READY
Peter Christopher
When my number clicked up I was ready for it. With all I had seen and done, I was as ready as I was ever going to be. Even so, I was amazed. There was—in that moment, jumbled together—white-hot fear, the searing pain through my eye and head and chest, while wondering how much luck I had left knowing for sure I was now goat-fucked, almost literally, and amazement too, the amazement of here I go, this is it!
The quiet past dusk tells us a lot. There is no one around under the blood-colored-crescent moon except for a young goat herder and his dusty goats come jingling from the desert. The goats stop to nose around in piles of trash and garbage. The neck bell of the biggest goat sets to clanking as he and the jingling others follow a narrow path to the brown river water. After drinking their daily fill, the big goat leads the others back up the path and onto the roadway over the bridge.
“Kut!” calls the herder, with the big goat turning and clanking back toward his master. The other goats follow.
The herder and his goats return the way they first came out of the desert, the clanking and jingling less and less, the darkness more and more, the moon another curved blade slicing the darkness.
It has been so long now since I have slept, really slept. The inside of my veins are scraped raw, lit up with exhaustion and the last of the greenies laying down such a fine cutting edge that I seem to glow. Holding up a hand trembling before my face, I can see the blood coursing radiant in my veins. The blood glows a weird bluish color, as if a diagram of blood, or a hospital dye chart of the body’s veins and capillaries. Along with my blood, I can also see the molecules of night gathering one by one on my retinas. All the while, I am keenly aware of what is going on around us: the scorpion waving its stinger before scuttling back into hiding, a fox padding past, bats swooping in the too quiet dusk.
“Who, who, who goes there?” calls an owl, and not a signaling tribal scout, not a wandering ghost.
A spray of spit worked up by a rounded-smooth river stone held under the tongue followed by Long Boy laid out on the sand is the answer. Slowly, inch-by-inch, pulling himself from our spider hole into the cooler darkness as if some other kind of darkness, or drifted sand slumping up, more skeleton bones and matted long hair rising from the grave, Boomer pulls himself into a crouch. When all looks clear, Booms waves me up looking much the same, gaunt warrior ghosts a long time on the backside of beyond. Under that bloodied moon, we follow the herder’s smooth sandal tracks, the cloven hoof-prints, careful to walk where only the herder and his goats have walked.
Boomer fills our canteens, while I keep watch. The water quivers, shows back a darker Boomer with a darker me standing over him, my weapon in hand. The desert stretches away into a layer of heavy-settled darkness. The sky spreads dark blue with the first stars scattered throughout. Beautiful is what I want to say, how the night is so beautiful, the air itself seeming slow and graceful, almost serene, but for that dark red hoodoo moon and the shattering quiet.
I follow Booms, trying to retrace our narrow goat-path steps. He halts at the crumbling rim of the riverbank. He looks around, lets fly with a squirt, before nodding okay and leading us on. I am about to clamber over the rim when I see Boomer take a wobbly step onto the roadway. Our darkest selves, our shadows, cross and come together for an instant. I hear the click of my number come up in that instant, my cakewalk moment, the ping-pong-ball-lottery-time of the tripped detonator.
I am ready for it.
Even so, when it comes, I am amazed!
A white flash of magnesium brightness sears my retinas. Hanging flash drifts inside my head followed by a wash of bright blue after-hue. The quiet is even quieter than before, a complete and total silence. A huge, scouring hot wind lifts me up, and as I am rising up, flying through the air, I can see Boomer. He is
a fiery pinwheel hurtling end over end. He is carried away on the hot, silent wind across the moon, over the crust of the world. There is no sound, no noise, because at the center of an explosion you hear nothing, the sound waves traveling outward. My head hurt squeezes, until I am floating above us in the silence, hovering more than flying, floating out of my right eye, when I see Boomer whump down hard in a scattering of flame onto the road. I think it is Boomer, only he now looks like piles of burning rags. I see his burning legs and boots in a way that I want to say is beyond a place of complete stillness and silence, a place where all motion and all sound have once been and no longer are.
When I hit down hard, eons and eons later, I see exploding spasms of white energy, dream flashes, sparks of pure light firing off under my eyelids.
Then I am walking in a snowy night. I am in the cold, getting colder breath by breath, while crossing the tracks near the Sons of Italy. I know I should look over my shoulder and into the wind before crossing the railroad tracks, look into the mountain tunnel, but I am afraid and cold and trying to make my way through the big flakes of blowing snow. I am too afraid to look into the gaping mouth of that freight train tunnel blacker than the night, even as I step on the shuddering rails and ties running past the Sons of Italy Lodge darkened and boarded up, past the V.F.W. Post 125 building also all dark.
In the wind and snow-blurred distance, someone is coming toward me, someone slipping and nearly falling in the deepening snow. At first I think it is Boomer, but then I see it is my old friend Alexander. He is hunched against the snow and wind whipping hot. From where I stand, he looks like Al, his wide shoulders, only Al is older and married now with two boys. As he comes closer,
I realize it is Al and he is somehow younger again, the way he was in the kingdom of our childhoods from that time when we were nine and ten. After practice, in our grass-stained football jerseys and padded pants, we would walk the tracks past the Sons of Italy to the Mohawk Tavern. We would hustle loose change from the drunks smelling of shots and stale beer slouching at the bar, telling them the dimes and nickels and quarters were for the Jimmy Fund. Knowing full well what we were doing, a bleary few would drop a wet single and a scattering of coins into our helmets held by the facemasks before the bartender chased us into wandering up Main Street. Clanking the change, feeling we were rich as kings, we walked to Jack’s with the steamed-over windows for hot dogs and cold glasses of chocolate milk.
“What are you doing out in this cold at this late hour?” is the first thing Alexander says when he comes close. “You’re dead.”
“Dead?” I say, and laugh, despite my fear. “How can I be dead, walking through the snow with this crazy blowing hot wind and talking to you, all at the same time?”
“Because you are dead,” Alexander says, “or in the place where you will soon know you are dead.”
“Maybe I can go with you to your house instead, talk with your mom and Carla if she is still up, listen to some of your wonderful funk music?”
“It won’t do you any good, you’re dead.”
“How about instead we go to Jack’s for those dogs and the glasses of cold chocolate milk with the syrup at the bottom of the glass or to Colonial Pizza to get ourselves out of this blowing wet snow? We can order up a pie oily runny and cheesy to warm us, the cheese sticking hot to the lid of the cardboard box. We will drink Cherry Vanilla Cokes from the can while the pie cools enough for us to eat and we will really taste it. We will know and enjoy every bite of it.”
“We have done that and you are still dead,” he says.
“How come I don’t feel dead?”
“Whatever you say,” he says sadly, shaking his head and walking away. The heavy-falling snow already blurs him, turns him all white, until he has disappeared.
“So how come I don’t feel dead?” I call after him.
The wet snow slants down harder, the wind blows hotter, pushing me back toward the shuddering rails and tunnel when the snow suddenly turns whiter too, as if turning all into light. I know I am heading toward the light of our Father who art in heaven, whosoever shall believe in me shall not perish. I am almost there, at the edge of the dazzling pure whiteness, when the wet blackness of the tunnel with its rumbling-the-ground freight trains, the dripping wet and freezing of that roaring blackness, the howling abyss, pulls me in and under, covers over my sight, and all is totally black. The wetness and shivering cold rolls through what was my mortal body. That wet cold becomes my knowing a loneliness and sorrow for every one who has ever lived.
I remember then how I started to get even colder, shuddering colder, and bleeding wet from what I was later told by doctors was shrapnel from a 250-pound BT-52 anti-tank mine blowing burning metal shards into my legs and chest and skull, shattering the bone around my eye socket, flying into my right eye, smacking my eardrums, leaving my hair on fire.
I hear what sounds like the huge screaming of metal on metal. The hollow loud rumbling of a massive freight train is approaching fast and unstoppable now in the complete blackness. Giant metal gates open once for all time, opening or closing, I am not sure which, the metal bending and twisting in living agony, when I realize the gates of a palace of many rooms are closing behind me forever. I can hear him too, just as the train is on me, just before those gates slam closed. I hear him calling me from far away, high on the wind, childlike, plaintive in the smallest calling voice.
I hear Top calling to me from other worlds away, from an emptiness we all share, from the beginning and end of things.
“Hold on,” he calls. “We have you!”
By then I am back behind my eyes, floating in that gorged darkness. I am behind one of my eyes, I should say, with the other shooting off sparks. I am not sure I am completely back in my body, until feeling my heart reaching through the nearest darkness for what is left of myself, grabbing and holding on to myself. My heart, or my soul, whatever you want to call it, cups a fluttering small flame. I am careful not to let it blow out. I hold on to myself like I have never held on before to anything, other than for baby Angelene sleeping peacefully in my arms the first time I held her.
When I come to, the first sound I hear is the gigantic spinning of planets from those other worlds beyond, the dusted grit of their asteroid belts, the rushing flood of the top-grade morphine pumping through my veins.
A nurse, hugging a clipboard, stands over me stretched out in a hospital bed of unbelievably white, unbelievably clean sheets. I believe I am dreaming, but for the tube in my nose draining out something dark and the I.V. in my veined-skinny arm.
“You were dead, a corpse lying in that bed, according to all the machinery and from what I could tell by checking you over twice,” the nurse says. “Now that you’re back among the living, is there anything I can get for you?”
“A hot dog with the works from greasy Jack’s and a chocolate milk and a whole pizza pie with a Cherry Vanilla Coke.”
“I don’t know about any hot dogs and chocolate milk or pizza for that matter, but I know a place where they got some decent ribs once you are ready to wander outside on your own.”
“Where am I?” I ask, looking at the tubes and whirring machines beside my bed. “Where’s Boomer and Alexander and Top?”
“You’re in Walter Reed,” she says. “I don’t know about those others.”
What she does not say and what I soon discover is how Boomer is dead. He is dead in a way that he is not coming back, at least not how he was, so very alive and vulnerable and determined to do the very best job at what he was ordered to do so he could come home for the rest of his young life and grow old with the world.
The rest of what I soon discover is that I have two-hundred-and-twenty-one shrapnel wounds. I also have the knowing, each and every moment, that I am one of the lucky ones, really lucky, with whatever I need to pay is the least of it. There is the ooze and stink of shrapnel still working itself out of my legs and chest and head that sometimes cause splitting headaches and set off all the metal detectors at airports. My head and my hair sometimes still feel on fire. The ringing in my ears and head sound like war. What is left of my right eye allows me to see only a slight curvature of light, a crescent-thin blade of blood-red moon.
I guess what I am trying to say is how all of us, each in our own way, is in pain and afraid. No news there. I guess what I am really trying to say and to learn is to do the best with what I have. When you are blown up the way I was, your choice is either shred away with fear or somehow, someway, get strong.
The blast rolled my eyeballs all bloody into my skull, stretching taut my cheeks and jaw muscles and flesh over the broken bones of my face. I was struck blind in one eye with little needled stars and white-hot splinters. The doctors said I am made of luck with the way a corkscrew of fine German steel came to rest dead center toward the back of the pupil. A little more detonation and the steel shaving would have continued whirly-gigging right through the retina, through the outside ocular muscles and optic nerve, through the eye socket and sinus cavities into all the big pulsing nerves and bundled veins, through my coiled brain matter into lights out for good.
Just as amazing is how three months later I was back home waking every night. I tried, and sometimes almost succeeded, in getting out of our bed without waking Cecilia, before limping in a cold sweat through the house, hearing the dry palm fronds scrape wind-blown naked across the roof shingles. Dawn came with the darkness leaving the sky taken over by colors deepening, by heaven’s own fire flaring low behind our house, before pouring over the abundance, over Angelene’s bicycle with the training wheels left in the growing grass of the front yard.
If you look closely into my eye, or see a photograph of me, you will see the dead solid center shining back, a red desert sun of deed and loss and love.
What I am trying to learn now is how to live with my one good eye wide open, ready for all of it.