And now, in a place where it was the least expected, the person he’d least expected to help him with this burden was listening. Of all people, it was the hippie chick. She was standing before him, unafraid of his rifle, and he could tell she’d made up her mind to die for the others, and what more could you say about a person?
< >
“I murdered a child.” Jeremy said to Ariel. “In Iraq.” The words came out with thorns on them. They were tough to dislodge. “I’m not a good guy. But the others…the soldiers…they weren’t all like me. You were wrong to say those things. We didn’t go over there to kill children. We went to do our job. They weren’t all like me.” His voice shattered, and fresh tears began to course down his face. “Do you hear?”
She felt what he wanted. His eyes were frightened, and he was starting to waver on his feet. She focused on this moment, this moment alone, and with an effort that redefined the limits of her willpower she put aside her grief at the things this man had done.
She knew. And she knew that whatever was with him in this place, whatever had brought him on his long journey, whatever it had promised him, whatever it had proclaimed, it could not give him what she was about to offer. It was so simple, yet so important that the lack of it could crush a soul.
“I hear you,” she said.
Oh my God, Jeremy thought. Oh Jesus… I have killed innocent people. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Maybe this band had been harsh in their interview with Felix Gogo. Maybe they’d been wrong in their judgement of his fellow soldiers…but how did the video itself lie? How was it not an accurate depiction of the choices that a soldier had to make, and no matter how tough you were trained you only had seconds to decide matters of life and death? How was it not the truth, showing the darkness that can swirl down in an instant and peck you to pieces?
I am the liar, he thought. Me.
And Gunny.
Gunny’s a liar, too.
There is no need to kill anyone else today, he thought. This battle is over.
< >
Jeremy felt his face begin to come apart. A knot rose, writhing, on his forehead. He reached up and pushed it down. His right eye began to sag from its socket. He took his fingers and put it back in its place. His mouth opened, wider and wider, and his jaw began to unhinge, but he pushed his jaw up with one firm hand and his mouth closed and the little ripplings and tremors that moved across the plains of flesh and bone ceased to be.
< >
He shivered. He lowered his rifle, and when he did a small figure stepped out from behind Ariel Collier, and held onto the edge of her dirty blouse with one hand, and from the shadowed face the voice of a little boy said, Daddy? You can come home now.
Gunny screamed in Jeremy’s ear that this thing lied.
Screamed that it was not what he thought. Screamed that it was a trick, that he should not—could not—let his eyes fuck up his brain. Screamed You have a mission, you dumb fuckstick.
But for a brief moment, as Gunny shrieked and babbled in first one ear and then the other, Jeremy Pett was allowed to see beyond the glass.
They were not alone in this ruined place.
There were other figures, at the edge of sun and shadow. They stood amid the rubble, behind Ariel Collier, John Charles, Berke Bonnevey and Truitt Allen. They stood silently, only watching. But Jeremy heard Gunny give a cry that began with bitterness and ended with ache. Jeremy looked from the hippie chick to the long hair to the drummer girl and then to the man on the ground. He looked at the small figure, whose eyes held centers of light that made Jeremy think of candles.
“Please forgive me,” he said to all of them, to every listening ear. He backed away. He dropped his rifle.
He walked a distance, to get his bearings, and then he began to slowly and painfully climb a small rise of shale and stones that stood behind the building. Halfway up he took the .45 from his jeans and dropped that too, and then at the top of the rise he faced a huge expanse of open desert, brown-dusted and white-streaked under the hot blue sky.
He went on.
He was sure the Elysian Fields lay in the direction he was travelling. He wouldn’t get there today, though. It would be a long, hard journey to—
He fell. He felt no weight on him, but he had the impression of hearing wings and the dry rattle of claws, and the sensation of something gripping his back and chewing at his neck. He tried to get up and could not. Tried again, but failed. He felt scrabblings at his flesh, and the noise of huge wings thrashing the air just behind his head.
Maybe on one side ten thousand times ten thousand screamed and capered, and on the other side ten thousand times ten thousand shouted and cheered for the man in the arena, the bloodied man, the man forsaken and cast aside, betrayed, yet the warrior spirit never broken.
It all came down to sharp edges, the wings of a crow, black origami.
That, against a Marine who was determined to stand.
Jeremy cast it off like an old skin. He walked on, staggering. The horizon was lost in the red descending mist. He knew he wouldn’t get to the Elysian Fields today. He had too much to account for. Too much innocent blood on his hands, to be allowed entrance today to the Elysian Fields. But wherever he was going, it would be a step toward the Elysian Fields. He told himself that whatever he had to do to get there, even if it was the impossible, he would find a way. He would never give up the fight to reach his wife and son—whatever they had become—on the other side of this.
The thing descended upon him again, but this time did not drive him down. As he staggered forward it beat at him, and clawed his back, and tore at his head with a beak like a piston.
His back bowed but unbroken, Jeremy remembered something Gunny had said to him, in the truck on the highway outside Sweetwater. That had been a lie, too. Its opposite was the truth.
“Without me,” Jeremy whispered to the enraged air, “you’re nothing.”
He shrugged the thing off. It whirled around him in a dark blur.
Gradually, whirl by whirl, the dark blur subsided. It did not vanish so much as it melted, oozing itself away in tendrils and chunks that also melted away into smaller and smaller pieces.
Jeremy fell to his knees.
He drew a breath, and he had a good look at the land that lay before him. Black clouds were rushing toward him, shot through with terrifying pulses of electricity. He smelled the ozone of war, the burnt scent of calamity and chaos. He figured he was in for a long hitch.
And in the last few seconds until his next mission began, he braced himself for the storm.
SIX
The Last Song
THIRTY.
“Guys, we want to thank you for being here tonight,” said Nomad into his microphone.
They had come to the end of their show at the Vista Futura, in Austin on Saturday night, the 16th of August. It was a packed house in this club, another black box on the knife and gun circuit. People had been turned away when the doors closed. It had been advertised as a free concert for those who came wearing a The Five T-shirt, which meant they’d been to another of their gigs or had bought the shirt off the website. All ages were welcome. It was approaching midnight, and it was nearly done.
Nomad stood cradling his Strat in a cone of clear white light. At his side, a few feet away, was Ariel with her acoustic Ovation. Behind them was Berke, at the center of her Ludwigs. Amazingly, only her snare and a floor tom had been damaged in the trailer. She was a firm believer now in styrofoam cubes and color-key labels.