, but I had the feeling that if I encountered anyone they would intuit my disgrace and would judge me instantly. Nothing is more isolating than having a particular history. At least that’s what I thought. Now I know: All pain is the same. Only the details are different.

  When I got back to the house, my shirt soaked through with sweat and starched again with salt, I’d put the beer in my closet, and walk into the kitchen, where I’d stand for a long time looking out the window onto the haze rising off the pond. I didn’t want to broaden the evidence of my existence wider than brief footprints of moisture on the floor of my mother’s modest country kitchen. I looked out the window and saw the street and railroad tracks, the woods beyond. Beyond the woods, the county of which they were a part. And so on, until it all dissolved into the larger thing: my mother’s house becoming every other house as I once had seen it, sitting atop the southern end of a broad river valley, close enough to the mountains that every few years a scared black bear would wander down into the remaining forest, and close enough to the ocean that those early English settlers took it as the farthest point they’d go upstream, the geology of the place preventing them from having any choice other than the one wherein they said, “We are lost; therefore we will call this home.” And close enough that as a child I had been teased by older kids who said if I only tried hard enough I would smell salt water, and I, believing, stood among the light poles and the gulls in the parking lots of A&Ps and cried when I knew that it was true despite the fact that they had meant to lie, as children sometimes do.

  The house itself rested above one of many ponds and streams meandering down to the James like so many pieces of unwound rope. And on the other side: Richmond, its glass buildings sometimes reflecting the river below, or clouds, or ironworks and track nearly gone to powder with rust. There it sat, up on its escarpment, which the river had scoured out over the millennia, and still it dug farther into the earth, winding in the landscape like a salesman’s banner unfurling to reveal his wares.

  Back home, everything had begun to remind me of something else. Every thought I had blossomed outward and backward until it attached itself to some other memory, that one leading to another, impermanent, until I was lost to whatever present moment I was in. “Honey, do you mind fixing the fence out by the pond?” my mother would say in the shortening days of summer, and I would walk into the long expanse of the yard holding a hammer and a fistful of nails and I’d reach the fence and lean on it, looking out over the water as warm breezes made it ripple and I’d be brought back. Back to what? To nothing, to everything. The yelp of dogs echoing out from where they rolled in wet garbage in the shadow of the Shamash Gate. If I heard the caw of ugly crows swing down from the power line that they adorned in black simplicity, the caws might strike in perfect harmony with the memory of the sound of falling mortars, and I, at home now, might brace for the impact, come on, you motherfuckers, I’d think, you finally got me, and then as the birds took flight I would remember and I’d look back and see my mother’s face silhouetted in the kitchen window and I’d smile back at her and wave, take the loosening wire meshing of the fence and begin to nail it back in place. You want to fall, that’s all. You think it can’t go on like that. It’s as if your life is a perch on the edge of a cliff and going forward seems impossible, not for a lack of will, but a lack of space. The possibility of another day stands in defiance of the laws of physics. And you can’t go back. So you want to fall, let go, give up, but you can’t. And every breath you take reminds you of that fact. So it goes.

  Late August. I left my mother’s house. I’d developed the habit of taking long, aimless walks to fill the days. I woke one morning in a small room off the kitchen in my single bed wishing that I hadn’t. It wasn’t the first time. I was tired of my mind running all night through the things I remembered, then through things I did not remember but for which I blamed myself on account of the sheer vividness of scenes that looped on the red-green linings of my closed eyelids. I could not tell what was true and what I had invented but I wanted it to stop, to leave it and have my perception drift away like a burned-up fog. I wanted to go to sleep and stay there, that’s all. A passive wish, one I didn’t push. Sure, there is a fine line between not wanting to wake up and actually wanting to kill yourself, and while I discovered you can walk that line for a long while without even noticing, anybody who is around you surely will, and then of c
ourse all kinds of unanswerable questions will not be far behind.

  The phone rang one morning. Ma picked it up. “It’s Luke, honey,” she said, calling to me from the other room. Eleven o’clock. Still in bed.

  “Tell him I’ll call him back.”

  She walked into my room and put the mouthpiece to her chest. “You’ve got to talk to people, John. It’s not good to be by yourself so much.”

  I’d known Luke since middle school. He was my best friend, though even now, those words don’t seem to mean anything. My fault, not his. His name reminded me of that discovery you make as a kid, that if you say a word over and over it will start to sound like gibberish, like white noise. “Take a message,” I said.

  She looked at me.

  “I’ll call him back, Ma. Promise.”

  She put the phone up to her ear and turned away. “He’s tired, Luke. Can he call you back?…Tomorrow? All right. I’ll tell him.”

  “We done?” I asked.

  “Goddammit, Johnny,” she huffed. “They’re going to the river tomorrow afternoon. They want to see you. People want to see you.”

  “All right.”

  “All right, what?”

  “All right, maybe.”

  “You’ll think about it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I really think you should. Just think about it.” She smiled tentatively.

  “Goddammit, Mama. All I fucking do is think.”

  I put my pants on and I went out onto the back porch and spit over the handrail, and it was a yellowish brown, and my body pulsed with a warm obtuse ache from my eyelids to my fingertips. The ache was inside my body too, an all-​encompassing type of pain like my whole skin was made out of a fat lip. I lit a cigarette and went down to the pond behind her house, the light all bright and shimmery like raw linen in the dense summer air, then farther back into the woods where the pond drained into a creek and ran between steeply gouged-out red-clay banks. At a spot where the creek caught up and swirled and eddied between exposed rocks, I found a place I’d often come to as a child. A large boulder overhung the creek, the red clay long since weathered away. Roots of a large gray birch clung to the side of the rock and went down into the ground where it leveled off into a clearing next to the creek. The leaves in the canopies of central Virginia’s hardwood forests had begun their pre-autumnal yellow tightening and they hung over the clearing and the creek and the light fell through them in a way that I was fond of and the morning was kind of soft-edged and clumsy like I’d been seeing it through gauze.