The Book of Jonas (16 page)

He doesn’t really know how it happens. He feels the anger creep up his back, rising in him, an almost physical force, or something tangible he can touch. He feels it consume him, blocking out everything else. He feels it. He is momentarily convinced that Shakri is deliberately bringing it out, seeking it, wanting it. He convinces himself that it fulfills some need in her.

The act itself doesn’t exist, only its aftermath. Jonas doesn’t even realize what he is doing until he draws back his fist and punches the wall next to the front door.

To his astonishment, Shakri laughs, albeit a little nervously.

“Oh, no,” she says, her accent fluttering. “No, you don’t, you melodramatic git. There is no way I’m going to start living in a country-and-western song.”

He regrets it almost instantly. He has punched a spot on the wall next to the front door, and realizes only afterward that he has hit not the dramatically breakable drywall, but the solid wood of the doorframe. His hand throbs, and he thinks he may have felt something snap in his wrist. The spot on the wall shows no sign of having been touched. His anger dissipated, his hand rapidly beginning to swell, he sits down on the couch.

“I, um…” he says, holding his wrist, “I think I really may have hurt myself.”

“You idiot,” says Shakri gently. “Let me see.”

She sits next to him on the couch and runs her hand down his arm and over the long, pale scar on his forearm.

“So now I finally know,” she says. “I finally know how you got that.”

“You finally know,” he says.

“I mean the truth,” she says, meeting his eyes. “Right? And not that rubbish about being swept over a waterfall, or falling out of an apple tree, or fighting a lion, or defusing a bomb, or … what was that other one, the one you told Trevor?”

“Training accident with a peregrine falcon.”

“Yeah, that. How did you ever come up with that?”

She touches his swollen wrist, and he winces at the contact.

“That’s really swollen,” she says.

“I think I might have broken something,” he says.

Shakri stands, goes to the closet, and puts on a heavy coat, then hands Jonas his jacket. “Come on,” she says. “My friend Mira is on call in the medical center.”

“Mira?” says Jonas. “She hates me.”

“Yeah,” says Shakri. “If it is broken, she will be happy to set it.”

Reluctantly, Jonas pulls on his jacket, easing it over his throbbing hand, and in a gust of chill air they are out the door and back into the cold night.

Things went downhill fast. After the ambush we didn’t care. We got sloppy. We lost something. Inhibitions, I guess. It gets easier; that’s for sure. Maybe we lost a little discipline. And then we started losing more guys.

First it was Marin, on point in some village, and he just lay
down like he’d decided to take a nap. Then, right after that, Landon tripped an IED and literally disintegrated.

Then a truck ran over Margold. No joke. It’s almost funny to think about it, if it weren’t so awful. He was on his back underneath the APC, because we thought a tie-rod was broken, and he was checking it, and damn if that rig didn’t just roll backward, right overtop of him. Squashed his chest flat, broke his back. We scrambled to lift it off, but there was no way.

Then, back in the zone, we had this big discussion about it. I mean, come on. You go off to war and get killed because a truck you’re fixing rolls over you? You could do that in your own backyard. I had already started thinking it was fate. You showed up and you lived or you died and there was just nothing you could do to alter it. But some of the guys said that they thought it was just chance, all totally random. And we got into it a little. We were pretty upset, which, let’s face it, is weird for such a high-brained discussion, fate versus chance, but somebody shoved somebody against a wall, I remember that, and there we were arguing and jabbering about our stretch of bad luck. And someone said it, said, “Well, you know, fuck it. We’re cursed.”

And everyone went quiet, like a secret that everybody knew but didn’t dare say had been spoken out loud. And a couple of guys laughed, but someone else got really angry, said, “Shut up; don’t ever say that again.”

And it’s true. You’ve got to nip that kind of thing in the bud. But it was too late. It was already out there. A unit gets that kind of thing into its head, that it’s cursed, and it’s useless. One of two things happens. Either they get mutinous, refuse to go out, or maybe
go out and dig in somewhere, refuse to do anything, or else they snap.

We snapped.

In the morning, Rose writes letters, often waking before dawn in the cold house and putting a kettle on to boil water for tea before settling into the rocking chair in the large-windowed addition Roy built before the divorce.
Dear Timothy,
she writes, in a graceful, flowing script on a sheet of cream stationery, writing by hand because she is still not entirely comfortable writing on the laptop that sits next to the printer upstairs.
You don’t know me, but you served with my son
.

Roy bought her both the laptop and the printer, and checks in on her occasionally, as she does on him. Separated after Christopher disappeared, now divorced, they are friends, of a sort. While Rose had founded the support group, Roy had seemed capable of carrying on as though nothing had happened, and Rose resented him. So she funneled into her work with the group all of the energy and attention that had been squeezed out of the marriage.

Even now, though friendly, they are vaguely wary of each other, each blaming the other in part for the loss of their son, even as they each know how irrational it is to do so.

I am writing because I have organized a group of veterans and
their families, anyone who has lost friends or loved ones in the line of duty.

Many of the soldiers and family members she contacts never get back to her, and she is not offended or put off by this. Quite the opposite: She finds it completely understandable, assuming that they want as much distance as possible from the past. But this is the opposite of her own reaction, and that of those who do get in touch with her, those who share a need to be close to others who have had similar experiences.

We are a group of over one hundred family members, friends, and comrades who have lost loved ones.

She never pesters or cajoles, and she is careful not to go on too much about her own loss. Her mission, she feels, is simply to be there, to be in touch, offering to those affected the opportunity for fellowship.

Jonas wakes up in pitch darkness to the sound of Shakri’s screams.

They are being hunted. He lies on his back, hiding with Shakri next to him. She screams into his ear, his good left ear, so that he can hear nothing aside from her screams. He can’t move, can’t sit up. They are surrounded. He tries to sit up again and smacks his head against something hard. He tries to keep them alive.

“I don’t understand you, Jonas!” Shakri sounds frantic, desperate. “What are you saying?”

It is her voice, but it feels unfamiliar. It is as though she is speaking to someone else, calling him a different name, in a different language, and he registers it merely as a kind of nuisance that threatens to prevent him from doing what needs to be done, and which, more important, threatens to give them away. He is trying to save her, and he needs her to shut up and let him do it.

“Wake up, Jonas, oh, please wake up!”

She is crying now, trying to keep her voice calm, sounding as though she is reasoning with a mugger or a rapist. He wraps his arm around her neck and clasps his hand tightly over her mouth.

He finds that he cannot move his legs, that they feel bound, and he reaches down the length of his thigh with the hand that is not holding shut Shakri’s mouth and gropes around to try to figure out what is restraining him.

It feels like bedsheets.

Then he takes a breath. Slowly, he releases his grip on her mouth.

In the darkness, he reaches up, grabs hold of the wooden slats, and pulls himself out from under the bed. He slides out of the sheet and blanket, which have wrapped themselves around his legs. Then he reaches down and tries to help Shakri crawl shakily out, as well, but she pushes away his hands.

He stands beside the bed, his bare chest bathed dimly by the light from the street lamp outside the window, which barely
penetrates the darkness of Shakri’s bedroom. He is soaked with sweat, and the cool air brings out goose bumps on his arms and legs. He hears nothing but a ringing sound in his good ear. He opens his mouth to say something, then closes it again. When sounds finally emerge from his mouth, they are raspy and forced, his voice catching in his throat.

“I don’t…” he says. “What happened?” he says. He says, “I didn’t mean…” and, “Are you okay?”

Shakri is curled fetally on the other side of the bed, practically as far away from Jonas as she can get while remaining in the same room. She holds the side of her head as though in pain, and Jonas suddenly realizes that he injured her as he dragged her underneath the bed. Her body shakes, but she is quiet except for an occasional sob or rapid intake of breath. He crosses the room and sits next to her.

“I thought we were going to be killed,” he whispers, and reaches out gently to put his hand on her leg.

“Don’t,” she says. “Just don’t,” she says. “Just please don’t touch me.”

What if, a few days later, you find them? What if you find them a week after they kill your point man while you’re patrolling some stretch of highway outside some godforsaken village? What if you find them a few days after you lose someone else, vaporized by
an IED right outside that same godforsaken village? What if you are absolutely certain that some of the locals know them, know who did it, who it was that killed your friends? What if you then get some intel? What if you get confirmation? What if you suddenly know where they are?

The next day it rains, and Rose can do no work in the backyard, so she reads some e-mail she has managed to print out from the computer, or she makes some phone calls, or she stares through the window at the giant drops flooding the small porch outside the front door.

She can still picture them standing there, framed by the doorway, soaking wet, the three of them, clustered around a red wooden wagon, and the thought makes her smile. They wear their dripping, oversize ponchos, their rubber boots as, behind them, the rain turns the front yard to mud.

Christopher had organized them into a team. He and Matthew were supposed to push the wagon and tuck the newspapers behind the subscribers’ screen doors, while the baby, Sam, sat in the wagon, pulling papers out from under a folded tarp and stuffing them into plastic bags. But Sam couldn’t keep up as the houses rolled by, and then it really started to rain. Though he is still years away from being old enough to drive, Christopher wants to borrow the car. “Just in the neighborhood,” he says.

“Come on,” says Rose. “I’ll drive you.”

They make nearly a hundred dollars a week from the paper route, which they split among themselves and spend on toy action figures and slushies and model rockets.

“They should save some of it,” says Roy.

“They’ll have time to save plenty of money later,” says Rose.

They roll the dripping wagon into the garage, load the damp newspapers into the trunk of the car. Matthew and Sam climb into the backseat, and Rose closes the door before whispering something to Christopher, who stands quietly next to the car.

“What were you thinking?” she asks, annoyed despite herself at having to drive them around. She speaks to him as though gently rebuking a confidant. “You know Sam isn’t big enough to keep up with you two.”

Christopher fixes her with his striking blue eyes. “It was just an idea,” he whispers back, before he gets into the car. “I thought it would work, but I was wrong. I’m ready to move past it if you are.”

Jonas leaves Shakri in thought before he does so in action. He has suspected he would have to. Maybe from the beginning. He has known he must. It is for her own good.

He stops calling. He avoids places he knows she may be. At first he tells himself that it is only temporary, only until he can get himself sorted out.

He knows he owes her an explanation. He considers calling her, talking to her, giving her the chance to convince him otherwise. Partly he wants to tell her why; partly he also wants to be proved wrong. Partly he is afraid of being proved wrong.

He tells himself it’s only temporary. He has to work through some things. He tells himself they will get back together after he has had some time, after he gets rid of this thing inside that consumes him. He tells himself that it will be safe for her then, that they will be better than ever. But he fears that none of this is true.

In the end, he picks a time he knows she will not be at home, and he calls and leaves her a message. In the message, he explains to her the reasons he does not contact her: that he is protecting her, that it would not do for her to be with someone like him, that it is not safe, that she does not really know him, that she deserves much better, that he is capable of horrendous things.

“What happened to the gazelle?” asks Younis, the wind blowing more gently now, up the mountain behind him. “You know, with the lion, what happened?”

The silence of the night is broken only by the crackling of the fire, the scrape of steel on whetstone, the wind bearing up the slope, and, eventually, by a softly accented voice, almost reluctant to speak.

“Life’s cruel sometimes,” Christopher says. “It was fast, at least. That was the only good in it.”

“Here’s to Kurdistan,” says Hakma, lifting his glass.

“You need a new toast,” says Jonas.

It’s a Wednesday night, and he is back at Wilson’s.

“Never,” says Hakma. “I will toast the motherland until the day I die.”

Wilson’s is empty except for one old guy at the bar, and they sit alone in a booth near the front. The beer looks clear and full, the cold glass in his hand, and he can’t wait to taste it.