War, page 6
I crawled toward the lick of water, the sand taking me deeper. I couldn’t hear how far and was too excited to stop and wait for it. All I heard was the slog and pop of my hands and knees in and out of the wet sand. I even forgot to care that the sniper’s wallet had disappeared in one of the sinkholes about three crawls back. I was moving toward something primal and perfect. There would be no violence in the ocean.
At the moment I found my first wave, tiny as a wicket, it didn’t seem to matter that the planet was awash in coastlines and that my search for place was no further along. What mattered was that I was eleven again, JJ was stuck in the house with his tipsy parents, and I was free.
I took off my shirt. And undid my vest, the porcelain too heavy for a swim. I tossed it and my ruck just out of the water’s stretch. The salt water burned its healing into my wound, and I splashed it until the bleeding was finally done. The sea was tepid as the third child’s bath, but it offered a sudden gathering of waves, which I could now hear and therefore surf. I caught the first one poorly, the white water leaving me behind in a tight-fisted curl of foam … I clambered back out again, chesting against the late breakers and diving under the taller rips. Out deeper, the water was colder, and I realized the residue of the fighting had turned the ocean’s edge into a stew, but nothing could affect its color and speed closer to its source. I was past standing now, and though the sky was choked black, I could sense the moon above me, pulling at the tide with a puppeteer’s grace.
I turned onto my back, floating to gaze at the chalkboard above me. Not a mark. Not an equation of light. I imagined for a moment that I hadn’t heeded JJ’s father’s call. That instead of hurrying (reluctantly) toward his elbowed gesture, I had simply ducked under and vanished. Would anyone have even cared? Of course there would’ve been a search party. The police. But only to assuage the guilt JJ’s parents had at bringing a stranger. They wouldn’t be out looking for me. It would be an APB for their peace of mind. Their suburban calm. Their place in the world.
It might have been easy. Catch the tiger by the undertow and, holler or not, never let go. Surf it to a distant southern village where they cooked on the beach and welcomed merboys like tourists welcoming birds back for a season. I could’ve been their mascot. Their sign that summer had come, and, upon seeing me, the fish would jump in their boats without a hook for an invitation. But I hadn’t. I’d obeyed the bitter rhythm of my days and wound up back in my house in time to hear my father mock my tears. My mother offered comfort by telling me that was why she never took us to the beach. Leaving was too disappointing. Better not to go at all.
It took a war to get me back to the beach. The hotel had been a seaside resort. That explained the outdoor furniture. The beach chairs and clamshells painted on the bottom of the pool. The pool was undersized, too, because the real thing was so close. I’d never seen a view, with the blackout-curtain sealant, but I wagered my corner room might have had a straight shot to the horizon. Maybe a terrace where the wind was meant to unfurl like a countryless flag. A symbol of nothing but itself. The beauty of something brought to life only when the wind decided to blow.
I dove under, holding my breath longer than I should have, then rose, light-headed and weak. Again. I wasn’t trying to drown. Suicide was never the point. I didn’t have enough of a self to want to erase. But the pain and the danger felt good. If I couldn’t have an enemy out this deep, I’d make one of oxygen. Again and again, until surfacing wasn’t an act of will but a science, the remaining air in my lungs making my body buoyant enough. Finally, I floated again. I was punishing myself for being happy in the water. For wanting to play, not just in the middle of a war, but in the middle of my life.
I floated again because I was too tired to swim. And the current had taken me out past the waves, so the beach was no longer an option. Water swam in and out of my ears like lazy midday traffic through a tunnel. I listened to the metronome of my brain in my temples. The ocean held me up and around, and for the first time in … I felt safe. It didn’t matter how far out I was. The ocean was telling me, “I will hold you until.” Until didn’t matter. It would be the exact moment of time.
Something brushed my arm. I let it bob up against and around. Driftwood, seaweed, a body, I didn’t want to know. This was my time. No one got to call me in. No one.
“Hey,———,” I heard Mc. shout from the beach. His voice sounded like burning leaves. “Get the fuck out of the water.”
Of course I knew it wasn’t Mc. Even in my blissed-out state, with water music in my ears, I didn’t think he could have spotted me adrift in all that darkness.
“Son,” I heard my father say, “no joke. Ass in.” That had been his standard threat if I was too long in the yard before dinner. And it had always sounded like a joke to me. Ass in. So I’d walk, awkward as a chicken, ass in, toward the door he would have already abandoned. He never expected needing to say it twice. Though that night, from the distant beach, he did parrot. “No joke. Ass in.”
“It is a joke,” I said, rising to a sitting position. I stretched my legs to feel the bottom. Not even close.
“No joke.” I could see his convex gut, his lit cigarette like a tiny, sideways lighthouse.
“Go home, Dad. Go back in your hole.”
“OK,” he said. Then flicked his smoke into a wave. Gone.
What makes a man a soldier? Is it only war, or is there a collection of tiny hatreds along the way that grow like pylons inside the soul? A foundation for better hatreds to be poured onto in adolescence. Alienation. Projection. Disassociation, even for the self. Was the blighted seascape peopled only by men like me? Men hallucinating their fathers and destroyers? Men perfectly suited to kill until they died? Or were there good souls out here? Men of honor and tenderness, snatched by the times? Posted on street corners, shivering with fear and want of their wives?
It was possible that my sniper was such a man, but he wasn’t around to ask. His wallet may have contained photos of family. Children in sports uniforms, dogs in the back. A library card. A bank card. A stub for the movies. If I had stayed in the water that long-ago day (found a new family, slipstreamed into a different life), might I have had such a wallet?
I’d never get to know. Because I didn’t get to stay in the water. The sea wouldn’t let me. A cocktail of wave and tide lifted me like a jellyfish and deposited me flat on the sand. Then it receded. The sand was soft again. The ocean undressed itself of me and left me undrowned on the beach.
I was wrong. There was someone on the beach. He yanked me to my feet and hooked me under the armpit to walk me out of there. “Hey,” I said.
“You were out there a long time,” he said. His voice was as familiar as a hymn.
“Didn’t want to come back.”
“Don’t blame ya.” His “ya” was without any forced hominess. This was a man who said “ya” and couldn’t say otherwise.
“Where are we going?” I asked. “What time is it? Where are we?” The questions came in a little boy’s comic burst.
“We’ll get ya there,” and his answer seemed enough. The fact that he was carrying me seemed to merit deference and patience anyway. “Could’ve drowned out there. Shouldn’t drift out so deep.”
“Drifting.” I laughed. “Is what I do best.” Gunfire. First bullets, like stones skipped over a lake. Then mortar rounds. Five hits lit up the mark enough to highlight toppled cars and road signs like tall, dead birds. He hunched us lower and sped us on. “I can walk,” I said.
“Not as fast as me.”
“Where …?”
“Toward the sun,” he explained. “Can’t see nothing out here but bodies and tracers that want to turn us into bodies.”
“R.?” He didn’t answer, but I knew it was him. He had survived Mc.’s ambush. Maybe he’d known a secret place to hide. In the yard, of course, or the subbasement. The king always knows where to hide during a coup. He’d hidden and gotten out before I’d even found the wreckage. And I had miscounted the casualties. We were moving faster now, and there was a thin band of light in the distance, like an old TV set trying to turn on. “R,” I said, using my feet more, trying to help carry my own weight. “I’ve been looking for Mc.”
“No, you haven’t, bleeder. You were taking a goddamn swim.” He turned then, and the half-light revealed his classic grim smile. It also showed he hadn’t completely escaped the force of Mc.’s treachery. His left eye was sealed shut, with stripes of metal still visible beneath the skin of his cheek and chin. I should have been hoisting him.
“You have to brief me, sir,” I shouted. The gunfire was getting closer and louder. “I can help. I’m not a bleeder anymore.” He was. A round caught him hard and clean through the left shoulder, spinning him around so that he was now on the other side of me and I had my chance to carry him.
“Goddamn it,” he cowboyed. It sounded as if he blamed himself for having flesh to wound.
“Point, sir. We’ve got to get out of this fire.” He didn’t answer. I knew the wound wasn’t mortal, so I added to my push. “R., soldier to soldier, tell me safe haven. Tell me the map.”
“Safe haven,” he laughed.
“You were running me somewhere,” I barked, still moving forward.
“Anywhere, soldier. Not somewhere.” It was mine. They talked about this briefly in training. When the chain of command is broken through injury or death, the situation will become mine. Possession. Like an inheritance. Or a family curse. But with R. listing and already ugly with loss, it had to be mine or death was going to be ours.
The white band of light had risen to the occasion, and it gave me enough vision to see a triangle of metal structures about a hundred yards up a rise to our right. Office buildings. Maybe an arena long disassembled by smart bombs. I flashed on cities that had sports stadiums near the ocean. Like the hell I know. “Check the internet,” I said to myself out loud.
Before I could laugh, R. said, “You think everything’s funny, don’t ya?”
I hooked my hand into R.’s belt and rocketed us up the ridge faster than either of us expected. Bullets chased us like kids late for a bus. It was officially morning. Flat light hummed a cold wave off the dangling metal forest we’d entered. Exposed wires. Infrastructure. I slinked us deeper in, listening for fainter guns and looking for crevices for foxholes. Found myself counting. “Forty-one, forty-two,” I enunciated quickly, careful not to miscount.
“Hell ya doing?”
“Shut up, sir. I’m getting to eighty-seven.” Eighty-seven steps into the rib cage of former commerce, there was a hallway nearly untouched. All the surface amenities had burned away, of course. There was no carpeting, furniture, water cooler, fax. But the shape was uncompromised. The bullets had turned their attention elsewhere. I looked back on our trail, and it seemed appropriately difficult to follow. I imagined having a hell of a time getting back out. But for the moment it looked sufficient. I turned R. so he could take in the entire area. We looked like business partners about to launch a start-up. “What do you say, R.?”
“I think we should take it,” he allowed, his tone saying thank you.
“OK,” I agreed, easing him down and tearing open his sleeve. He gestured toward the knife in his belt, and I tested the entry point. He was lucky. It had passed clean through. “But I get the corner office. Why are we at war?” I shifted, hoping to surprise an answer out of him.
“Because the government says so.”
“Which government?”
“Do you forget where ya come from, boy?”
“It seems I do.”
“The goddamn United States of America.”
“United by what?”
“Don’t get political, bleeder. Fighters fight, thinkers think.” In the gathering light, I could see better how ruined his face was. Blind in one eye, for sure, with metal polyps studding his face like tribal markings. I bandaged his wound just to look away.
“Who are we fighting, sir?”
“Everyone now. Everyone with a gun. This place is chaos. We just need to get out alive. That’s why I came after you. You’re the last of my unit. Need to bring someone home.”
“Mc.’s alive.”
“Possible.”
“I’m not going back until I find him.”
R. grunted and rose. His gait wobbled and he leaned against me for balance, then pushed off with bravado. I had to catch that fall.
“You need to lie down, sir. You’re out of blood.”
“Can’t shoot what you can’t see.” I didn’t know if he meant us or Mc.
“He was a traitor. No one can prepare for that,” I said, feigning wisdom with my tone but believing it, too.
“I should have seen it. He was too goddamn loud. Even his hair was a fucking shout.” The image drew a laugh, and R. coughed one back at me. “Guess I ain’t too pretty no more.”
“It’s all right,” I lied.
“No it ain’t. But it’ll have to be. Besides, my wife never bothered much with that.” I got R. propped up against a rerouting pipe, with his rucksack as pillow, and he closed his eyes.
“Where are we, sir?” No answer. I felt weak from ignorance. I pondered beating it out of him, whatever it took. “Sir?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t bullshit me,” I growled. “There’s no reason left to. No mission. You want to bring me back in, and you’re too sick to walk. You need to tell me, sir. R. Tell me now.”
Eyes still closed, he said, “I don’t know.”
I dropped to my knees, metal digging in through my pants, and slapped him hard. My teeth felt like biting the shrapnel out of his face. “You’re going to tell me, because I can’t not know anymore, you understand? I’m not fucking around.”
“Neither am I. And you’re hurting my shoulder.” I reared back to punch him. Recalled what I did toY. and how easy it would be to do again. I could aim for the windpipe, give him a real reason to keep quiet. “Don’t,” he said, eyes still shut. “I can’t hurt any more right now.”
“Then say it.”
“I did. Word never came down. I was transported in just like you. Blindfold. Orders in code. I couldn’t tell you if this was Tokyo or Bangladesh.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Doesn’t matter. I can’t tell you, either way.” I wanted to throw him back against the pipe but found myself laying him down gently as a nurse. “Thanks, kid. For not doing what you do.” Violence, he meant. That’s what I did. What I was known for.
“Why did you send me out? Before …”
“Luck, I guess, for you. You got luck.” He opened his good eye, and it made him look like he was letting me in on a joke. “Anything else you want to know?” We both laughed again, short, snorting laughs that didn’t satisfy.
“When’s Christmas?” I asked.
“December twenty-fifth, last time I checked,” he managed.
“I mean how close? To today.”
“Maybe Santa could pick ya up.” His breath shortening. “Hell of a wait, bleeder. Can’t be later than end of summer.” I stood up and walked ten feet toward where we had arrived from. Stuck out my tongue. It wasn’t ash.
“Then, sir, why is it starting to snow?”
R. didn’t respond. I guess he was tired of questions he couldn’t answer. I went to check to make sure the bastard hadn’t died on me, and he smirked, “Go play in the snow. Bleeder.”
I explained I wanted to check the perimeter, see if I could get a better grasp on the landscape, but I really did just want to play in the snow. Combat was having a bizarre effect on me, it was bringing out the boy. I saw the tangled remains of the office building as a metal fort that needed exploring. As I tiptoed room to room, I wasn’t half as afraid as I should’ve been. I kept waiting for little brother to pop out again and take me to the hill where there’d be enough accumulation to make a snowman. He’d always been a brilliant snowman constructor, even as I’d pelt him with snowballs from the roof. “I’m coming,” I would yell, drilling him everywhere but the off-limits ears.
But there was no little brother that morning. Just me and my curiosity. How in the hell could it be snowing? I’d heard of seasonal cold snaps all over the world. It had snowed in deserts, on beaches, in the middle of a lake near my hometown when I was less than ten. It snowed like a funnel over a half-mile radius of the water, while not an inch fell anywhere outside of it. And the lake left the mystery proofless by absorbing every flake. Yet all those events shared one element that this day did not. It had been cold. And as I reached out my hand to feel the cool tingle of a landing flake, steam rose off my skin because it was so summertime hot.
I patrolled the entire floor we were on and saw that I could follow a path of half steps and melded elevator shafts to the floors above. There was no roof, and the higher I climbed, the faster and thicker the snow fell. I could still see the top of R.’s head. The flakes disappearing into his hair looked like tiny mice burrowing into the earth.
Farther up and in I traveled, needing my hands to purchase balance. Looking up toward the building’s severed head, my eyesight yielded to what was fast becoming a deluge. Small hills of white formed on my shoulders and boot tops. The higher I climbed, the calmer I felt. Snow made everything all right. It covered over the scars of November and whited out whole days of school. There was a reason to go outside and not respond till the dinner bell. Snow meant sledding on garbage can lids and pushing little brother down hills inside of the garbage can (garbage included, preferably), which inevitably left him covered in cabbage and laughing uncontrollably. Snow salad, we called it, and we couldn’t get enough. It meant Dad stuck in the driveway and brother and me pushing till our veins were outside our skin. Laying down salt, shoveling, all while he gunned the exhaust. Because we needed him off at work, not stuck at home ruining our snow day.
