Song for Night (11 page)
American Express, or Amex, is the kid who can find you anything, anytime, and anywhere. He isn’t one of us in the sense that he wasn’t with us in boot camp and he doesn’t diffuse mines. He is just a kid who has been following us for months now. He is only seven or eight, and in his bedraggled clothes that are several sizes too big, he looks like a scruffy elf. The .45 automatic he lugs around would be funny if it wasn’t real.
Vainly I try to recall the rest but cannot. This is terrible and I feel caught somewhere between helplessness and guilt, betrayal even. How can I not remember people I have fought and died with over the last three years? People I have played cards with, played at soccer, danced with, pillaged villages with? What kind of leader forgets his men? Maybe that is why I cannot catch up with them.
I watch shooting stars like flares filling the sky.
Fingers Pinching a Nose Is a Bad Smell
Even before I see the camp, the smell of rotting bodies reaches me. It is a choking stomach-wrenching stench. I gag and hold my hand across my nose. Walking to the roadside, I pluck some aromatic grass from the verge. Crushing it into a field dressing I wrap it around my mouth and nose. When I breathe, a lemon-rosemary tang takes the edge off the worst of the smell. But it is still pretty strong and getting stronger the closer I get to the source. Monkeys call to each other and I stop abruptly as a family of baboons runs across the road in front of me. When they disappear in the forest, I continue.
I see the spire of the church before I see the makeshift buildings. When I round a bend, I see a temporary camp sprawled out in front of me. The camp is in a disused church compound and the forest has been cut back for at least fifty yards and a wooden fence rings it. And just beyond the fence, the river winds around. Everything is still a sparkling white except for where blood has stained some places black.
The sight that greets me is something out of one of the grisly fairy tales I heard as a child. On one side is a big pit dug into the earth from which flames leap maybe ten feet high. It is not clear at first what they are burning because there is so much smoke. Enough to hang like a blanket over everything. Near the pit of fire is a pile of dead bodies. There are flies everywhere, huge blue bottles that hum and dive like enemy planes on a bombing mission. I have to keep swatting to keep them off me. All over the camp, old women have lit bunches of aromatic herbs to drive away the flies and the smell of death, but the belching smoke from the funereal pyres smothers them and they are as ineffectual as an umbrella in a hurricane.
I realize what is going on. Some men are fishing the dead out of the water, others are throwing them on the growing pile, and others are chopping them up and feeding the parts to the flames. I know it is meant well; both to help the souls of the dead and to stop infection and disease from afflicting the living, but it is gruesome and frightening nonetheless. In fact, given that I have seen ghosts recently, I wonder if this is not hell and the people I see, demons. But there is something fundamentally human about them: the looks on their faces or the tired sadness in their eyes, I am not sure which. Some of them stop and watch me as I walk past. A new look has come into their eyes—fear? I want to assure them that I am friendly. I wave at them and continue past them and the pyre, heading instead for an outcrop of stone projecting over the water. I sit there, light a cigarette, and drag the smoke down deeply. Before me is the water heavy with a sun high in the sky. I imagine that in the past children would have played here, diving off the rock into the river below. It amazes me how this very river has flowed through my life.
I can’t stay here, not tonight. I want to double back to the old man’s place, but I need to press ahead, find my comrades. I flick the burning cigarette into the water and turn back to the forest. Still the river flanks me.
Dirty Is a Scrunched-up Face
and a Palm Waving
This river winds through my journey like an irritant that will not go away, and yet the water will not wash me clean. Not in a symbolic sense, but clean from the dirt here that grits every pore until I sweat mud. Neither will blood, though there is plenty of that to bathe in. It’s not the stench, which after a while becomes bearable. It is the dirt: black soot from everything burning, dust and the loam of the forest, unwashed sex, blood and cordite, smoke, plant and grass stains, and mud for sweat. It all congeals into a second skin that still itches with its newness, like Adam must have felt as God first clothed his naked soul. When my fingernails rake, they first pull away thick flakes of it, then with repetition and increased pressure, skin, then more blood.
I stop by the river and light a cigarette. As I look around, the spot seems familiar. It is made distinctive by the big tree with bright red flowers that we call
flame of the forest
. They seldom grow this close to a river, preferring to hide deeper in the forest where hunters and startled villagers come upon its flame and are awed by it. It must have been years since we stopped here. Back then the war was only months old and I was still twelve going on thirteen and excited that my pubic hair was beginning to grow out. That’s how you knew you were a man—pubic hair, then armpit hair, then facial hair.
We had made a stop to rest, the whole troop, vultures and all; plus a long train of refugees who had attached themselves to us thinking we could keep them safe. I had no idea where we were, but I didn’t care. It was all still new enough to be exciting. Even then, the dirt was irritating and the vultures in particular. That band of soldiers who had to count the dead were already in the river trying to wash. My platoon and I were lying in the shade of the flame of the forest, and from that shelter I looked around me. Accompanying the refugees were some nuns—probably Irish, it seemed like all the Catholics here were—and they all wore that tight-lipped look that years of enduring Catholicism bestows on the pious, except for one of them. She was wandering around with a curious smile on her face. She looked unhinged. We turned and peered at each other and then back at the nun. We guessed that for her the dirt was more bearable than the debris that had no doubt collected in her mind, befuddling her. It was early on in the war, when the horrors were still new enough to unhinge decent people.
We watched her wander over to an outcrop of rock overlooking the river. She stood there awhile, the entranced smile on her face, and then without warning she leapt off. From that height the fast-flowing water below would be solid enough to knock her out and drag her under, delivering her into the ocean. For a moment though, it seemed like she was suspended in midair like a big black crow, her habit flapping like angry wings, before she disappeared, leaving behind a piercing scream.
Ijeoma shook her head. She was the first to speak: telepathy this time.
“The bird who made the world was like that. A big black thing with a white beak, and it flew over the face of the dark waters; it’s screeching the first sound in God’s memory, waking creation. Just like that.”
We lit cigarettes, the whole platoon in one synchronized but unrehearsed movement, twenty of us in those days, and we sighed in a collective out-breath of smoke before returning to scratching from the dirt.
This dirt will not wash off with water.
Not even in a river.
What kind of God makes a world like this?
“Not God,” Isaiah, our prophet, signed. “Man.”
Ijeoma smiled.
“You know people,” she said. Then she raised her forefinger to God and wiggled her body before bending down to pick up a pebble. Taking careful aim, she threw it at Nebu. We broke into play, throwing tiny pebbles at each other until we were a mass of small stings and lumpy bumps. We were flushed and breathing hard when we stopped, and grateful—for the pain that penetrated that skin of dirt.
On the outcrop of rock over the river, another nun prayed for the suicide. In the distance, John Wayne was expounding on his manual loudly to a group of bored officers.
I return.
Now, sitting here, I realize that was important because it reminds me that even if water won’t wash me clean, hope might.
A mosquito bites me. It is getting dark.
A wind sets to howling in the flame tree and I shiver in fear. I know it is the wind but it might also be disembodied spirits, or ghosts, or demons. The amount of blood on my hands doesn’t grant me the luxury of complacence, and no amount of horror seems to have inured me to my own pain, or fear, or hunger, or desire. Only to that of others: war and its attendant deviance hasn’t made me braver, only more callous. If any of my men could see me now, they would spit at my feet. The sign for cowardice.
The wind is calling in a voice I remember. A man John Wayne chased down into a woman’s kitchen, a man unarmed and afraid, and John pulled him out and made him butcher his children in front of us. In that kitchen as though he would make a gory feast of them, as though he was a host and we his invited guests. And as that man chopped with the machete, blood spattering his face, I flinched from the greed in his eyes. The greed for living that made him do that, and then when he was done and panting from the effort, John Wayne put his revolver point blank to the man’s head and blew his brains across the kitchen wall.
Tonight he is howling in the wind.
But I can’t tell if it is anger, shame, or remorse.
Shit, I need to find my platoon. I cannot go on like this.
A Question Is a Palm Turning
Out from an Ear
If we are the great innocents in this war, then where did we learn all the evil we practice? I have seen rebel scouts cut off their enemies’ ears or fingers or toes and keep them in tin cans as souvenirs. Some collect teeth, which they thread painstakingly into necklaces. Who taught us this?
Who taught me to enjoy killing, a singular joy that is perhaps rivaled only by an orgasm? It doesn’t matter how the death is dealt—a bullet tearing through a body, the juicy suck of flesh around a bayonet, the grainy globular disintegration brought on by clubs—the joy is the same and requires only the complete focus on the moment, on the act.
Before the hate, before the war, I was in love with a little girl on my street, Aminatu, who gave me toffees from the jar on the counter in her mother’s shop. I loved those toffees, always half-melted from the heat of her clenched palm and smelling faintly of her sweat.
I have never been a boy. That was stolen from me and I will never be a man—not this way. I am some kind of chimera who knows only the dreadful intimacy of killing. If it would help, I would cry, but tears are useless here. Anyway, I can’t afford to lose any more fluids until I find clean drinking water. God, all this time and no water.
There are many ways to die in a war. Dehydration is one.
For the want of water.
Vision Is the Same As Dreaming
I am in the middle of a battlefield.
The Angelus rings and I stop and lower my head. Before me, Ijeoma does the same. Behind us and all around but invisible in the shadows are the sounds of wings, a host of unseen. Ijeoma and I mouth the prayer together, lips folding greedily around words we can never utter:
The angel of the Lord appeared unto Mary … Hail Mary
… the words burn in us, like the love we still share. I finish and look up smiling.
Ijeoma is not smiling. Instead, she aims her rifle straight at my chest. I flinch at the report; flinch as the bullet tears through me. I feel my chest. No blood, no wound, nothing. Maybe it’s a ghost bullet.
I look over at Ijeoma and now she is laughing. Silently, of course, but no less abandoned. I am in shock for a moment, then I drop my head back and howl at the moon. The hard convulsions of my throat, not the sound, wakes me.
I shiver in the dark. Something disturbs the fruit bats, maybe a python, and they scatter from their perches in the trees into the night, their wings like the sound of a hundred ghosts and their high-pitched squeals unbearable. It drives me to a deeper hysteria and I fire blind into the sound. Tonight the world is full of fallen angels.
A Train Is Forearms Back
and Forth Like Pistons
This village, nothing more than an old water stop for the train, is no more. All that I see is the rubble of some huts. There is only one standing—roofless, but humped there in the night, its protruding sticks and poles and crumbling earthen body give it the look of an elephant’s skeleton. I pause by it, leaning against a pole. This trek of mine is getting more and more ridiculous, I think. I am mostly moving from one scene of past trauma to another, the distances between them, though vast, have collapsed to the span of a thought, and my platoon is ever elusive. I am thoroughly confused, but my desire—which is larger than my need to find my platoon, yet wrapped into it—is relentless in propelling me forward. I look at my watch. Ten minutes, it says. Ten minutes to or after, I cannot tell. Nor the hour; still, there is reassurance in looking at it.
I came here from the river, from that gruesome scene of brimstone, because while making my way through the forest, I heard the whistle of a train. If I can hitch a ride it should make my progress faster. But now that I am here I wonder if it is the right decision. Around me, darkness covers everything in a thick blanket of peppercorns. Occasionally the wind moves a cloud and the moon spills silver over the black. That’s how I see the slow snake of the train approaching. By the time it reaches me, I am crouched by the track. The train moves slowly and it is easy to get a foothold and pull myself up. The cargo car I am now hunched in is empty, but I can smell straw and animals. Through the open door I can see more villages as we pass: huts crouching into the ground; orchards flowering in sweet scents; ponds; the river again; forests; more huts; a town with electricity, the neon somehow vulgar in light of the war, the music blaring in apologetic spurts; a straggly line of refugees walking, hugging the tree line, heading for some still distant hope.
The train begins to slow and pulls to a stop in a deserted station. Dawn is just ripping night’s fabric, stars dropping as dew. A flickering storm lantern sways gently from the station-master’s quarters, its light already diffused by the birthing sun. I know I have to get off here.
