“‘Did I have a sister?’” he said.
“The Asian kid?”
“I said sure.” My soldier snapped his wrist. He heard something. “War child, war child” was what he said — like a not great song—“and ‘was my sister my brother?’”
“Said that,” I said.
“Right. You could hear worse.”
“It’s my friend,” I said. Soldier snapped his wrist, pumped his thumb. “You going back to Kut?” “How did you know,” I joked. “Said he was getting married to his brother’s sister, he better watch who he works with, they looking for the other guy.” “Who, the guy you used to know?” “Unfinished business,” said the soldier clairvoyantly, and was gone, calling back to my “San Diego?” “Naw, Kut”—as if he had been deserted — burning his presence into some act to come that was mine; still taller turning a corner, he had heard me and was gone before I asked if the other guy was his friend. I was left with my thoughts and with tomorrow.
One of Umo’s film crew, then, was a serviceman, I thought, though not now was a second thought, but why? Not a civilian now either, come to think of it. Still in the service but. What was he, this known man who might be using as an assistant a very young Asian, and there were three of them and maybe a fourth, a driver (maybe not).
I heard shots clear as kindling branches snapping, and I was certain that it was about my informant that they clustered like deerflies to sting his blood. When would they come after me? The whirr of bicycles in the dark and that double ring of one handlebar bell answering itself, and a third in some code unmistakable to one acquainted with the dark in these no longer bicycled streets curfewed five and a half hours nightly even for women in labor who had to get to the hospital. Locals lacking good radios fired their rifles to let each other know where they were when they patrolled the palm groves and here in town. Someone was coming for me in the morning.
In my room I checked cassettes, battery pack, head, a card in a metal frame attached to the cam that I wrote sequence numbers down on if I had the time; unstrapped my watch and set the alarm. And later couldn’t tell if I’d really slept, for in my uncertainty a test would be, Had I dreamt? when the dream this night was just another waking memory and getting up I found a memento on a table and took it back to bed in the dark before I fell asleep toward dawn thinking who they would have the right to arrest back home these days if they wanted. My family?
Milt had snapped up Umo’s ID, fingers like a bird. Umo went for him, not the ID, lifted him up over his head. Cheeky shrieked for the four-bulb ceiling light fixture over the dining table and for the shepherd’s pie and roasted birds and a jar of candied ginger and all the food was there on her table and Umo spun Milt like a plank, some poor pro wrestler who didn’t get the joke, and Umo nearly falling down laughing his laugh making to lay Milt in Cheeky’s thin and veined arms (for I measured with a shock or the beginning of some thought the two years since I’d seen her, by her thinness, who’s light as a crust of fire ash, yet also her desire to tell me something — Umo’s abandonment of her on his arrival in Vera Cruz, but—), instead laid Milt on the “ancient rug” I’d heard of, a gift from The Inventor, who quickly scribbled in his book a note to himself I assumed — and I needed to ask about a book in his store he wouldn’t let me look at (and I thought I gave that surprise envelope to Dad and didn’t know what was in it) but Cheeky was saying to me and a chain-smoking little kid gobbling lox-in-a-blanket and the last three buffalo corn dogs and cheese nachos strewn on the table that Umo came in handy at times. (Umo was…telling him something, Em said. He was? I said in the dark — Pretty vigorously… Mmhmm…that you would be OK. He’s wild, he’ll never desert you, we’re all family but what’s that law they like to forget? It wasn’t whether the war was right, he was telling Milt and you, it was that you were doing something in it.) The war, Milt said. Absolutely, said Umo. I’m just going as a… I began (but did not say, picture taker). See you there, said Umo. He was a little different.
My sister, half asleep, I knew was exposed really to me in all her attention, covers thrown back typically. When I gave up at last and got up, wondering at a fine length of light under the door from the hall, I found an amber glint on her chest of drawers and the little bookcase. “Look, that ol’ geode.” Next to the old useless “mouth organ” harmonica her grandfather, a farmer we never visited, had sent her, this geode rock the size of an orange — half, in fact (better than a whole, you can see the inside, once upon a time a cavity in a rock vein, like a mold filled up then with crystalline minerals projecting toward the center). And she had dug it up, this craggy sphere in space, and my father had cracked it in two (I must have been eleven) to see the amber, sea-cactus green, violet, yellow icy forms, a mountain six inches across, and worth something.
Take it, she murmured half-dreaming I thought. I ran my fingers over the little bookcase begun in the garage and finished by me for better or worse, the screws countersunk by my father who had left the bookcase unsanded and unfinished one whole winter almost. But, ’member Wiley’s Well? my sister murmured.
I did. The geode beds. The campground. They called it “primitive” and it was. My sister made a sound, awake. Brought in our own firewood and toilet paper, she said softly. The feet near her door weren’t heard again, though the thin line penciled under the door of light dim from the far end of the second-floor hall didn’t cease, and in the near-dark I went and stepped down hard on my keys in the pocket of my pants, sat down on the bed, thought again, found my sister’s arm under my neck when I stretched out as if I had never gotten up. “One step forward, one back,” she said comfortably. We always went halves, she said, you and me. The three of us in that tent, I said into her hair, and somewhere near there we dug up the geode. Not exactly, I said. No, never exactly, she said. You and I, I said.
Yes.
And Dad, she said… Yes, read the survey map for us with a vertical distance of forty feet between the lines — Yes, when it was almost too dark to see by the fire. And the contours made fingerprints, I said; she turned her face to me. Whorled. Mmhmm. Whorled. Did she speak or did I?
Elevation.
Saddle. That’s the hourglass. The dip between two rising — Mmhmm — elevation lines.
Gray for privately owned. Brought our own firewood, water… The haves and the have-nots, he said. Yeah what did he mean?
We heard familiar, heel-hard feet softly seem to pass, cease, pass outside my sister’s door, heel, ball of the foot barely sticking to the pine boards.
And the white, she said. That was for rock outcrops he said. Right, he did. Open lands, I think; yes, too open for—
Hiding (whispered, giggling)… For hiding a platoon on a single acre it said (I added),…from — Mmm, from planes flying over — a memory in both minds, both heads, mouths. A trek, he called it. You’re right. The River. The Colorado. Yes, a half hour for each mile of dotted lines for trails unless you’re climbing and then… He slept between us. (Horse trail, foot trail. Mmhmm.) You and I facing the opposite way from him, talking across (she giggles)…his…shins, his…sleeping-bag feet, ‘n we added up the mileage of each stop our father had made: from the gas station to Blythe, from trading post to the Wiley Well turnoff, from the turnoff south to the dirt road past the state prison, from there to Coon Hollow Campground, from there back to Wiley Well — It’s Wileez. Until…
We were thinking of another time we’d been talking in bed and God that time when I came out into the hall in my underwear to go to my room, he was standing in the bathroom doorway the light off behind him, and you just knew he was angry as hell. Did she remember? What in particular? she retorts, her tongue softly clicking the syllables. “It was the night before the accident.”