Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism

by Jennifer Percy

  The driveway’s a half mile long. No visible neighbors besides a small mobile home where an older man lives with his mother. There’s six grand worth of oil stored in his shack. April says it’s a country that takes no joy in the toughness of women. Men drive trucks but women don’t. April bought a Chevy Silverado. Pissing everybody off.

  In the end April bought the trailer for Brian, not because she believed his theories about the Iraqi invasion of American soil, but because she knew he’d need to be alone to recover from Iraq.

  When I arrive two horned goats in a wire cage take their hooves to the metal. The trailer door’s open and the television flickers blue. I walk up the steps. A fake Uzi in the shoe rack points toward a framed diploma from the Hypnotraining Institute of Northern California: “April Somdahl is hereby awarded a diploma as Master Hypnotist.”

  No one’s inside. The air is quiet.

  April and her daughter Khaia appear wordlessly from the backyard. In Khaia’s arms—an oily black chicken, motionless and gripped by the child’s tight fingers as if taxidermied into a position of grief.

  “This is my blind chicken,” she says. It’s got no eyes, just a beak. “Oh, chicken,” she says, rubbing her cheek against its small head. April and her daughter have curly black hair that sticks out nearly a foot from their heads. “Come here, chicken.” Khaia loops a rubber band over the chicken’s neck, slides it over the beak, drags it up the head until tiny feathers rise straight. “There they are.” Two eyes like swollen ticks. “Not really blind.”

  The chicken is carried up the porch steps, into the trailer, set on the carpet like a child. Khaia disappears. The chicken paces around three cats wrapped like dolls in blankets. Another whacks at ribbon. On the windowsill is a caterpillar named Wormy who lives in a plastic home. Outside, in the backyard, April built a purple chicken coop. Beyond that, rumors of bear.

  April’s already making sweet tea and tells me she wants to sunbathe while we talk because there’s a competition going on at work: she needs to outsexy Donna. “She wore this black silk halter top with these itty-bitty jeans and black heels that looked like they should be onstage. I show up for work in my sweatpants. ‘Oh, I won,’ Donna said. ‘I look hotter than you today.’ I feel honored that there’s this beautiful person competing with me. She doesn’t even know that she’s beautiful.”

  April owns a tattoo parlor with an alien-war theme outside the Marine Corps base of Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville. If you go past the alien landing diorama you’ll find a statue of a uniformed skeleton on a long march. As the war approached, the marines wanted eagles and United States flags. When the war began, the marines wanted meat tags to help identify their dead bodies. After the troop surge, marines wanted tattoos of their dead friends. Recently, the employees put up a life-sized dartboard of Osama bin Laden.

  April walks onto the porch in her American flag bikini, muscled as a seal, sitting with her legs straight and spread, brushing her hair.

  “Egyptian,” she says. “Some will recognize. They’ll say, ‘You got African in you? I can tell by your cheeks. I can tell by your lips. I can tell by your hair, ma’am, with that curl in it. You got African in you?’ ”

  April has Egyptian blood. The only reason she knows is because Brian wanted a genetics test. The guys in his unit started calling him an Iraqi: “You look so much like an Iraqi I hope I don’t accidentally shoot you.”

  Brian knew they were right. One of them looked like he could be his brother. “Don’t worry,” April said. “I’ll go ahead and get my genetics tested and let you know whether we’re Iraqis.” The more April thought about it, the more she worried it was true. She waited until a year after his death. Turns out they weren’t Iraqi.

  “Immigrant is what Native Americans call white people,” Khaia says.

  “That’s right, fish lips,” April says. April weeps into the hand towel and wrings out her tears on the porch and they evaporate into the sun. “I’m going to have to get another towel. I’ll get one for you too.”

  Then I’m alone with Khaia, who’s pointing to the cat named Pit Pat. “I think he died.”

  “He’s not dead,” I say. “He’s asleep.”

  “I think he’s dead.”

  “He’s not.”

  “He speaks human. Years of talking to him makes him know.”

  • • •

  Brian enlisted after 9/11, and it was less for the war and more for his father—to earn his love. But when he showed up to the recruitment office, the army told Brian he was overweight and the Marine Corps said the same thing. He dropped pounds quickly. His sister April asked how he lost so much weight. He said, it’s easy—you just quit eating.

  “Your dad is a coldhearted fucking old-fashioned marine,” April said. “You’re never going to get love out of him, so quit trying.”

  He was the type of father who would check the dishes for water spots. When he found one on the spoon in the silverware drawer, what he’d do is he’d rip the drawer out, dump the clattering utensils, then take all the dishes in the kitchen—breaking and slamming and piling them in a mountain of fucking dishes. He’d tell April to clean them all up again. She do it too—stay up until two or three in the morning doing the dishes.

  They’d been living in military housing at Camp Lejeune. At wit’s end, April told her mother, “It’s either him or me. I’ll run away. I’ve got friends.”

  April ran away. Their mother finally took everyone to a bullet-shaped trailer in Kinston, North Carolina, on a street called Blue Creek Road. Their mother stayed in her room most of the time and smoked cigarettes and cried a lot. A year passed and their mother left them, five teenagers, alone, in the trailer. Brian found an envelope of cash on the bed. A handwritten note, too. April said she wanted to read it. She thought maybe their mother left because the house wasn’t clean enough. Maybe they were arguing too much? Brian read the letter and then told April she couldn’t read it. She never did.

  April’s biological father was in a freak accident that damaged his brain and so he couldn’t help them.

  They divided up household tasks. Brian had to take out the laundry and keep his bathroom clean. Nothing too hard. Sarah got a job at Taco Bell and brought tacos home. James worked at Golden Dragon Chinese Takeout and brought noodles home. April used her babysitting money to buy toilet paper. She didn’t have friends with cars like they did. Sarah’s boyfriend had a car. James had a beat-up old truck. When April met a boy named Dane with long blond hair, she remembered liking him because he had a truck. She met him in the month of April and she remembers that detail because her birthday was coming up and she saw him on the street and she said, “I’m gonna be sixteen, come to my birthday.” He was a tall Scandinavian-looking man. It wasn’t much of a birthday. Dane came, though, and they had cake and they have not been apart since.

  One day Brian was eating his after-school snack in the kitchen and April was in the back room doing homework when she heard the front door slam shut. April ran outside to find that Brian’s father had returned. He was barking orders, demanding that Brian get his shit and get in the car.

  April said he’d have to take her with him. “You don’t even know what kind of snacks to make him.”

  “I can only afford one kid right now,” he said, and they left.

  All those years Brian slept in a hallway. Eventually he made enough money selling pot to buy a beat-up car and come back to April. “I’m so happy now,” he said. “I’m so happy.”

  When Brian shipped off to Iraq as a helicopter mechanic with Fort Campbell’s 96th Aviation Support Battalion, the two made a habit of talking every night using Internet voice chat.

  Nighttime in Baghdad, morning in North Carolina. April hooked up a mic and kept his spirits high ever since he saw troops outside his window, walking up and down oil pipes, and suspected a different reason for the war. April asked how things were going and he’d say things were fine. He lied to her for a while.

  The first story he told was about
the day he tried to help a wounded soldier whose cheek had been ripped off by shrapnel and all the flesh was just dangling there by a thread. He smoothed it back on the bone, gently, like papier-mâché.

  Then there was another story about a ripped-up face. One time when he waved to a soldier walking casually across the tarmac, the soldier turned around and half his face was gone too. Brian marveled at the whiteness of bone.

  But April said killing the Iraqi man is what really messed up her brother. There was so much blood on the windshield he couldn’t even see the body.

  April asked if the Iraqi man had a wife and kids and then she apologized for even asking.

  Brian went on these patrols where they’d blast through a wall and they’d be shooting men, women, children, and dogs. On the other side of the wall was a soccer field where the Iraqi children played.

  “Fucking shoot everything that moves!” That’s what the soldiers told him, and so he shot everything that moved. “Even the dogs!” Brian said.

  Later they turned the soccer field into a cemetery.

  It wasn’t too long before Brian invited other soldiers into the room at night to listen to April’s voice. Soon the room was piled with soldiers from the 96th Aviation Regiment, all in their sleeping bags like on a grade-school sleepover.

  “Keep talking, April,” they said. “Just keep talking.” If someone walked by, a guard, or a superior, someone who’d get the men in trouble, April pretended to be a radio and recited the news of the world. Sometimes she sang songs from American Idol, or lullabies from childhood.

  But Brian always made April talk to the other soldiers first. “These guys need you more than I do,” he said. Most all of them had PTSD.

  The first time Brian put a soldier on the line, April said, “How’s it going?”

  “We need to exterminate out here!” the soldier said. “We need to exterminate all the cockroaches.”

  A few soldiers giggled. “Yeah, man, all these cockroaches. All breeding and taking up my air.”

  Another soldier’s voice: “Yeah, their families all live in one house. They all live together like a cockroach nest.”

  April asked Brian why he wasn’t saying anything. Brian said he was too worried about how much he looked like an Iraqi.

  April told the soldier he was a racist and that all the Iraqis have mothers and fathers just like he did. After a long quiet, the soldier cried. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “It was them. They told us to think about the Iraqis like cockroaches because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to shoot them.”

  • • •

  Brian said he was happy in Iraq on two occasions. The first was on May 1, 2003, when April was home watching the news of President George W. Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier with the big sign behind him that read MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. “You’ll never guess what,” she said, “the war is over! Yeah, I’m watching it right now.”

  Brian called the soldiers into his room. April asked what they were looking forward to most when they got home. One guy said BBQ chips. Another said sleeping. Another said pillows.

  Then the soldiers started thanking April for her voice. They said they were never going to forget their conversations. When they got home they were going to get together and have a cookout. They were talking and laughing, and then a soldier said, “But, April, it doesn’t feel like the war is over.”

  “Well, maybe they just haven’t told us yet?” said another soldier.

  “Well, if the president announced it,” Brian said, “it must be true.”

  “If Bush says it’s over,” April said, “it’s gotta be over, guys.”

  “I don’t know,” the soldier said, “it doesn’t seem over.”

  “I’m watching it on CNN right now.”

  “April,” Brian said, “if the war is over, then why are we still here?”

  The second happy moment involved a chicken, and Brian said it was the best day he’d had in Iraq. The soldiers, sick of the mess hall food—the soggy broccoli, warm fruit in a styrofoam cup, the burgers and hot dogs—decided to go to the market in Baghdad. They weren’t supposed to be out, but they went anyway. They were ducking behind grain sacks and goats until Brian located a fat orange chicken. April didn’t understand the economics of the exchange, but all that matters, she told me, is they got the chicken. They crawled back, maneuvered around stalls and cars, disappeared into crowds of people. When a military Humvee passed, Brian ducked. “If we hide,” his buddy said, dragging Brian from his crouched position, “they’re going to think we’re fucking Al Qaeda and shoot us.”

  The soldiers made it back, and they went into Brian’s room and they shut the door and they put the chicken on the table. They were just sitting there in the barracks with this chicken and none of the boys knew what to do. They didn’t have anything to make that chicken a meal.

  “We’re going to have to go on another mission,” Brian said. “We’ve got to break into the mess hall and get some spices and steal some shit.”

  One soldier kept lookout while Brian and the others went to snoop. They smuggled barbecue sauce, seasoning, a bottle of mustard, a spatula, and they took it outside and they cooked this chicken in the sun on an old grill. Other soldiers followed the smell and joined them with sticky red mouths, glistening fingers. The soldiers kept coming, and the pieces were cut smaller and smaller so that every soldier could have a bite.

  “Wouldn’t it be crazy,” a soldier said, “if the Iraqis shoved a bomb in this chicken and we all died.”

  • • •

  April remembered the day Brian called to tell her that he believed he was a vampire. She asked why. He said all his friends were dying but he wasn’t dead. So he must be immortal. Immortal like a vampire.

  “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, April, if I were a vampire?”

  “You aren’t a vampire, Brian.”

  “Maybe long ago vampires actually existed and I got their DNA passed down from generations and it’s just our society that doesn’t think they exist.”

  “I was there when you were born. I raised you. I fed you baby food. I would know. Of anybody, I would know if you were a vampire.”

  Brian took longer to respond to this thought. “I’ll consider that. And you consider that vampires aren’t born as vampires. They’re made vampires.”

  “Vampires are just a myth.”

  “But, April,” he said, “don’t all made-up stories have some truth in them?”

  • • •

  In the month of November, the same month twenty-four women and kids were shot at close range by American marines at a massacre in Haditha, a retribution, the media theorized, for the death of a young lance corporal blown to pieces by an IED, Brian took a fork to the shoulder of a fellow soldier and then slumped into the fetal position. The soldiers in Brian’s unit picked him up and carried him to a phone. They dialed April and held the phone to his ear.

  April asked why he stabbed a man.

  Brian said he wanted the man to fight him and kill him so then he would know he wasn’t immortal like a vampire.

  “You’re going to get a punishment,” April said, “but maybe they’ll let you come home.”

  The commanding officer grabbed the phone and said, “Is this the sister that keeps my men locked up at all hours of the night? Is this the sister that my men miss meals to talk to?”

  Brian was discharged, flew home in January 2007. He asked April, “Do you still love me?”

  “I still love you but I don’t know what’s going to happen to you now.”

  Brian wanted to go back to Iraq.

  “Why would you freak out so bad that you think you’re immortal and you claim you’re a vampire and then you stab this guy and then you still want to go back? I don’t get it.”

  “April, my boys are out there.”

  “Your boys?”

  “Yeah, my men.”

  April took Brian to the VA. “Don’t lie to them,” she warned. “Tell them everything you’re thinki
ng.” Brian told the doctor everything he was thinking.

  Do you feel like harming yourself or others?

  “I will harm myself and, if someone gets in my way, I will harm them too.”

  Brian bragged that the doctor talked to him twenty minutes longer than he talked to the others.

  • • •

  It was the winter of 2007 when Brian started speaking to angels and receiving prophecies from God.

  He called April his “little treasure box of secrets.” Open up, April, and I’ll put all my treasures in your head. Visions about the fourteen acres in North Carolina where no Iraqis would find them. Visions about his own death. Visions about Khaia getting run over by a car.

  In Brian’s vision of Khaia, she crossed the road and walked a mile to the neighbor’s house where a woman lived with five diapered children. Khaia played, grew bored, and returned. The gate was locked so she tried the secret passageway under the bridge. It was flooded. She couldn’t crawl through. Next she tried the barbed-wire fence but it pricked her. She tried the gate again but it was locked. Khaia got the idea that she would check the mail in the mailbox across the street. That’s when the white car appeared, ran her over. Killed her. Brian was waiting in the trees to collect her soul.

  Khaia didn’t want to go yet. She needed to say good-bye to her mother.

  They walked to April, who was on the couch weeping, and Brian repeated, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “Mommy, I’m here.”

  April was too upset to see her daughter’s ghost.

  “We have to go now, Khaia,” Brian said, “but you can come back and visit Mommy when she’s calmed down.”

  Brian had visions of Khaia’s funeral and the pink flowers. April walking down the street to find her little girl’s glasses. She’d take those glasses and carry them for the rest of her life.

  Brian talked about his own death as if it had already happened. “It all makes perfect sense now,” Brian told April. “I know what I have to do. I have to die. I have to leave the physical realm and leave earth and go up in heaven and be part of the Army of God.”