Kevin Powers - The Yellow Birds

“Nothing’s gonna happen to him, right? Promise that you’ll bring him home to me.”

“I promise,” I said. “I promise I’ll bring him home to you.”

Sterling caught me later as I was walking back from the gym to our barracks. He was sitting on the front stoop and I stopped to smoke a cigarette. “It’s kind of nice out tonight, huh, Sarge?”

He stood up and started pacing back and forth. “I overheard you talking to Private Murphy’s mother.”

“Oh, right. That.”

“You shouldn’t have done that, Private.”

“What?”

He stopped and put his hands on his hips. “C’mon. Promises? Really? You’re making fucking promises now?”

I was annoyed. “I was just trying to make her feel better, Sarge,” I said. “It’s not a big deal.”

He knocked me to the ground quickly and hit me twice in the face, once below the eye and once directly in the mouth. I felt his knuckles fold my lips under my teeth. I felt my front teeth cut into my top lip, the blood running hot and metallic into my mouth. My lips swelled immediately. My cheek had been cut by a ring he wore on his right hand, and that blood gathered into runnels and ran down my face and into the corner of my eye and onto the snow. He stood over me with his feet on either side of my body, just looking at me. He shook the sting out of his hand in the cold air. “Report me if you want. I don’t even fucking care anymore.”

I lay in the snow for a while longer, picking out the constellations bright enough not to be obscured by the artificial light pouring out from the barracks windows and the streetlamps lining the nearby avenue. Saw Orion, saw Canis Major. When the lights went out in the barracks, I saw other stars, arranged as they had been a million years ago or more. I wondered what they looked like now. I got up and dragged myself up the stairs and into our room. Murph sat up, but the lights stayed off. I took off my uniform and threw it in my locker, then slid under the tight folds of the sheets.

“Tonight was good,” he said. I didn’t answer. I heard him turn in his bunk. “You OK?”

“Yeah, I’m good.” I looked out the window, through the tops of the evergreen trees arranged in rows between the barracks. I knew that at least a few of the stars I saw were probably gone already, collapsed into nothing. I felt like I was looking at a lie. But I didn’t mind. The world makes liars of us all.

Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

It wasn’t long after I left Al Tafar that I began to feel very strange. I first noticed it on the highway between the air base and the town of Kaiserslautern. The trees outside the window of the taxi made a silver blur, but I could clearly see the green buds of spring as they untethered themselves from the remains of winter. It reminded me of the war, though I was only a week removed from it, and unbeknownst to me at the time, my memories would seem closer the farther I got from the circumstances that gave birth to them. I suppose, now, that they grew the same way other things grow. In the quiet of the taxi, the thin trees made me think of the war and how in the desert our year seemed like a seasonless thing, except in fall. There was a sharp disquiet in the way days passed into other days and the dust covered everything in Al Tafar, so that even the blooming hyacinth flowers became a kind of rumor.

I imagined it would be easier then, to arrive in a temperate place so obviously passing from winter into spring, but it was not. The wet, cold air of March in Germany shocked my skin, and when the LT said we wouldn’t get a pass even though we couldn’t leave until the next day, just wait it out, I decided I’d earned one anyway.

I’d had to walk a half a mile or so to get out the security gate and another two until the first row of buildings appeared on my left. The sky was now less brightly lit, and there was a steady, fine mist that hovered in the air. In the plane, the sun had a kind of buoyant dominance, but it had hidden itself away beyond clouds that appeared like pale, soot-colored sketches of themselves. The buildings were more colorful than I thought buildings could be, with light pastel trims, and rich creams and yellows thickly painted on the stucco walls. I walked toward the town, past softly lit cafes emitting deep, hearthy smells, past solitary people walking on the street, the collars of their slickers pulled tightly around their necks, their eyes pausing to evaluate me. Without fail, they turned toward some other ending for their travels.

It made me feel fine to be walking alone in the rain that day, alongside the tall, ordered rows of pines and birches, and I began to feel a kind of calm when I passed the townspeople. I couldn’t have placed it then, but now, looking back, there was peace in the absence of talk. We passed, and our eyes would meet briefly, the sound of my boot heels amplified by cobblestones or alley walls. Then they would fall away from one another, our eyes, and they would know me by my skin, tan and sun-beat to linen, an American, no reason to speak, he will not understand the words, and I thought, Thank you, I am tired and do not know what to say. By then, in every instance, we had passed each other. And it felt good, somewhere behind my breastbone, to sense that this separation was explicable, a mere failing of language, and my loneliness could proceed with a different cause for a little while longer.

I reached a traffic circle where a pair of silver cabs idled. I tapped on the first one’s driver-side window. The cabbie, a man with large eyes and a small, almost lipless mouth, sat up. He rolled his window down and leaned his head out ever so slightly. My hands were in the front pockets of my jeans and I leaned in to him as well. “K-town,” I said quietly. For a moment we were very close, almost touching, and he said something that I didn’t understand. “No sprechen,” I said. He sighed and smiled and waved his hand toward the backseat of his taxi and I got in.

And that’s when it began, on that short ride in to Kaiserslautern. We rode in silence, without pleasantries, and the radio stayed off. I leaned my head against the window and watched as my breath condensed on it. I took my finger and made rudimentary lines in the fogged-over glass; first one, then another, until I had made the shape of a square, a smaller window inside the window. As I looked out onto the trees that edged the road, my muscles tensed and I began to sweat. I knew where I was: a road in Germany, AWOL, waiting for the flight back to the States. But my body did not: a road, the edge of it, and another day. My fingers closed around a rifle that was not there. I told them the rifle was not supposed to be there, but my fingers would not listen, and they kept closing around the space where my rifle was supposed to be and I continued to sweat and my heart was beating much faster than I thought reasonable.

I was supposed to be happy, but I cannot recall feeling much of anything except a dull, throbbing numbness. I was very tired and the blur of the silver trees on the side of the road became a comfort that described both newness and continuity at once. I wanted to get out and run my hands along the bark. I was sure that it was smooth and although it was still raining in the odd hovering way that it had been, I wanted to go out in it. To let it fall on my dark neck and hands, to feel it.

We rode the rest of the way into town like that, in silence, a few trembles held just so in my hands. He dropped me on a wide street. The sun hovered half hidden above the pale buildings in the rain. A few streetlights were on and gave off a thin glow through the gray afternoon, and after I paid the driver for the trip I began to walk toward the edge of town. I passed in and out of circles of light made by the sun through the clouds and the useless lamplight. By the time I reached the end of Turnerstrasse, the lights had adopted their own rhythm. My passage through them became more regular, something firm to which I could commit myself. I figured Sterling and some of the other guys would worm their way out to the bars to raise hell. I hoped I wouldn’t see them, and not just because I’d gone AWOL. The mere thought of him made bile well up in a kind of raw, acidic burn at the back of my throat.