Missionaries

by Phil Klay

  “That makes me very happy.” He grins wide. “You and I always understood each other, didn’t we?”

  “Sure,” I say. I avoid looking at my mother’s face.

  “So where are you on to next?”

  “I thought I’d go to New York, see some people, then . . . someplace new.”

  “Someplace new. Always moving. You get that from me.”

  “I get that from you?” Except for Vietnam, I doubt he’s ever left Cambria County.

  He grins. “You know what I mean.”

  I do know. I sip my tea without tasting it.

  Uncle Carey leaves after breakfast and it’s pretty quiet between my mother and me until my mother, seeming to have come to some determination, says, “Your uncle never much listened to anybody, but . . .” and I know that what follows is going to be “he might listen to you.” Which isn’t true. He won’t, and I don’t want to get into it, or to pretend that I’ve got the ability to help live someone’s life for them, and live it in a way I might not even choose myself.

  * * *

  • • •

  Over the next few days I try to distract my mother from the Uncle Carey situation. We take a trip to Pittsburgh. We visit Fallingwater and Kentucky Knob. And we visit my older sister Linda and her baby, which always makes my mom happy. Linda is settled. Happily married. She’s got one son and is pregnant with twins and she visits my mom all the time and helps out with Uncle Carey and is in general the kind of dutiful daughter nobody would have thought she’d become.

  On the way back I try to talk to my mom about why I’ve chosen the life I have. Perhaps for her sake. Perhaps for mine.

  “You remember the freelance piece I did on Karen Wheeler?” I ask her. She takes a moment to place the name, so I add, “Lieutenant Wheeler? With the women’s engagement team? Who stepped on a bomb?”

  “The one they gave you trouble with, for the photos?” she says.

  Wheeler, who would lose a left foot and a good chunk of intestine, had given us permission to take the photos while we waited for the medical evacuation. It had been a painful, protracted affair. The Taliban arrived and shot at the incoming helicopter, so the helicopter asked the soldiers to go to a safer LZ. The soldiers had to pick up their wounded and drag them five hundred meters back to a safer location, by which point Wheeler was screaming curses, only to have the pilots declare that landing zone too hot as well, and they had to drag the wounded another five hundred meters, by which point Wheeler was silent. The images and text together made for a powerful piece, I thought, but the oh-so-chivalrous military PAOs threw a fit over images of wounded women, and ultimately an editor, from the safety of New York, decided it wasn’t worth the hassle and that the images were “too real” anyway, because “goriness distracts from the substance here.” Which I thought, and still think, was cowardice.

  Yes, the photos were gnarly. Yes, you’d never have just run them alone, because that would have been pornography. War photography needs the context the writer provides, because without context it’s too easy for photos of life’s extremes to become kitsch or propaganda. But writing only shakes the reader if they cooperate, put in the work to go past the headline and the lead and imagine their way into what you’re trying to tell them. A good photo stops you in your tracks. Shakes you against your will. So writers need the photos just as much. They need them to put you there.

  “Mom, when those photos got canned, I could still . . .” I decide not to tell my mother that I could still smell the shit from Wheeler’s open intestines, bled out over her stomach and crotch. “I could still hear her, cursing the pilots. And they were beautiful photos. They weren’t just pain and fear. They showed people. They made you look.”

  “I remember how mad you were.”

  “At the time I thought, here I am, risking my life to educate Americans about what this war is, and some jerk in an air-conditioned office is saying no. No, thanks.”

  My mother is starting to look uncomfortable, so I wrap it up.

  “But things like that teach you about what you really believe. Because next up I get a chance at another embed, in another rough area, and I’m scared. And I’m like, Here we go. Am I really going to risk my life again to educate Americans about this war after all that, after getting something vital and important thrown aside like it was trash? And then I thought, Yes. Yes I am. Because not every editor is a coward. And because doing that work is who I am. That is what matters to me, more than anything.” I say it with conviction, to remind myself I still believe it.

  My mother nods. She gets what I’m telling her. That even if I’m not going back to Afghanistan, it doesn’t mean I’m staying home. And she keeps her eyes on the road, and she says, “I’m proud of you, don’t you know?”

  I’m not sure I believe her.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next couple of days are fine, in part because I promise my mom I’ll have a serious talk with Uncle Carey before I leave. It seems to satisfy her, though it weighs on me. I spend much of the time reading with my mother on the glassed-in part of the back porch, looking out over the hills from time to time, sipping tea. My mother has a wonderful way of not asking questions, of practicing patience until things spill out, but this time I don’t have so much to report. I don’t want to talk about Kabul, or why I’m not going back, because I haven’t perfectly worked out the answers to any of those questions, and I don’t want to speak out of turn and learn something about myself prematurely. If my father were here, he’d hustle us around, convince us we needed to do something, go fishing or hiking or just out for a walk. “Wild apples are hanging from every tree,” he’d say, “and here you are eating Oreos.” But of course my father is not here. Even the plants he used to keep out on this porch have died, so there’s nothing obstructing our view. Less work, my mother would say, if I were to ask her why she never took care of them. The only conflict comes when my mother gets up to go to church and asks me if I’m coming, even though she knows I’m not, but it’s a small spat, an old rerun of fights past, dating back to high school, and it’s over quickly enough and then she leaves me there, on the porch, looking out over the hills, sipping tea, alone.

  When the time comes to leave for good, I load up the rental car, say my good-byes to my mother, and make my promised trip to Uncle Carey’s. He lives about five minutes west of Davidsville, in a perpetually poorly maintained one story with an oversized American flag, a small and tattered Gadsden flag declaring “Don’t Tread on Me,” an overgrown front yard, and a beautifully ordered, pristine garage. He has a beer cracked open for me before I even walk in the door, and we spend the time reminiscing, laughing about the things he used to do, the scoldings my mother would give him, like he was one of the kids, and the crazy things he did with us in the car that no responsible adult would ever do. Eventually we run that conversation to the ground, and in the silence he leans forward and that vulnerable, childish look comes on his face.

  “What do you think,” he whispers. “Should I do the chemo, or just have some fun on the way out?”

  It’s not a question I want to answer. We both know I’ve been running it through my head since his visit to my mother, that I can’t claim not to have an opinion on whether he should die quick or die painfully. It’s all that’s been on my mind. So I sit there, trying to form what I feel into words. Something about the man he is, about what he means to my mother, and about the crazy things he’s done in that old, beat-up car. “I think,” I say, knowing the words make me even more a traitor to my mother and to this place than I already am, “I think that old Buick can still do a few flips.”

  Uncle Carey grins wide, that big, goofy, gap-toothed grin. “Promise me something,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t come for the funeral. Be somewhere else. Somewhere awesome.”

  Which is, of course, when I start crying, and Uncle Ca
rey wraps me up in a bear hug, a hug that always used to mean getting lifted up off your feet and shaken around a bit, but not this time. He just holds me as tight as he’s able to muster. It’s not very tight. I bring myself under control, I kiss him on his cheeks, and then I slip his grasp, free.

  7

  ABEL 2001–2002

  I was still having nightmares when I met Luisa. The dreams were horrible because they were real. Things I knew or had seen happen to other people. I would run through the street without a weapon, Iván chasing behind. Toads for the guerrilla would come to slit my throat. Or Jefferson would come and do to me the things I had seen him do to other people, and I would scream that I loved him, that he should spare me because I loved him and worshipped him more than all the world. And he would tell me that is why he must do this, because a warrior must kill the things he loves.

  Because of the nightmares, I would stay out very late, drinking. On the road to Rioclaro there was a gas station where they sold alcohol, and behind the gas station were plastic tables by the river, lights strung across the trees, and a few speakers to play music. I liked it because normal people went there, especially the girls who didn’t just want to sleep with paracos because they had money.

  I was still a virgin then, though I’d made attempts to cure myself. But taking off my clothes, I’d become terrified, feeling naked even before I was naked. In each case the women were whores, confident and unashamed in front of a young, nervous man, and their confidence made it worse. More shameful, each time I failed. More full of fear and dread and a desire to cover myself so deeply in earth no one would ever find me. But at the gas station, with normal people and normal girls, girls who had no interest in a man like me, I felt safe. I watched normal life. Workers sharing stories from the day’s labor, girls flirting playfully, the old drinking until they could no longer walk, and boys starting fights that never ended in murder.

  Being there reminded me that the world I lived in—of paracos and narcos and guerrillas and criminals—it was just the thinnest sliver of life. Most people are not killers, and even then, as I was still finding my new place in the world, I suspected that a killer is not just a different kind of person, but a different kind of thing. I was a different kind of thing, though I had never killed anyone myself. At the river I would see carpenters, bakers, construction workers, shopkeepers, farmers. Mothers, babies sucking on their breasts, calling their drunkard husbands home. Men shouting their fanciful dreams out in loud voices. Girls with cruel laughter and kind faces. Every sort of person was there and yet I, with my pistol tucked in my pants like a gangster in a telenovela, did not belong. I had been torn from the world of those people, and there was no way to stitch myself back in. Even if they respected me, a current of fear kept them distant. I was not alive the way they were. Still, at night, with a beer in my hand, I liked to watch, a pale ghost feeding off the colors of the living.

  That’s where I saw her. Roberto Carlos’s “Amigo” was playing on the radio, there was a table of young people my age, and one of them, a beautiful girl whose name I don’t remember, got up and started dancing. In the middle of the conversation, without saying anything or inviting anyone to join her, she got up and began swaying, moving her hips, her eyes closed. She had a perfect body, a shirt that ended an inch above her belly button, long legs and curvy hips. She knew she was beautiful. She must have. Women who are not beautiful don’t make scenes like that. She danced and swayed, she sung the lyrics of the song, and the conversation at the table jerked and stuttered. Some of the men stared at her openly, some looked quietly down. Her movements were like a magnet for the eyes—to look away took effort and you could see, in the faces of the boys not looking at her, the effort it took. And when she opened her eyes, she’d point at a boy, sing loudly, smile, close her eyes, and lift her face to the sky while she slid her hands down her stomach as her hips swayed.

  And then Luisa got up. I had never seen her before, had not even noticed her sitting at the table with the beautiful girl who drew all eyes even when she wasn’t dancing. Luisa was a plain girl, neither fat nor thin but with a stout body, long hair, and large, masculine hands. She was shorter than the beautiful girl, she stood awkwardly to the side, and then started dancing herself. A flicker of awareness appeared in the beautiful girl’s eyes as Luisa began to move, and she began to exaggerate her movements. Once more, she ran her hands down from her breasts to her stomach, but this time her hands went lower and lower. I felt a spasm of anger watching her, different from the normal anger a man feels at the beauty of a woman he does not own. Luisa shifted jerkily from side to side, half singing the lyrics, her eyes shifting from the spectacle of her beautiful friend to the boys at her table, none of whom looked at her for even a second. I could see Luisa’s eyes, searching, seeking to make contact, to be seen. The song ended, and the beautiful girl collapsed, laughing, into her chair, while Luisa remained standing, waiting for the next song, which turned out to be a slow song, a song you need a partner to dance to, and then she sat down as well.

  It was her defeat that gave me confidence. I imagined, perhaps, that she would be grateful when I walked up to her and told her, “I noticed you dancing, and you were very beautiful,” but she stared at me, stone-faced, and said, “I know who you are.” Then she returned to her friends.

  Later that same night, when she had drunk more and so had I, I met her and told her that I did not think of myself as a paraco, but as an administrator of local government. A bridge from the people to the power that ruled them—Jefferson. She looked very afraid of me then, and asked me what I wanted of her, and I told her I wanted to see her here more, and she asked me if she had any choice, and I told her she didn’t. Her face went flat. It was no longer a face but an object, a mask. I knew I had made a mistake and I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I want to say. Of course you have a choice. But it would hurt me. It would make me very sad not to see you again.” The mask shifted, animated back into a face capable of compassion, and she nodded, but after that day she never drank there again.

  * * *

  • • •

  The next time I saw Luisa, I was with Jefferson. He took me with him to Rioclaro. The little town, it seemed, had become disloyal.

  “I blame the mayor,” he said.

  The mayor, a man named Victor Sánchez, wanted his town to be left alone. Left alone by the guerrilla, left alone by the army, and left alone by us. A place of peace. Jefferson was going to make it clear that was impossible. I was there as the carrot to Jefferson’s stick.

  “You will offer him money for the town,” Jefferson told me. “I will say nothing. He will know I’m offering him death. The trick is to make him think he’s taking the money because he cares about his people, and not because he’s scared. If he thinks he’s doing it out of fear, he’ll feel like a coward, and he’ll hate us. So there must be a way for him to be the hero, and then he will come to love and defend us, because loving and defending us will be the same as loving and defending himself. So I want you to talk a lot. I want you to be excited about what you can do for his town. The only reason he’ll let us in the door will be because he knows if he shuts us out, we’ll kill him. Your job is to make him forget he’s a coward.”

  When we entered the town it was hot, and I had dark stains on my uniform under my arms and in the center of my belly where the sweat had soaked all the way through. The town was pretty, with clean, well-kept houses and balconies full of flowers. I thought we’d head to the mayor’s office but instead we went to a bar. Jefferson posted his men at the corners of the street and then invited me to sit down with him.

  “We’re going to visit Sánchez at his home, not at his office,” Jefferson said. I understood very well why that would be more frightening.

  As we sat and sipped cold beer, I looked out at Jefferson’s paracos, posted on the corners, and it astonished me to realize that I was somehow important enough to sit in the shade and dri
nk beer while they sweated.

  Jefferson was thinking the same. “You’re smart,” he told me, “and trustworthy. Usually, the smart ones are not trustworthy. Only the really, really smart ones are smart and trustworthy. They understand obedience.”

  “Yes,” I said, obediently agreeing with him that I was smart, and trustworthy, and that I understood obedience. Two men passed by and Jefferson smiled and waved to them. They scurried away.

  Jefferson settled into himself, his face like an outcropping of rock. I didn’t know whether I should say anything, so I remained silent. We stayed like that, not talking, ordering new beers as soon as we finished the old ones. The fear we’d provoked in the town, just by being there, began to infect me. Then he broke the silence.

  “In ancient times, all wars were holy wars,” he said.

  I nodded. And he spoke of the book of Joshua, which tells of how the Jews killed for God. How they killed from the rivers to the seas, and from the plains to the seas. They killed to the salt sea, and the way north and south, and the coast that was the land of the old giants, and the people that dwelt in the mountains and in the valleys and in the plains and by the springs, and in the wilderness, and in the south country. They killed the king of Jericho, and the king of Jerusalem, the king of Ai, of Jarmuth, of Lachish, Megiddo, Gezer, Shimronmeron, and many other places. Thirty-one kings. And not just the kings. In each place, they followed the command of God: You shall not leave alive anything that breathes.

  “That was real war,” he said. “Holy war.”

  He stared darkly into his beer.

  “I fought for the Castaños in Cesar. I fought for them as if I were fighting for God.”