Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

I’ve been holding off on Marly, saving her for as long as possible, but Marly never was one to be held off, even in memory, and I can no longer neglect her presence, her glorious body: thin, tan, her rounded chest, her impossibly blond hair. She was twenty-two I think, seven years older than me, and I counted her as my friend. Her and Doug the Reaper rented the little falling-down house on the rear of my father’s land, and she spent a lot of time that year in our house, especially when my aunt, who was supposed to be my caretaker, was gone to Stillwater to see her friends. Marly was quiet and beautiful wafting around the rooms of our house. People said she’d run around on Doug during the first seven months of our fathers’ deployment, before Doug came back to do his three-fold job in town, and it seems possible, just because she was always so supremely bored, but I don’t like to believe it. Douglas Reeter was the only one of the men allowed to come back before their tour was done.

Finally all the boys were back in, splayed out in the bleachers, and we were listening to Brother Reeter, having finished his pep talk, settle in to one of his stories.

•

Pat Lincoln, John Hedis, and Peter Powers are walking alongside the Humvee, which rolls along in the caravan across the dirt road out in the desert. Along one side of the road is a kind of olive orchard, the men think. The trees are not much taller than they are, and scraggly. Along the other side of the road stretches an open, undulating green field. You can never tell what Iraq is going to look like, the men think. Sometimes it looks like this, sometimes something else entirely. Hard to know which is the real country. It is very hot. This is the road that runs behind the orchard of olive trees; on the other side, somewhere through the trees, is the main, paved road that the coalition supply caravans keep getting attacked on. The insurgents are using the olive orchard as cover, the officers think. So now the men are pushing along the back road, trying to flush the insurgents out.

Are there shadows between the layers of slender trunks? Does the sandy soil shift in the breeze, as the loose end of a scarf masking a face would shift? A stray goat idles in the roadside ditch. Scott Holdeman, who is all of eighteen years old, is up in the vehicle’s turret, slowly swiveling the machine gun back and forth. Doug Reeter is driving the Humvee behind them, watching. His windshield is like a video screen when the explosion goes off. The spray of dirt against the thick glass is unexpectedly gentle in the space after the great sundering, like rain against a house’s window.

Then they are all out of the vehicles, someone is shouting IED, IED, half of the men are flat on their stomachs taking cover in the ditch, which is now a chaotic landscape of dirt. Is anyone down, is anyone down, someone screams. Reeter is out of the vehicle now, staring at the road in front of them. The road is gone, just a big crater, but placed in it, spanning it actually, like a toy car some giant child has put there, is the Humvee, and the men who were in it are tumbling out, coughing but OK. Reeter, along with everyone else, looks wildly around for the men who were walking alongside it. John Hedis and Peter Powers have fallen together, their limbs tangled, into the opposite ditch, which they are crawling out of, stunned, maybe concussed, but whole. Reeter looks again at the crater. People start screaming Pat Lincoln’s name.

They can’t find him. They don’t see him. The thought is there in the back of everyone’s minds; they’ve heard about the larger IEDs, guys on patrol being partially or wholly vaporized by the force, especially if they were the ones who triggered it. Then a figure appears across the field, three hundred yards (swear to god) away, and the men on the road almost open fire.

“Fuck, no, shit that’s him, that’s him,” someone yells, waving his arms. The figure staggers, but waves back. There’s no helmet but they can make out the uniform. He starts to jog toward them in the thick soil, and they can see it is him, it is Pat Lincoln, unharmed. The men stand there, stilled on the road, and stare in amazement. Just at that moment there is a heavy, loud, close, wet sound, and they all fall down again in panic, only to realize that the wild goat’s head, apparently airborne this entire time, has landed on the hood of the stalled vehicle.

Brother Reeter sat back on the bleacher plank, as if in disbelief at his own story.

“I mean, can you imagine the trajectory?” he said, reverently, and it was unclear whether he meant the goat’s head or Pat Lincoln’s flying body.

•

Later the next day, Samuel Lincoln sat up on my bed to go. We were there in our underwear, my upper-floor bedroom dry and hot in the afternoon sun, the window open, blinds lazily bowing in the occasional puffs of breeze. Samuel was a sweet boy then; he always carefully took off my braces and blew for a long time on the red marks they left, his breath cool on my skin. He liked kissing the freckle that sat catty-corner to my bellybutton before he kissed anything else, and I generally let him do what he wanted after that, my palm prickling warm against the muscles of his tan back as he moved above me.

We’d been done for a while, not speaking, just lying there together before we’d have to go to get back to our cabins at the camp. This was Saturday afternoon, which we had free from Bible study, and which most of us used to go home and see our families. That morning Douglas Reeter, Casualty Affairs Officer, had visited the Powers household, and Gary (Peter Powers’ son) wasn’t in morning worship, and so we’d all come to know that his dad had become the sixth man from New Jerusalem, Kansas to be killed in Iraq. I was thinking about Doug Reeter, Doug the Reaper, wondering what it was he said to Gary’s mother.

“Listen,” Samuel said, not looking at me. He sounded unsure, so I stayed quiet. “You know the well-marker shack, out in the third field over, behind the Dust Bowl?”

“Listen,” he said, looking at me now, having decided something. “You got a watch and a flashlight?”

As he climbed out of my window and crab-crawled across the roof of the porch before dropping down into the sideyard, I leaned against the sill. Standing there I saw Marly in her front yard, beside the fluttering white shapes of her wash hung out to dry. She was watching me, one hand on her hip, the other shielding her eyes.

•

I still have the tapes, of course. Though I’ve only watched them once since I made them, on a rainy spring afternoon a couple years ago after I found out Hilton Hedis had been killed in an accident at the grain elevator. I was missing those boys, then, and I realized I didn’t have any pictures of them, only the tapes.

What is not on that first miniature videotape: the faces of the boys, barely legible in the dark of the shack. It was not a big space, that shack, and they were arranged around the squared U-shape of the well-pipe coming out of the ground. Also not on the tape: the long walk out there: the cool air and imperfect dark of one forty-five in the morning; the cabins asleep behind me; only the small plastic and metal sound of my gait, the seething of the cicadas, the fog drifting between the trees, out of the crops.

In the shack, P.J. Holdeman shoved the video camera at me and I took it and looked up at them. Samuel nodded and watched me, seeing what I would do. The other boys met my gaze, then looked away.

What is on the tape: the image jolts on and we are outside the shack, the camera’s night vision picking up the ambient glow of the night sky. There is the sound of a struggle as Truman Renolds and Ralph Simonsen materialize out of the stalks of the field, dragging a hooded figure between them that I know is Gary Powers.