Carthage (18 page)

ANOTHER TIME ASKING
the corporal what he’d seen. Whom he’d seen.

How close he’d been, and when.

Number of rifle shots. How many times the AK-47 fired.

If he’d seen the bodies inside the house. The body in the culvert.

Each pronouncement of
Corporal
was a mockery in his ears.

WHAT ARE YOU
claiming, Corporal. Did you witness.

You were not there, yet you claim.

You were there, yet you claim.

How can you be certain. These are serious allegations.

Not what you have heard from others but what did you see.

Not what they told you. Not what you told the chaplain or what you remember. Not the pictures you saw or believed you saw.

Serious allegations, Corporal. Accusations.

EXACTLY WHAT DID
you see. Exactly which men.

Not which men you “knew” were there but which men you saw and in what relationship to one another and to you and when. Not which men you “were told” were there but which men you saw.

Did you see the faces, Corporal. Can you identify each individual.

Did you witness.

Were you there. If there, why did not you not intervene.

Why were you there if you could not witness.

Serious allegations. Accusations.

Corroborators?

THEY WERE SAYING
Sure you did, Brett.

Corporal? Just tell us how it happened.

They were not uniformed. Their hair was not shaved at the sides.

He was confused, how his interrogators had altered themselves. Like they’d moved into a blurred patch in the center of his head and emerged on the other side and were different people and the fascination of this so drew his concentration he had no clear idea what was being asked of him still less how to truthfully reply.

Didn’t mean to hurt her—eh? Just, got out of control.

. . . led you on? These things happen.

And she’s the sister of the other one.

Fuck anybody’d blame you, son. After what you went through in the U.S. Army treating you like shit your own fiancée blowing you off you’re “disabled” then the sister in your face—hell man, you were provoked.

Wasn’t he provoked? The corporal? Sure he was—shit!

Want to tell us how? And what you did with her—with the body—after?

We know you put her in the river. See we found some of her clothes at Sackets Harbor. That far away, Corporal—hard to believe but happens to be true.

See, this is it—her sweater. That poor little girl’s sweater, some kids found in the rocks at Sackets Harbor too bad for you, Corporal, it didn’t get carried out into the lake like maybe her body is there—in the lake? Or maybe her body is in the river, sunk? You know anything about that?

We can find the body, you don’t cooperate and tell us, Corporal. It will take a while but we can find it, state troopers will help us drag the river and out into the lake. Poor little girl didn’t weigh one hundred pounds and her blood was in your Jeep and on your shirt and her hairs in your Jeep where you yanked at her head—that what you did, Corporal? Grabbed her by her hair and smashed her face against the windshield so there’s blood there? And her fingerprints, too. Just will take time for us to find her so you could save us the time and it will be a credit to you, the judge will be impressed if you cooperate, see Corporal—not like asshole meth-heads and fuckups too stupid to cooperate with the D.A. wind up on Death Row at Dannemora in a cell the size of a shitter and rot there for ten, twenty years till they wish they were dead and by that time their brains have rotted like Alzheimer’s. But if you say what you did with her could be the D.A. will drop the charge to manslaughter not homicide, that’s his call, could be the judge will give you twenty to life so you could be paroled in nine years—a pretty good deal considering what you did to that poor little girl, Corporal. You know and we know and you need to acknowledge it. And the girl’s family needs to be told and their minds put at ease. Everybody in Carthage is saying Corporal Kincaid was a good decent American kid got fucked up by the Iraqi-enemy—not your fault, Corporal. No one will blame you, or hardly.

HE WAS SICK
with shame. Sick with guilt. Backed-up in him like a drain. He couldn’t purge himself.

Better to die. To have died—“in combat.”

Now it was too late. He’d been killed but hadn’t died—exactly.

Felt to himself like something carelessly made to resemble a human being—a mannequin-mummy. Scraps of original skin dried like leather, swaths of hair like something you’d see in a natural history museum exhibit.

In D.C. he’d visited museums—Smithsonian, National Gallery.

It was calming to think of a museum, for a museum housed dead things. People stared at the dead things which were appropriate in such places and did not arouse emotion or even much interest. It was a kind of embalming—cool air, marble floors, high ceilings.

During “exodus” break at Christmas—midway in basic training at Fort Benning—he’d had ten days he might’ve been home in Carthage but instead flew to D.C.

Alone he’d gone. Alone he’d wanted to see the Vietnam Veterans Memorial he’d been reading about for years. He knew the monument had been considered “controversial” initially. He wanted to see for himself.

He knew of an older relative—father’s cousin—who’d died in Vietnam. There’d been others in Carthage but he wasn’t sure of their names.

The first name was
Tom
, or
Tim.
A name he hadn’t paid much attention to, as a child.

He wished his father knew he’d enlisted in the army. That in BCT—basic combat training—he’d excelled, so far.

The drill sergeant seemed to like him. The other guys seemed to like him. He’d been chosen “platoon leader” in his training class.

Wished his father could know, he’d enlisted twelve days after 9/11.

Scared him to think, maybe his father would never know.

He’d be sent to the Middle East, probably. Infantry. That was his choice. Iraq, Afghanistan—he didn’t care which. It was a secret from Juliet, his mother and the Mayfields—how eager he was to
go.

Eager to finish basic training. Then to advanced training also at Fort Benning, Georgia. With a part of his mind he knew it was crazy yet he hoped—like a child, desperately hoped—the war(s) would not end before he joined the U.S. troops there.

It wasn’t normal behavior, he knew. Every guy in basic training was desperate to get home after six weeks of exhausting boot camp but Brett Kincaid opted to spend the first weekend alone in D.C. where he didn’t know anyone. There was his fiancée waiting for him in Carthage, waiting to love him, not even knowing he wasn’t coming home directly.

Might’ve taken Juliet with him. He had not.

Cold-raining Saturday morning yet there were visitors to the memorial. Most were families, a few couples hand in hand, but apart from Private Brett Kincaid, not one other person there alone.

Juliet didn’t know where he was. No one knew.

Moving with others facing the long horizontal monument-walls down a gradual descent you didn’t realize was meant to suggest a communal grave in the shape of a V. No wonder he’d begun to feel strange—halting and breathless.

So many names!—stretching beyond his range of vision.

Visitors—had to be relatives of dead soldiers—searched for names then stopped to stare for long minutes like sleepwalkers. With a childlike sort of wonder they touched the names engraved in the black granite. Some had to stand on their toes straining to touch names almost out of reach. There was a stepladder you could use, to climb higher. For it was not enough to
see,
you had to
touch
.

In the ground at the base of the memorial were small flags wet from the rain, photographs, flowers both artificial and real. He’d read that, each evening, these precious objects were cleared away.

When had his father’s cousin died? Brett wasn’t sure but he believed it was nearer the end of the long war than the beginning.

Scanning columns of names seeking out
KINCAID.

His father’s name would not be here of course. Brett knew that. His father hadn’t served in Vietnam but in the first Gulf War and in any case his father hadn’t died in any war.

More than fifty-eight thousand soldiers had died in Vietnam! You could not comprehend such a sum, your brain was struck blank at the prospect.

Passing years 1959, 1963, 1967, 1970 . . . His eyes blurred with moisture, it was difficult to see. No name leapt to his eye as familiar until near the end of a column beneath 1971 there was
TIMOTHY KINCAID
.

That was him!—his father’s cousin.

Brett stopped dead. He stared at the name, that was at about the height of his shoulder. He leaned forward to touch it—to move his fingers over it.

He swallowed hard. He had no idea why he was so deeply moved by what was essentially a stranger’s name.

“Excuse me?”—a woman was speaking to him. An older woman walking with a cane, in a transparent raincoat, younger people accompanying her—must’ve been asking Brett who
TIMOTHY KINCAID
was to him and he murmured something vague and polite to her even as he turned away blinking tears from his eyes.

“God bless.”

Quickly moving away. Not a backward glance.

He hadn’t even taken a picture with his cell phone as he’d planned.

When he returned to Carthage he would tell no one about his visit to D.C. Often he would recall the name
TIMOTHY KINCAID
as one might recall the name of a lost relative, a brother not seen in many years.

Even his fingertips recalled—
TIMOTHY KINCAID
.

IN THAT PLACE,
the Land of the Dead.

His mother, his fiancée and her parents. His friends.

High school buddies/brothers. Soldiers in his platoon.

They are all silent, the color has drained from their faces.

Like faded Kodak snapshots in his grandmother’s old photo-album.

Brett? Come here.

Yes you are in the right place.

Yes we have been waiting.

PORNOGRAPHY, CHEAP CANDY,
tooth-rotting candy.

Drugs. Dope. Smoking joints like shit. Dog-shit. Dried, mummified. Sandstorms.

He’d died when the grenade exploded. When the wall exploded.

He’d been called. Commanded to hurry forward. With his rifle at the ready cradled in his arms rifle butt pressed into his shoulder hard and firm, prepared to fire.
Enemy sighted!
The last voice he’d heard was braying Sergeant Shaver—
Get here, Kincaid! Get here! Jesus Christ get here fast!

He’d died and gone to
that place.
There, he’d seen figures huddling together for warmth.

Still, they’d shoveled and swept the parts of him together. Ingeniously stitched and glued and inserted wires to hold him together. He saw a pattern of figures—shapes like clouds passing high overhead—and knew he had to deduce, from this ever-shifting pattern, a focal point, a
self,
that saw it; a
self
that possessed the mechanism that registered it.

Call this
self
some convenient name—
Brett Kincaid. Timothy Kincaid.

Trying to trick him asking him to “lift” his right leg, left leg, right arm, left arm he couldn’t figure out how to do this, how you could manage to “lift” whatever it was they were asking you to “lift”—how could a part of the body “lift” a part of the body?—trying to explain
You would not have leverage.

And they’d touch you with a rod or a stick that was sharp?—meant to tickle?—like the sole of a foot—(but which foot?)—and you’d have to guess what this was. And was something “hot” or “cold”—was the texture “smooth” or “rough”—wildly he guessed or sometimes just said
Whatever
to signal it was OK with him whatever—whatever it was.

Loyalty. Duty. Respect. Selfless Service.

Honor. Integrity. Personal Courage.

Army Core Values.

Corporal Brett Graham Kincaid Property U.S. Army.

Intraocular lens in his mangled left eye. Titanium implant holding together the broken skull. The skin/skins of his face stitched together and a rash like stinging ants itching like hell but you must not scratch the stitches for you might tear them out and the skins would loosen and bleed and become infected. Tight-strung wires in the lower part of the body (bowels, groin) and a
cath-EEE-ter
stuck up inside his limp-rubber cock to drain the poison-piss so he wouldn’t turn mustard-yellow like some of the guys in the hospital you couldn’t guess how old they were—his age, or his father’s age.

Jesus, he’d been a happy kid! Didn’t realize at the time, his mother suffered such misery and bitterness backed up in her like a stopped toilet—(and their toilet on Potsdam Street was always getting stopped up, Ethel complained and wept trying to unstop it herself with a filthy toilet plunger)—but Brett made friends easily, in grade school; one of the taller boys, quick on his feet, a natural athlete but not a bully or boastful for the sadness in him, his father had
gone away
. People were likely to say that he took after Graham, good-looking, wavy fair-brown hair and pale brown eyes and a quick smile, rarely sulked or brooded or talked-back to adults for adults naturally liked and trusted him.

Basically Brett was just a nice guy. Everybody liked him—kids, adults. He never mouthed off like the other guys, he’d be quiet thinking his own thoughts. He didn’t judge people, he never made fun of people. A cripple-kid—Brett would be nice to him. A teacher having trouble keeping the kids in order, Brett would help maintain discipline. He’d had to work at school like with math and English but actually he got pretty good grades—mostly B’s. He’d be loyal to his friends like Duane Stumpf, Rod Halifax and what’s-his-name—Weisbeck. They’d been little kids together in the neighborhood along Potsdam so it was like they were brothers. Why he’d defend Stumpf when Stumpf got into trouble, you’d have to know their background. Duane Stumpf had this round pudgy face, little-boy-face when he was a young kid, he’d break you up saying some crude really dirty things like he had no idea what the words meant.