The Yellow Birds

by Kevin Powers

  And I thought it was this and not her beauty that brought Murph there over those long indistinguishable days. That place, those little tents at the top of the hill, the small area where she was; it might have been the last habitat for gentleness and kindness that we’d ever know. So it made sense to watch her softly sobbing in the open space of a dusty piece of ground. And I understood why he came and why I couldn’t go, not just then at least, because one never knows if what one sees will disappear forever. So sure, Murph wanted to see something kind, he wanted to look at a beautiful girl, he wanted to find a place where compassion still happened, but that wasn’t really it. He wanted to choose. He wanted to want. He wanted to replace the dullness growing inside him with anything else. He wanted to decide what he would gather around his body, to refuse that which fell toward him by accident or chance and stayed in orbit like an accretion disk. He wanted to have one memory he’d made of his own volition to balance out the shattered remnants of everything he hadn’t asked for.

  The girl rose and tossed her cigarette on the ground, smothered it beneath the toe of her boot, and walked toward the chapel. She walked past the poplar and withered hackberry planted haphazardly about, toward the chapel, which rested like an afterthought in its dusty hollow, set back from the netting that covered the artillery pieces perched on the far side of the outpost’s gentle summit. Light fell between the wood slats, passing from one side to the other through the gaps in the warped boards. Its steeple with its simple unadorned cross was visible even to the residents on the edge of the city. The girl in the distance was framed by the plain white structure, chipped and bruised. There were no doors and the windows lacked both frame and glass. She tracked the fine dust as she walked and it rose up behind her in small plumes slightly as she went.

  I put my hand on Murph’s shoulder. “We’re going to be cool,” I said. “We’ve got each other. We know what’s up.”

  “I don’t want to be tight with anyone because of this. Being here can’t be the reason we’re tight. I won’t let it be.”

  “Naw, man,” I said. “You and me, we’re tight just ’cause. We’d be tight anywhere. It isn’t about this.” I can’t remember if I meant it. I felt so different then, with everything immediate and new, with no reflection, and I saw only with the short sight of looking for whatever might kill me in the next few moments. I don’t even know if we were actually close. It was only after that I tried to understand, to discover what it was I was guilty of.

  I clasped his hand in mine and pulled him up and we stood and walked back toward the platoon area. I knew what he was trying to say and it frightened me. He wouldn’t be bound by this place to anything or anyone, even me. And I was afraid because I wondered what would be required for him to keep that promise to himself.

  We did not take more than a few steps before we heard the whine of incoming mortars. A bright sound like the sky had become a boiling kettle. We looked at each other, Murph and I, dumbly staring into our own infinity made up of fractions upon fractions of seconds. For one brief incalculable moment we were not brave or afraid. Neither spoke nor moved. Welled eye abuts welled eye, a look between gun-broke horses. I couldn’t tell where the first one hit, but it sounded close. It enveloped me, a small metal fist to the chest of the earth. The whole ground shook under my boots, and all I saw was a bright flash and then gray smoke flung like dirty paint on a washed-out canvas, all shapes beaded and dissipated by the angry crunch of the impact.

  I hit the ground without thinking and covered my head with my hands, opened my mouth and crossed my ankles over each other. Count the heartbeats. Still there. Small pieces of metal flew over my head with each deep concussive impact, moving with a speed and sound that seemed beyond all governance. Take a breath. Then another. Getting harder now. Focus.

  I gave up, surrendered, whatever, I was gone. My muscles became marionetted by nerve ending and memory. “Murph!” I heard the sound of my own voice, disembodied, arching into and out of the dust and smoke. “Murph!” No answer. The voice of my drill sergeant entered my mind, dominated each and every synapse as it fired inside my as yet unpunctured brain. Get small, Private. If your dumb ass wants to live, you get so fucking small you can take cover under your K-pot.

  I didn’t count the mortars. All measures of time and increment were discarded like childish superstitions. Crump. Crump. Crump. The earth shook and the vibrations ran up the heels of my palms where my hands, now bloodied, desperately tried to push the dry earth into a ridge in front of my face. They flowed up to my elbows and shook the buttons of my blouse, which dug like rivets into the ground. Get small, Private. You fucking get small and stay small.

  There was a lull, brief and intangible like a small circle of sunlight falling absently through clouds. A deep constriction occurred in my chest, under my breastbone, as if my ribs had turned into fingers clutched in an arthritic fist. I was still prostrate on the ground. My face and body had plowed a small plot in which I lay. Dirt in my mouth ground against my teeth, coating my tongue with a thin particulate film. It was in my nose too. Each breath was thick and structural and I felt for a moment like I was falling, like falling into wakefulness after dreaming your fingers have slipped from their last nocturnal handhold.

  I listened for an all clear but heard nothing. This is my life again, I thought. Fuck it, I’m not going to die in a grave dug by my own bleeding hands. I got up and as I rose to my knees the mortars began to fall again, though not so close as before. An adjustment of fire. No one was around to call out direction or distance, so I ran. I was afraid. My eyes welled with tears, and I wet my pants and though there was no need I shouted “I’m up” and took off on limbs of unset jelly. “I’m moving,” I screamed, sobbing with each step, and, “I’m down,” I said, out of breath and fallen into the womb of a low ditch running with dirty foul water that would not wash out for weeks. Only my nose and eyes were above the level of the water. A flock of babblers scattered in the distance, and the crumpling noise dissipated, fading with the mortars as they were walked away from my position. I heard the fragments tearing through the air again, hard and fast but not as close. I stayed in the shit water until I was sure that none had fallen for a little while. Gray smoke settled down into my fetid ditch. Fuck. I breathed. I made it.

  I looked around and tried to figure out exactly where I’d ended up. The sewage ditch ran through the center of the base, below the hill where the chapel and the medics’ station sat, just below another small rise where the colonel allowed the hajjis to set up little shops in a strip of abandoned buildings from before the war. The little shops that everyone on the FOB called the hajji mall must have been the mortars’ intended target. It seemed they’d caught the brunt of the barrage. On the knoll above me, the hajjis arranged themselves supplicant, clutching at their wooden prayer beads. A chorus of grim wails began. Their little storefront hovels were on the brink of destruction, fires ablaze here and there, and parts of cheap knockoff watches had been scattered in the open spaces around the bazaar. Their bent and broken faces counted time without standard. Coils and springs, the bright silver and gold of counterfeit metal, were all sown errantly about, which made the freshly pocked earth glitter in the sun just so.

  Like the dust, the smoke from the last of these mortars dissipated and floated away toward sparse clouds roughly brushstroked against the pale blue sky. A siren blared, warning of the already fallen mortars. I crawled out of the ditch and began to move toward the little burned bazaar, my boots sloshing with stale wetness.

  In an open courtyard medics treated the wounded. A shopkeeper was lying in the dust, blood pulsing from his neck, black and jugular. His black eyes widened and then shut tightly. His feet kicked out wildly. Worn brown sandals conducted themselves through the dust, back and forth, leaving abstract markings on the ground like the hands of an obscene clock. The medics held his neck and applied pressure to the wound, unable to stop the bleeding until his body was spent of its supply and he wrenched one last time, the surf
ace of his body now settling in the dust. He was surrounded by his fellow itinerant merchants, who shooed away the medics and lifted him onto their shoulders, his blood soaking their white shifts and the tails of their headdresses. One fetched a piece of plywood and laid it out on an inert fountain centered in the courtyard of their bazaar. They rested his body on the fountain and began an otherworldly recitation. The artillery pieces near the chapel began to buck and jump. Each pull of the lanyard sent shells screaming out toward the city. The ground was stained rust brown where the man died. The last tremors of his legs and arms left a strange impression in the earth. I got down on one knee for a closer look, but turned away, fighting convulsions of dry heaves and bile. The image burned into my mind like a landscape altered by erosive weather. Even as I walked away, I saw it, a perfect bloody angel made of dust.

  I made my way uneasily toward the chapel. Its steeple had collapsed. The small wooden cross was broken and speared the earth near a clump of tamarisk trees. The girl was there, the medic, about where I expected her to be, lying on the ground next to the chapel, her hair blowing in small wisps behind her, in and out of the dust in a manner both fantastic and actual. Her eyes were half-lidded. The uniformed backs of two boys blanketed her in the performance of some ancient pantomime, a silent and shuffling attempt at recuperation.

  One of them looked up at me when I reached them. “I think she’s dead,” he said. The other one turned around. It was Murph, sitting on his knees with his hands resting on his thighs, gape-jawed at the sight of her. “I just got here yesterday,” the other one said. Murph was silent. He didn’t move. “I didn’t know what to do,” the boy said, weeping now, and then shouting, “Where were the fucking medics?!” I reached over to him and grabbed him by the shoulders, standing him up.

  “Come on, buddy,” I said. “We’ve got to get her moved.”

  Two of the chapel’s warped and battered planks had fallen on her and we reached over to pick them up. The force of the blast had torn her shirt open and a deep wound in her side had already ceased bleeding. Her skin was a pale gray. Dead gray. We repositioned her shirt to cover her and laid out three planks parallel and placed her on them.

  I tied off the planks with some rope and lifted her up. “Murph,” I said. “Come on, give us a hand.” The new private grabbed the back end near her feet while Murph curled up helplessly in the still-smoldering ruins of the chapel, muttering to himself, over and over again, “What just happened.” As we walked her up the hill, his litany faded from our ears. The new boy and I walked the dead girl’s body up to the medics’ station.

  We walked her past a copse of alder and willow that bowed in the heat of the small fires burning nearby, their old branches lamenting her, laid out as she was on that makeshift litter. Our hands began to cramp with each passing step, each taken with whatever reverence we could muster, clutching at the edges of the boards. Thin splinters roughed the flats of our palms as we walked. Listing in concert with our deliberate footsteps, the gentle curves of her body swayed beneath her torn clothes. The boards creaked. A small number of boys out on a head count stopped and turned toward us. A pale review as her body ascended the gently sloping hill, fringed by the bleached and spotted patterns of their uniforms. We conducted her pall in earnest up the remainder of the hill. At the top, we lowered her to the ground and set her under a tree on the tied-together boards, her body now translucent and blue-tinted. One of the soldiers alerted the medics and we watched them as they came to her. Her friends grabbed her and enveloped her in hugs and kisses. She rolled absently in their loving arms and they cried out beneath the setting sun. I held my hands to the back of my skull. As I walked away, the muezzin call began. The sun set like a clot of blood on the horizon. A small fire had spread from the crumbling chapel, igniting the copse of tamarisk trees. And all the little embers burned like lamps to light my way.

  9

  NOVEMBER 2005

  Richmond, Virginia

  By the time autumn came again I was firmly settled in the old gasworks building at the edge of the river. My life was small. I lived in an apartment on an upper floor and had little in the way of companionship. It was perfect for a while. A stray tortoiseshell cat would occasionally settle in an unkempt flowerbox hanging from my window. It had a habit of meandering over ledges and sills, jumping between air-conditioning units and the building’s few balconies. I reached out once or twice and tried to pet it. “Here, buddy,” I said, “here, kitty-kit,” but it only mewed at me and continued rubbing its face on the stub of a naked branch. I’d strung a few medals above a small gas heating unit. The picture of Murph I’d taken from his helmet was tacked into a nook of broken plaster next to the window. I rarely went out.

  Sometimes I’d cross the footbridge to the city side of the river to get a case of beer or a box of frozen potpies. On the way back I always noticed the diminished intervals between my footfalls, looking mostly down at the tops of my boots, how my gait had withered to a shuffle since I’d come home. When it got cold enough I’d rest a few beers on the windowsill overnight. I’d cook a potpie on a hot plate, as I was unequipped to follow the proper heating instructions. As night settled in, and frost spread on the edges of the windows, I’d flip through news stories in magazines picked out of garbage cans, searching for the names of places I had been. I’d eat a half-cooked meal and drink enough of the window-chilled beers to fall asleep. I often wondered what someone would see if they looked up from the river as it cut its habitual curve through the little valley, my arm above it, skinny and white, reaching through a yellowed curtain, a disembodied hand pulling in, from time to time, one last, yes just one last, beer before sleep.

  In the mornings I’d walk up to the roof of the building and work the lever of a cheap rifle I’d picked up from Kmart, shooting at the refuse accumulating at the base of the building. Small trash fires sometimes began when a spark from the lead settled into ember on the cardboard and discarded fabrics below me. I traced the paths of birds in flight, following closely behind the creatures, embracing them in the two stakes of my sight post. But some reflexive tremor always overtook me and I’d work the action, over and over, expending the unfired cartridges to scatter on the tarred rooftop around my lawn chair.

  That was more or less my life. I was like the curator of a small unvisited museum. I didn’t require much of myself. I might return a small trinket from the war back to a shoebox, take another out. Here a shell casing, there a patch from the right shoulder of a uniform: articles that marked a life I was not convinced had needed to be lived.

  I knew the C.I.D. investigators would find me eventually, and I was pretty sure I knew what they wanted. Someone had to be punished for what happened to Murph. It probably wouldn’t matter what our level of culpability was. I was guilty of something, that much was certain, that much I could feel on a cellular level. What crimes we had committed, though, which articles we’d be charged under, didn’t seem to matter. They’d find ones broad enough to fit over what it was we’d done, and justice would be served, and Murph’s mother would be satisfied, would stop asking whether the army covered up the nature of her son’s death.

  And me? That letter? Five years was my guess. I only vaguely remembered the long cursory sessions of legal instruction in the auditorium during basic. The drill sergeants had seemed to really turn the screws on us the night before. Front-back-goes for hours in the barracks hallway, the morning run that turned our legs to quivering spindles, and when the JAG officer got up on stage to tell us everything that was expected of us according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, all I can remember is being on the edge of sleep, feeling like I was floating in the cushioned theater chair and loving it. I’m not blameless. Some will say I should have known: goddammit, you were a soldier and you couldn’t even stay awake? Well, see, I was no hero, no poster boy, I was lucky to get out upright and breathing. I’d been willing to trade anything for that. That’s what my cowardice was: I accepted the fact that a debt would come due, bu
t not now, please not now, anything for a little more time.

  It happened so easily when the day came. Something turned. The note was called in. I remember the white sky and fog above the James, snow, unbelievably early for Virginia, beginning to fall over the hotels and abandoned tobacco warehouses, each flake a repetition of the one before as they descended through the veil of just how little I remembered, and my memory narrowing, the snow falling unmercifully as it spread over the river, the sky now white forever and unbroken and low.

  Every moment has turned over in my mind since I came back from Al Tafar. Each one unlinked. But then it was just another day, the snow nothing more than a curious way to distinguish that day from the day before. I’d put my hands through the open window when it started and watched, untroubled, as each flake met my skin and melted, saw the river stones take on a thin sheet of blankness underneath the naked sycamore and dogwood trees that lined the avenue below. A car pulled up, a Mercury, I think, gray in color. A man stepped out. The small silver bars on his shoulders reflecting off an unknown light as he closed the door.

  As I think about it now, all the times I think of the unceasing footfalls, the endless loop in which I watch him walking up the street, it seems as though I should have asked the snow to stop, for one reprieve, to not have to face another next. But even in my mind the fire of time still burns, just the same as it did then.

  The knock came quickly after that. I opened my door, ashamed at the state of myself, unshaven, my life more or less ignored. There were times I’d been pleased with my ability to give up, to forget, to wait…for what? I don’t know. The captain entered the room and stood looming over the emptiness in which I lived. I wore only a pair of PT shorts and an unwashed sleeveless undershirt, stained a little. It was cold. The snow filled the window with whiteness as though a shroud had been hung over it. A thin blanket hung from my shoulders and I stank. It had been weeks since I’d drawn a sober breath.