Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  Despite this fresh hint about Damarkus’s mobility, and despite Euclide’s familiarity with the state of trauma rehabilitation, Euclide was nevertheless taken aback by Staff Sergeant Damarkus Lockwood’s swaggering entry into the living room. From the injuries that’d been reported to him, Euclide was expecting someone who looked…well, injured. But Damarkus Lockwood most certainly didn’t. Yes, the long-sleeve jersey he was wearing dangled slack where the lower half of his left arm used to be, and, yes, he was walking on twin prosthetics left unconcealed by the basketball shorts he was wearing. And beneath those shorts, Euclide knew, was the residue of equally dire wounds. But no: Damarkus Lockwood did not look injured, he looked repaired instead, he looked bionically strapping, carrying his six feet, four inches of height into the room with a jock’s supple confidence. Shyrece lagged behind with the tetchy face of someone who’s just lost an argument.

  Damarkus apologized for making Euclide wait. He’d been on a conference call for work, he explained, and you know how hard it is to beg off one of those. He parted the front curtains for a peek outside. “Shy says you come up in some dope ride.” He nodded admiringly at the glass. “You really come all this way from Italy? Lotta layovers getting to this here corner of White County, Georgia.”

  Damarkus Lockwood, at thirty-two, is as handsome as his sister, Shyrece, is beautiful; Euclide, that aging batticuore, didn’t fail to recognize this. He has a lustrous mahogany complexion and high narrow cheekbones, the latter lending some credence to his grandfather’s claim of Cherokee blood. He keeps his hair and beard fastidiously close-cropped, his hairline pitched perfectly level except for the slice cut out at his right temple, a dandyish geometric flourish. He wears his sergeant’s authority lightly, but it’s unambiguous when it appears—not as barking but as a quiet and calibrated pressure that squeezes you into submission. His grin, on the other hand, can be so broad and ebullient as to seem deceptively innocent, as though the kind of delight it projects cannot be manufactured so swiftly and smoothly, with every last micron of guile filtered out.

  He took a seat across from Euclide as Shyrece passed by to fuss at the baby, the bulk of her attention, Euclide noted, sticking fast to her brother. Damarkus breezed through an explanation of his job coding security software for Verizon—part-time work, he said, mostly from home. The remainder of his working hours he devotes to a local nonprofit using athletics to reach at-risk youths. The kids get a kick out of his prosthetic legs, he told Euclide, just as Shyrece’s other child, a nine-year-old son who was at school at the moment, gets a kick out of them.

  “He says D got Transformer legs,” the grandfather said, with a croaky snicker. “One time Shyrece caught him outside using one them legs for a toy gun. Boy about needed a prosthetic butt after that whupping.”

  To his grandfather Damarkus said, “Chief, you gotta clear out so we can talk.”

  “The hell you say.” The old man twined his fingers across his belly. “I wanna hear about this boy he’s talking about.”

  “Come on, Chief,” said Shyrece, “D just needing some privacy.” He ignored her until she flicked off Judge Judy with the remote, at which point he submitted, with a teenager’s pouty shrug, letting her escort him out to the porch. When Shyrece slipped back inside, Euclide observed, she did so stealthily, as if trying to elude notice by her brother or by him, a fly seeking a wall.

  Euclide was laying out the reason for his visit in capsule form, omitting any details about Nicholas Fahey or Congregation processes and protocols. His mission, he said, was simply to determine whether there might be a temporal explanation for Cameron Harris’s recovery—something other than the miracle people were touting. The way Damarkus was tightening in his seat Euclide interpreted as polite concentration. When Euclide finished Damarkus asked, “So what’d you come all this way to talk to me for?”

  “You served with Private Harris.”

  “Lot of us did.”

  “You were injured with him.”

  Euclide discerned the same subtle wince buckling Damarkus’s face that Shyrece must have. From behind Euclide’s chair he heard her say, “You don’t gotta do this, D. He’s just church. You don’t gotta do nothing you don’t want.”

  Damarkus’s hand went up like a stop sign. “Chill out, Shy. It’s all good.” Then he turned back to Euclide, the set of his jaw looking hard. “Yeah,” he said. “Me and him went down in the same blast.”

  Euclide pretended to jot this down in the notepad open on his knee. What he wrote instead, however, was the Italian word for sister: La sorella? Shyrece was trying to shield her brother from something—but what? Post-traumatic stress disorder came into his mind. He knew Janice had diagnosed Cameron Harris with it, that Cameron was on a lifetime regimen of antidepressants. If Damarkus was similarly afflicted, maybe that explained Shyrece’s resistance. To her, perhaps, Euclide was here as a dredger of toxic memories that’d taken years to subside, a walking talking trigger appearing uninvited on their remote, siloed doorstep.

  “From the way you were nodding earlier,” Euclide said gently, “I take it you’ve heard about Private Harris’s recovery.”

  “Yeah, that’s some crazy shit, ain’t it?” The tone was flat, as if he was reading off a teleprompter. Perhaps to correct this, he added enthusiastically, “I mean, I guess it’s some really crazy shit if you coming all the way from the Vatican to talk to me.”

  “How did you hear?”

  Damarkus hesitated, his eyes exploring the room as if the answer might be mounted alongside the arrowheads. “One of my old lieutenants, I think that’s who it was…he sent me a link or something.”

  “Have you heard from Private Harris? Since then?”

  “Nossir I have not,” Damarkus said.

  “D…,” Shyrece moaned, her brother hoisting the stop sign again.

  Euclide paused to underline the one word in his notepad: There went la sorella again. “Can you tell me what kind of soldier he was?”

  “Cambo?” Damarkus shrugged a few times as though to unwind some shoulder tendons, like a batter approaching the plate. “He was a meat eater, man. The best kind. You could count on him for anything. You wouldn’t know it, talking to him—he’s this quiet guy, you know, acts kinda loose, he’s pretty chill most of the time—but when shit got kinetic, man, he’d light up. That’s why I always liked him being a SAW gunner. A lot of these guys, you know, they get out in the shit, they just open up a blossom, emptying rounds every direction. Cambo, he was smart, he was deliberate, used his eyes. He had everybody’s back.”

  With this brief description Euclide was already feeling some of the air escaping Janice’s theory, its tires beginning to go flat. “Is there an example you could offer?” he asked, seeing if more air might leak out. Shyrece was moving about the room, he noted, not quite pacing but close.

  “An example. All right, I hear you.” Damarkus sat thinking for a while, Euclide’s blinking eyes prodding him, before finding one: “First time he sees action will tell you a lot about a soldier. No matter how hard you train him, no matter how many times you drill him, no matter how many goddamn video games he’s played, the thing you’re gonna see, that first fight, that’s instinct. And he don’t even know himself what that instinct is, not until that first bullet misses his head. His mama gave it to him, his daddy gave it to him, his people a hundred years back gave it to him. You can adjust that but you can’t flip it. You get born one way or you get born the other.”

  Darmarkus, reverting to sergeant mode, was looking for a sign from Euclide that he’d heard and understood this prologue. Euclide nodded.

  “Cameron’s first fight was in Paktika Province. We was on mounted patrol and got ambushed,” he said, adding tartly, “which is pretty much how every story from there begins. Coming up this steep mountain pass we came up on a civilian truck blocking the road, a big one, what we call a jingle truck, no way around it, no way to pus
h it uphill, no real way to back out, when all of a sudden the Talibs start raining on us. That trap was ill, man—we couldn’t even call in air support because they’d figured out it was a dead spot for radio reception. They had two fronts pinning us down—firing RPGs from across and above, capping us with small arms fire. That might’ve been the worst tactical position I was ever in. The field manual doesn’t prep you for that one, not the terrain we were in. Nothing does.”

  Shyrece delivered him a glass of water then lingered beside him. Damarkus took a sip and continued: “The lieutenant wanted to blast that truck with the two-oh-three, try to blow it out of our way. But, like we all told him, no matter how much fire you get going on that thing you’re still gonna have a few tons of hot steel that you ain’t pushing up that incline. Only other option was to try to hot-wire it. Thing was, they’d probably booby-trapped it. Their whole attack, their positioning, all that—it was all so tight that you got to assume the truck was wired to blow. So whoever you’re sending up there probably ain’t coming back. But then again, now, you got forty-three guys who might not make it if you don’t try. That’s combat math. It sucks.

  “This specialist we called Suge, he was our hot-wire man. So he was going up. The platoon sergeant at the time, he ordered Cameron to go up with him to provide cover. Now to me this seemed like a pretty stupid choice, because Cameron’s untested, you know, this is his first damn firefight, but I guess Terry—that was the platoon sarge—he didn’t want to send one of his guys up there. Because his guys, you know, he understood the assets they brought to the platoon, he knew all about their wives and kids…but he didn’t know anything about Cameron yet. That’s combat math too.

  “We’re all watching from the rear, doing our best to give them two some cover fire. Cameron and Suge get up to the truck and Suge lies down inside, gets to work. And then Cambo, he starts into doing this thing—almost like he’s trying to draw fire, running around like a rabbit or something. The lieutenant’s watching thinking he’s panicking, thinking we’re fucked, but I’m seeing different. I didn’t know nothing about Cameron then, but I knew he wasn’t panicking.”

  “How did you know?”

  “The way he was laying down fire. You hear enough of it and after a while it’s like hearing someone play a guitar or something—someone strumming an M249 the right way, man, you can almost hear music. There’s a rhythm, there’s almost a tune in there. What it is, see, it’s the sound of control. You hate hearing it from the other side, but from your side, man, those are your beats, you know what I’m saying? And every second till that truck started up, him and Suge figuring they’re dead, Cameron doing his rabbit runs with a Dragunov trained on his ass, a sniper trying to mist him, every one of the enemy knowing what was happening and where to gear their fire…that was the sound.”

  “So the truck,” Euclide clarified, “it wasn’t booby trapped?”

  “The truck wasn’t wired, right, that was the good thing. But the damn second Suge sat up to drive, he took a bullet in the neck.”

  Euclide shook his head, in a show of reverent horror, but Damarkus seemed to be relishing this part of the story, his voice pitching higher and faster. “So Cambo, though, listen, he crawls into the truck and shifts it into reverse. Lying down on the seat. Suge, he’s still conscious, but Cameron has to grab Suge’s legs to push his feet onto the clutch and the gas, you know, like he’s milking a cow. And then we’re all watching that truck come lurching backwards, watching it crash right into the front of our lead vehicle, bam.”

  “Why backwards?”

  “Yeah, that’s exactly what the lieutenant’s screaming. But Cameron figured there wasn’t no way he was gonna get that truck forward. There’s bullets coming through that door, they’re swiss-cheesing it, and any second now a grenade’s gonna come busting into that cab, lights out. Best he can figure, he might get that truck moved twenty feet uphill, then the next guy coming up to shove his dead body out the way to drive is just gonna get it moved another twenty. So he cranks the steering wheel all the way left and throws the truck into neutral. Pulls Suge out of the cab through the passenger door, kinda drags him back till the medics get up there. I’m watching Cameron waving his arms for us to roll back right about the same time the lieutenant is losing it completely, he’s wanting to shoot Cameron instead of the enemy. But when that lead vehicle backs up a few feet I see what Cambo done and I’m like, okay, roger that shit. We order everyone to pull back a ways, from rear to front. And when that lead vehicle backs up, fast as it could go, the jingle truck stays smooshed to its front, rolling back, until its rear wheels tilt over the side and then that whole motherfucking truck just tips right off the side of the cliff.”

  Euclide was writing, trying to get as much of this story as he could into his notepad. Whatever image of Cameron he’d allowed to fester in his mind was blurring now, its pixels scrambled by this new information. What he was hearing didn’t match the profile of someone who could be literally paralyzed by fear. He went casting about his mind for another potential motive to fit Janice’s theory.

  “So our route was clear after that,” Damarkus went on. “We moved up to better terrain, called in an airstrike, got a pair of Warthogs that blew the face off that ridge, and we counterattacked. And we pretty much wiped them out. We lost three guys in that fight—not Suge though, they stitched him up. Three guys instead of forty-three. Thing is, like I was saying earlier, you can break that story down and find about a dozen instinctual decisions Cameron made that’ll tell you what kind of soldier he was. He shoulda got some chest candy for that one, you ask me. That shoulda been a medal.”

  “And how did he respond to that—his first combat experience?”

  “Well, first thing he had to respond to was getting his ass chewed out by the lieutenant. There were guys said I was a textbook motherfucker, but him…you either build the Legos like the instructions say or you don’t take them out the damn box.” Damarkus rolled his eyes before gathering his face into a thoughtful frown. “After that, though, with Cameron…same way he responded to anything else. Smoke a cigarette, kinda stick off to the side. He had Suge’s blood all over him. He threw up a little while later. But that’s normal.”

  “Was he especially close to anyone in the platoon?”

  An inscrutable half-grin crept onto Lockwood’s face, Euclide thinking he might be weighing whether to answer this question with a joke. A glance to his sister yielded Damarkus the faintest of nods, even more inscrutable. “I’d have to say that was me, sir,” he told Euclide.

  “You? Why was that?”

  Damarkus’s eyes widened as he blew the air from his cheeks. “Oh, man, I dunno. Put aside the difference in rank, you know, me and him just got along, we could hang good. We’d both played high-school ball. We was both from down South, even though, obviously, he’s white, and I ain’t—”

  Prompted by all those Indian artifacts, Euclide couldn’t resist breaking in. “This is totally irrelevant,” he admitted, “and I hope you’ll pardon the curiosity of a foreigner. But your grandfather—he told me he was Cherokee?”

  “Straight up,” Damarkus confirmed. “We got Cherokee in the blood; we got—what we got, Shy?—Melungeon ancestors from up Tennessee way; my dad’s grandad, he was white; and you can see we got some Africa going on. It’s funny, when I was a kid, messing ’round with Play-Doh, you know, I found that when I mixed all the colors together I got the exact same shade as my skin. And that was like this lightbulb moment—like, all right, you mix some of everything together, and what you get is me.”

  The beam of Damarkus’s grin was like another lamp turning on in the room, and Euclide felt happy for the swerve. Shyrece, however, seemed coiled more than ever. The baby was drawing her into the kitchen, bleating for more Cheerios to replace the ones strewn across the floor.

  “But also,” Damarkus went on, “well, you must’ve driven through Helen getting here, ri
ght? Then you probably noticed there ain’t a ton of black faces ’round here. We’re in the Blue Ridge mountains, man. I mean, we’re in White County, Georgia, you feel me?” He laughed at this, clearly not for the first time: a lifelong absurdity. “So what I’m saying to you is, I grew up around guys like Cameron, wasn’t like he was something weird or foreign to me. I mean, I didn’t gotta like that country shit he listens to but it ain’t like I didn’t grow up hearing it…”

  Euclide leaned in, wanting to capitalize on this higher-watt rapport. “Did he confide in you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, did he tell you anything about his home life, or his personal life…”

  “Yeah, of course he did. Especially when we was at Outpost Hila, with a lot of time to kill. I knew he had a wild-ass sister like the one I got.” From the kitchen Shyrece grunted to acknowledge receipt of her brother’s zing. “I knew his daddy wasn’t around same way mine wasn’t. He’d lost his mama, same as me. He never got to play college ball, I didn’t neither. We just had some shit in common.”

  “He confided a great deal in you, it sounds like.”

  “Look, man, you’re gonna learn a whole lot about people when you’re stuck up in a little combat outpost for an Afghan winter. With some them guys, you’re gonna learn shit you ain’t never wanted to know.”

  “Then how would you describe Cameron Harris, personally?”

  Damarkus drew his face into another thoughtful frown, but a soft one, with something far-off in his eyes. “Cameron was tough, you know. Kinda raw ’round the edges. You get him in a group, man, you ain’t gonna hear much out of him. But he was…he had a righteous heart, you know what I’m saying?”

  “A righteous heart,” Euclide echoed.

  “Yeah, he was strong, you know. Army strong, and all that shit, but…” He tapped his chest. “Heart strong, too.”

  “Would you say he was brave?” Euclide asked, thinking to aim a kill shot at Janice’s theory about a motive.