Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (21 page)

But Brian always made April talk to the other soldiers first. “These guys need you more than I do,” he said. Most all of them had PTSD.

The first time Brian put a soldier on the line, April said, “How’s it going?”

“We need to exterminate out here!” the soldier said. “We need to exterminate all the cockroaches.”

A few soldiers giggled. “Yeah, man, all these cockroaches. All breeding and taking up my air.”

Another soldier’s voice: “Yeah, their families all live in one house. They all live together like a cockroach nest.”

April asked Brian why he wasn’t saying anything. Brian said he was too worried about how much he looked like an Iraqi.

April told the soldier he was a racist and that all the Iraqis have mothers and fathers just like he did. After a long quiet, the soldier cried. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “It was them. They told us to think about the Iraqis like cockroaches because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to shoot them.”

•  •  •

Brian said he was happy in Iraq on two occasions. The first was on May 1, 2003, when April was home watching the news of President George W. Bush on the USS
Abraham Lincoln
aircraft carrier with the big sign behind him that read
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
. “You’ll never guess what,” she said, “the war is over! Yeah, I’m watching it right now.”

Brian called the soldiers into his room. April asked what they were looking forward to most when they got home. One guy said BBQ chips. Another said sleeping. Another said pillows.

Then the soldiers started thanking April for her voice. They said they were never going to forget their conversations. When they got home they were going to get together and have a cookout. They were talking and laughing, and then a soldier said, “But, April, it doesn’t feel like the war is over.”

“Well, maybe they just haven’t told us yet?” said another soldier.

“Well, if the president announced it,” Brian said, “it must be true.”

“If Bush says it’s over,” April said, “it’s gotta be over, guys.”

“I don’t know,” the soldier said, “it doesn’t seem over.”

“I’m watching it on CNN right now.”

“April,” Brian said, “if the war is over, then why are we still here?”

The second happy moment involved a chicken, and Brian said it was the best day he’d had in Iraq. The soldiers, sick of the mess hall food—the soggy broccoli, warm fruit in a styrofoam cup, the burgers and hot dogs—decided to go to the market in Baghdad. They weren’t supposed to be out, but they went anyway. They were ducking behind grain sacks and goats until Brian located a fat orange chicken. April didn’t understand the economics of the exchange, but all that matters, she told me, is they got the chicken. They crawled back, maneuvered around stalls and cars, disappeared into crowds of people. When a military Humvee passed, Brian ducked. “If we hide,” his buddy said, dragging Brian from his crouched position, “they’re going to think we’re fucking Al Qaeda and shoot us.”

The soldiers made it back, and they went into Brian’s room and they shut the door and they put the chicken on the table. They were just sitting there in the barracks with this chicken and none of the boys knew what to do. They didn’t have anything to make that chicken a meal.

“We’re going to have to go on
another
mission,” Brian said. “We’ve got to break into the mess hall and get some spices and steal some shit.”

One soldier kept lookout while Brian and the others went to snoop. They smuggled barbecue sauce, seasoning, a bottle of mustard, a spatula, and they took it outside and they cooked this chicken in the sun on an old grill. Other soldiers followed the smell and joined them with sticky red mouths, glistening fingers. The soldiers kept coming, and the pieces were cut smaller and smaller so that every soldier could have a bite.

“Wouldn’t it be crazy,” a soldier said, “if the Iraqis shoved a bomb in this chicken and we all died.”

•  •  •

April remembered the day Brian called to tell her that he believed he was a vampire. She asked why. He said all his friends were dying but he wasn’t dead. So he must be immortal. Immortal like a vampire.

“You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, April, if I were a vampire?”

“You aren’t a vampire, Brian.”

“Maybe long ago vampires actually existed and I got their DNA passed down from generations and it’s just our society that doesn’t think they exist.”

“I was there when you were born. I raised you. I fed you baby food. I would know. Of anybody, I would know if you were a vampire.”

Brian took longer to respond to this thought. “I’ll consider that. And you consider that vampires aren’t born as vampires. They’re made vampires.”

“Vampires are just a myth.”

“But, April,” he said, “don’t all made-up stories have some truth in them?”

•  •  •

In the month of November, the same month twenty-four women and kids were shot at close range by American marines at a massacre in Haditha, a retribution, the media theorized, for the death of a young lance corporal blown to pieces by an IED, Brian took a fork to the shoulder of a fellow soldier and then slumped into the fetal position. The soldiers in Brian’s unit picked him up and carried him to a phone. They dialed April and held the phone to his ear.

April asked why he stabbed a man.

Brian said he wanted the man to fight him and kill him so then he would know he wasn’t immortal like a vampire.

“You’re going to get a punishment,” April said, “but maybe they’ll let you come home.”

The commanding officer grabbed the phone and said, “Is this the sister that keeps my men locked up at all hours of the night? Is this the sister that my men miss meals to talk to?”

Brian was discharged, flew home in January 2007. He asked April, “Do you still love me?”

“I still love you but I don’t know what’s going to happen to you now.”

Brian wanted to go back to Iraq.

“Why would you freak out so bad that you think you’re immortal and you claim you’re a vampire and then you stab this guy and then you still want to go back? I don’t get it.”

“April, my boys are out there.”

“Your boys?”

“Yeah, my men.”

April took Brian to the VA. “Don’t lie to them,” she warned. “Tell them everything you’re thinking.” Brian told the doctor everything he was thinking.

Do you feel like harming yourself or others?

“I will harm myself and, if someone gets in my way, I will harm them too.”

Brian bragged that the doctor talked to him twenty minutes longer than he talked to the others.

•  •  •

It was the winter of 2007 when Brian started speaking to angels and receiving prophecies from God.

He called April his “little treasure box of secrets.”
Open up, April, and I’ll put all my treasures in your head.
Visions about the fourteen acres in North Carolina where no Iraqis would find them. Visions about his own death. Visions about Khaia getting run over by a car.

In Brian’s vision of Khaia, she crossed the road and walked a mile to the neighbor’s house where a woman lived with five diapered children. Khaia played, grew bored, and returned. The gate was locked so she tried the secret passageway under the bridge. It was flooded. She couldn’t crawl through. Next she tried the barbed-wire fence but it pricked her. She tried the gate again but it was locked. Khaia got the idea that she would check the mail in the mailbox across the street. That’s when the white car appeared, ran her over. Killed her. Brian was waiting in the trees to collect her soul.

Khaia didn’t want to go yet. She needed to say good-bye to her mother.

They walked to April, who was on the couch weeping, and Brian repeated, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Mommy, I’m here.”

April was too upset to see her daughter’s ghost.

“We have to go now, Khaia,” Brian said, “but you can come back and visit Mommy when she’s calmed down.”

Brian had visions of Khaia’s funeral and the pink flowers. April walking down the street to find her little girl’s glasses. She’d take those glasses and carry them for the rest of her life.

Brian talked about his own death as if it had already happened. “It all makes perfect sense now,” Brian told April. “I know what I have to do. I have to die. I have to leave the physical realm and leave earth and go up in heaven and be part of the Army of God.”

“Why, Brian? Why do you have to do that?”

“I’ve got to stop this war and save my guys. And the best way I can do that is to do it up in heaven. I’m going to meet the angels at the Cumberland Park. I’m going to put my hands out and they’re going to walk me out of this body. The angels explained that I have to have a cause of death. So you see, it will only look like I shot myself. Really, I won’t feel a thing.”

A vision of April bent over his corpse, in a casket, partially decapitated, and her running hysterically out of the funeral home.

“You’re not going to end up in a casket,” April said.

“I’ll come visit you when I’m a ghost,” he said. “You’ll know because I’ll smell like musky cologne, like Old Spice.”

April is allergic to cologne. “It gives me a headache. How about peppermint candy cane?”

They agreed and Brian said he’d return on the Fourth of July.

•  •  •

April finds a framed photograph of Brian cooking his barbecued chicken in Iraq. She sets it on the counter and says, “I hope you like chicken because we’re having chicken for dinner.” Her pale hands pull lucent breasts from green styrofoam. “I never freeze my meat. I like it fresh.”

A teenage boy appears from the back room, looks at me, and turns around.

“How many kids do you have?” I say.

“Oh, that’s my son. My third child was born still. That counts, though. I got four kids. I went through it all, so it still counts. It does.” Her eldest daughter, Emily, has her stomach pressed to the taupe carpet, face lit by the computer screen. She carries with her the smell of electronics burning too long.

“What are you doing on that computer all the time?”

“Talking to my friends.”

“Who’re your friends? They live around here?”

“They don’t live around here.”

One of them lives in Europe but she can’t say which country. She’s never met any of them and she’s known them in the virtual realm for five years.

“Why aren’t you in school?”

“We’re homeschooled,” Khaia says. “Some girl kicked my sister.”

“Some black girl punched me in the bathroom,” Emily says.

Khaia chants, “Bad kitty. Bad kitty. Kitty, kitty, kitty. Hi kitty.”

“I hope Brian is wrong that she’s going to die next year. I’m so scared it’s going to happen,” April says. She wipes her eyes. She speaks with an unlit cigarette caught on her bottom lip. “Sometimes I get mad at him. He left me. I get so mad at him, you know, and then I’m like, man, that asshole, he probably just told me that my poor little girl is going to die just to fuck with my head!”

“Who was driving the car?”

“Brian said it was Khaia’s daughter from a past life who asked God for permission to be the one with the privilege to kill her.”

Khaia turns to me, her glasses bright with light. “Mama says I’m never moving out.”

April sticks her head in the fridge. “Shit. We’re out of butter.” She moves aimlessly. Khaia rolls chicken parts in bread crumbs.

“Brian said she wouldn’t feel a thing. She just got bumped a bit. I asked Brian, ‘Where am I? If I know my kid’s crossing the street I will be out there to help.’ He said, ‘I know, April, but you will be too angry to leave. You’ll see it happen. You will be right by the window when the car goes by but your brain won’t process it. You will never remember that it happens because your brain will block it for you.’ ”

April has a knife in her hand. It hovers over a pile of chopped chicken glistening on a wooden board.

“If it weren’t for my kids,” April says, “and me trying to build holidays and memories for them, I wouldn’t even celebrate the holidays. They’re my chance to do life over. I’m creating childhood memories. I’m creating their childhood. That’s what I’ve chosen to do with my life.”

“Don’t tell the chickens we’re eating chicken,” Khaia says.

“Once we had a chicken,” April says, “who looked just like a box of KFC. His name was KFC.”

Khaia leans over the counter. Her pink flowered shirt soaks warm sink water. “Mama was in the yard running around, saying, ‘I’m gonna kill you, chicken.’ He ran away. We never saw him again.”

“Sometimes we hear him,” April says. “He’s out there still—high up in a tree, thinking we’re gonna kill him.”

Khaia points to the woods and she says, “We like to go out there with chain saws and look.”

We get the machetes from the shack, put on boots and heavy packs, and take our legs high to press and pass the forest’s soft-bodied vines. “Okay,” Khaia says, “we just survived a plane crash. Got it?” She raises her knife high but it catches no sun. “This way,” she says.

The machete is a dark bird fluttering ahead. The earth takes our feet, rises over them.

“KFC is out here, I know it. Did you hear what Mama said? She said,
We’re gonna eat you, chicken.
He’s been hiding out here. Looks just like a box of KFC with legs.” She stops in the brush, pulls a white mushroom from the ground. “Here, chicken, chicken, chicken.”

The machete rises, finds itself in the skin of a tree. Khaia hacks and wiggles until the bark parts and the tree’s white insides gape and its smell is released into the world. “So we know how to get back,” she says.

The air is old, heavy, trapped there.

In the forest’s center, a tree is felled and in its light we rest. Khaia takes her hand and lets it swim through the green light.

“He’ll come,” she says. And we wait.

•  •  •

Brian didn’t return on the Fourth of July. No lingering smells of peppermint candy. April smelled cologne one time over by the couch but she couldn’t be sure it was Brian.

When I find her spinning and stretching and doing yoga moves on the floor, she says she’s training to dance for Brian.

“If I dance in a way that displays the suffering,” she says, “then maybe he will understand. If he can see me, then maybe he can energetically pick up on the feeling.”