The Five (9 page)

Then what might be a flash of lightning or a camera’s flash pops, and as a drum beats and guitar chords start growling, the scene changes to a herky-jerky handheld camera and what could be five or six or seven soldiers in full battle-rattle are advancing down a street between broken concrete walls. The color is washed-out, grimy, the sick pale yellow of Iraq. But it’s not Iraq, and these fools aren’t soldiers, because Jeremy instantly sees that some of them are wearing imitation desert pattern MARPAT camo and others are wearing imitation desert pattern ARPAT camo. So they’re stupid fucking actors with pretend gear, and they’re not any good anyway because they don’t move with the caution of knowing your head could be blown off at any second, they’re all twisting around and looking every fucking whichaway, a picture of chaos instead of control. Meat for Mookie, Jeremy thinks. Come right on down the street like that, old ladies, and get your asses handed to you.

The scene jumps to a band set up in the street: long-haired punk playing lead guitar, bass player with tattooed arms, skinhead fucker with glasses playing a piano or something on metal legs, hippie chick with reddish-blonde ringlets working a white guitar and another chick with short-cut curly black hair pounding the shit out of a drum kit, the cymbals flashing in the sun. Then it goes up close to the punk’s face, right up in his angry baby blues, and he sings like a half-drunk black man whose throat has been worked over with a razor:

“
I was walking on a street under a burning sun,

Put my visor down, thumbed the safety off my gun.

Heard a rumble, might be thunder in the sky,

Might be cannons or an F-18 fly-by.
”

Visor
, Jeremy thinks. His lip curls. Guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Now intercut with the singer’s face and glimpses of the band are scenes of a house and some young dude’s father showing him an old picture of a soldier, and in the background an American flag is flying from the front porch.

Then the punk goes again:

“
I was raised to think my blood’s red, white and blue.

I was raised to do what I was told to do.

Somehow in all that time I never did ask why,

It’s the young men like me who go to kill and die.
”

Yeah, well, shit
, Jeremy thinks.
Get a clue
. He believes he needs to sit down, his knees are weak and his stomach feels like it’s got fish swimming in it.

With an explosion of drums, bass and guitar that sounds like a freight train crashing through a building, the scene goes to the face of one of the soldiers on the street and Jeremy sees it’s the kid from the house, and now the herky-jerky shit goes wild because ragheads are shooting from windows and smoke curls up and the supposed soldiers run into another building except for one who goes down on his belly and jerks his legs like he’s hit, and the singer goes:

“
When the storm breaks and the rain falls down,

And the mighty laugh with a hollow sound,

We got money for oil, you got battles to fight,

And the heroes come home in the dead of the night.
”

Jeremy realizes the chair is empty. As he sinks into it, he is aware that the disturbed air around him smells like the hospital.

He doesn’t know a whole lot about music, but this isn’t bad. It’s got a strong beat. It sounds muscular and hard-assed. The guitars sound like bands of sharp steel flying through the air. There’s a firefight going on between the buildings, and then there’s a blast of flame and tendrils of black smoke whirl up and that, right there, looks pretty real. Then another of the good guys gets shot and claws at his throat and Jeremy leans forward because the shadows in this part are dark.

Everything stops but the drums, and over their thud and rumble the punk growls:

“
This was somebody’s child, this was somebody’s dream,

I hope they bury it where the grass is green.
”

And a second time, while the drums speak:

“
This was somebody’s child, this was somebody’s dream,

I hope they bury it where the grass is green.
”

The music swells again, the bass and the guitars come up and so does a trembly organ part that is half tough snarl and half sad murmur. The young guy who’s the hero of the video has somehow lost his helmet, he’s got blood on the side of his face, and around him lie the bodies of his brothers. And then the singer goes:

“
I’m not saying this world will ever get along,

Not saying everything is right when it’s so wrong,

But I do believe that war makes some men rich,

And too many of them love that wicked bitch,

When the storm breaks, and the rain falls down…
”

And now the young dude has lost it and broken cover, and wild-eyed he crosses the street alone and kicks in a door and nobody’s in there except a figure on the rubbled floor who looks up at him, and the camera shows that it’s an Iraqi kid maybe twelve or thirteen years old, who lifts his arms and crouches against the wall as the soldier raises his rifle and takes aim.

“
We got money for oil,

You got battles to fight,

And the heroes come home in the dead of the night
.”

The camera backs out of the room and the soldier staggers from the doorway with an expression of shock on his dust-white, blood-streaked face, and he throws his rifle down and begins to run along the street in the direction he came from.

“
This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,

When the storm breaks,

This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,

When the storm, when the storm, storm breaks,

This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream,

When the storm, when the storm, storm breaks, yeah when it breaks,

This was someone’s child, this was someone’s dream…
”

And then the music stops and the punk’s face fills the screen and he sings, in his husky razor-burned voice: “
I hope they bury it where the grass is green
.”

Fade-in to what Jeremy realizes now is the Felix Gogo Show. He’s seen this a few times, has seen Felix Gogo up on the billboards. Felix Gogo is standing with the band—The Five, is that what they call themselves?—in a room of bright light and black shadows, and behind them on the wall is an American flag. He says they’re going to play at the Curtain Club in Dallas on Saturday night. As Gogo asks them questions, their names come up underneath their faces.
Mike Davis
talks about his tattoos, and then the camera briefly shows
Berke Bonnevey
but she doesn’t say anything, and
Ariel Collier
starts answering a question about how long she’s been a musician, and suddenly the screen breaks apart into multicolored squares like the cable’s about to go out, but the audio’s still going and through a hiss of digital distress he hears the hippie chick say, “I wanted to be a musician so I can tell the truth.”

“What truth?” Gogo asks, a distorted shape on the tormented screen.

“Like this,” she answers, and there’s a weird echo:
this…this…this
. “The truth about murder,” she says, her image washed-out in a mosaic of pallid green squares.

Then the screen comes back like it ought to be, everything’s fine, and Jeremy sees that
Terry Spitzenham
is speaking but now the audio is down and nothing is coming from his mouth. The screen ripples and breaks apart again, goes completely to black. The audio lets loose a burst of static and then picks up and the guy is saying, “…what this war’s about is training killers, just a training ground for murder. You know how many kids have been killed by our so-called heroes?”

“Don’t go there,” Jeremy says numbly, to the black screen. “Don’t you go there.”

“Ashamed,” says another voice, crackling with static. “They should all be ashamed, and they all deserve to suffer.”

The picture reappears but everything is gray and ghostly, and the ghostly image of Felix Gogo says in a voice that sounds high-pitched and indignant, “So you want to make people believe our soldiers are shooting kids over there? That for everything they’ve done for this country, every sacrifice they’ve made, you’re making them out to be child-killers?”

Another spirit image flickers in the gloom. Suddenly the picture clears and the singing punk is standing there with a fake smile on his face, and underneath it is the name
Nomad
—what kind of fucking name is
that
, anyway?—and he says, very clearly, “We’re working on it.”

“Well, good luck with that,” Felix Gogo replies, and the way he’s said it makes Jeremy know that if Felix had a gun he might have shot that long-haired, smirking bastard on the spot.

Jeremy loses the rest of it, because he’s seen all he wants to see yet he does not have the strength to turn the set off. Where’s the remote, anyway? In the kitchen, or the bathroom? A wave of weary sickness washes over him; he smells his own blood, leaking from the blade-cut on his wrist, dripping into a dark circle on the tan carpet. Now
that
, he thinks, is going to be one bitch to explain to Mr. Salazar.

Wait a minute, he tells himself. Hold on. I’m leaving tonight. Going back in there and finishing what I started.

Yet he does not get up. Nor does he even try.

It occurs to him, somewhere far back in his brain like a distant voice shouting for him to put it in gear and
move
, that he ought to get this wound bound up while he can still walk.

This is a weird world, he thinks. When you try to climb up a ladder, it breaks underneath you; but when you decide to jump off a cliff, a hook comes out of nowhere and grabs your miserable ass.

He doesn’t fully understand this song and video, or why the death angel wanted him to see it. Death angel?
Whose
death? His, or…

He thinks the song was about rich men who never go to war making money off war, or maybe even starting wars to make money.
Duh
. Who didn’t already know that? And nobody cared, even if they did know it. It was how the world worked, and so what? Like, maybe, it was news back in the days of the Civil War or ancient history. Yeah, and like that
band
wasn’t trying to make some money off the war, too? Make me laugh.

But that crap about the storm breaking, and somebody’s child and burying it and everything. Maybe that was talking about what was going to happen when the soldiers came home, and started thinking about…what? Doing the jobs we were trained to do?

Jeremy can feel the sweat rising from him like a hot mist. He feels sick to his stomach, he knows he’s going to have to puke here real soon, and it is going to be an effort to get to the bathroom before his own storm breaks.

You know how many kids have been killed by our so-called heroes?

“What do you know about it?” he asks the TV screen, which by now has gone into another segment in which Felix Gogo is behind his desk in the studio, chatting up some huge-boobed Hispanic actress who sits on a red sofa shaped like a pair of lips.

The thing is, the video didn’t actually show the soldier shoot the boy. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. All Jeremy knows is that every block was a battleground. Especially in Fallujah, after the Blackwater dudes got waxed. If Jeremy had been the soldier in that video, he would’ve shot the boy. Damn straight. You shoot at me, I take you down. Then again…where was the boy’s weapon? Maybe he’d just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happened. A casualty of the mission, no big whoop. You just put your head down and kept going.

So you want to make people believe our soldiers are shooting kids over there? That for everything they’ve done for this country, every sacrifice they’ve made, you’re making them out to be child-killers?

We’re working on it
, that punk had said.

Jeremy lowers his head and closes his eyes, very tightly. An old rage has begun to awaken, and he thinks that if he had those lying scummy pieces of shit right here, he would wax them all, one after the fucking other. Just to shut their lying mouths.

And someone standing behind his right shoulder leans forward and says, in a bitter whisper that conveys both sarcasm and challenge,
Are you my pet?

Jeremy’s head comes up and he looks around, but no one else is there. It was what his old Gunnery Sergeant used to say to him, when Jeremy’s lungs heaved from miles of uphill running, or when he was crawling through the mud in full gear, or doing the endless pushups, or whatever else the Gunny threw at him.
Are you my pet?
Translation: guy with a pussy last name ain’t gone be no pussy, not in
this
man’s Corps.

He can’t wait any longer. He hauls himself up, staggers, crabs sideways, collides with the TV, gets his knees turned the way he wants to go, and starts for the bathroom. The hallway becomes the twisting corridor of a carnival funhouse he thinks he remembers going to as a kid, but this is no fun. Another collision, this time with the wall, and then he gets into the bathroom and falls to his knees in time to throw up about eighty percent of his troubled freight into the toilet, the other twenty percent going onto the floor.