Elegy on Kinderklavier (6 page)

•

What do I remember?

The sun burning high and hazy in the sky above the green sea of the corn past the outfield, but not yet high enough to burn the color out of everything. It was maybe two weeks before the summer ball season started. The boys were one by one coming in from the field at the end of their morning practice, gathering on the other set of wooden bleachers. I had my braces off and was lying across the highest plank of my own bleachers. Two planks lower, Marly was lying with a forearm draped over her eyes, her cotton shorts and T-shirt scrunched up in a way that had caused a good number of fielding errors already.

I've been holding off on Marly, saving her for as long as possible, but Marly never was one to be held off, even in memory, and I can no longer neglect her presence, her glorious body: thin, tan, her rounded chest, her impossibly blond hair. She was twenty-two I think, seven years older than me, and I counted her as my friend. Her and Doug the Reaper rented the little falling-down house on the rear
of my father's land, and she spent a lot of time that year in our house, especially when my aunt, who was supposed to be my caretaker, was gone to Stillwater to see her friends. Marly was quiet and beautiful wafting around the rooms of our house. People said she'd run around on Doug during the first seven months of our fathers' deployment, before Doug came back to do his three-fold job in town, and it seems possible, just because she was always so supremely bored, but I don't like to believe it. Douglas Reeter was the only one of the men allowed to come back before their tour was done.

Finally all the boys were back in, splayed out in the bleachers, and we were listening to Brother Reeter, having finished his pep talk, settle in to one of his stories.

•

Pat Lincoln, John Hedis, and Peter Powers are walking alongside the Humvee, which rolls along in the caravan across the dirt road out in the desert. Along one side of the road is a kind of olive orchard, the men think. The trees are not much taller than they are, and scraggly. Along the other side of the road stretches an open, undulating green field. You can never tell what Iraq is going to look like, the men think. Sometimes it looks like this, sometimes something else entirely. Hard to know which is the real country. It is very hot. This is the road that runs behind the orchard of olive trees; on the other side, somewhere through the trees, is the main, paved road that the coalition supply caravans keep getting attacked on. The insurgents are using the olive orchard as cover, the officers think. So now the men are pushing along the back road, trying to flush the insurgents out.

Are there shadows between the layers of slender trunks? Does the sandy soil shift in the breeze, as the loose end of a scarf masking
a face would shift? A stray goat idles in the roadside ditch. Scott Holdeman, who is all of eighteen years old, is up in the vehicle's turret, slowly swiveling the machine gun back and forth. Doug Reeter is driving the Humvee behind them, watching. His windshield is like a video screen when the explosion goes off. The spray of dirt against the thick glass is unexpectedly gentle in the space after the great sundering, like rain against a house's window.

Then they are all out of the vehicles, someone is shouting IED, IED, half of the men are flat on their stomachs taking cover in the ditch, which is now a chaotic landscape of dirt. Is anyone down, is anyone down, someone screams. Reeter is out of the vehicle now, staring at the road in front of them. The road is gone, just a big crater, but placed in it, spanning it actually, like a toy car some giant child has put there, is the Humvee, and the men who were in it are tumbling out, coughing but OK. Reeter, along with everyone else, looks wildly around for the men who were walking alongside it. John Hedis and Peter Powers have fallen together, their limbs tangled, into the opposite ditch, which they are crawling out of, stunned, maybe concussed, but whole. Reeter looks again at the crater. People start screaming Pat Lincoln's name.

They can't find him. They don't see him. The thought is there in the back of everyone's minds; they've heard about the larger IEDs, guys on patrol being partially or wholly vaporized by the force, especially if they were the ones who triggered it. Then a figure appears across the field, three hundred yards (swear to god) away, and the men on the road almost open fire.

“Fuck, no, shit that's him, that's him,” someone yells, waving his arms. The figure staggers, but waves back. There's no helmet but they can make out the uniform. He starts to jog toward them in the thick soil, and they can see it is him, it is Pat Lincoln, unharmed. The men stand there, stilled on the road, and stare in amazement.
Just at that moment there is a heavy, loud, close, wet sound, and they all fall down again in panic, only to realize that the wild goat's head, apparently airborne this entire time, has landed on the hood of the stalled vehicle.

Brother Reeter sat back on the bleacher plank, as if in disbelief at his own story.

“I mean, can you imagine the trajectory?” he said, reverently, and it was unclear whether he meant the goat's head or Pat Lincoln's flying body.

•

Later the next day, Samuel Lincoln sat up on my bed to go. We were there in our underwear, my upper-floor bedroom dry and hot in the afternoon sun, the window open, blinds lazily bowing in the occasional puffs of breeze. Samuel was a sweet boy then; he always carefully took off my braces and blew for a long time on the red marks they left, his breath cool on my skin. He liked kissing the freckle that sat catty-corner to my bellybutton before he kissed anything else, and I generally let him do what he wanted after that, my palm prickling warm against the muscles of his tan back as he moved above me.

We'd been done for a while, not speaking, just lying there together before we'd have to go to get back to our cabins at the camp. This was Saturday afternoon, which we had free from Bible study, and which most of us used to go home and see our families. That morning Douglas Reeter, Casualty Affairs Officer, had visited the Powers household, and Gary (Peter Powers' son) wasn't in morning worship, and so we'd all come to know that his dad had become the sixth man from New Jerusalem, Kansas to be killed in
Iraq. I was thinking about Doug Reeter, Doug the Reaper, wondering what it was he said to Gary's mother.

“Listen,” Samuel said, not looking at me. He sounded unsure, so I stayed quiet. “You know the well-marker shack, out in the third field over, behind the Dust Bowl?”

“Listen,” he said, looking at me now, having decided something. “You got a watch and a flashlight?”

As he climbed out of my window and crab-crawled across the roof of the porch before dropping down into the sideyard, I leaned against the sill. Standing there I saw Marly in her front yard, beside the fluttering white shapes of her wash hung out to dry. She was watching me, one hand on her hip, the other shielding her eyes.

•

I still have the tapes, of course. Though I've only watched them once since I made them, on a rainy spring afternoon a couple years ago after I found out Hilton Hedis had been killed in an accident at the grain elevator. I was missing those boys, then, and I realized I didn't have any pictures of them, only the tapes.

What is not on that first miniature videotape: the faces of the boys, barely legible in the dark of the shack. It was not a big space, that shack, and they were arranged around the squared U-shape of the well-pipe coming out of the ground. Also not on the tape: the long walk out there: the cool air and imperfect dark of one forty-five in the morning; the cabins asleep behind me; only the small plastic and metal sound of my gait, the seething of the cicadas, the fog drifting between the trees, out of the crops.

In the shack, P.J. Holdeman shoved the video camera at me and I took it and looked up at them. Samuel nodded and watched me, seeing
what I would do. The other boys met my gaze, then looked away.

What is on the tape: the image jolts on and we are outside the shack, the camera's night vision picking up the ambient glow of the night sky. There is the sound of a struggle as Truman Renolds and Ralph Simonsen materialize out of the stalks of the field, dragging a hooded figure between them that I know is Gary Powers.

The boys are all outside now, a clump of dark bodies. The five whose houses Doug the Reaper has already visited begin to wrap cloths that I can't quite make out around their faces: checked red tablecloths, indistinguishable from what we knew were called kaffiyehs. Those five: Ralph Simonsen (roadside IED), Truman Renolds (Vehicle Borne IED), P.J. Holdeman (his brother shot through the jugular while urinating on the base of a tree), Jackson Kepley (his father riddled with shrapnel from the grenade dropped down onto the street at his feet), and Daniel Willis (his dad knocked unconscious, then burned alive in a helicopter crash). Those five, masked now, open the door to the shack and disappear inside. I feel Samuel's hand push roughly at my back. On the tape, his voice says, “Go on,” faintly, almost gently, but I don't remember that.

There's a limit to what you can be surprised by, I guess. And hadn't I already seen first Daniel's face, then P.J.'s, then Jackson's after we'd found out about their dead—bruised, eyes swollen like pastries, lips split, empurpled? I remember it making sense, in a way, when I saw them like that; it was how I imagined it must feel privately, just externalized. But I didn't think about it, not really, and when I saw them in the shack, tying Gary Powers awkwardly to the pipe, it was no revelation. I'm sure I was surprised. I'm sure the whole thing was vaguely terrifying to me. I was fifteen years old, after all, and not one of them, not really. But I stood there in silence and pointed the handheld video camera where they wanted, and there has to be a reason why I did not leave.

I was more startled by the violence of the movement on the videotape, on my little TV screen, watching it that day after Hilton passed than I was standing there at the time, watching them beat Gary over the top of the little pop-out viewfinder. In person, it felt like one person hitting him (the hood now off his head) at a time, which is, in fact, how it was, each one of the boys taking turns with their fists, but on the tape it looks more like a close mob, a gang, a group beating, unfair. The tape, unlike my memory, has not been granted the small mercy of silence, either, and when I watched it alone in my living room, years later on that rainy afternoon, I winced at the solid, wet impact of the awkward punches, at Gary's whimpering, more panicked than I remember it being.

One thing that's not on the tape, but that I do remember clearly, is watching Gary three days later during Bible class. Samuel told me much later about how it was his duty to take Gary to the camp nurse afterward, because he was good at stories. But what I remember, sitting there that morning in Bible study, is Gary Powers' face, the bruises already turning their muted, sickly colors, half of his upper lip so swollen that it almost succeeded in obscuring his goofy smile at the boys who had abducted him.

•

The 27th season of the Four State Christian Summer Baseball League started off for us about how you would expect. The only thing the members of the One True Congregation of the Savior and Nazarene who ran the Hope and Grace Bible Camp actually paid for were our hats, which were maroon with a gold cross above the bill. We did have uniforms (embroidered by the generous Sisters during a marathon Army Wives meeting in the Temple Mount). They only
had two words on them, both on the front: HOPE on the right side of the buttons and GRACE on the left, and each set of letters was situated too high up, almost in line with the collarbone. The effect was to make the words seem like labels for our arms (a detail not missed by our opponents' bench, who guffawed every time Hilton's GRACE rocketed the ball to center field while trying to catch a runner stealing second, or Truman's HOPE sent a batter in the on-deck circle sprawling to the dirt). Four games in, all of which we lost, the league donated some batting helmets so we could stop borrowing the other team's, and the day before the best prospect for our first win Brother Reeter brought a collection of his old Babe Ruth League bats from when he was a kid, which cheered us all up, even though they were the old fashioned kind (“Wood was good enough to see to Christ's demise, it'll work fine for yours,” he grouched). It was also around that time that the other teams started calling us the Martyrs.

I can still see our starting lineup. Everyone's positions seemed almost preordained, fated in a way. Gary Powers, for instance, whom everyone called You Too after the day Sister Brooks told us about his namesake in history class, was small and wiry and played a rangy shortstop. Hilton Hedis, of course, played catcher (“Just to give the ump some protection,” Brother Reeter said, only half joking). Samuel Lincoln was our star pitcher, but when he wasn't pitching he wiled away his time bored in the outfield, making comments to himself about the opposing team's batters that only Ralph Simonsen, whom he split the outfield with, and P. J. Holdeman, who played second base, could hear. Third base was covered by Truman Renolds, a tiny, quiet kid who heckled the batters with surprising meanness and who occasionally, when we were already down by a lot and sometimes when we weren't, missed incoming throws on purpose, letting the balls fly into the opposing team's bench and sending them diving. To round out the infield, our first baseman was a slightly older
kid named Honor Riley who wanted to be an Elder when he grew up, who we had to convince to be on the team so that we could field an almost full roster. Our only options after Samuel got exhausted on the mound was to end the game watching Truman throw his angry fastballs in the very general direction of the batters, or to watch Ralph loop the one pitch he knew how to throw (a fat curve) over and over again until Brother Reeter stormed out to the mound and told him that if he kept pitching like that even the apparition of Jesus Christ himself wouldn't be able to save his arm.