Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds

The bargirl had backed away from him when he came down the stairs, and he let go of me and lurched around the bar. “Not tonight?” he slurred at her. “Huh, bitch? Not tonight?” He grabbed her by the face with his free hand and squeezed and she struggled to get loose and I could see on her cheeks a deep red where he held her. His thumb and fingers made the skin of each opposing cheek sink between her teeth, and she tried to pull away. Tears ran down through the remains of her mascara, but she kept her fine jaw clenched and stood as tall and firmly as she could against the presence of his hands.

“Sergeant Sterling,” I stammered. “Come have a drink with me.” I could see that he heard me — a small twitching began behind his ears and the naked skin on the sides of his head bunched up ever so slightly — but he did not let her go. I pulled the stale air surrounding me deep into my lungs with a long breath and yelled, “Come on, pussy! Drink.”

Before he let her go, he shoved her and her head hit the wall behind the bar and made a loud thump. The plaster cracked a little, and she started to run around the bar, but he caught her by her arm. He squeezed her elbow, forcing her arm straight. “Get back over there.” She was crying softly to herself now and the red marks along her cheeks looked like a sad, painted-on clown smile and her mascara ran in black streaks below her eyes. He sat down next to me and slapped me on the back and grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. “Living the fucking dream, Private,” he bellowed.

The room had long since cleared. Some of the customers had gone upstairs with girls, and others, not wanting to get caught up with a bunch of drunken Americans, had left and walked off into the night. The clock behind the bar read nearly two in the morning.

“This is complete freedom, hero.” He laughed. “God, I love this.”

The warm, astringent smell of the whiskey had begun to clean me out. Sterling sat quietly for a moment before he spoke. I lit a cigarette and the smoke from it hung above our heads in the yellow light. The girl slid her back down the wall and sat on the backs of her calves.

“Hey, you remember the look on his face when that hajji blew herself up at the DFAC?”

“Whose?” I asked.

“Murph’s. C’mon, man. Murph’s.”

“Not really, Sarge. That day was fucked.”

“Shit. That hajji was gone, Private. Poof. Gone.” He put his arms around my neck and squeezed. “Poof. Gone.”

“Yeah.”

“He had a really funny look on his face.”

“I can’t remember.”

“I thought you remembered everything. Like some retarded genius or something.”

I tried to laugh it off. “You’re wasted, Sarge,” I said.

“Yeah. But now you see how shit ends up?”

“Sure. Yeah. Sure I do.”

“I’m in charge.”

I laughed nervously. “I know that.”

“When I’m in charge, things end up OK. When I let people talk me into shit…we are a fucking no-go at this station.”

I tried to change the subject. “What made you think of Murph?”

“Fuck Murph.”

I didn’t say anything.

“We know what happened. That’s all we got.”

He was drunk. I’d never seen him like that: on the edge of losing control, morose and somehow sentimental in his own way. It was like you could feel him about to shake loose from something, I wasn’t sure what from, but I didn’t want to be around when it happened.

He put his finger into my chest and then into his. “We know. Me and you. Like we’re married. Don’t you forget. I’ve fucking got you, Private Bartle. UC motherfucking MJ, anytime I want. You see this?” He took his thumb and held it in my face, pushing his fist firmly and deliberately against my cheek. He then turned his hand and pressed his thumb into the dark lacquered wood of the bar top, grinding it against the surface as if squishing a bug. “That’s where you are. I own you. And AWOL, too? Too fucking easy, Private.”

I’d be out soon. My three-year enlistment was up. I was getting out of the army when we got back stateside. “You won’t do it,” I said. I didn’t really believe it. I knew Sterling was capable of anything. “I can give you up too. You were in charge, remember?”

“Ah,” he grunted. “No one gives a fuck about Murph,” he said. When he reached the fricative in Murph’s name, he began to laugh. I could feel his breath on my lips. As he talked, his eyes flashed a little and the color of them seemed to wash out and deaden. “Everybody else, man, they don’t want to know. If they wanted to, they would, right? It’s not like he’s the only bullshit KIA with bullshit medals and a bullshit story for his mother?” He drained the last of the liquor from his bottle, tipping it up slowly above his head. I watched his Adam’s apple move the clear liquor down his throat. When he finished, he threw the bottle against the wall above the bargirl’s head. It did not shatter. The thick glass held and it made a sharp thwack against the wall and fell.

“We could tell,” I said. “Just get the whole thing over with.”

He laughed. “There you go again, Private. Retarded genius.”

I woke upstairs. I was in a bed, two mattresses on top of each other, really. The paper on the walls was striped yellow and corroded white and peeling. I heard running water from down the hall. I could see the bargirl’s reflection in the dirty mirror through an open door. A few seconds passed before I recognized her. She came out of the bathroom in a dingy pink robe. I saw freckles scattered over her chest, down her arms, down her long pale legs.

“Is he gone?” I asked her.

She took a damp washcloth and pressed it onto my forehead. I felt sick. “Yes,” she said.

“You speak English.”

“Of course I do.”

I couldn’t identify her accent. Tracks on her arms. No saint. Me neither. I saw that the bruise below her eye had deepened. It was now a thick black. I lay back on the bed. “I’m sorry,” I told her. “I should have done something else.”

“You tried. That’s something.”

“Will you…,” I began. I didn’t know what I wanted from her.

She cut me off. “Are you serious?” A very sad look came over her face and her bottom lip began to tremble slightly and she slapped me.

“No. Not that,” I said, although a part of me did want to, to have control over something, even if it was for just two minutes. But I disgusted myself. I thought of the Joe who’d given me the address. He had probably done it, and he was probably dead. I imagined his body collapsing in on itself, the flesh rotting and then gone, the skin on his lips cracked until only dust remained in a thin veneer over his skull. I pushed her hands up to my withers. I moved them back and forth against the very short hair on the side of my head. I doubled over and grabbed an old metal trash can next to the bed and threw up into it. She rubbed my back. She kneeled at the foot of the bed and I sat up.

“You are all so sad,” she said.

I noticed an odd chirping outside the bedroom windows and I saw a few starlings flit by in the pale light of the streetlamps. They flew in circles, or else there were many of them, and the whole group passed in and out of the light on their way to settle on a rooftop, or on some tree that asked to have its branches filled, at least until its leaves and flowers blossomed, until winter was as far away as it could be. We stayed like that awhile. I finally let go of her thin waist and looked at her. “Is everyone gone?” I asked.

She nodded.

“I’ll go back downstairs and sleep there if that’s OK.”

“Yes, fine.”

I was still quite drunk and my head was foggy. I went behind the bar and found a whiskey bottle. I sat on the floor and looked out the window and drank the rest of the whiskey. The sun came up over a small canal across the street. I was very tired, looking out over the narrow band of water, wondering if it was cold.