Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds

“Who is he?” the priest requested.

“Daniel Murphy. My battle. He got killed in Al Tafar. He died like…” I looked to the wall where the paintings of the saints hung. “It doesn’t matter.” The whole church was dark except for a few spheres of light that welled up from glowing candles and a few dim lamps.

Still, there went Murph, floating down toward that bend in the Tigris, where he passed beneath the shadow of the mound where Jonah was buried, his eyes just cups now for the water that he floated in, the fish having begun to tear his flesh already. I felt an obligation to remember him correctly, because all remembrances are assignations of significance, and no one else would ever know what happened to him, perhaps not even me. I haven’t made any progress, really. When I try to get it right, I can’t. When I try to put it out of my mind, it only comes faster and with more force. No peace. So what. I’ve earned it.

“And what should I pray?” he asked.

I thought of Sterling again. “Fuck ’em,” I said under my breath. I turned back toward the priest. “Thanks, Father. You can pray whatever you want, I guess — whatever you don’t think will be a waste of time.”

I walked outside onto the cobblestone streets looking down at my feet. I am sure people noticed me, as I thought I heard a few gasps while I walked, but I never looked up. It wasn’t in me. My separation was complete.

I walked aimlessly until I saw lamplight falling softly through the red curtains of a building near the outskirts of town. I heard music and women’s voices coming through the thin openings above the windowsill. I hadn’t particularly been looking for this place, but I remembered a cav scout in Al Tafar writing down the address for me on the torn top of a cigarette pack. “Best fucking place in history to get your dick wet. Fucking crucial,” he’d said. Maybe I had intended to come here. I wanted something, something different, but I couldn’t imagine that it would be getting my fucking dick wet. I lit a cigarette and stood in front of the building for several minutes. The rain continued to fall very gently over the city, and I was by this point nearly soaked through. Even the top part of my cigarette was wet and it burned unevenly and I had to take deep draws to keep it going in the rain.

It sounded like I could have a pleasant time inside, but crowds had already started to make me jumpy. If only Murph were here, I thought. But Murph was not there. Never would be. I was alone.

Maybe if things had happened a little differently in Al Tafar it could have been like that. But things happened the way they happened without regard to our desire for them to have happened another way. Despite an age-old instinct to provide an explanation more complex than that, something with a level of profundity and depth which would seem commensurate with the confusion I felt, it really was that simple.

Murph himself had told me that, as we stood over a field of worn and pale bodies scattered in the sun like driftwood. “If it ain’t against the rules, it’s mandatory,” he’d muttered, mostly under his breath. He wasn’t really talking to anyone in particular that day. He wasn’t talking very much at all then, so I listened carefully when he did. I often thought about what he’d meant from that day on and it wasn’t until I stood in front of the house with the light coming through the curtains that I understood. People have always done this, I thought. They looked for a curved road around the plain truth of it: an undetermined future, no destiny, no veined hand reaching into our lives, just what happened and our watching it. Knowing this was not enough, and I struggled to make it meaningful, as they had perhaps done here in Germany many years ago, looking for some pattern in all the strange things that occurred, covering their faces with ashes and pigments from berries they’d gathered from thawed valleys in spring, standing over the bodies of boys or women or old men covered by leaves or grasses ready to be lit beneath the stones that would hold them down in case the fires and the heat and the noise of the burning woke them from their strange sleep.

The door opened while I was distracted by my thoughts. A man walked out and pulled the brim of his hat down tightly around his face. When he saw me, he folded up the collar of his coat so that he appeared to be nothing more than a figure wrapped in fabric briskly walking down the road. The door was left open and I could see inside through the narrow opening. Women laughed and carried drinks around a parlor. A few men sat on pieces of worn furniture, wringing their hands and waiting for the women to bring drinks over to them and sit on their laps. When the women came, the men leaned their heads back and opened their arms wide to receive them. There was loud brass-band music coming from the house, and I followed it inside.

A small makeshift bar was shoved up against the far wall. I sat on one of the stools. Its leather upholstery was cracked and coming off in large swatches. A girl behind the bar spoke to me, but I could not understand her. It was loud inside, and she looked me up and down, and I remained in the seat without responding. Her hair was fine and red and even in the smoky room it seemed to shine with its own light. It looked artificially straightened, falling down not quite vertically on her shoulders, and I imagined smooth curls swinging as she moved. Her skin was pale and freckled, and a deep, purple bruise welled beneath her right eye.

“Whiskey?” I asked. I was alarmed at the softness and timidity of my own voice. It barely made its way through the smoke and music, but she seemed to hear me anyway. She went for a bottle on the top shelf. I shook my head and pointed down. “Lower,” I said. She poured me a glass and I let it warm my throat and bite my stomach in a long swallow before I put it down. She never smiled at me. I watched her move around the room touching the arms of the businessmen and teenagers that drank and waited for their turn with one of the other girls. I guessed that she was off from those duties tonight, maybe because of her black eye or for some other reason.

For a long time I was the only patron at the bar. When she was not pouring me another glass she would lean back against the wall and fold her pale arms across her small breasts. She did not look at me much and when she did and I returned her gaze she would look away very quickly. Her blue eyes were rimmed with red and after a few glasses of whiskey I began to speak to her. “Are you all right?” I asked. I was beginning to slur.

She didn’t answer me. The closest I got was when she would hold the bottle up and furrow her brow to see if I wanted another.

I heard a crash against the wall of the staircase. Coming down the steps, careening from wall to wall, was Sergeant Sterling. I wasn’t really surprised. I couldn’t have been the only Joe who’d heard about the place. He was shirtless and bleeding a little from the side of his mouth, and in his left hand he held a bottle of some clear liquor. The bottle flashed in the smoke and cold yellow light that fell from the naked bulbs swinging from the ceiling. When he saw me he bared his teeth and yelled, “Private Bartle!” I nearly slipped off the worn leather of the barstool. I could hear a few other people making noise upstairs and I saw Sterling as he staggered for a moment, the flash of recognition settling over his drunken face. I said a silent prayer that he would turn around and go back upstairs, but my prayers were futile, all of them, and I knew it. He came down and jerked a stool as close to mine as he could get it and his breathing was deep and ragged. The tattoos on his chest heaved with his breathing and he put his arm around my shoulders and squeezed hard. He was still smiling through his white teeth, and his eyes were wide and bloodshot and blue like the color of dried sprigs of lavender at the centers.