“That turned-around morning—”
— what I had said before I shot that picture.
“It moved you, Livy—”
That wasn’t all.
“You said the picture moved you no end….”
The Reservist—
“Powerlifter, friend of my father’s—salesman, my father didn’t — one of those friends — in the picture arm-wrestling with the do-rag Triple Canopy construction mercenary, I told your beloved boss—”
Going a little far with Livy didn’t stop her: “It was him like a wild horse, the eyes — someone under the table too, cropped out of the picture, a woman tied up you said,” my driver, my companion, I better believe her, Livy said, because remembering what happened she was never wrong. Well, I didn’t want to be the first to give her negative feedback. No, all Dad meant was telling him and her brothers not to believe a neighbor that if you’re wading in a stream deer won’t notice you.
I said one reason obviously she enlisted was a talent—
She agreed but—
— a talent for Intelligence, I finished my thought, she picked up something I’d said, That turned-around morning? (Oh now she saw, it was just the way things went at the pool. I said No it was something else before that, the drive to the palace, for she had reminded me of seeing things in reverse as if to rerun them.) Meanwhile, if I was right, her assignment made less and less difference to me, a cushy slot compared to most women, leaving us with the mysterious real job like exactly where we were and where we were coming from, my sister’s one step forward two back or diagonal or a relief so I very nearly told Livy the job within the job idea my Chaplain credited me with — long dead, my underwater friend and no matter what they’d told her to watch for she was never going to see me in contact with him, I very nearly told her, but…nor could I explain that flash turnaround so arriving at palace came first, leaving from hotel in repainted Chevy Suburban last.
Did she recall me asking about an Asian kid with a film crew? Asking, yes. I had gotten him his citizenship even though they thought he was dead. Livy drove. What kind of citizenship was that? Maybe it brings you back to life, I said.
An American soldier in the road wanted something. There’s more to it, I said.
We stopped for him. He had his headphones on. Where was he going? It was the drive-bys, four in Kut last week. We gave him a cigarette he didn’t want. He took some crackers and a newspaper we unloaded on him. He just wanted to talk. He was interested in Livy, talking across me. He said the Secretary of War had announced that you could make a claymore out of office supplies, some tape, some toner, talc, pepper, a straw he almost forgot, he listed them. Did we know that a palace was being renovated for a bank? I said it was a branch of the Euphrates. Drive-bys worried him, what it was was you’re the target but they’re moving. He was nodding at us. He didn’t want a lift. We left him standing there, his headphones, what was he listening to? — the Base newspaper under his arm. He didn’t belong out on the road, Livy said, she knew him. His unit anyway. Which wasn’t Kut. One reason she enlisted she was good with people, I said. We arrived at a roadblock. Was that it? she said, was that—? Most people, I added.
— was that all?
It wasn’t a reason in itself, but maybe it was, I said. A dusty militiaman in a T-shirt got in back with a rifle and heaved a sigh.
Well, the Russian’s story, she wanted to get that straight. Archaeologist of…(?).
Livy, I said.
Of water, Livy said. She seemed to ignore the guy in back. And he had discovered the well intersection under the palace — (?)
The intersection of the whole—.
— before the Scrolls—? Livy was armed. She sniffed, she kept an eye in the mirror, what was the militiaman sitting on?
A hundred yards off the road a hooded man was rifle-butting three it looked like men on the ground. One, with a wine cask for a belly, got up like a snowboarder who’s been having balance problems, and was shot. “Why don’t you do something about that?” I said to the militiaman. “What you have in trawnk?” he said. His automatic rifle had a taped-together ammunition clip. He opened his door. He said that we were not moving, Livy braked and he got out, leaving the door open, and walked up ahead.
“He discovered it before the Scrolls were even found?” Livy finished her question, her fingers on the door handle.
“If they were found.” “What else could they be?” I got out and shut the rear door. Words came to me and I said them, that my sister had once read out loud: “‘Dust is the only Secret—/ Death, the only…’” “Get inside,” said my driver. “‘…the only One / You cannot—’”
“Please.” “‘You cannot find out all about / In his “native town.’”
“Thanks. What else could they be? I think we’re moving.”
“Made up, I guess. And he was — this archaeologist was,” I said, “liquidated. In Mexico (?).” She’d thought I would take a picture.
I was telling this woman who might be pumping me that what didn’t get written up was the day that she’d delivered me when the Scrolls were supposed to come in by water and the bomb went off and the Scrolls were salvaged, most of it, and a half hour later—
Livy’s window caught a blow from a rifle butt and the militiaman with the moustache was back just as the two cars ahead of us and the truck ahead of them took off and we with them and on my side out off the road a hundred yards the fat man who’d been shot in the leg was beating someone on the ground with a rifle butt and our militiaman running up stopped and lifted his musket—“Friendly fire, step on it”—but something, a cigarette, hit him from a car window, and he acted like it was a dog of a wasp at him, and I knew Liv had heard the words I’d come up with. “What did I say? — good with people.” She thought about it.
Her boss phoned all afternoon, she knew it was him, where there’s a will there’s a way, we were talking till two in the morning, I debriefed on recent events. The mobile gave up, and there was nothing left of our candles, one after the other, the flame shadowing her blond and dark hair as if her hair were the light, and I debriefed on the Competition Hearings back home, my talk on diving — the Twist, what you actually did, the time factor, competing not against but (in this slippery way recalling by chance the gray-haired square-shouldered man over on my left as my old girlfriend Liz’s Navy now retired husband)… One more candle then, a special one I thought found at the bottom of Livy’s bag and only when it was down to nothing she said it was in honor of us and her uncle in Australia had sent it to her on her enlistment a year ago it was one of the sixteen-thousandplus candles a minister had organized along the median of his town in the mountains to remember the civilian dead swept under the carpet in this unconscionable war and this candle had been blown out by the wind and rescued by her uncle, all they had was paper guards, no hurricane sleeves.
I had tossed a live coal from the campfire into the stream where we were camping once in a canyon, I was telling her when the mobile rang. I thought she better answer it. She explained what I wrongly (why should I have?) told her she didn’t need to — what a mess at home with her enlistment, and family friends were worse. Vietnam-vet banker, hotel administration prof, mortgage broker, working mom attorneys, sporting goods equipment, all these tough guys in the neighborhood trashing the war — like, shoulda got out before we got in — and their legendary high school math teacher Ms. Mansfield, still unretired, hey younger programmers, though a much younger coach from Romania backed the war — nuke thaim if we need to, on’y keeding—