Elegy on Kinderklavier (8 page)

Finally one of their bigger batters swung hard and made contact. Everyone who was left watched as the ball sailed high and straight. It seemed to stay in the air for a long time before finally disappearing into the corn. Samuel turned around and breathed in the near dark. His teammates were all standing still, looking at him. Hilton had taken off his catcher's mask and now stood, glancing back and forth between Samuel and the bench. Brother Reeter was the only one left in the stands, and he stood. Samuel let his glove drop to the mound, and went to face him. We forfeited the next game, and just like that, summer was over.

•

They did not ask me to tape Samuel's turn in the shed. By then there were so many hands, so many punches to take. What I do know is that he had to go to the ER afterward, and that he sputtered blood all over the nurse's uniform trying to explain that he'd started the fight, that it was his fault, really.

•

We didn't find out that Douglas Reeter had been lying until late September, when my father and what was left of the unit came back. I told him at dinner all the stories Brother Reeter had told the team. I didn't even ask if they were true, but my father just got this long look in his face and stared over at the window for a while and said, “Honey, Douglas Reeter sat at a desk in Kuwait the entire time before coming back here. It was a reward for his typing skills. We didn't even see him.”

It seems impossible that none of us had asked our fathers, in all those emails or calls, about Brother Reeter's stories, but I only remember the boys leaning across those rows of bleachers, looking off up into the sky or trees or grass, listening and listening. There was a news story once the men of our town that could come back did come back. We were briefly the town with the highest casualty rate of all the places in America that had sent men to the war. It only lasted a few months, though.

•

In the fall cold at midnight, the group of dark bodies standing back in the fallow field that fronted my house had a specter of frozen breath hovering over it. There was Samuel's face at my window. I followed him out without speaking.

Three of the boys were carrying their father's shotguns. Samuel already had his farm license, and we sat in the back of his truck, Douglas Reeter lying face down, hooded, gagged, hands bound behind his back with plastic zip-ties, between us.

In the shack, on the tape, his eyes are wild when the boys pull off the hood, when he sees the gun. They don't hit him. For some reason, this tape is the hardest of all of them to watch. He looks, his eyes so wide, at the shotgun that Samuel holds up to his face, but it's not that. There is the sharp, ammoniac scent of urine. Then, the part I can never get over: you see his shoulders soften, his eyes go dull—like he's accepting it. He closes his eyes. Samuel Lincoln pulls the trigger and there is only a click. Someone undoes Reeter's hands, and the boys file out, leave him there. They do not beat him. They do not really even touch him.

The tape follows the boys out, catches their faces where they stand together out in the cold, exhilarated. There is the faint sound of Reeter weeping, back in the shack.

And I remember them there well, I remember their faces, lit by the glow of the cigarette they pass around on the tape. Truman, who will accidentally kill his girlfriend driving around after prom, when he will take a hill on a gravel road too fast and the car will flip and roll, crushing her to death but sparing him perfectly, without even a scratch. P.J., Gary, and Ralph, who will move away after graduating, getting as far as Oklahoma City, St. Louis, and Omaha, respectively; all three mechanics, if you can believe it. Hilton Hedis, who will become an overweight student football manager for the University of Kansas, before getting fired after being arrested for breaking three bones in his girlfriend's face after a drunken fight, and finally end up with the job at the grain elevator in Cloud County. In the end only I will stay in New Jerusalem. Only I will be left around to remember.

•

The Old City at New Jerusalem still stands, more or less, though it's been closed to tourists ever since a wooden cutout of a minaret fell over on a kid from Kansas City, causing him a head injury. The well-marker shack and all of the old vacation cabins at the old Hope and Grace Bible Camp were pushed down a few years ago so the church could sell the land.

Samuel Lincoln and I dated all the way through high school, and we tried to keep it together in college—me at Pittsburg State, him at Missouri Southern—but Samuel eventually dropped out to go roughneck on an oil derrick outside Wichita Falls, though not before getting me pregnant with my beautiful daughter, who is five years old
now. I don't feel badly toward Samuel, in the end. As he got older he got eaten up by an anger even he didn't fully understand, I don't think. He sent along what I think must've been nearly the entirety of his paycheck, all the way up until the day he fell from some rigging and hit his head on a girder and died three days later in a hospital in Dallas.

Douglas Reeter and Marly ended up buying that old house on my father's property, and getting married. Three months after their wedding I was at college, and so I wasn't there at my window to see Marly steal away, leaving him as he slept. Nor was I there four weeks after that, when Douglas Reeter took himself off into the woods, making sure to get clear of my father's land, and put a bullet through the roof of his mouth.

Nobody really knows where Marly went, how far away she got. None of us have ever heard from her again, not a single word. I'll confess that sometimes, when the house is quiet and the light long and blue, I'll fantasize about the phone ringing, about me picking it up to hear nothing but a familiar breathing on the other end of the line. I want to ask her where she made it to, where she ended up going, what she ended up doing. I want to ask her if she made it all the way to the real Jerusalem, what it's like there. And I also want to tell her to come here and sit in my living room and dream up those dead boys with me again, Reeter and all. But I don't know what story I could tell her about how things went to convince her. I don't know what story there is that could bring her back.

The IED

1.

What is he looking at? The maze of light made by the high mud-brick walls of the narrow alley that the line of men, generously spaced, are navigating. It is the early part of late afternoon, the heat subdued into a smoldering focus by a low ceiling of clouds, everything very dry. The dust from the passage of something or someone—recently? hours ago?—floats through the diffuse angle of light at the intersection of two alleyways, giving the air there a sort of grain, causing it to briefly coruscate. But that is only at the border of what Abrams is looking at as he feels the strange texture under his boot, the slight resistance of the rectangular metal contact plate.

Though it's not a maze of light he can really see, not completely, at the moment, just one he imagines. The part he can see is, he supposes (or was supposing in the microseconds before registering the change under his foot), only one corridor. Farther along, he can also see the beginnings of a perpendicular corridor, another alley. Together they make one small corner of the maze.

It is enough: the narrow, dirt-floored alley, cast partially into cool shadow by the obstruction of the high walls on either side. It is
almost pleasant, the quiet at the end of their patrol, the stillness of the village around them, the genial fatigue of the men, which is a kind of gladness, Abrams has always thought. And it is this moment of mindfulness—when Abrams looked up from the ground in front of his feet and noticed the alley half in shadow and the slump of the shoulders of the men in front of him at their delicate distance—which caused Abrams to look farther upward, to allow his face to continue on its vertical pivot enough to take in the sky, the light, the unparsable complex of sky and light framed in that curious way by the tops of the walls into a kind of maze. And it was exactly then that he felt the slight slip, the sudden ease of friction beneath his right boot afforded by the metal contact plate.

Though that's not quite right either because it implies a false parade of events, when what it is surely more accurate to say—accuracy being meaningful to Abrams—is that there was a sensory-cognition master-fade type situation going on somewhere in his cortex, the phrase
maze of light
fading out even as
contact plate
or, more simply,
IED
faded in. That is to say that even as
maze of light
was dawning on Abrams (seeming, in fact, to fall down out of the vision in order to describe it)
IED
was beginning its scaled march into attention, so much so that the two thoughts may be said to have been coeval.

Neither is the irony lost on Abrams that it was a moment of actual mindfulness (and not distraction or carelessness) which possibly led him to place his foot on the small stretch of shallow dirt that hides the contact plate. He can still hear the instructor during the lengthy pre-deployment training exercises in the real alleys of the fake village in the Arizona desert. Specifically, that in order to
never ever
be
caught unawares
by the presence of an improvised explosive device while on patrol in the Shit, they needed to first and foremost learn how to
cultivate a state of extreme mindfulness
in which each of them could stare at the ground, the dirt in front of their feet (carefully stepping
only in the compressed boot shapes of dust left by the man ahead), for hours and not become
zombified
or otherwise rendered senseless to the small hints of micro-terrestrial disturbance that would signal the presence of a device.

Abrams had thus far handled the weeks of their patrol assignment by allowing himself to focus so hard he lost all sense of scale. In his vision the miniature landscapes of alley dirt became actual landscapes; the ridges and mounds, the troughs, the swales, all began to loom, began to feel like life-sized features of an entire sprawling world.

No, what Abrams and the other men actually needed was a sort of mind
less
ness, an absence of thought that would allow them to stare at unremarkable stretches of dust and dirt for hours at a time without developing an acute awareness of the moment, or the light, or the other men, or any of the marginalia of actual experience that is
mindfulness
. It now seems a strange irony that such a human moment—the maze of light, the pleasant preprandial lull of the village, the alley wearing its stole of shadow, the pleasant cutting scent of the other men's sweat—has possibly led to Abrams' imminent cranial evacuation by way of shrapnel moving through the tissues of his face at unimaginable speeds.

Unbidden, the flash of memory: Mrs. Clowney (sharp-faced, gently obese English 9 teacher). She is repeating, somewhat smugly, the
true definition
of irony.
Irony is when the audience is aware of something that the player on stage is himself unaware of
.

Unbidden, also, the related memory of Mrs. Packard, Abrams' third-grade teacher, trying, for some reason, to impress upon the class the unthinkable speed of light. She is standing at the classroom's light switch, flipping it on and off, which sets off tremors of giggles. Abrams raises his hand (the teacher's face falling at another of his questions) and asks which is faster, then, the time it takes the
electricity to go from the switch to the light, or the time it takes the light from the light bulb to reach their eyeballs, or the time it takes the students themselves to know that the lights are on? For a moment, Mrs. Packard, in her sturdy floral dress, goes silent, her face bled of its pride at her lesson. She clasps her hands in front of her in a way that Abrams understands on some level as a sign of vulnerability, of being hurt in some way by this child, which makes him feel really bad the rest of the day every time he looks at her, though, of course, he can't explain why.

Later, when he learned about it in college, Abrams couldn't believe how slowly perceptions and conscious sensations move into our attention, outpaced often (always?) by even our own reptilian subsystems. Also in college, Abrams, long suspicious of Mrs. Clowney, ended up looking up the definition of irony, finding its root to be in
, meaning “dissimulation” or “feigned ignorance,” which Abrams thought sounded more like it. His body (specifically his foot) knows before he does, but cannot bear to short-circuit his mind's self-myth of mastery, and so must feign ignorance, must wait until the phrase
IED
finishes its patient fade into Abrams' mind,
maze of light
still echoing in some synaptic hallway.