From THE YELLOW BIRDS: KEVIN POWERS (PP. 143-47)
On returning to his home town after a year of the Iraqi War:
“Small lines wound their way up and down the surface of the
stump on which I sat. They were
intricate and gouged out or termited into a pattern that struck me as oddly
orderly. Luke (a high school buddy) and
the rest of the boys and girls still splashed in the water, taking turns diving
from the broad gray rocks into the draft of the current that swept them ten or
twenty feet down stream like an amusement park ride. They were beautiful. I had to resist the urge to hate.
I had become a kind of cripple. They were my friends, right? Why didn’t I just wade out to them? What would I say? “Hey, how are you?” They’d say.
And I’d answer, “I feel like I’m being eaten from the inside out and I
can’t tell anyone what’s going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the
time I’ll feel like I’m ungrateful or something. Or like I’ll give away that I don’t deserve anyone’s
gratitude and really they should all hate me for what I’ve done but everyone
loves me for it and it driving me crazy.”
Right.
Or should I have said that I wanted to die, not in the sense
of wanting to throw myself off that train bridge over there, but more like
wanting to be asleep forever because there isn’t any making up for killing
women or even watching women get killed, or for that matter killing men and
shooting them in the back and shooting them more times than necessary to
actually kill them and it was like just trying to kill everything you saw
sometimes because it felt like there was acid seeping down into your soul and
then your soul is gone and knowing from being taught your whole life that there
is no making up for what you are doing, you’re taught that your whole life, but
then even your mother is so happy and proud because you lined up your sight
posts and made people crumple and they were not getting up ever and yeah they
might have been trying to kill you too so you say, What are you gonna do? , but
really it doesn’t matter because by the end you failed at the one good thing
you could have done, the one person you promised would live is dead, and you
have seen all things die in more manners than you’d like to recall and for a
while the whole thing fucking ravaged your spirit like some deep-down shit,
man, that you didn’t even realize you had until only the animals made you sad,
the husks of dogs filled with explosives and old arty shells and the fucking
guts and everything stinking like metal and burning garbage and you walk around
and the smell is deep down into you now and you say, How can metal be so on
fire? And Where is all this fucking trash coming from? And even back home you are getting whiffs of
it an then that thing you started to notice slipping away is gone and now it’s
becoming inverted, like you have bottomed out in your spirit but yet a deeper
hole is being dug because everybody is so fucking happy to see you, the
murderer, the fucking accomplice, the at-bare-minimum bearer of some fucking
responsibility, and everyone wants to slap you on the back and you start to want
to burn the whole goddam country down, you want to burn every goddam yellow
fucking ribbon in sight, and you can’t explain it but it’s just, like, Fuck
you, but then you signed up to go so it’s all your fault, really, because you
went on purpose, so you are in the end doubly fucked, so w why not just find a
spot and curl up and die and let’s make it as painless as possible because you
are a coward and, really, cowardice got
you into this mess because you wanted to be a man and people made fun of you and pushed you around in the cafeteria
and the hallways in high school because you like to read books and poems
sometimes and they’d call you fag and really deep down you know you went
because you wanted to be a man and that’s never gonna happen now and you’re too
much of a coward to be a man and get it over with so why not find a clean, dry
place and wait it out with it hurting as little as possible and just wait
to go to sleep and not wake up and fuck
‘em all.
I started crying.
Through my tears night had fallen.
The girls in the hot summer night were toweling off and laughing,
standing on the darkening rocks beneath the soft light of the lampposts on the
nearby train bridge. I got up and
followed a path that skirted the banks of the river and I followed it
aimlessly. At the edge of the river, I
waded in. It was hot then, but the river
cooled me, and the moon above the trees on the hilltop, blocking the
streetlights, kept the river flickering softly, and I felt myself calmly fading
in it. As I leaned forward and floated,
I drifted a little, a little down, a little to sleep.
Goddamn the noise.
The yelling closed in. Them yelling. “Get him out.
Goddamn it, get his ass out.” I
shocked awake and spat up water from the river and they banged on my chest
until I spat out more and I lay on the bank, drunk and smiling, looking out at
the strange faces gathered there. I lay
for a little while half in and out of the water and it ran over my feet,
lapping up and down and cooling them, shallow enough to be safe where I
lay. I smiled absently and thought of
the old palomino nuzzling me as I came around around. Whatever.
They called me in the lamplight.
Night now. “
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