Vampires in the Lemon Grove (22 page)

He waits a beat, but Beverly cannot think of one word to say. She knows she’s failed because she feels his muscles tense, the world of Fedaliyah stiffening all at once, like a lake freezing itself.

“Plenty of guys in my unit got tattoos like this, you know. It’s how the dead live, and the dead walk, see? We have to honor his sacrifice.”

Pride electrifies the sergeant’s voice. Unexpectedly, he gets up on his elbows on the massage table, cranes around to meet her eye; when he says “the dead,” she notes, his long face lights up. It’s like some bitter burlesque of a boy in love.

“What does your own mother say about all this, if you don’t mind me asking?”

He laughs. “I don’t talk to those people.”

“Which people? Your family?”

“My family, you’re looking at them.”

Beverly swallows. “Which one is Mackey? Is this him, in the palm grove?”

“No. That’s Vaczy. Mackey’s burning up.”

Zeiger pudges out a hip bone.

“He’s—this red star?”

“It’s a
fire
.” The sergeant’s voice trembles with an almost childish indignation. “Mack’s inside it. Only you can’t see him.”

The truck has just run over a remotely detonated bomb and exploded. Still burning inside the truck, he explains, is Specialist Arlo Mackey.

“Boom,” he adds flatly.

Why on earth would you boys choose this moment to incarnate?
Beverly wonders.
Why remember him—your good friend—dying—engulfed?

“You were with him on the day he died, Derek? You were all together?”

“We were.”

And then he fills in the stencil of April 14 for her.

At 6:05 a.m., on April 14, Sgt. Derek Zeiger and a convoy of four Humvees exited the wire of the FOB, traveling in the northbound lane of Route Roses, tasked with bringing a generator and medical supplies to the farm of Uday al-Jumaili. The previous week, they had driven out to Fedaliyah to do a school assessment and clean up graffiti. As a goodwill gesture, they had helped Uday al-Jumaili’s son, a twelve-year-old herder, to escort a dozen sweaty buffalo and one million black flies to the river.

Pfc. Vaczy and Sgt. Zeiger were in the lead truck.

Pfc. Mackey and Cpl. Al Grady were in the second vehicle.

From the right rear window of the Humvee, Sgt. Zeiger watched telephone poles and crude walls sucked backward into the dust. Sleeping cats had slotted themselves between the stones, so that the walls themselves appeared to be breathing. An orangeish-gray goat watched the convoy pass from a ruined courtyard, heaving its ribs and crusty horns at the soldiers, its pink
mouth bleating after them in the rearview like a cartoon without sound. At 6:22 a.m., a click away from the farm in Fedaliyah, the lead Humvee passed a palm grove within view of the Diyala River and the wise-stupid stares of the bathing
jammous
. Zeiger remembered watching one bull’s tremendous head disappear beneath the dirty water. At 6:22, perhaps fifteen seconds later, an IED tore through the second Humvee, in which Pfc. Mackey was the gunner. Sgt. Zeiger watched in the mirrors as the engine compartment erupted in flames. Smoke flew into the gash of his mouth. Smoke blindfolded him. On his knees in the truck he gagged on smoke, its oily taste. Incinerated metal blew inside the vehicle, bright chunks raining through the window. His head slammed against the windscreen; immediately, his vision darkened; blood poured from his nostrils; a tooth, his own, went skidding across the truck floor.

“This front one is a fake,” he tells Beverly, tapping his enamel. “Can’t you tell? It’s too perfect.”

He remembered picking up the tooth, which was a shocking, foreign white, etched in space. He remembered grabbing the aid bag and the fire extinguisher and tumbling from the truck and screaming, directing these screams nowhere in particular, down at his own laced boots, then skyward—and then, when he got his head together, he remembered to scream for the intervention of a specific person, the medic, Spec. Belok. He saw the gunner from the third truck running over to the prone figure of Cpl. Al Grady and followed him.

“Well, okay: the bomb was a ten-inch copper plate, concave shape, remote-detonated, so when it blows there’s about fifty pounds of explosives behind it. I heard over the radio ‘There is blood everywhere,’ and I could hear moaning in the background. The blast shot Corporal Grady completely into the air, out of the vehicle—and Grady is six foot five, Beverly …”

Beverly pulls at the wispiest clouds along the cords of his neck.

“Where’s the triggerman? Are we about to get ambushed on the road? Nobody knows. There’s no one around us, there’s no one around us, and do you think maybe Uday al-Jumaili came running to help us? Guess again. His house is dead quiet, it’s just our guys and the palm grove. Behind the truck, the
jammous
are staring at us. Three or four of them, looking as pissy as women, you know, like the attack interrupted their bathing plans. Grady is responsive, thank God. The door is hanging. Mackey is screaming and screaming, I’m kneeling right under him. Some of his blood gets in my mouth. Somehow even in my state I figured that one out: I’m coughing up Mack’s blood. And whatever he’s screaming, I don’t understand it, it’s not words, so I go, ‘Mack, what’re you saying, man? What are you saying?’ I cut his pants to see if the femoral artery was severed. I remove his IBA looking for the chest wound. I wrap the wound to his head and his neck with a Kerlix …”

Zeiger’s head is buried in the cushion—all this time, he hasn’t looked up from the floor. Jigsaw cracks spread through the tattoo where his muscles keep tensing.

“Hours later, I’m still hearing the screaming. That night at the DFAC—the chow hall—we’re all just staring at our food, and I’m telling people, ‘I didn’t catch his last words. I lost them, I didn’t catch them.’

“And Lieutenant Norden, I didn’t see him standing there, he goes: ‘Hey, Zeiger, I’ll translate: good-bye. He was saying: bye-bye.’ Norden’s like a robot, no feeling. And I almost get court-martialed for breaking Norden’s jaw, Bev.”

Bev
, he says, like a strand of hair tucked behind her ear. Incredibly, in the midst of all this horror, she can still blush like a fool at the sound of her own name. She’s terrified of setting him off again, knuckling down on the wrong spot, but at no point during his story does she halt the exploratory movements of her hands over the broad terrain of Zeiger’s back.

“So now we all hump Mackey around like turtles. That day, April 14, it’s frozen for all time back there.”

“Well, for
your
lifetimes,” Beverly hears herself blurt out.

“Right.”

Zeiger scratches at a raw spot on his neck.

“Nobody has to live forever, thank God.”

“Gotcha. My mistake.”

Moisture clouds her eyes out of nowhere.
Forever
, just that word fills Beverly with an unaccountable, schoolmarmish sort of rage. Forever, that’s got to be bad math, right? Such terrifying math. God, she does not want the kid to have to carry this forever.

“You know,” she says, adjusting the pressure, “I think it’s a beautiful thing you’ve done for your friend—” She traces the inky V below the tight cords of his neck. Silent birds migrating into the deeper blues. “You’re giving him your, ah, your
portion
of eternity.”

Portion of eternity, Christ, where did she get that one? A Hallmark mug? The Bible? Possibly she’s plagiarizing the chalkboard Hoho’s menu, some unbelievable deal: the bottomless soup bowl. Until doomsday, free refills on your coffee.

“No, you’re right.” He laughs sourly. “I guess I’m only good for a short ride.”

A long silence follows. Fedaliyah heaves and falls.

“How long do you think, Bev?” he asks abruptly. “Fifty, sixty years?”

Beverly doesn’t answer. After a while she says, “Are you still being treated at the VA down the road?”

“Yes, yes, yes—” His voice grows peevish, seems to scuff at the floor under the head support. “For PTSD, the same as everybody. Do I seem traumatized to you, Beverly? What’s the story back there?”

Instead of answering his question, Beverly lets her hands slide
down his back. “Breathe right here for me, Derek,” she murmurs. She eagles her palms outward, pushes in opposite directions until she gets a tense spot above his sacrum to relax completely. Beneath the sheet of oil, the tattoo’s colors seem to deepen. To glow, grow permeable. As if she could reach a finger into the landscape and swirl the
jammous
into black holes, whirlpools in the tattoo …

Soon Zeiger is snoring.

She works her fingertips into the skin around the fire, and she can smell the flowery scent of the oil becoming more powerful; just briefly, she lets her eyes close. Suddenly the jasmine smells of her room are replaced by burning rubber, diesel. Behind her closed eyelids, she sees a flash of beige light. Spidery black palms, a roadside stand. A pair of heat-blurred men waving at her as if from the other end of a telescope. Sand ticking at a windscreen.

Beverly hears herself gasp like someone emerging from a pool. When her eyes fly open, the first thing she sees are two hands, her own, rolling in circles through the oil on the sergeant’s shoulders. She watches, astonished, as her two hands continue to massage on autopilot, rotating slickly all the way down the man’s spine—has she been massaging him this whole time? She feels a disorientation that is very close to her childhood amazement during the ghostly performances of her uncle’s player piano: the black keys and the white keys depressing in sequence, producing music. Sergeant Zeiger groans happily.

What just happened?
Nothing happened, Beverly
, she hears in the no-nonsense voice of her dead mother, the one her mind deploys to police its own sanity. But her nostrils are stinging from the burning petroleum. Her eyes are leaking. Tentatively, Beverly strokes the red star again.

This time when she shuts her eyes, the flashes she gets are up close: she sees the clear image of a face. Behind the long windscreen of a Humvee, a sunburned, helmeted soldier smiles vacantly
at her. “Hey, Mackey—” someone yells, and the man turns. He is bobbing his chin to some distant music, drumming his knuckles against the stiff Kevlar vest, uneclipsed.

Beverly has to stop the massage to towel her eyes. Where are these pictures coming from? It feels like she’s remembering a place she’s never been before, reminiscing about a face she’s never seen in her life. Somehow a loop of foreign experience seems to have slotted itself inside her brain, like her uncle’s piano rolls. Zeiger’s song, spinning wildly through her. She wonders if such a thing is possible. Music she hears on the radio lodges in Beverly for weeks at a stretch. All sorts of strange contagions sweep over this earth. Germs travel inside coughs and sewer rats, spores are cloaked in the bare wind.

A “flashback”—that was the word from the VA literature.

Beverly tries to concentrate on her two hands, their shape and weight in space, their real activity. If she closes her eyes for even a second, she’s afraid that Humvee will roll into her mind and erupt in flames. She forces herself to massage Zeiger’s shoulders, his buttocks, the tendons of his neck. Areas far afield of the “Arlo Mackey” trigger, the red star—the fatal fire, rendered down. The star seems to be the matchstick that strikes against her skin, combusts into the vision. And yet, in spite of herself, she watches her hands drawn down the tattoo. Now she feels she has some insight into the kind of trouble that April 14 must be giving Sergeant Derek Zeiger—there’s a gravity she can’t resist at work here. Her hands sweep around the red star like the long fingers of a clock, narrowing their orbit. Magnetized to that boy’s last minute.

At the end of the massage, she pauses with the oily towel in her hand.

Her eyes feel as if there are little heated pins inside them.

A truck goes rolling slowly down Route Roses.

“Wake up!” she nearly screams.

“Goddamn it, Bev,” Zeiger grumbles with his eyes shut. Beverly
stands near his face on the pillow, and watches him open one reluctantly. Under her palms, his pulse jumps. “I was just resting my eyes for a sec. You scared me.”

“You fell asleep again, Derek.” It’s an effort to ungrit her teeth. She can feel an explosion coming in their tingling roots. “And it seemed to me like you were stuck in a bad dream.”