A Living Grave (5 page)

Both my father and his brother had seen combat and come back grateful but changed. My father romanticized and surrounded himself with the best of that world. He went to reunions and visited the wall. His dreams were a darkness buried so deep he convinced most of the daytime world they did not exist. Uncle Orson wore his dreams of elephant grass bent by helicopter wash and burning hooches billowing with the smoke of rice and human bodies on his skin. They were scars cut into his skull by Zippo tracks and young boys with AK-47s screaming their death in black pajamas. All of it was lit up by the muzzle flash of M16s in a nighttime ambush. He didn't romanticize; he drank. I come by it naturally.

Uncle Orson loved the corps but he understood the spine of the thing was violence and raw force. It had no real ethics and it had no regrets. There were just the dreams of veterans. I could tell him things that would have shattered my father. And I did.

That was why on nights like that one, when the fading blue of a summer sky burned red ocher on the underside of high clouds, when I see the color bleed and the air fill with blowing dust, I go to Uncle Orson. He sees his own ghosts.

Like so many times before, I didn't remember driving to Rockaway Beach or walking up the swaying suspension walkway of the dock. One moment I was in the truck trying to hold on to the smile of someone I didn't know; the next moment I was there. On one level, I know the in-between was a brown wash of dirt and the grinding roll of Humvees on patrol. I know that the passing time carried a horrific sense of loss and anger so blinding it colored the entirety of my life. I know. I know, but I don't really remember.

“Wondered if I'd see you tonight,” Uncle Orson said from behind the counter. He was a big man who filled the space, any space, he was in. This space was his. After retiring, he had purchased the dock and floating general store/bait shop. He lived in an apartment on the second level never more than ten feet from the minnows and night crawlers or the humming machines that kept them alive. Over the years, inventory in the shop moved so slowly the place looked as much like a museum of lake life as it did a gas station and store. On the wall behind him was a rack of Zippo lighters with transparent cases within which were feathered fishing flies. They had been there when he bought the place and were probably twenty years old then. The one modern look to the place was provided by the large art calendar on the wall at a right angle from the lighters. That month was a high view of a river bottom that had been harvested for a first growth of hay. The bales were sitting in golden squares on a verdant green second growth. A snaking river caught the light of the sun just breaking from dark clouds in a somber sky. Sunlight hit the water and broke into shards of silver-gold. It was an image that made you proud to be a part of life and in awe of it at the same time. In the border between the picture and the stapled seam under which the calendar page dangled, was the name Nelson Solomon.

“Katrina,” he said. I heard him but it was as if from a distance. “Katrina,” he called again softly, “come back, Katrina.”

“I'm here,” I reassured both of us.

“Yeah. Like I said, I wondered if I would see you tonight.”

“Why's that?” I asked.

“People talk,” he answered. “A friend of mine called. Said you both had a bad day.” He watched, waiting for me to tell him. I didn't, so he went on. “I've got brats and chicken on the grill. You want one? Or for you, I might throw on a T-bone.”

As soon as he mentioned it I smelled the smoke of the grill. It was a 55-gallon drum that had been cut in half along the length and hinged together, with legs welded on. It burned and rusted constantly until the bottom fell out and the drum was replaced.

“Brats would be wonderful.”

“You want a beer?” he asked me, but it wasn't exactly a question. “I was afraid you would get the case. The girl. I know things like that get to you.”

“They get to everyone.”

“So you don't want a beer?”

“You know I want a beer.”

He pointed to the table in the corner, right under the calendar, and pulled a bottle from a packed cooler. Brushing away the flecks of ice and clinging moisture before opening it, he set the bottle on the table in front of me.

“I talked to your dad today,” he said over his shoulder as he went out to the smoking grill.

“About what?”

“This an' that.”

I watched him through the screen as he moved meat around on the grill. Grinning like he had just won the lottery, he held up four fat brats skewered on a bit of tree limb he had whittled the bark from.

“I told him he needed a girlfriend.”

That made me smile. It was a common discussion between the two of them and always ended up circling back to me.

“And he said you needed one more than he did.”

“Yeah, he did. But I told him I had more women than I could shake a stick at.”

“And he said, Why would you shake a stick at women?”

“Yup.” He put brats and buns and paper plates on the table and sat down across from me. “But we both agreed what we really needed was to get you a man.”

“I just bet you did. But I'd just as soon you keep out of my sex life.”

“No one said anything about sex. You stay away from that. It's bad stuff. You just need a boyfriend to do things with, like . . .” Waving a hand in front of his face, he searched for something a woman might possibly want to do.

“Like dinner?” I helped him. “Dancing? Going to movies or shows?”

“Fishing.”

I loaded up a brat and took a bite, then washed it down with a long drink of cold beer. I felt so good I almost forgot why I felt so bad. We talked and ate for over an hour, luxuriating in the feel of family, spicy sausage, and beer.

Finally, in a quiet moment, I said, “I kind of met a man.”

Uncle Orson scooted his chair up close and took a swallow that emptied the last half of his second beer. It struck me how odd this was, but how natural. I had no idea how it would have worked to have this discussion with another woman. In a way, my tough-as-old-callous, sixty-eight-year-old uncle was my best girlfriend.

“Well, come on. Tell me,” he said as soon as the bottle was drained and a new one opened. “Are you going to bring him around?”

“Slow down. I just met him. I don't know him, but he seems pretty nice. I don't think I'd mind getting to know him.”

“Just met him? Is he a perp?”

“You need to stop trying to talk like cop shows. No one says
perp
.”

“Sure they do. It's short for
perpetrator
.”

“I know what it means, and no, he was not a suspect. He was jumped by a biker.”

“Sounds like a weenie.” Uncle Orson let his face tell me what he thought of weenies. And I knew for a fact that wasn't the word he would have used if he wasn't talking to me or any other woman.

“The biker tried to back him down, but he went down swinging. Went down and got back up three times.”

He grunted, but it was a grudging sound of reconsideration. Orson liked men who won their fights but he gave respect to any man who lost with honor. “You should have brought him with you. I'd have thrown on steaks.” Throwing on a steak was my family's idea of slaughtering the fatted calf.

“I told you, I don't know him. I just met him. Besides, the ambulance took him to the hospital.”

“Hospital? Was he hurt that bad?”

“I don't think so, just stiches. They probably took him for observation. He might have had a concussion.”

“How'd he get into it with a biker?”

I told him about Nelson Solomon and how we met earlier that day. Added to that, I told him how it intersected with the murder of Angela. He pulled down the calendar from the wall behind him and examined each page as I talked.

“You know,” he said, folding the pages back to the current month, “I'd actually looked forward to turning the page each month. Now I've flipped through it, I ask myself why I waited on things so amazing.”

I had the definite feel that he was trying to tell me something more than he liked the pictures.

“So was Clarence Bolin the friend that called you about me?”

“I guess you
were
listening,” he said. “Clare's a good guy. Makes good whiskey.”

“You know about the whiskey?”

“I sell it. Off the books, of course.”

To say my jaw hit the table and bounced would not be much of an exaggeration.

“Don't look so surprised, Katrina. Homemade whiskey has a long history around here. My granddaddy sold a few jugs to Pretty Boy Floyd himself.”

“I've heard the story, Uncle Orson. That was in the depression. Why do it now?”

“It's a fad. Like cigar bars and microbrews. Whiskey is hipster cool.”

“Hipster? Do you even know what that means?”

“Honey, I'm a hepcat from way back. Besides, I read it online.”

“Uh-huh. It's still a crime.”

“Yeah, but there are crimes and there are
crimes
. This is basically tax evasion.”

“I'm a cop. And we don't get to pick and choose the laws we follow.”

“Don't we?” His question was like a hard foot on the brakes. I felt the burn of a flush creeping up my face. Orson knew me and he knew there have been times in my life I had opted for justice over law. He wasn't throwing it in my face, though. It was my own guilty conscience doing that. “Ever heard of the Whiskey Rebellion? Ever know anyone who didn't play a little loose with their tax return?”

“I don't make enough to worry about my taxes.”

“You should worry more. You know that since the 1950s—America's most prosperous years, I might add—the tax burden has been methodically shifted from corporations to the individual?”

I pressed my fingers to my temples and massaged the ache that bloomed there every time he got started on these things.

“Uncle Orson, I'm talking about law, not taxes.”

“There is no way to disentangle the two. But I'll tell you this: The mark of a good government is how it chooses to apply law.”

“I don't need a lecture on good government.”

That stopped him. He let out a big breath of air, deflating slowly. “I know you don't, sweetheart. I guess we've both seen the best and the worst of that.”

“Just tell me about the whiskey.”

“What's to tell? He sells it to me for five dollars ajar and I sell it to fishermen with more money than sense for twenty. No taxes, all profit.”

“It sounds like good money, but is it worth violence?”

“What violence? Those are the old days, tommy guns and speakeasies. Nobody's fighting over this anymore.”

“Maybe . . . Can I stay in the boat tonight?”

“You never have to ask.”

Uncle Orson had a huge houseboat that stayed parked at the dock. For a long time it had been his home. Now it was my home away from everything and I always asked before I took it over. I told him thanks and stood to head to the hard bed that would rock me gently. Before I made it through the door, he said, “Hang on.” Then he reached behind the counter and tossed over a canning jar filled with clear liquid. “For your
professional
interest.”

In Uncle Orson's defense, he didn't know how deep my relationship with whiskey went. In my defense I resisted. Darkness, a hazy blowing of memory that sucked up all light, was already enveloping me. My body began trembling and my eyes began crying, but those things were happening without me. I was somewhere else.

I
felt like it was the end of summer. Not that there was a hint of green or the creeping red-oranges of leaves turning. In Iraq, everything was brownish. Not even a good, earthy brown. Instead, everything within my view was a uniform, wasted, dun color. It was easy to imagine the creator ending up here on the seventh day, out of energy and out of ideas after spending his palate in the joy of painting the rest of the world. This spit of earth, the dirty asshole of creation we called the Triangle of Death, didn't even rate a decent brown.

I had been in country for eight months. I had been First Lieutenant Katrina Williams, Military Police, attached to the 502nd Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division for a little over a year. Pride and love had brought me here. Proud to be American and just as proud to have come from a military family, I was in love with what the ROTC at Southwest Missouri State University had shown me about my country's military. I fell in love with the thought of the woman I would become serving my nation. I wanted to echo the men my father and my uncle were and add my own tone to the family history. Iraq bled that all out of me. Just like it was bleeding my color out into the dust. Bright red draining into shit brown.

It was the impending weight of change that made me feel like the end of summer. As a girl, back home in the Ozarks, the summers seemed to last forever. It wasn't until the final days, carried over even into a new school year, when the air cooled and the oaks rusted, that I could feel them ending. Their endings were like the descent of ice ages, the shifting of epochs. That was exactly how I felt bleeding into the dirt. The difference was that I felt an impending death rather than transition. The terminus of an epoch. In Iraq though, nothing was as clear as that. It was death; but it wasn't.

Lying on my back, I wished I could see blue sky, but not here. The air was hazed with dust so used up it became a part of the atmosphere. There was no more of the earth in it. Grit, like bad memories and regret, hanging over an entire nation. I coughed hard and it hurt. A bubbly thickness slithered up my throat. Using my tongue and what breath I had, I got the slimy mass up to my lips. I just didn't have it in me to spit. Instead, I turned my head to the side and let the bloody phlegm slide down my cheek.

Dying is hard
.

Wind, hot and cradling the homeland sand so many factions were willing to kill for, ran over the wall I was hidden behind. It eddied there, slowing and swirling and then dumping the dirt on my naked skin. A slow-motion burial. Even the land here hated naked women.

I stayed there without moving, but slipping in and out of consciousness for a long time. It seemed long, anyway. I dreamed. Dreamed or remembered so well they seemed like perfect dreams of—everything.

Green
.

We played baseball. Just like in old movies with kids turning a lot into a diamond. No one does that anymore, but we did. My grandfather played minor league ball years ago and I had a cousin who was a Cardinals fan. Everyone was a Cardinals fan, so I loved the Royals. When the games were over and it was hotter than the batter's box when I was pitching—I had a wild arm—my father would take me to the river. Later when we had cars, I was drawn there every summer to swim and swing from the ropes. We floated on old, patched inner tubes and teased boys. That was where I learned to drink beer. My father would take me fishing on the river. My grandfather would take me on the lakes. I used the same cane pole my father had when Granddad taught him about fishing. Both of the men used to say to the girl who complained about not catching anything, “It's not about the catching, it's about the fishing.” I don't think I ever understood until a good portion of my blood was spilled on the dirt of a world that hated me.

My head spun back to the moment and back to Iraq. If I was going to die, I would have done it already, I figured. At least my body. That physical part of me would live on. That other part of me, the girl who loved summer . . . I think she was already dead. Death and transition.

It was a huge effort to roll to my side and when I did, I saw the stain of my blood. It was already mixed with the dirt, surrendering its color. Everything becoming something less than brown. I wondered about the rest of my color: the auburn of my hair, turned redder in the sunlight; the pale green of my eyes; and the almost-peach–toned spray of freckles that trickled from my nose to the tops of my breasts. Was it going too? All that color, all that life—wasted here.

The worst wound was in my back, below the shoulder blade. The knife had been thrust straight down and hard. There was no telling how bad it was, but it was bad. I had been left for dead, after all. Or at least to die. And I'd been left with no weapons. My uniform had been cut and stripped away. If soldiers had found me dead, they would assume I was abducted and raped by insurgents. If insurgents found me, they would assume another faction was responsible. If I was found alive by any insurgent, I would be raped some more and condemned to die for the sins of being female and American.

The men who had raped me first, who had killed the girl that loved summer, were Americans too. Hating women crosses all borders and faiths. Something all the boys could agree on. They thought they were careful, but I knew who they were. I had seen their hands.

Another gust rippled over the wall, dumping a handful of grave dirt over me.

It took a while, but I finally rolled completely over and rose to my hands and knees. Every part of me was shaking with the effort. My head throbbed a golden flash of spinning pain and then I vomited.

Concussion
.

The word was part of the catalogue I began writing in my mind. An inventory was needed to assess chances and options. Concussion. Hole in my back. My rib might be broken.

When my gut seemed ready, I opened my eyes again. The puddle of puke under my face had lost its color to the Iraqi dust, making a mottled mud. Careful not to put my hands in the mess, I backed away. That was when I felt the cuts in my backside. I remembered the captain slapping and cutting my ass with the knife as he sodomized me. When he bucked up against me, moaning with his release, he had stabbed, thrusting the blade deep into my right buttock.

The effort of turning my head back to look only made the world spin again. I let my head sag so I could look down the length of my body. More blood and more cuts. Both of my breasts were tracked with bruises, black finger marks on pale skin. The right one, though, had a long gash starting high on my chest and running under the soft flesh, causing it to hang lower and at an impossible angle. On my left, the nipple was sliced and twisted.

Scars. So many scars
.

The freckles that had been a part of my identity since I knew to think of myself as separate from my mother were faded out.

There was another laceration in the pubic hair, a violent, jagged gash, and a bare strip where the darker red curls had been stripped away.

Blood was flowing, a fresh rush over the sticky, semidry coating between my legs. The fresh fluid cut a new path that trickled right down dead-white thighs with dark galaxies of bruising. Most of the blood seemed to be coming from my vagina. I recalled the lieutenant punching between my legs several times before he shoved his fist inside. That ring raking me. Afterward, he said he wanted a lock of hair, like a lover might. He used the Ka-Bar to cut away the strip. With one hand he pulled the hairs tight. With the other, the one with the ring, he cut.

Both of the men had rings. Different years and different designs, but the rings came from the same school. They had the good sense not to wear them during patrols, but around base the rings were always on display. Everyone knew those rings.

I cried. For a short time or a long one, I wasn't sure. Maybe it was a short time that only seemed equal to all the time I had lived so far. I stayed there on my hands and knees because it hurt too much to move, and I cried. It poured from my frothy lungs, a quiet, keening wail that sounded almost like a meadowlark, but there was no answering call.

They were supposed to be on my side. My people. I'll never know how anyone can survive feeling as alone as I did then. When the tears and the pitiful wailing dried up, I was left with just the silence. Eventually even the silence was too great a weight to bear. I started gathering clothes and doing what I could to cover myself. The only thing worse than being raped and left naked behind some mud wall and shack in Iraq, was being found naked in any condition by the local faithful. A naked woman in this part of the world was a whore and whores got no sympathy.

My bra was cut in two and my uniform shirt was just gone. The T-shirt was there. More brown. I found my panties down by my feet, but someone—the lieutenant, I assumed—had ejaculated in them. I wouldn't put those on for anything. I could reach my pants, but only found one boot. It didn't matter; I had to get moving.

The clothes went on slowly. When I pulled the shirt over my head I almost screamed. Fresh blood streaked the cotton.

It took another five minutes to get pants on.

When I stood, my head lurched again and the guts followed. There was no fighting it. I draped my body over the low wall and puked in hard spasms. Gold starbursts patterned my vision. I smelled bile and copper.

I didn't remember rising again. Nor did I remember walking from the wall. There is a gap in time and place that left me staggering toward a road, but away from the village in the distance. If I was anywhere near where I thought I was, there would be a traffic checkpoint in about three kilometers. It could just as well have been a million. Before I made it a hundred yards down the road, a white dot appeared on the horizon. A vehicle.

If it wasn't green it wasn't safe.

There was a depression in the dirt alongside the road that was almost deep enough to pass for a ditch. It was mostly bare dirt but here and there were bits of trash. No cover.

No choice. I dropped into the dirt. When I hit, something popped in my chest. It was physical and audible and started a cascade of wrenching pain. A doctor told me later a nick in my lung must have torn through. Air was escaping into the chest cavity at the same time that blood was running into the lung. Each breath was a loud, gasping rattle that brought in little air and almost as much dust.

The white pickup truck slowed on shrieking brakes, and then wheeled around after passing. They had seen me. I had seen them. It was a small truck, but it carried three men up front and six in the back. All were armed.

Even over the old engine and bad brakes, even over my own ragged breathing, I could hear the excited shouts of the men.

I said good-bye, in quiet thoughts, to my mother and father. All thoughts had become prayers. Everyone who had ever done me harm, I forgave, except the men who had put me where I was. Then I waited for the real death.

One man jumped down from the truck bed and the others stayed behind, shouting. I couldn't tell if the shouts were instruction or encouragement. The bolt on an AK-47 was pulled. All the shouting stopped.

The shouting started up again, but it was different in tone and urgency. The man with the AK ran back to the truck. He sprayed a wash of rounds at me without aiming as the truck left the road and took off across open ground.

A moment later, I watched as a column of Humvees stopped short of my position. A squad of men piled out and formed a perimeter. A sergeant I had never seen before stalked up to me with his weapon at the ready. He looked close and long before calling back, “We need a medic and a litter up here.”

* * *

I rose early in the damp chill of sunrise on the lake. Every breath captured the full life smell of watery fecundity and the slow decay of deadwood. Carried across the width of deep liquid green was the sound of a woodpecker hammering his way into the carcass of a standing, dead cedar. I noticed all of it, but appreciated nothing as I skulked from the houseboat to my truck. The beauty of the world around me felt like something to hide from after a night spent reliving what I had come to think of as my first death. Closing the truck door shut it all out. It failed to shut out the shame I felt. It might have helped if I hadn't carried the jar of whiskey with me.

At home I cleaned up and caffeinated. I did it all like someone trying to ignore a camera in their bedroom. I kept all my thoughts behind a veil of normalcy. Then I caught myself looking out from the mirror. So much of me was gone from what I was.

“It wasn't your fault,” I said to myself. I looked back with sad eyes and scars that seemed to disagree. It was an odd sort of shame that I felt; I was ashamed of what others had done to me. I was ashamed of the flashbacks that made me relive it. Both seemed like a kind of weakness. I kept staring at myself, the short hair with the red summer cooked into a burnished penny color, the scars that tracked my skin, the pale skin and faded freckles that spoke of hiding under mannish clothing for so long. All those things carried an accusation that I had been facing for a decade.

While I stared I saw the girl, Angela Briscoe. Finding her, seeing her body in the woods, had pulled the hammer back on me, then pulled a slow-motion trigger. The thought and self-knowledge that came with it did nothing to lessen any of the effects of the flashback. But they did serve to make me mad. It was the anger about her that got me out of the bathroom.

Powder fresh and dressed for work, I carried a thermos full of hot, black coffee out into the world, resolved—once again—to keep my ghosts behind me. When I climbed into the truck, I saw myself in the mirror again. This time I tried something the therapist had told me. I tried to visualize what others saw rather than my own judgment. What I visualized was Nelson Solomon looking at me, more than what I imagined he saw. But it made me smile. Smiling changed the image and I brushed the hair back from the scar beside my eye. That was the woman I wanted him to see.