by Paul Watkins
When the first smudges of dawn filtered yellow through the smoke, Gabriel found himself to the east of Kuwait City. He crossed a deserted highway and saw the ocean in the distance. By ten in the morning he had reached the sea. But it was not the sea. It was oil. The slugglish-arcing waves that slopped up on the black beach were black and the seaweed was a fringe of black at the edge of the waves. Hideously dying cormorants tried to swim in the sea, their wings like black knife blades now, and useless. Turtles like half-constructed toys lay tangled in weeds and oil at the high-tide line or crawled blind and mostly dead onto the black sand and vomited oil and tried to blink the oil from their eyes. The crabs still scuttled on the sand, but they were black and dying. He could smell the rotting fish. Their bodies were gleaming bumps in the slick black water. It was black as far as Gabriel could see. Everything that had lived on the beach or swum in the ocean here was dying or dead. Gabriel moved in a trance along the beach toward the city. He was overcome with horror. He looked down at himself and saw that he had become the same greasy obsidian black as everything else. He rolled up his sleeve and the skin underneath seemed so pale that he barely recognized it as his own.
This entire land had been visited by the devil, Gabriel thought—not a mansized, horned devil who bothered to torment one soul at a time, but a devil who hated all men and the world and was killing everything at once.
These pictures would never leave Gabriel. They would not leave anyone who had seen the oil fires in Kuwait. They would be carried as communal scars by people like him who would never meet again and never return to the desert.
At the outskirts of the city, Gabriel saw more bodies lying on the roads. One man’s eyes had been pecked by birds, and the sockets were dried brown-red caves. Gabriel walked into a house whose front door had been kicked in. The hinges were wrenched half out of the wall. It occurred to him only as he walked through the doorway that the place could have been booby-trapped. He walked over broken glass in his melted-sole shoes and went straight to the kitchen sink, stumbling in the blue-gray moonlight that had found its way through the oil clouds now that the wind was blowing the smoke out across the desert. He held his head under the tap and turned on the faucet. He stayed, neck painfully contorted, and waited, feeling his open mouth dry up in the cold night air. After a minute, he realized there would be no water. He turned on all the faucets in the house, but there was no water anywhere. It was the same in several other houses. All empty. All ransacked. Things too big to steal heaved out of windows or bludgeoned with gun butts.
As he crossed one street, he saw a body lying in the road. It was a soldier in desert camouflage, tans and yellows and greens, none of which hid the corpse in the moonlight. Instead the blurred lines of color seemed to hover around him, like static. Gabriel walked up to him. The man was not as badly coated with oil as the other bodies had been. The dry air had pinched the skin around the corpse’s face and dimpled the tips of his fingers. At first, Gabriel could see no wound. Then he turned the man over, the body stiff and strangely light, so that when he tipped over onto his face, his open arms made him seem as if he were falling from a great height and trying to slow himself down. A huge hole had been blown through the man’s back. The combat jacket was shredded and bloody around the wound. It looked as if he had exploded from the inside. Stubs of broken rib jutted from the skin. Gabriel did not feel nausea or sadness. The man had been dead too long. Too little remained that he could recognize and pity. The corpse was only a thing now, its teeth bared in hostility against what it once had been. Gabriel took the canteen from the soldier’s belt, splashed a little of the water onto his palm and sniffed and then tasted it. Then he drank. At first, his throat was so cramped from dust and oil that he could not swallow. But he forced the water down. The greasy bitterness of the oil stayed in his spit long after the canteen was empty.
In the soldier’s side pack, he found an ID card written in Arabic and a mess tin. He opened the tin, slicked fingers slipping over the aluminum lid. It was filled with olives in a paste that looked red in the moonlight. Gabriel sniffed at it and the spices made his eyes water. He ate some of the olives and his mouth caught fire from the chili paste. He knew what it was. Harisa. There was no water to wash it down. His lips buzzed painful and raw. He puffed to cool them down. But he was too hungry to stop eating and he finished what was in the mess tin, squatting with his back to the body, looking up and down the silent street in the dingy light.
He kept moving. Now that he had reached the city and found it empty, he no longer knew where he was going. Gunshots sounded in the distance. They echoed across the thousands of broken windows and blast-chipped white walls. Now and then Gabriel came to a road and could see the desert. The nuclear mushroom clouds of burning oil merged in the sky, snuffing out stars as the wind changed direction.
Gabriel walked past the zoo. The animals had been set loose. A hippopotamus walked by him down a sidestreet, swinging its head from side to side. Three giraffes ran, hooves clattering through a park and away down a road lined with burned-out businesses. An elephant walked slowly down the street, knocked softly on each door with its trunk. Gabriel wondered if it was part of some trick that the elephant had learned at the zoo, some man-taught ritual.
Black rain fell on the city. Only pale and darkening shadows remained of places where cars had stood. Gabriel left his footprints in the empty streets, and when he turned to look at them, he had the feeling that he had walked into a parallel universe, where images remained like photographic negatives, all the light in them reversed.
It was getting bright. Now that the dawn was finally arriving, Gabriel dreaded its approach. He had grown used to the night, which he felt convinced had lasted longer than half a dozen nights, and his watch and his eyes had conspired to cheat him of the daytime in between. With oil sweat-welded to his clothes and body and smeared obscenely in his hair, it was as if he had become a part of the darkness and he would never find his way back into the light. He felt pushed past the brink of his own sanity, and knew that even if he made his way to safety, a part of him would always be out there among the oil fires, lost in an atrocity of pollution and waste.
He had stopped in a doorway to rest. He sat on his haunches, arms resting on his elbows. The dawn was gray around him. The colors had not yet returned.
A window above his head burst into slivers and it seemed to Gabriel that the sound of the gunshot came afterward. Glass like hardened rain fell on his head and stuck in his hair. At first he just sat there, looking to see who had fired the shot. Then he scrambled through the doorway and into the house. As he ducked inside, another bullet zipped along the wall, tearing the wallpaper as if a knife had been drawn across it. The bullet vanished into the plaster, leaving a scorch mark. He ran through rooms, jumped over a bed and through a bathroom, and as he ran he heard a strange and muffled engine outside the building. Then voices. Then the thump of footsteps in the house. He heard Arabic being shouted. It sounded as if they were calling to him.
He wished he had a gun, at least to take one of them with him. But the pilots had been cautioned against carrying sidearms because if they were shot down over enemy territory, it gave the people who found them an excuse to open fire.
Gabriel ran into a room and there was no way out. Even the window was too small. It was a child’s room, with posters of cartoon figures on the wall.
I’m going to die, he thought. They’re going to kill me. The knowledge came to him as an absolute fact. There wasn’t even a tremor of doubt. When he had thought about death before, he had always imagined it coming in a sheet of fire as his jet exploded, or the screaming free fall of a pilot whose chute has failed to open. But not this. Not dying in some child’s room in an empty chair with his pockets picked, being left to rot like the dead man in the street.
He turned. They would catch him in the hallway. They would shoot him in the chest with their burp guns. He saw it so clearly that it was as if he had already been killed. There was no use running. T
he hallway or in here. Same difference. He raised his hands and stood there in the dark room, waiting to die and wishing only for it to be over quickly.
The men rushed past the hallway. They were not talking now. He heard the rustle of their clothing and the soft pad of their boots on the carpeted floors. Gabriel knew they were on either side. Any second now, they’ll fill the hallway with bullets and rush me, he thought. Or throw a grenade. Just get it over with, he thought.
A head wrapped in a wool cap jabbed around the corner and swung back again. More whispers. Arguing. Then a voice called to Gabriel in Arabic. But it was bad Arabic, as if someone who didn’t know how to speak the language were reading it off a phonetically spelled flash card.
Gabriel breathed in slowly, the first threads of hope returning cool into his lungs. “Hello,” he said. His voice was thin and he barely recognized it.
“Identify yourself!” shouted a voice in the corridor. It was a nervous voice. Jumpy.
Now Gabriel was more afraid than he had been before. To be killed now. By my own people. By this man behind the jumpy voice. He told them who he was. “I was shot down on the other side of the oil fields. I think two days ago. I can’t even remember anymore.”
The head appeared again. It didn’t disappear immediately. Instead, the body followed it, hunchbacked under ammunition belts and an assault pack. “What base are you off?”
“A carrier. The Pendleton.”
“Are you hurt?”
“I’m hungry.”
The man started walking toward him. He was carrying an assault rifle with a huge infrared scope attached. “You’re fucking lucky, Mister. I don’t know how the hell I missed you with that first shot.”
Gabriel kept his hands in the air. “Who are you guys? What’s going on? How come there’s only you?”
The man was close to him now. He wore an American flag around his neck. The red and white bars twisted like Christmas candy canes under the desert camouflage. The man raised and lowered his hand to show Gabriel he did not need to keep his arms in the air any longer.
“So who are you guys?” Gabriel asked again.
“We’re kind of an advance unit. That’s about all we can tell you.” The man stepped closer. He sniffed. “Did you get burned or something? You smell like gasoline.”
“Oil,” Gabriel said. He smelled Juicy Fruit gum on the man’s breath.
They led him outside to where three other men were waiting. They crouched in doorways and peered around through their infrared scopes. Parked in the street was a vehicle that looked to Gabriel like a dune buggy. It was all pipes and fat-treaded tires. Gear hung in string bags from the frame. The engine was hooded to muffle the sound. He thought these men must be Delta Force. Or Seals. He knew there was no point in asking.
They put him in the buggy and drove him out of the city, keeping clear of the highways, until they reached a radio post set up in a drained swimming pool on the property of a grand house that had been burned and blown up. Its roof had caved in and the protruding metal beams of the roof structure reminded Gabriel of the dead man’s ribs sticking from the cavern of his wound. A Hessian net had been strung over the swimming pool and the radio satellite dish was hidden in the landscaped bushes nearby. A generator puttered next to it.
None of the men wore any insignia. They seemed only half-aware of his presence. Some were American and some were Arab. Stacks of guns lay in the basin-smooth corners of the room they had created. Lantern light glimmered off the turquoise-blue walls.
A man threw him some camouflage clothes. They were the American pattern, browns and yellows in irregular splotches. The men watched him as he changed, snorting as the paleness of his skin revealed itself against his painted hands and face.
“You look like you took a bath in the stuff, bubba.” The man had sat down at his field desk. He had a flat, midwestern voice. When Gabriel didn’t answer, the man pointed to a canvas-backed chair on the other side of the desk. “Why don’t you tell us exactly what happened to you?”
Gabriel quit the Air Force soon after returning to America. The work it had taken him to become a pilot and the ambition and the pride he had felt in it seemed suddenly to belong to someone else. It wasn’t even something he could understand anymore. In its place was all the horror of the oil fields. The wreckage it made of the land. He began to see the same destruction everywhere, in the forests and the rivers and the air. It was not happening with the same intensity that he had seen in Kuwait. At home, the damage was more gradual, which made it seem all the more sinister.
His life started to take on a different purpose, one that he would never have considered before. He wondered if it had something to do with how close he had come to dying. He had heard about people who had been changed suddenly and permanently at the point of almost losing their lives. He could not trace his feelings to their source, the way his old self would have done, analyzing and rethinking until all facets of the issue were laid bare. All Gabriel could do was act on them. Not long afterward, he joined his first environmental activist group. He quickly used up his savings and his patience in peaceful protests. He attended meetings where philosophical discussions dragged on into the night. He stood on street corners and handed out leaflets to people who glanced at the words, crumpled the paper and threw the leaflets into the nearest garbage can.
Then Gabriel heard about a man named Hannibal Swain, who operated a group out in the Gros Ventre Range in Wyoming. He heard them referred to as environmental terrorists. Others called them radicals. Extremists. There seemed to be any number of names given to this group, which specialized in the spiking of trees and the disabling of heavy logging and road-building machinery. They were the only ones Gabriel had heard of who had actually stopped logging projects from going through.
In his frustration, Gabriel traveled out to Wyoming. For a while, he found it impossible to contact Swain’s people. He began to wonder whether they were just a myth. But in the end, they were the ones who found him.
He had been with the group only two months when Hannibal Swain came to the restaurant in Jackson Hole called the Peppermill, where Gabriel had a daytime job. Swain was the man’s real name, unlike others in the group, who had chosen to give false names. The best camouflage, Swain had said, was not to hide at all. So far, at least, it had worked. Swain sat down at a table. When Gabriel came with the menu, feeling the veins in his neck thump with worry at the sight of the man, Swain told him, “Meet me out front at the end of your shift.” Swain had watery blue eyes, and the sun had withered his skin so that he seemed to be a decade older than he was. His blond mustache looked like threads of straw. Swain handed back the menu and stood up to leave.
Gabriel knew that something terrible was about to happen. Only two days before, they had spiked three hundred trees and were just finishing up when a logging patrol heard the dull sound of their copper-headed hammers. The patrol came charging through the woods and ran right past where Gabriel lay, covered with the earth he had thrown over himself. He realized then that he could not have been what he was now without first having been a soldier for the other side. None of the group had been caught that day, but they all knew it was only a matter of time.
After the shift, Gabriel walked out of the restaurant into the glare of late-afternoon sun. He moved past the huge arch of elk horns at the entrance to the town square and found Swain sitting in a pickup at the corner. One arm, wrapped in the faded indigo of a jeans jacket, hung out of the window and down the glossy, tomato-red door of the truck.
“Get in,” Swain said, and rapped his knuckles on the door.
They drove out of town and over the pass into Idaho. Swain didn’t speak. For a long time, Gabriel waited to be told what was going on. He knew what a risk Swain had taken to meet him in broad daylight. To Gabriel, Swain was a man who often took big risks, but never without reason. Swain allowed no more drama into his life than he had to. He didn’t spend his time in philosophical discussions about whether he was breaking the
law. If the subject ever did come up, it was in hope that the laws would be changed and that their work would eventually become redundant.
They passed through smoke from a burning leaf pile in someone’s garden. For a moment, as the smoke stung Gabriel’s eyes, he heard again the roar of blazing oil spigots. Then suddenly it was gone.
After an hour, they pulled up outside the Painted Apple Ranch Café in Victor. The dust of the parking lot blew past them. The rolling plains of Idaho reached out to the horizon. It was more than just a different state. It looked like a different country from the forested hills they had been in only a short while before.
“I’m about to get arrested,” Swain said in a deadpan voice, as if he had been saying it to himself all the way over the pass. He didn’t look at Gabriel as he spoke. He had his gaze fixed on the giant red-apple sign of the café. “Federal agents have traced me to the last spiking we did in the Gros Ventre Range. Traced me and all but one person in the group.” Swain swung his head wearily to face Gabriel. “And you’re it. And you have to get out of here now.”
Gabriel said nothing. The shock had silenced him.
Swain settled back in his seat. He seemed calmer now that he had told the news. Resigned to it. “You weren’t on the Feds’ list. A friend of mine found out. He tried to warn me about the others, but it’s too late.”
“How did my name get left off the list?” Gabriel asked.
“There used to be someone in the group before you arrived. He disappeared one day without saying good-bye. It’s not the first time that’s happened. He looked like he could take care of himself. I didn’t think too much about it.” Swain passed his callused fingertips across his chin, rustling the bristles. “But I guess he was working for the police. That’s what I was told. He got the names of everyone in the group at the time. You weren’t with us yet.”
