by Phil Klay
In this way, I found a place in the world. From the animal life of Cunaviche to the family of Osmin’s front was the first great step. A life with purpose, and a leader to obey. With Jefferson, though, I became a person on my own. People in the towns came to know me as more than just a paraco. Workmen, ranchers, shopkeepers, and mayors, they greeted me when they saw me. Their smiles were unforced, unafraid. They knew my talents. My eye for details.
One day I went into a small town on the north edge of our area called Rioclaro with a group led by a former soldier named Javier. He had a reputation for cruelty, and as we entered I could see the life of the town dying around us. First, the movements of the adults stilled or turned mechanical, like bad actors on a stage. Next, the children stopped their play and stared at us curiously before catching the mood and freezing in place. All of us gripped our weapons, peered into windows and dark alleys. I wondered what Javier had done here, and whether there was any point in what I did, any way to win the people’s love. And then I saw the old rancher with the white mustache sitting at a little table, eyes fixed on a dominoes game. He looked up, a furtive look, and saw me. Recognition. He grinned, stood, and waved. I walked over to him and clasped his hand. In that moment, we were the only two living souls in Rioclaro. Oh, I thought, surprised. I matter.
6
LISETTE 2015
In theory, home was Pennsylvania. And in theory, you’re obliged to go home, to pay obeisance to the household gods. To lie to your mother not in word but in deed, because going home is like saying that this place, Fourteen Burnham Street, still has a hold on you, that your roots there haven’t withered, that maybe you would go back even if she didn’t demand the visits. My mother has a sense of place, a sense of the value of land, of belonging, of community. It’s one of the things that helped me develop a feel for Afghans and for American soldiers, who have their own version of tribalism. Being fixed in a community is one way of living, of knowing exactly who you are, why you are, what you are doing. Which is why betraying your family and your hometown by leaving feels like flying.
So any trip home means taking care that you don’t get your wings clipped, don’t let your mother or your sister or your crazy Uncle Carey love you back down to earth. Which is why the first thing I always do when I’m back home is run. Run until I’m purified. A long, long early morning run through western Pennsylvania. Miles and miles and miles. The cold early morning air, me with nothing but running shorts and a thin shirt against the cold, knowing I’ll be freezing for the first half mile or so until the exercise warms my body as fast as the wind steals the heat away. It’s my ritual of return, down the hills of Cambria County, down past the businesses and restaurants on Old Scalp Road, down past the camp my mom sent me to in the summers, where I caught my first fish, kissed my first boy, and, more importantly, met Rhonda, the camp counselor who wanted to be a reporter and introduced a thirteen-year-old me to Ernie Pyle and Martha Gellhorn and George Orwell. Rhonda has three kids now and lives a few miles away from my mom and when I’m home I always tell myself I’ll swing by and see if she remembers me. Of course I never do. I don’t indulge in nostalgia. I run. I run until there are no memories in my head at all, not of Kabul, not of Cambria County, not of Rhonda or my sister or anything penetrating my mind beyond pure sensation, the intake of breath, the burn in my lungs, the ache in my legs, and the elation of mastering that pain with every foot flung forward.
I get in late—flight to Istanbul, to New York, then Pittsburgh, then a rental car pickup and a ninety-minute drive, pulling into Fourteen Burnham Street at 4:30 in the morning—but my mom is awake anyway, waiting in ambush.
“Mom,” I try to scold. “You don’t sleep enough as it is.”
“I’ll sleep when I die,” she says, and before I can tell her what I always do, that her death will come sooner if she doesn’t take care of herself, she wraps me in a hug. She insists on carrying my bags herself, she brings them to my old bedroom, and starts making me a cup of tea.
I’m too tired to handle it, to sit there across from her and watch her love me the way she does. Coming home late at night from Afghanistan, from a job I’m proud of, and there’s something about her that makes me feel like I’m seventeen and she caught me sneaking back into the house drunk. She doesn’t like that I do this job, and that hurts but I know she doesn’t like it because she worries about me, so I sit there and let her baby me. There’s a part of me that even enjoys it, even tired as I am, hearing how things are going, how Linda and the kids are doing, and oh just wait until you see little Timmy, he’s so much bigger, he’s walking now, and oh by the way your Uncle Carey is coming by tomorrow, or I guess today . . . it’s so late, he said he’ll stop by after the doctor’s.
But there’s another part of me that feels deeply uncomfortable, because I know why my mother makes such a fuss every time I return. And I think, I want to run. I need to run. The sun needs to rise, or at least start curving some light over the horizon, or bouncing rays off clouds and back to earth, to give me something to work with other than country darkness.
And then she brings up a local family whose son returned from Iraq a few years ago and had some issues, how they weren’t sure whether the issues were from Iraq or from him just always being a bit of a scoundrel, from a family that never was the most functional in the first place. I tell her I couldn’t answer for sure but I do know that stretch of time in Iraq wasn’t so bad and that things had been quiet before the rise of ISIS. My mother stares at me intently and I know what she really wants to know is if reporters get affected like soldiers do. I tell her he’s probably fine, that war isn’t so bad as people think, that most soldiers wouldn’t give up their time abroad and most think it makes them tougher, stronger, better able to deal with the hard breaks you find wherever you live.
“That’s true, that’s true,” she says, “but you know, your uncle, after the war . . .”
But Uncle Carey is the last person I want to hear more about so I shush her, tell her I’m tired, I’m not having more tea, and once I’ve hustled her to her room I head to mine. There I lay out my things, and sit collecting my thoughts and memories, and once I’m sure she’s asleep I change into running gear.
I start out right as the sun is rising, while the night air is departing and leaving bits of fog in the hollows of the unfolding hills. It’s in this first stage of the run, before I’ve really burned myself out, that the nostalgia tries to creep in. Western Pennsylvania is beautiful. Perhaps not as starkly grand as the Pacific Northwest, or as the crueler parts of Afghanistan, where steep cliffs and arid valleys suggest a land belonging more to God than humanity. This land isn’t so alien. It’s lived in—you pass barns and tilled fields and old homes set off from the road. It’s gentle—you head down rolling hills, past quietly meandering streams. Nothing dramatic. It’s a warm, simple beauty, one fitting the people I grew up with.
When I get to Old Scalp, though, I start noticing real changes from the last time I was here. A few new stores and restaurants. The local pharmacy has shuttered. Jake Siegel’s diner, the Wavetop, is now a Long John Silver’s. And as I get to the end of Old Scalp there’s the final blow—Hilda’s Furrier Fashions and Fur Salon, where I’d worked as a teenager. My second day there I’d gone to open the store only to find that out-of-towners had chucked a cinderblock through the glass and posted the statement: “Until all the cages are empty and all are free our struggle continues. This is not the last you’ll see of us Hilda.” An animal-rights group based in California had taken credit, confirming everything we ever could have thought about the Left Coast, and Hilda had been undaunted but unsure of how to show it. She was just a regular clothing store. Her furrier had gone out of business a decade earlier and she’d just never bothered to change the sign. So Hilda and I had driven to a shop outside of Pittsburgh to pick up fur underwear, of all things, to put on the shelves. “It was the cheapest fur they had,” Hilda had explained when we were stocki
ng it. I’d always figured Hilda would die before closing the place down, and as that thought goes through my head I realize how old Hilda had been even when I worked there, and I turn and keep running, cutting away from Old Scalp and skirting the rest of downtown. I don’t like to think this place has a hold on me, but I also don’t like to see it change.
My mind’s not in the state I want, even though my legs are starting to really feel it, so I cut down Route 20, which was Uncle Carey’s favorite road for tricks. A UPS driver by profession, Uncle Carey believed you could, and should, take every curve in the road at twice the posted speed. He thought small hills were launching pads. He thought sober driving was for pussies and funeral processions. His favorite trick was called the bootlegger’s turn, where you burn down the road, throw the gearshift to neutral, flick the wheel a touch toward the shoulder with your right hand before yanking it toward the opposite lane while hitting the emergency brake and holding the brake release with your left. This sends the car spinning. Done right, you can pull a 360-degree turn and continue on your way as if nothing had happened. The first time he did it, I was ten, my older sister was thirteen, and he gave us absolutely no warning. I was staring out the window, in the backseat, my sister was irritatingly switching the radio stations every other second, and then my vision blurred, centripetal force smacked my face into the window, and then we were moving forward again. It was so surreal it didn’t even occur to me that I should have been terrified until about thirty seconds later, when he slowed down for a stop sign, turned, and gave us his big, goofy, gap-toothed grin.
The other trick he played with us was driving to the railroad crossing, stopping the car on top of the tracks as a train came toward us, and then pretending that the engine wouldn’t start. That, I did find terrifying, though in a strange way those times we spent in Uncle Carey’s car were useful training for being a war correspondent, insofar as it takes a lot to overload my systems.
I reach the stop sign where Uncle Carey had grinned at us after his bootlegger’s turn, the spot where my sister had bawled inconsolably while I stared at Uncle Carey, unsure of what I was feeling, excitement or terror or joy, until I chose joy and smiled back. I raise my arm and slap the metal as I pass, and then slow to cover a long, flat stretch at a medium pace, giving myself a little rest to prepare for the final uphill sprint to get home. I’m running on fumes—if it weren’t for being acclimatized to Kabul’s elevation this run probably would have knocked me out already—and the last bit’s going to be rough. Fourteen Burnham Street sits near the top of a steep hill looking out over Lower Yoder, and as I reach the crest of the hill there’s nothing in my mind except the pain in my chest, which has stopped being an ache and is now a sharp spasm with each intake of breath. And then I see Uncle Carey’s Buick in the driveway.
The Buick is a miracle—pretty much every part on it has been replaced, occasionally with parts that would rightfully belong to other cars, it’s been wrecked half a dozen times, more than one of those wrecks that should have meant it’d be fully junked, and patched up and repaired so that now it’s either a real monstrosity or a piebald beauty, depending on your perspective. Uncle Carey’s a “Glory be to dappled things” kind of guy. I have no idea why he’s here so early.
I walk through the front door to the spare, clean house my mother keeps. She doesn’t believe in the accumulation of “stuff.” My mother and Uncle Carey are sitting in the parlor, her with a pinched look on her face, Uncle Carey with a manic grin.
“Lisette!”
He hugs me, my sweat leaving an imprint of my body on his T-shirt. He seems thinner, but he’s got his hair, his face is even a little paunchier than last time, and a little redder. It’s not as bad as I’d thought, not yet—he looks more like slow dissolution through alcohol than rapid hollowing out through cancer, and I’d be relieved if not for the tension in the air. My mom tells me to sit in the parlor and when I start to tell her I’m going to shower first, she gives me a look that silences me. I find myself sitting in an armchair, leaning forward so that my post-run body touches as little of the chair’s fabric as possible, sitting across from my uncle, with my mother hovering in the background, scowling.
“How are you?” I say.
“Tell me a crazy story,” Uncle Carey says.
“You know she doesn’t like that,” my mother says.
“Sure she does,” Uncle Carey says, winking at me.
I shrug and start telling him about an arms dealer I’d met, and how he was the last of six brothers, all of them dead to violence, and how he looked as he told me about each of their deaths, and who killed them. I try to tell it almost flat, not so much emotion that my mother will think I’m really bothered by it, not so emotionless she’ll think I’ve gone numb. Midway through, the teakettle goes off, my mom walks into the kitchen, and even though she can still hear I relax and start to get into it, try to get him to really see him.
“No, no,” Uncle Carey says. “That’s a depressing story. I want a crazy story. Like the one about the guy who got shot in the face.”
This was his favorite, about a Marine I knew with a false front tooth that he’d received when he was room clearing and an insurgent shot him point-blank in the face with a small caliber pistol. The bullet blew through his front lip, ricocheted off his teeth, snapped his head back, and knocked him to the ground, but otherwise left him unhurt. So the Marine popped back up and tackled the insurgent who’d shot him. The insurgent was terrified. From his perspective, he’d sent a bullet through the head of his enemy, only to have the man come back at him like the T-1000 from the Terminator movies. There’d been a lot of discussion in the unit afterward that, instead of detaining the guy, they should have set him free to tell stories of the invincible zombie Marines.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe some other time.”
“You could read the stories she writes,” my Mom calls out from the kitchen.
“Ehhh . . .” Uncle Carey says, waving his hand. “Why do that when I can get it from the horse’s mouth? Besides, you know they don’t print the real stories in the paper.”
“Lisette prints the real stories,” my mother says, bringing in a cup of Lipton’s for me.
“You know, you should cover some of the craziness going on in this country!” he says.
“Oh?”
“You should cover the riots. This country is exploding!” He seems excited by the prospect.
“I think we’ll be fine,” I say.
“You should—”
“Your uncle,” my mother says, “is supposed to be at the doctor’s.”
“Ah,” I say.
Uncle Carey waves his hand dismissively, as if this is all no big deal. “I already made my decision. I’m just gonna do symptom management.”
“Ah,” I say again. My mom had told me Uncle Carey was dragging his feet about chemo. There’s a part of me that’s glad. When I found out the diagnosis, I checked the five-year survival rates for his stage cancer and the percentages were in the teens. Besides, we both remember how it was for my dad. Sometimes fighting the good fight isn’t worth it.
“Did you know,” he says, “I’ve already passed the life expectancy for most folks in this part of the country?”
“Instead, he came here. For breakfast.”
“I’ve been thinking . . .” he says.
“That was never your strong suit,” says my mother.
“I’ve been thinking . . .” he says again.
“Here I thought I had a brother who was a fighter all these years.”
“What I’ve got,” Uncle Carey says, “it’s not survivable.”
Those weren’t words meant to be spoken, not in our family, not in that house.
“You know what I’ve got, right?” he says. “Can you say the word?”
My mother and I look at each other.
“Life,” he says, grinning at
his joke. “It’s a terrible condition. It’s got a one-hundred-percent mortality rate.”
My mother rolls her eyes.
“You know,” Uncle Carey says, and turns to me, “my great-uncle, your great-great-uncle, he died when I was fourteen.”
“Yes, the game warden, I know,” I say. Great-uncle Alister, shot in some dispute in the woods, no details on who did it, though everybody knew it had to have been somebody from the community. Great-uncle Alister is part of our family lore, and he isn’t going to distract me. “With treatment, it’s the difference between months and years, right?”
He ignores me and starts telling stories about how he used to dream about Uncle Alister, how they’d go fishing or hunting and how in his dreams he’d ask him to tell him who did it, but he never got an answer. He tells me they weren’t sad dreams, they were happy, because Uncle Alister was a happy guy, even if he did get murdered, an event that I know from my mother absolutely destroyed the rest of my grandmother’s life, since she could never get over thinking about who did it. I get the point Uncle Carey’s trying to drive home, but to underline it, he tells me, “You know, there’s a lot of people I’m looking forward to seeing on the other side.”
I check my watch. It’s nine thirty-five. I don’t know why I bothered to check, or what possible difference it could make, now that I know the time.
“You understand, don’t you, sweet pea?”
He looks at me with his open, honest face. There’s something vulnerable there, and though I do understand, I’m not sure I should say so. We’re quiet for a bit and he keeps staring at me, like a child. When I can’t take it anymore I quietly say, “Okay, I guess I do,” and he smiles and sits back in his chair, and as he moves a flash of pain goes across his face for a moment before he settles whatever it was in his body.