by Kevin Powers
I made my way down the steep clay bank and tottered along a downed tree that crossed the creek. The rocks were slick but they were not as far apart as I remembered, and it was not too hard to get across because the previous night’s beers had me moving at a deliberate pace. I used my hands to brace myself as I made my way beneath the overhang, and though the morning had already begun to warm up it was cool under there, and I could feel the cool from the moisture of the big rock against my hands. Up on a birch, the initials J.B. had been carved into the sheet of silver bark a half-dozen times, each one a slightly different size from the others, with various patterns of lines where the cuts had stretched out with the tree’s growth. I climbed over to the tree and rubbed my fingers, all dull and warm, into the cut marks. I could not remember making the marks, but I was sure I’d made them. Of course J.B. is not an uncommon pair of initials, but I was sure I’d made the carvings and I could not remember anything about doing them and so I smiled.
I sat down there awhile until the sun was straight above me and the light fell down in wide columns and sweat ran down between my shoulder blades. I decided then to walk the tracks toward the city. It wasn’t so much a decision as it was a product of trying to turn off my mind. I couldn’t stop thinking about Murph. I drifted and followed the guidance of the tops of my boots and I tried not to think and when I got back up to the porch, I wiped the sweat from my forehead, opened the sliding door, put a few things in my duffel bag, and left.
I hadn’t known what I was doing then, but my memories of Murph were a kind of misguided archaeology. Sifting through the remains of what I remembered about him was a denial of the fact that a hole was really all that was left, an absence I had attempted to reverse but found that I could not. There was simply not enough material to account for what had been removed. The closer I got to reconstructing him in my mind, the more the picture I was trying to re-create receded. For every memory I was able to pull up, another seemed to fall away forever. There was some proportion about it all, though. It was like putting a puzzle together from behind: the shapes familiar, the picture quickly fading, the muted tan of the cardboard backing a tease at wholeness and completion. I’d think of a time when we sat in the evening in the guard tower, watching the war go by in streaks of red and green and other, briefer lights, and he’d tell me of an afternoon in the little hillside apple orchard that his mother worked, the turn and flash of a paring knife along a wrap of gauze as they grafted uppers to rootstocks and new branches to blossom, or the time he saw but could not explain his awe when his father brought a dozen caged canaries home from the mine and let them loose in the hollow where they lived, how the canaries only flitted and sang awhile before perching back atop their cages, which had been arranged in rows, his father likely thinking that the birds would not return by choice to their captivity, and that the cages should be used for something else: a pretty bed for vegetables, perhaps a place to string up candles between the trees, and in what strange silences the world worked, Murph must have wondered, as the birds settled peaceably in their formation and ceased to sing. And I’d try to recall things until nothing came, which I quickly found was my only certainty, until what was left of him was a sketch in shadow, a skeleton falling apart, and my friend Murph was no more friend to me than the strangest stranger. My missing him became a grave that could not be filled or leveled, just a faded blemish in a field and a damn poor substitute for grief, as graves so often are.
So I took the railroad tracks, roughly following the old Danville line northeast toward the city. It began to rain a little. The creosote seeped out of the railroad ties and became slick, and the wet gray aggregate shifted under my boots. I walked slowly, more or less shuffling from one railroad tie to the next, hardly looking up. Though I was in no hurry and had no destination in mind, the trees opened up and before I realized how far I’d gone I was above the river standing on the railroad bridge’s first trestled arch. The sun would soon be going down behind the trees, and the river was calm and flat, and it bent out of sight and trailed gently off toward its beginning in the mountains. The water was all a bright purple and orange where it reflected the ruddy clouds in the fading light, and I looked over the railing down onto the old stone piers of earlier iterations of the bridge where earlier iterations of aimless walkers must have seen some kind of sight like this and stopped and stood for a while and looked out over the water taking a deep breath and maybe seeing a small wavy outline of themselves reflected down below, with all that space around, thinking there was just so much damn space to be in that it hurt.
Soon enough I felt the dull rumble of a train shudder up the tracks, and I saw the first hint of its lamplight coming around the bend on the river’s other side. The sun was not quite down yet so the light around the bend was indistinct and only twinkling a little, like a star seen at daybreak or dusk. I slid down off the trestle and a little ways down the steep dirt bank and then I sat and watched the outline of the train moving, skylit, over the bridge from one side to the other. I could barely make out windows, much less see into them, so I did not see if the train was crowded but still I thought I might want to be on it. Maybe the train was coming from D.C., crossing the bridge north to south as it was. Maybe it was headed down to Raleigh or Asheville or perhaps cutting west on a hitch line out toward Roanoke and the Blue Ridge. I looked for a place to jump on but I did not see one because the train against the sky and the lights of the city to the east moved like a black shape in the blacker night.
A small deer run led down the hill below the bridgehead toward the flat, muddy riverbanks. There were fifty yards or so of good bottomland with birches and elms scattered around and then little islands leading farther out which became sparse until they were just spits of sand and muck between dark runnels of water. The broad river, not yet whitecapped, ran a half or a quarter of a mile to the other bank. Beyond the river and up the opposite hill, the city stood outlined against the sky. It squatted on the high ground above yet more rail lines and past the remains of a canal carved out by colonial merchants who sought to break the impediment of the fall line which Richmond straddled. And it seemed, as I lit a fire by the waterside and sat under a lean-to of birch branches, that whole rotations had reversed themselves and that I alone watched the city and the ground on which it sat spin throughout the night inside the universe.
When I woke I saw that the fire had decayed to ember in the night. It was late morning and the sand in the bright light looked like burlap sacking where I’d slept. The driftwood from the fire was all black and charred. Music swam toward me from a boom box leveled on a midstream rock where a group of boys and girls about my age lay out on towels or jumped into the swift water, laughing. I could see Luke, but I couldn’t tell who the others were.
The ash and smoke had seeped into my skin while the fire burned out during the night, and I waded into the water below the rail bridge to try to wash it off, but I could still smell it an hour later. I climbed back up the hill and onto the tracks again and shuffled across the bridge one hundred feet above the water. I moved to the edge where the ties met the structure of the bridge itself and moved along the oxidized metal, occasionally swinging my foot out over the water flowing down below while watching the kids laugh and swim in the fresh water. The day was warm and clear, and the sky behind the city was bright blue and empty. When I got to the north bank of the river, I followed the tracks toward the city for a while, then turned down a worn path that led toward the water.
It was hard to cross the canal and even though it had been cut out some two hundred years before, it still seemed industrial and slightly dirty. Finally, I found a spot where the river hung up behind a couple of downed oaks on the canal side and doubled back toward the path along the river’s edge. It took me to a campsite looking right out over the water, and it was the afternoon now and the site was empty but only recently so. Three lean-tos perched beneath strong, firm elms bordered a small clearing with a fire pit and a few stumps for seating.
I set my duffel on the ground and got a fire going and took my boots off and my clothes off and hung them on a branch near the fire. My feet were in the water, and the river ran docilely by and I was hardly a speck on the landscape and I was glad. An egret flew just over my shoulder and skimmed the water so close and I thought there was no way a body could be so close to the edge of a thing and stay there and be in control. But the tips of its wings skimmed along the water just the same. The egret didn’t seem to mind what I believed, and it tilted some and disappeared into the glare of the gone sun and it was full of grace.
Small lines wound their way up and down the surface of the stump on which I sat. They were intricate and sort of gouged out or termited into a pattern that struck me as oddly orderly. Luke and the rest of the boys and girls still splashed in the water, taking turns diving from the broad gray rocks into a little draft of current that swept them ten or twenty feet downstream like an amusement park ride. They were beautiful. I had to resist the urge to hate them.
I had become a kind of cripple. They were my friends, right? Why didn’t I just wade out to them? What would I say? “Hey, how are you?” they’d say. And I’d answer, “I feel like I’m being eaten from the inside out and I can’t tell anyone what’s going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I’ll feel like I’m ungrateful or something. Or like I’ll give away that I don’t deserve anyone’s gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I’ve done but everyone loves me for it and it’s driving me crazy.” Right.
Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense of wanting to throw myself off of that train bridge over there, but more like wanting to be asleep forever because there isn’t any making up for killing women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there is no making up for what you are doing, you’re taught that your whole life, but then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they might have been trying to kill you too, so you say, What are you gonna do?, but really it doesn’t matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing you could have done, the one person you promised would live is dead, and you have seen all things die in more manners than you’d like to recall and for a while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit, man, that you didn’t even realize you had until only the animals made you sad, the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking guts and everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around and the smell is deep down into you now and you say, How can metal be so on fire? and Where is all this fucking trash coming from? and even back home you’re getting whiffs of it and then that thing you started to notice slipping away is gone and now it’s becoming inverted, like you have bottomed out in your spirit but yet a deeper hole is being dug because everybody is so fucking happy to see you, the murderer, the fucking accomplice, the at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want to burn the whole goddamn country down, you want to burn every goddamn yellow ribbon in sight, and you can’t explain it but it’s just, like, Fuck you, but then you signed up to go so it’s all your fault, really, because you went on purpose, so you are in the end doubly fucked, so why not just find a spot and curl up and die and let’s make it as painless as possible because you are a coward and, really, cowardice got you into this mess because you wanted to be a man and people made fun of you and pushed you around in the cafeteria and the hallways in high school because you liked to read books and poems sometimes and they’d call you fag and really deep down you know you went because you wanted to be a man and that’s never gonna happen now and you’re too much of a coward to be a man and get it over with so why not find a clean, dry place and wait it out with it hurting as little as possible and just wait to go to sleep and not wake up and fuck ’em all.
I started crying. Through my tears night had fallen. The girls in the hot summer night were toweling off and laughing, standing on the darkening rocks beneath the soft light of the lampposts on the nearby train bridge. I got up and followed a path that skirted the banks of the river and I followed it aimlessly. At the edge of the river, I waded in. It was hot then, but the river cooled me, and the moon above the trees on the hilltop, blocking the streetlights, kept the river flickering softly, and I felt myself calmly fading in it. As I leaned forward and floated, I drifted a little, a little down, a little to sleep.
The river had a dream in it. I faced the opposite bank and stood there naked in the water. I saw a band of horses in a field dotted with dogwood and willow. Each was like the others in temperament, all roans except for a single old palomino that looked at me as the others grazed in the thin moonlight. It was bloodied on its hooves and carried the marks of both lash and brand on its haunches. Ducking its head sweetly, it entered the shallow water. As it walked toward me the blood washed downstream and the horse left a little red wake as it walked. It stepped lightly, but bore no grimace on its face, and was only tentative in its step. I stood, still naked, and softly splashed the water around me with both hands. Not hard, just back and forth through the water with my hands in semicircles. It neared and I watched it snort a little and as it neared it shook its head, once, twice, calmly. It stood before me, old and worn from the lash and it bled into the gently flowing water and stood tall despite its wounds. It leaned in and nuzzled me about my shoulder and neck and I leaned in too and nuzzled back and put my arms around it and I could feel the power in its bruised old muscles. The horse’s eyes were black and soft.
This was my vision as I woke. Goddamn the noise. The yelling closed in. Them yelling, “Get him out. Goddamn it, get his ass out.” I shocked awake and spat up water from the river and they banged on my chest until I spat out more and I lay on the bank, drunk and smiling, looking out at the strange faces gathered there. I lay for a little while half in and out of the water and it ran over my feet, lapping up and down and cooling them, shallow enough to be safe where I lay. I smiled absently and thought of the old palomino nuzzling me as I came around. Whatever. They called me in the lamplight. Night now.
Luke had seen me floating and called 911 from one of the girls’ cells. The cops didn’t make me go through the motions of any kind of psych evaluation out of respect for my service. I’d given them my military ID when they asked for one and they said, “All right, soldier. Let’s get you home.” When they dropped me off at my house one of the cops looked at me with a pitiable concern and said, “Try to keep it together, buddy. You’ll be back in the swing in no time.”
When I opened the door my mother was waiting. She grabbed at my face and began kissing my cheeks and forehead. “I thought I’d lost you.” she said.
“I’m fine, Momma. Everything is fine.”
“I don’t understand what’s happening to you. I’ve been worried half to death.” She stood there, then moved to the counter and started shuffling the letters nervously where they were stacked. “You know I’m getting calls now too, on top of this,” she said.
“Yeah? Who from?”
She turned to look at me and I saw in her eyes all the pain and horror that I had given her. “Some captain. He said he was from the C.I.D.” She mouthed the words slowly. “The Criminal Investigation Division. He wants to talk to you.” She paused and moved toward me again. I moved away and went into my room and closed the door. Her voice came through the cheap layers of artificial wood. “What happened over there, Johnny? What happened, baby? What did you do?”
What happened? What fucking happened? That’s not even the question, I thought. How is that the question? How do you answer the unanswerable? To s
ay what happened, the mere facts, the disposition of events in time, would come to seem like a kind of treachery. The dominoes of moments, lined up symmetrically, then tumbling backward against the hazy and unsure push of cause, showed only that a fall is every object’s destiny. It is not enough to say what happened. Everything happened. Everything fell.
8
OCTOBER 2004
Al Tafar, Nineveh Province, Iraq
Fall came at the tail end of our first storm. We’d been granted a reprieve from the heat and the dust, both gently smothered by flat sheets of rain fallen from skies the color of unworked iron. We were still tense, but now we were tense and wet.
On a morning several days after the fight in the orchard a major came to our platoon area just before first light. Our platoon had done well in the orchard, minimized civilian casualties, killed a lot of hajjis and suffered only a few casualties of our own. This had earned us good duty: regular patrols with forty-eight hours on and twenty-four off. When the major arrived, we were just returning from one of our cushier patrols through the sparsely occupied buildings on the southern outskirts of Al Tafar. We casually tossed our equipment on the ground and lolled against the low concrete barriers and trees in whatever position was easiest to achieve.