Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds

I hit the ground without thinking and covered my head with my hands, opened my mouth and crossed my ankles over each other. Count the heartbeats. Still there. Small pieces of metal flew over my head with each deep concussive impact, moving with a speed and sound that seemed beyond all governance. Take a breath. Then another. Getting harder now. Focus.

I gave up, surrendered, whatever, I was gone. My muscles became marionetted by nerve ending and memory. “Murph!” I heard the sound of my own voice, disembodied, arching into and out of the dust and smoke. “Murph!” No answer. The voice of my drill sergeant entered my mind, dominated each and every synapse as it fired inside my as yet unpunctured brain. Get small, Private. If your dumb ass wants to live, you get so fucking small you can take cover under your K-pot.

I didn’t count the mortars. All measures of time and increment were discarded like childish superstitions. Crump. Crump. Crump. The earth shook and the vibrations ran up the heels of my palms where my hands, now bloodied, desperately tried to push the dry earth into a ridge in front of my face. They flowed up to my elbows and shook the buttons of my blouse, which dug like rivets into the ground. Get small, Private. You fucking get small and stay small.

There was a lull, brief and intangible like a small circle of sunlight falling absently through clouds. A deep constriction occurred in my chest, under my breastbone, as if my ribs had turned into fingers clutched in an arthritic fist. I was still prostrate on the ground. My face and body had plowed a small plot in which I lay. Dirt in my mouth ground against my teeth, coating my tongue with a thin particulate film. It was in my nose too. Each breath was thick and structural and I felt for a moment like I was falling, like falling into wakefulness after dreaming your fingers have slipped from their last nocturnal handhold.

I listened for an all clear but heard nothing. This is my life again, I thought. Fuck it, I’m not going to die in a grave dug by my own bleeding hands. I got up and as I rose to my knees the mortars began to fall again, though not so close as before. An adjustment of fire. No one was around to call out direction or distance, so I ran. I was afraid. My eyes welled with tears, and I wet my pants and though there was no need I shouted “I’m up” and took off on limbs of unset jelly. “I’m moving,” I screamed, sobbing with each step, and, “I’m down,” I said, out of breath and fallen into the womb of a low ditch running with dirty foul water that would not wash out for weeks. Only my nose and eyes were above the level of the water. A flock of babblers scattered in the distance, and the crumpling noise dissipated, fading with the mortars as they were walked away from my position. I heard the fragments tearing through the air again, hard and fast but not as close. I stayed in the shit water until I was sure that none had fallen for a little while. Gray smoke settled down into my fetid ditch. Fuck. I breathed. I made it.

I looked around and tried to figure out exactly where I’d ended up. The sewage ditch ran through the center of the base, below the hill where the chapel and the medics’ station sat, just below another small rise where the colonel allowed the hajjis to set up little shops in a strip of abandoned buildings from before the war. The little shops that everyone on the FOB called the hajji mall must have been the mortars’ intended target. It seemed they’d caught the brunt of the barrage. On the knoll above me, the hajjis arranged themselves supplicant, clutching at their wooden prayer beads. A chorus of grim wails began. Their little storefront hovels were on the brink of destruction, fires ablaze here and there, and parts of cheap knockoff watches had been scattered in the open spaces around the bazaar. Their bent and broken faces counted time without standard. Coils and springs, the bright silver and gold of counterfeit metal, were all sown errantly about, which made the freshly pocked earth glitter in the sun just so.

Like the dust, the smoke from the last of these mortars dissipated and floated away toward sparse clouds roughly brushstroked against the pale blue sky. A siren blared, warning of the already fallen mortars. I crawled out of the ditch and began to move toward the little burned bazaar, my boots sloshing with stale wetness.

In an open courtyard medics treated the wounded. A shopkeeper was lying in the dust, blood pulsing from his neck, black and jugular. His black eyes widened and then shut tightly. His feet kicked out wildly. Worn brown sandals conducted themselves through the dust, back and forth, leaving abstract markings on the ground like the hands of an obscene clock. The medics held his neck and applied pressure to the wound, unable to stop the bleeding until his body was spent of its supply and he wrenched one last time, the surface of his body now settling in the dust. He was surrounded by his fellow itinerant merchants, who shooed away the medics and lifted him onto their shoulders, his blood soaking their white shifts and the tails of their headdresses. One fetched a piece of plywood and laid it out on an inert fountain centered in the courtyard of their bazaar. They rested his body on the fountain and began an otherworldly recitation. The artillery pieces near the chapel began to buck and jump. Each pull of the lanyard sent shells screaming out toward the city. The ground was stained rust brown where the man died. The last tremors of his legs and arms left a strange impression in the earth. I got down on one knee for a closer look, but turned away, fighting convulsions of dry heaves and bile. The image burned into my mind like a landscape altered by erosive weather. Even as I walked away, I saw it, a perfect bloody angel made of dust.

I made my way uneasily toward the chapel. Its steeple had collapsed. The small wooden cross was broken and speared the earth near a clump of tamarisk trees. The girl was there, the medic, about where I expected her to be, lying on the ground next to the chapel, her hair blowing in small wisps behind her, in and out of the dust in a manner both fantastic and actual. Her eyes were half-lidded. The uniformed backs of two boys blanketed her in the performance of some ancient pantomime, a silent and shuffling attempt at recuperation.

One of them looked up at me when I reached them. “I think she’s dead,” he said. The other one turned around. It was Murph, sitting on his knees with his hands resting on his thighs, gape-jawed at the sight of her. “I just got here yesterday,” the other one said. Murph was silent. He didn’t move. “I didn’t know what to do,” the boy said, weeping now, and then shouting, “Where were the fucking medics?!” I reached over to him and grabbed him by the shoulders, standing him up.

“Come on, buddy,” I said. “We’ve got to get her moved.”

Two of the chapel’s warped and battered planks had fallen on her and we reached over to pick them up. The force of the blast had torn her shirt open and a deep wound in her side had already ceased bleeding. Her skin was a pale gray. Dead gray. We repositioned her shirt to cover her and laid out three planks parallel and placed her on them.

I tied off the planks with some rope and lifted her up. “Murph,” I said. “Come on, give us a hand.” The new private grabbed the back end near her feet while Murph curled up helplessly in the still-smoldering ruins of the chapel, muttering to himself, over and over again, “What just happened.” As we walked her up the hill, his litany faded from our ears. The new boy and I walked the dead girl’s body up to the medics’ station.

We walked her past a copse of alder and willow that bowed in the heat of the small fires burning nearby, their old branches lamenting her, laid out as she was on that makeshift litter. Our hands began to cramp with each passing step, each taken with whatever reverence we could muster, clutching at the edges of the boards. Thin splinters roughed the flats of our palms as we walked. Listing in concert with our deliberate footsteps, the gentle curves of her body swayed beneath her torn clothes. The boards creaked. A small number of boys out on a head count stopped and turned toward us. A pale review as her body ascended the gently sloping hill, fringed by the bleached and spotted patterns of their uniforms. We conducted her pall in earnest up the remainder of the hill. At the top, we lowered her to the ground and set her under a tree on the tied-together boards, her body now translucent and blue-tinted. One of the soldiers alerted the medics and we watched them as they came to her. Her friends grabbed her and enveloped her in hugs and kisses. She rolled absently in their loving arms and they cried out beneath the setting sun. I held my hands to the back of my skull. As I walked away, the muezzin call began. The sun set like a clot of blood on the horizon. A small fire had spread from the crumbling chapel, igniting the copse of tamarisk trees. And all the little embers burned like lamps to light my way.