The Things a Brother Knows (23 page)

“Oh Jesus. That’s not where we’re headed? To the A Million Strong for America rally?”

“No. That’s not where we’re headed.”

“Where are we going?”

“Your brother didn’t tell you?”

“He doesn’t tell me much of anything.”

Just then Bo comes back outside.

“So where are we headed?” I ask him.

He throws an extra tall can of beer to Jack, who catches it in one leather-gloved hand.

“We’re meeting up with some people.”

“But not a million people?”

“I’d doubt that.”

“We’re not going to a rally to support the troops?”

“No, Levi. We’re not.”

“So? Where to? And you’d better tell me, because I have to go on ahead, but I’ll catch up with you wherever it is you’re going. I’ve come all this way—all this way, Boaz—and I think I’ve earned the right to know, finally, where it is you’re going.”

He looks at me, and just as I start to think this is it, that he’ll give me one of those blank stares and say nothing at all, he says, “The Vietnam Memorial. At sundown.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I’ll meet you there. You can count on that.”

And I begin to run.

It takes me at least a mile before I remember I’ve got Zim’s board tied to the outside of my pack. I grab it and I ride it a few blocks, but that doesn’t feel right. It feels like a cheat. And anyway, I’m a fast runner. I think I can make better time on foot.

So I run.

Having no hair left is working in my favor. It’s not falling in my face or hanging heavy on my neck. I’m lighter, sleeker, faster.

I don’t need a map. I’ve been looking at maps long enough to know my way. The closer I get to the Mall, the closer everything around me looks to the Washington, DC, of my imagination. I take it all in, despite the sweat pouring down my face and into my eyes. It’s muggy. And hot. But I don’t slow down. I keep pace. I have everything on my back, it’s weighing me down, but I run and I keep time.

I’m in the final stretch of the 10k.

It’s a sprint now. Not a marathon.

I run down Fourteenth Street until it dumps me into the Mall. I turn to my left and I continue to run. I’m coming up on the Museum of American History, and there, just like I’d planned for hours earlier, sit Mom and Abba and Dov and Christina and Pearl and Zim, waiting. Gathered in a circle on the grass.

And as I get closer I see they’re not alone.

Two other people fill out this circle. Paul Bucknell and Celine. I’d told her about the rally but I didn’t expect she’d show up. But then again, Celine is the unexpected. My unexpected. She’s huddled with Pearl and Zim and this makes me burst into a big goofy grin and here I am, approaching all the people in the world who matter most to me, and I call out, “Hey! Hey, everyone!”

I get closer and they look up at me but nobody makes a move. They’re looking at me like they don’t even know me. And then Mom screams out, “Levi?” and she scrambles to her
feet and she’s coming at me with Abba right behind her. It’s then I remember my hair. Mom throws her arms around me and squeezes me and she says into my neck, “For a minute I thought you were Boaz.”

“No, Mom,” I say. “It’s me.”

And she’s crying now. And she’s squeezing me. And Abba is holding on too.

“I’m glad, baby,” she says. “I’m so, so glad it’s you.”

T
HE RALLY ENDED HOURS AGO
. Several hundred people packed up their several hundred flags and left.

We sit outside the Museum of American History on the Mall, littered with blue and red flyers, used-up water bottles and hot dog wrappers. A lonely worker in a green vest stabs the trash on a stick and shoves it into the large bag he drags slowly behind him.

I think maybe there’s nowhere that feels emptier than a place still showing the signs of people who’ve already moved along.

I say what I can about the trip. I say what I can about Bo. I fill in what blanks I’m able, but still, there’s plenty of blank space left.

Mostly, I sit in the grass and soak up what it feels like to be with my family again. To sit with Zim and Pearl. To look at Christina and think that yes, she’s beautiful, but not as beautiful as Celine in her bare feet.

I lean over and whisper in her ear, “Thank you for being here.”

Her smile is six miles wide.

I tell everyone that we’ll see Bo later. At the Vietnam Memorial. I tell them that he’s come all this way for tonight, though I also know that the old fortune cookie wisdom of the journey being the destination probably bears some truth here too.

I lean back and close my eyes to the fading sun. I sit up again and look around at the Mall and all the glorious buildings. I watch the lonely man in the green vest. He’s hardly made a dent in all that trash.

I get up from the circle and I start to help him. Everyone follows. We all gather up those flyers and water bottles and hot dog wrappers because it’s easier to do something than it is to sit around waiting for sundown to come.

We finally leave our patch of grass in search of food and discover a restaurant, where Abba orders a special bottle of wine. We toast Bo and Mitch and every man and woman who, for whatever personal reason, chooses to leave everything behind and put on the uniform of his or her country.

We walk to the Vietnam Memorial and by the time we get there it’s already dark. We come upon a crowd gathered around a small stage. A birdlike woman with long gray braids stands under a weak lamp reading from a sheet of paper.

I look for Bo but it’s hard to see anybody by this light and the people are packed in pretty tightly, so we just find a place at the edges, and we huddle together, and we listen.

She’s reading from a long list of names.

When she gets to the end she folds up her list, but before she leaves the stage she leans in close to the microphone.

“And finally, James Eric Stanton, Jr. My only son. The kindest person I ever knew, and judging from how he kept his bedroom, the world’s biggest slob.”

She takes something from her pocket—too small to see from where I stand—and she kisses it and tapes it to the wall.

A college student follows her onstage, arms full of flowers. She reads a list of names and then talks about what they’re doing on campus to raise awareness about the war.

This isn’t a rally.

This is a protest. These people are gathered here to name the dead. They’re reading a list of all the lives lost.

There’s no flag in that shoe box he’d planned on waving with a million strong. He’s come all this way to
protest
. He’s
anti
.

Or is he?

Maybe he’s come all this way to disrupt this protest. And he’s got something with him to cause a disturbance, because he’s not anti, he’s
pro
.

Or.

Or maybe it’s not a matter of one side or the other. It’s not about
anti
or
pro
.

It’s just about Boaz.

Maybe I should just stand back and listen.

Three more people take the stage to read names. Some leave notes taped to the wall. Some leave behind other objects.

The names pile up. One after the other after the other after the other.

As the next reader leaves the stage there’s a pause, then some sort of commotion. Jack is trying to get up to take the microphone, but the stage doesn’t have a ramp, so Bo and some other guys lift him to the platform in his chair.

Jack begins to tell the story I heard from Bo about riding in the Humvee and the IED, and it was hard enough to listen to this story the first time, when Bo told it, but hearing it again from Jack, from the one who found himself lying three feet from his legs, hell, that’s even harder.

He reads the names of the marines who died that day, his brothers, he calls them, and he talks about how lucky he is to be here this night.

After they lift Jack down from the stage, Bo approaches the microphone and clears his throat. He has the box in his hands and he puts it on the podium in front of him.

He doesn’t open it. He doesn’t look at it. He’s looking out into the crowd, but it’s impossible to tell if he’s looking at us. I don’t even know if he can see that we’re here.

“We were on checkpoint duty,” he says. “This van comes barreling along. Too fast. A little reckless. So we fired some warning shots. You know, trying to get the van to slow down, but it doesn’t. It’s just flying. Only two weeks prior three soldiers were killed by a suicide bomb at a different checkpoint not too far away from where we were, so we knew not to take any chances, we’d been told not to take any chances and anyway, who wants to take chances?

“So there’s this moment, this
what do we do
moment, but
the thing is, it’s not really a moment, it’s a collection of seconds and there isn’t even any time to think it through because the van isn’t slowing, so we do what we know we have to do, and we open fire.

“The van goes skidding off the road and flips over. And we go running at it, guns drawn. There’s blood. Lots of it. And there’s bodies. Everyone’s screaming. It’s total chaos.

“People are stumbling out of the wreckage. They’re kids. Well, not little kids. But kids, you know, teenagers. And one guy gets right up in my face and he’s covered in blood, it’s all over his chest, it looks bad, and I know he should be lying down but he’s screaming, just screaming, the same phrase, over and over, right in my face, and of course, I have no idea what he’s saying.

“I’m screaming for an interpreter. I can’t even remember if we’ve got one with us. Some of our guys are screaming that we need to take this kid down. He could have a gun, he could be strapped, he could blow himself up, but I’m thinking if he had those kinds of plans, I’d be dead by now.

“He’s that close.

“He keeps screaming, the same thing over and over, and the guys in my unit are screaming at me
Take him down
and I’m yelling back at this kid:
I don’t understand you
. But my screaming is just as useless as his, and I’m thinking about how fucking lousy I’ve always been with languages, but worse than that, I’m lazy. All this time in this place and I can barely say
hello
.

“Finally our interpreter runs up. Now I’m screaming at
the interpreter.
What’s he saying? What’s he saying? Tell him if he doesn’t calm down and shut up he’s going to get himself shot
.

“This poor guy’s covered in sweat. He’s a sweater anyway, but he just turns to liquid under pressure. He’s talking a mile a minute to this kid, but the kid just keeps repeating the same thing, and he’s clutching his bloody chest, and whatever our interpreter is saying to him just makes him repeat himself faster and faster.

“
What the fuck is he saying?
I scream.

“Finally the interpreter turns to me. He wipes the sweat from his face.

“
He’s
asking you to kill him
, he says.
He wants you to shoot him
.

“The minute this kid sees that I know what he’s been saying, that I understand him, he stops and he looks at me. He says it again slowly. He pulls his hands away from his chest. He’s not bleeding at all. He’s clutching a shirt that’s soaked in blood. He holds this shirt out to me and says something else.

“
My brother
, he says.
My brother is dead
.

“And again he asks me to kill him. One more time before he falls to his knees and sobs. And I get it. I do. Because I have a brother too.”

I think I’ve forgotten to breathe for the entire time he’s been talking.

Bo looks up and out into the dark, and he’s still under that one light, it’s shining right on him, into his eyes, but I’m pretty sure he sees me out here. That it’s me he’s looking toward.

And if it were just the two of us tonight, and if we were alone, and if he could hear my voice across this distance, I’d tell him that what he did at that checkpoint was heroic. He saved the life of that older brother. Anyone else might have given in to the panic, with everyone shouting to take him down, because he could have had a bomb, he could have been strapped. But Bo didn’t do it. He didn’t shoot him. He didn’t kill him.

You didn’t do it, Boaz. You saved that brother’s life. You are a hero
.

Bo takes the lid off his box and places it to the side. He reaches in and he pulls out a piece of paper.

“So the thing is,” he says, “I don’t know if it was me or not. It could have been, or maybe it was the guy standing next to me, or the guy on the other side of him. I don’t know. I can’t know. But I figure there’s a pretty good chance I killed this guy’s little brother or either of the other two kids in that van.”

He unfolds the paper in his hand.

“So I’ve got some names I want to add to this list tonight. Three names.”

He begins to read.

“Jassim Hassad, age sixteen. Tareq Majid, age sixteen. And Bashir Amar, age fifteen, brother of Wadhar Amar.”

He reaches into the box and he pulls out a folded piece of fabric. It’s not a flag, though for the briefest second I think that’s what it is because I see a flash of white. But that white is just the small part of the shirt that isn’t stained in the dark brown of blood that dried up months ago.

He takes the shirt and he places it next to the bouquet of
flowers left by the college student, as delicately as if it were made of sand.

He steps off the stage and someone else takes the podium. The evening’s next reader of names. He walks through the crowd. It parts to let him pass.

He walks in a direct line right to where we stand waiting.

What follows are all the sorts of things you might expect at a moment like this. Long embraces. Some tears. Something like that night he slipped through our front door, unnoticed.

And then comes the pleading. Mom. Abba. Dov. Christina, even.

Come home. Boaz. Please
.

“I will,” he says.

“So let’s go,” Abba says. “Right now. I’ve brought the car.”

Abba: forever the man of the practical solutions.

“I will,” he says again. “But first I need to take Jack back to the hospital. And—”

“We’ll give you both a ride.”