The Yellow Birds

by Kevin Powers

  “No, sir. That’s all right.” I appreciated the gesture, but it seemed obligatory and somehow therefore meaningless, as all gestures come to seem.

  “A friend, perhaps?”

  “I had a friend. I have a friend you can pray for.”

  “Who is he?” the priest requested.

  “Daniel Murphy. My battle. He got killed in Al Tafar. He died like…” I looked to the wall where the paintings of the saints hung. “It doesn’t matter.” The whole church was dark except for a few spheres of light that welled up from glowing candles and a few dim lamps.

  Still, there went Murph, floating down toward that bend in the Tigris, where he passed beneath the shadow of the mound where Jonah was buried, his eyes just cups now for the water that he floated in, the fish having begun to tear his flesh already. I felt an obligation to remember him correctly, because all remembrances are assignations of significance, and no one else would ever know what happened to him, perhaps not even me. I haven’t made any progress, really. When I try to get it right, I can’t. When I try to put it out of my mind, it only comes faster and with more force. No peace. So what. I’ve earned it.

  “And what should I pray?” he asked.

  I thought of Sterling again. “Fuck ’em,” I said under my breath. I turned back toward the priest. “Thanks, Father. You can pray whatever you want, I guess—whatever you don’t think will be a waste of time.”

  I walked outside onto the cobblestone streets looking down at my feet. I am sure people noticed me, as I thought I heard a few gasps while I walked, but I never looked up. It wasn’t in me. My separation was complete.

  I walked aimlessly until I saw lamplight falling softly through the red curtains of a building near the outskirts of town. I heard music and women’s voices coming through the thin openings above the windowsill. I hadn’t particularly been looking for this place, but I remembered a cav scout in Al Tafar writing down the address for me on the torn top of a cigarette pack. “Best fucking place in history to get your dick wet. Fucking crucial,” he’d said. Maybe I had intended to come here. I wanted something, something different, but I couldn’t imagine that it would be getting my fucking dick wet. I lit a cigarette and stood in front of the building for several minutes. The rain continued to fall very gently over the city, and I was by this point nearly soaked through. Even the top part of my cigarette was wet and it burned unevenly and I had to take deep draws to keep it going in the rain.

  It sounded like I could have a pleasant time inside, but crowds had already started to make me jumpy. If only Murph were here, I thought. But Murph was not there. Never would be. I was alone.

  Maybe if things had happened a little differently in Al Tafar it could have been like that. But things happened the way they happened without regard to our desire for them to have happened another way. Despite an age-old instinct to provide an explanation more complex than that, something with a level of profundity and depth which would seem commensurate with the confusion I felt, it really was that simple.

  Murph himself had told me that, as we stood over a field of worn and pale bodies scattered in the sun like driftwood. “If it ain’t against the rules, it’s mandatory,” he’d muttered, mostly under his breath. He wasn’t really talking to anyone in particular that day. He wasn’t talking very much at all then, so I listened carefully when he did. I often thought about what he’d meant from that day on and it wasn’t until I stood in front of the house with the light coming through the curtains that I understood. People have always done this, I thought. They looked for a curved road around the plain truth of it: an undetermined future, no destiny, no veined hand reaching into our lives, just what happened and our watching it. Knowing this was not enough, and I struggled to make it meaningful, as they had perhaps done here in Germany many years ago, looking for some pattern in all the strange things that occurred, covering their faces with ashes and pigments from berries they’d gathered from thawed valleys in spring, standing over the bodies of boys or women or old men covered by leaves or grasses ready to be lit beneath the stones that would hold them down in case the fires and the heat and the noise of the burning woke them from their strange sleep.

  The door opened while I was distracted by my thoughts. A man walked out and pulled the brim of his hat down tightly around his face. When he saw me, he folded up the collar of his coat so that he appeared to be nothing more than a figure wrapped in fabric briskly walking down the road. The door was left open and I could see inside through the narrow opening. Women laughed and carried drinks around a parlor. A few men sat on pieces of worn furniture, wringing their hands and waiting for the women to bring drinks over to them and sit on their laps. When the women came, the men leaned their heads back and opened their arms wide to receive them. There was loud brass-band music coming from the house, and I followed it inside.

  A small makeshift bar was shoved up against the far wall. I sat on one of the stools. Its leather upholstery was cracked and coming off in large swatches. A girl behind the bar spoke to me, but I could not understand her. It was loud inside, and she looked me up and down, and I remained in the seat without responding. Her hair was fine and red and even in the smoky room it seemed to shine with its own light. It looked artificially straightened, falling down not quite vertically on her shoulders, and I imagined smooth curls swinging as she moved. Her skin was pale and freckled, and a deep, purple bruise welled beneath her right eye.

  “Whiskey?” I asked. I was alarmed at the softness and timidity of my own voice. It barely made its way through the smoke and music, but she seemed to hear me anyway. She went for a bottle on the top shelf. I shook my head and pointed down. “Lower,” I said. She poured me a glass and I let it warm my throat and bite my stomach in a long swallow before I put it down. She never smiled at me. I watched her move around the room touching the arms of the businessmen and teenagers that drank and waited for their turn with one of the other girls. I guessed that she was off from those duties tonight, maybe because of her black eye or for some other reason.

  For a long time I was the only patron at the bar. When she was not pouring me another glass she would lean back against the wall and fold her pale arms across her small breasts. She did not look at me much and when she did and I returned her gaze she would look away very quickly. Her blue eyes were rimmed with red and after a few glasses of whiskey I began to speak to her. “Are you all right?” I asked. I was beginning to slur.

  She didn’t answer me. The closest I got was when she would hold the bottle up and furrow her brow to see if I wanted another.

  I heard a crash against the wall of the staircase. Coming down the steps, careening from wall to wall, was Sergeant Sterling. I wasn’t really surprised. I couldn’t have been the only Joe who’d heard about the place. He was shirtless and bleeding a little from the side of his mouth, and in his left hand he held a bottle of some clear liquor. The bottle flashed in the smoke and cold yellow light that fell from the naked bulbs swinging from the ceiling. When he saw me he bared his teeth and yelled, “Private Bartle!” I nearly slipped off the worn leather of the barstool. I could hear a few other people making noise upstairs and I saw Sterling as he staggered for a moment, the flash of recognition settling over his drunken face. I said a silent prayer that he would turn around and go back upstairs, but my prayers were futile, all of them, and I knew it. He came down and jerked a stool as close to mine as he could get it and his breathing was deep and ragged. The tattoos on his chest heaved with his breathing and he put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed hard. He was still smiling through his white teeth, and his eyes were wide and bloodshot and blue like the color of dried sprigs of lavender at the centers.

  The bargirl had backed away from him when he came down the stairs, and he let go of me and lurched around the bar. “Not tonight?” he slurred at her. “Huh, bitch? Not tonight?” He grabbed her by the face with his free hand and squeezed and she struggled to get loose and I could see on her cheeks a deep red where he held her.
His thumb and fingers made the skin of each opposing cheek sink between her teeth, and she tried to pull away. Tears ran down through the remains of her mascara, but she kept her fine jaw clenched and stood as tall and firmly as she could against the presence of his hands.

  “Sergeant Sterling,” I stammered. “Come have a drink with me.” I could see that he heard me—a small twitching began behind his ears and the naked skin on the sides of his head bunched up ever so slightly—but he did not let her go. I pulled the stale air surrounding me deep into my lungs with a long breath and yelled, “Come on, pussy! Drink.”

  Before he let her go, he shoved her and her head hit the wall behind the bar and made a loud thump. The plaster cracked a little, and she started to run around the bar, but he caught her by her arm. He squeezed her elbow, forcing her arm straight. “Get back over there.” She was crying softly to herself now and the red marks along her cheeks looked like a sad, painted-on clown smile and her mascara ran in black streaks below her eyes. He sat down next to me and slapped me on the back and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. “Living the fucking dream, Private,” he bellowed.

  The room had long since cleared. Some of the customers had gone upstairs with girls, and others, not wanting to get caught up with a bunch of drunken Americans, had left and walked off into the night. The clock behind the bar read nearly two in the morning.

  “This is complete freedom, hero.” He laughed. “God, I love this.”

  The warm, astringent smell of the whiskey had begun to clean me out. Sterling sat quietly for a moment before he spoke. I lit a cigarette and the smoke from it hung above our heads in the yellow light. The girl slid her back down the wall and sat on the backs of her calves.

  “Hey, you remember the look on his face when that hajji blew herself up at the DFAC?”

  “Whose?” I asked.

  “Murph’s. C’mon, man. Murph’s.”

  “Not really, Sarge. That day was fucked.”

  “Shit. That hajji was gone, Private. Poof. Gone.” He put his arms around my neck and squeezed. “Poof. Gone.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He had a really funny look on his face.”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “I thought you remembered everything. Like some retarded genius or something.”

  I tried to laugh it off. “You’re wasted, Sarge,” I said.

  “Yeah. But now you see how shit ends up?”

  “Sure. Yeah. Sure I do.”

  “I’m in charge.”

  I laughed nervously. “I know that.”

  “When I’m in charge, things end up OK. When I let people talk me into shit…we are a fucking no-go at this station.”

  I tried to change the subject. “What made you think of Murph?”

  “Fuck Murph.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “We know what happened. That’s all we got.”

  He was drunk. I’d never seen him like that: on the edge of losing control, morose and somehow sentimental in his own way. It was like you could feel him about to shake loose from something, I wasn’t sure what from, but I didn’t want to be around when it happened.

  He put his finger into my chest and then into his. “We know. Me and you. Like we’re married. Don’t you forget. I’ve fucking got you, Private Bartle. UC motherfucking MJ, anytime I want. You see this?” He took his thumb and held it in my face, pushing his fist firmly and deliberately against my cheek. He then turned his hand and pressed his thumb into the dark lacquered wood of the bar top, grinding it against the surface as if squishing a bug. “That’s where you are. I own you. And AWOL, too? Too fucking easy, Private.”

  I’d be out soon. My three-year enlistment was up. I was getting out of the army when we got back stateside. “You won’t do it,” I said. I didn’t really believe it. I knew Sterling was capable of anything. “I can give you up too. You were in charge, remember?”

  “Ah,” he grunted. “No one gives a fuck about Murph,” he said. When he reached the fricative in Murph’s name, he began to laugh. I could feel his breath on my lips. As he talked, his eyes flashed a little and the color of them seemed to wash out and deaden. “Everybody else, man, they don’t want to know. If they wanted to, they would, right? It’s not like he’s the only bullshit KIA with bullshit medals and a bullshit story for his mother?” He drained the last of the liquor from his bottle, tipping it up slowly above his head. I watched his Adam’s apple move the clear liquor down his throat. When he finished, he threw the bottle against the wall above the bargirl’s head. It did not shatter. The thick glass held and it made a sharp thwack against the wall and fell.

  “We could tell,” I said. “Just get the whole thing over with.”

  He laughed. “There you go again, Private. Retarded genius.”

  I woke upstairs. I was in a bed, two mattresses on top of each other, really. The paper on the walls was striped yellow and corroded white and peeling. I heard running water from down the hall. I could see the bargirl’s reflection in the dirty mirror through an open door. A few seconds passed before I recognized her. She came out of the bathroom in a dingy pink robe. I saw freckles scattered over her chest, down her arms, down her long pale legs.

  “Is he gone?” I asked her.

  She took a damp washcloth and pressed it onto my forehead. I felt sick. “Yes,” she said.

  “You speak English.”

  “Of course I do.”

  I couldn’t identify her accent. Tracks on her arms. No saint. Me neither. I saw that the bruise below her eye had deepened. It was now a thick black. I lay back on the bed. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I should have done something else.”

  “You tried. That’s something.”

  “Will you…,” I began. I didn’t know what I wanted from her.

  She cut me off. “Are you serious?” A very sad look came over her face and her bottom lip began to tremble slightly and she slapped me.

  “No. Not that,” I said, although a part of me did want to, to have control over something, even if it was for just two minutes. But I disgusted myself. I thought of the Joe who’d given me the address. He had probably done it, and he was probably dead. I imagined his body collapsing in on itself, the flesh rotting and then gone, the skin on his lips cracked until only dust remained in a thin veneer over his skull. I pushed her hands up to my withers. I moved them back and forth against the very short hair on the side of my head. I doubled over and grabbed an old metal trash can next to the bed and threw up into it. She rubbed my back. She kneeled at the foot of the bed and I sat up.

  “You are all so sad,” she said.

  I noticed an odd chirping outside the bedroom windows and I saw a few starlings flit by in the pale light of the streetlamps. They flew in circles, or else there were many of them, and the whole group passed in and out of the light on their way to settle on a rooftop, or on some tree that asked to have its branches filled, at least until its leaves and flowers blossomed, until winter was as far away as it could be. We stayed like that awhile. I finally let go of her thin waist and looked at her. “Is everyone gone?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “I’ll go back downstairs and sleep there if that’s OK.”

  “Yes, fine.”

  I was still quite drunk and my head was foggy. I went behind the bar and found a whiskey bottle. I sat on the floor and looked out the window and drank the rest of the whiskey. The sun came up over a small canal across the street. I was very tired, looking out over the narrow band of water, wondering if it was cold.

  The light was graying when I opened my eyes. The streetlights were still on. There was a bitter taste in my mouth. I looked around to get my bearings. My head pounded. My hands were very cold, and I realized I was lying facedown on the bank of the thin canal with my hands dangling in the water. It was flat and glassy and the only motion on the water was where my hands moved in it slightly. I pulled them out and sat up and began to rub my hands together to get the feeling in them back. God, what
time is it? I thought. The house was across the street. The women stood like tired caryatids on the porch, each one leaning against one or another of several warped and peeling columns. They did not move, and I stood up and turned toward them, and they remained that way, as if in some raw tableau.

  “Where is the girl?” I hollered.

  They stood the way they had been for another moment, and then they turned and filed through the door. It was quiet inside or seemed to be, and I stood there staring at the house until I realized it must have been close to dawn.

  When I got back to the base, the LT was angry. He didn’t yell, he just said, “Wash up, Bartle.” I did and when I was finished I changed into a clean uniform and pulled a field jacket over my shoulders and fell asleep on a bench in the terminal. Only a few MPs and officers were still awake.

  I was woken by a nudge on my shoulder, then by a harder shake. I rolled over, and Sergeant Sterling whispered to me, “I covered for you.”

  “Thanks, Sarge,” I said groggily.

  “Don’t go thinking we’re finished, Private.” He walked away. Outside in the dark it had begun to rain again. I was almost home, I thought, almost gone.

  4

  SEPTEMBER 2004

  Al Tafar, Nineveh Province, Iraq

  Through the daylight hours we took turns on watch, sleeping for two hours and nodding off behind our rifles for one. We saw no enemy. We made up none out of the corners of our eyes. We were too tired even for that. We saw only the city, appearing as a blurred patchwork of shapes sketched in white and tan beneath a ribbon of blue sky.

  I woke for my shift as the sun set into a wadi. It snaked off beyond the orchard, cut into the foothills and disappeared. The fires in the orchard had gone out, but Murph and I did not notice their absence until we heard the thin crackling of embers gently smoldering in the distance. The shadows of the outbuildings reached down and covered everything and we didn’t notice it was happening and then it was night.