I can never relate the brutality: 4:17 a.m., awakened by the Ophelian babble of a young white woman. I lay in bed, staring at my ceiling as her whispers rose into garbled questions, then rose into sobs — and, finally, into mindless, screaming pleas: “Help me, please. Somebody. Help Me, Please. Somebody. HELP ME! PLEASE! SOMEBODY!”
Alongside anguish, the woman’s cries also conveyed a plain-as-you-please disbelief that absolutely nobody cared. Cares.
As she stumbled beneath my alleyside window I ran into the bathroom. I tried to vomit, but couldn’t. I couldn’t call the cops either.
SPEC has this German shepherd with smashed hips. You can tell the dog’s injury is a couple of years old by the way it hops. By the way its pale tongue hangs, and its eyes hit the ground. Spec has to yank the dog outside by this harnesslike device made of old belts and duct tape. He cinches it around the animal’s neck and chest — taking the weight off the back legs — then lifts it up by the duct-tape handle and lugs it down the front steps of his building.
Dog looks like a piece-of-shit suitcase. Placed in the strip of sidewalk snow, it ambles sideways, as if drunk. Spec stands beside it and smokes while the shepherd coils around, then quakes as it defecates. He looks away from the dog, and to the industrial FOR SALE sign, red letters on white, newly bolted into the side of his house, a rental.
I’d be embarrassed if it was my dog. Spec doesn’t acknowledge the disfigurement. He just flicks down his smoke when the animal finishes, yanks up the silver-tape harness, and lugs the shepherd back up the front steps. Goddamn dog. I bet it used to be the most gloriously mean motherfucker in the alley.
LAST night, drunk, coming home from the VFW on South Wallace, I emerged from the train to a neighborhood on lockdown. Nobody walked, loitered, cruised; there was nothing but the sound of the train gears squeaking away, then the flitter of tumbling trash. I shuffled past shuttered liquor store and Title Loan, Carnicería and Orthodox Church. Stapled to power poles were new Health Department signs in Spanish with a picture of a target over a cartoon rat’s head: Ratón. I cut into the alleyway, leaned into the razor wind, and marked progress by yellow streetlight spheres. I imagined an insurgent rupturing my capillaries, his fists bashing the blood vessels of my sclera. I knew that I was being watched, yet there were no beautiful neighborhood kids to save me, to serve as witness. No romantic cat analogy. No war narrative to claim.
No. That’s drama. There was and is exactly one war narrative: Benefits, rightly mine. Health. Retirement. Education. Home ownership. Cheap meals at Applebee’s on Veterans Day. Ten percent discount at Lowe’s.
The rest of it? The cause? The memory and terror? Sanctimony. Total bullshit.
I clapped my gloved hands and laughed at myself, my boots crunching bottle shards as I walked towards my dog-shit-littered alley door.
Stepping through a cone of security light, I heard a series of metal clinks from the adjacent darkness. I darted into shadow and crouched against a wall, grasping for a rifle I haven’t carried in years. I keened to the source, a black void of open crawl space, a haven of cats and gas lines.
“Spec?” I whispered. “Specialist?”
Nothing.
“It doesn’t have to go down this way,” I stated. “I mean, think about it. There are guerrilla garden plots to plant. Or we rehab the neighborhood rec center. Or. . or hell, man, let’s occupy a red X house. I mean, just take it over. We’ll occupy, then gut and rehab, and then give it away to an evicted family. Teach the kids how to do the same, then unleash them on the neighborhood. We can fight, Spec. Can retake the land. And your house, even. We can buy your house proper and establish a base of. .”
From the crawl space came the waft of rotten eggs, of the mercaptan fused to natural gas. “Specialist? The opening of gas lines is not an acceptable tactic. In fact, this is selfish, a shortsighted campaign. And you know what? I get it. I do. I know what it means to stand next to death. I crave how it feels to be made alive by violence. But it won’t work like that anymore. Not here, anyway. I promise you, man. The law won’t turn their backs on this. It’ll take about a day to figure out someone blew this building up, and another to figure out it was you. And then?”
Still, nothing.
“Spec?” I called out. “Let me in. Please.”
I waited for a few seconds, then turned and marched home. On my doorframe was a newly scrawled hobo symbol. A diamond shape with a line pointing up from the top corner:
A diamond on a noose? A diamond with a fuse? Whatever it meant, there was no mistaking the threat.
“Roger that!” I shouted, then spat into the blackness. I went inside, sat at my lighted table, in my lighted kitchen window, and filled out that VA loan app.
THIS morning I woke to a rhythmic clash of metal on metal. It sounded like a chain gang, or the grinding track gears on an APC. I got up, put coffee on the burner, looked out the small window, to my Hermosa and Humbolt Parks version of Rome. Two brown men in layers of plaid flannel shirts were tearing down the first of the ancient cupolas. Blue-sky-blue surrounded them. The process of destroying both domes took about an hour.
I dread the idea of walking up on the old cat’s carcass. Best-case scenario, one day, one week, I’ll realize she’s gone. This will be enough.
Colleen
LAND
COLLEEN LAY AWAKE the nights, staring at the popcorn-textured ceiling. Her bedroom window was propped open by a box fan, its draft blowing out against the thick Mississippi air. She smoked in slow, labored sighs, a glass ashtray on her tummy as she sprawled on her old twin bed. Now twenty-two, she’d gone from high school straight to Basic Training and AIT, then on to deployment, before circling right back to that rural, postwar starter home, and to her childhood bedroom, a chorus of graduation tassel and sapphire-paneled basketball trophy, her parents biting back the demand that she smoke outside.
She’d get her own place soon. A job and whatever. Sometime.
She could picture the desert, barren and pocked by missile char. Fighter jets rented the vast gray horizon, cracking the sound barrier, shredding the calls to prayer. She had watched them deliver payload on the beige city in the distance, a city almost shorelike against a gulf of sand, and with minarets capped in turquoise. From her platoon’s staging area she saw the explosions, and the tufted clouds that rose silently afterward. At distance, it took several seconds before the concussions of the blasts had arrived to buckle her knees; the space between visual and physical was like being stuck in a riptide, a schism of cause and effect. Colleen could not get over this dead interval. She was terrified of it, but more than anything wanted to find it again. To somehow crawl inside.
The beige city in the distance. The goat herd that wandered onto the edge of the formation. Their bellies distended, their hip bones propping hide. Gray and black goats with stringy beards. Their shepherd, a lanky teenage boy in a beige caftan, wielded a dry reed. His face was smooth and feminine. One troop had laughed about the goats acting like stray dogs, trotting in a pack, starving, their dusted tongues bobbing from the sides of their mouths. Their shrill bleats and neck bells. Starving and trotting toward the soldiers.
Colleen and the platoon had loitered in the sand, having exited the vehicles despite orders to stay put, to remain on the outskirts and wait. They were heavy with equipment, tactical armor to tempered steel plate; their sweat was quickly shed to the oven-dry air. The guys pissed at the back bumper, and cut up, and listened for the order to engage the city. Now and again they’d seen the small, muted blooms of smoke rise from a frag grenade or IED.