THE ROAD TO BAGHDAD
ADAM LOOKED BACK over his shoulder at the two rounded, upthrusting granite boulders and thought them like the open sides of a giant vise. The figure framed between the jaws, standing on his own high red rock in the distance, was the boy—“the feral boy,” she had called him—full of fury. Adam touched his own mouth, then looked at his fingers. No sign of blood. It was not he, but the feral boy, who had eaten Riley’s heart. What connected Adam to the wild boy? Only that the boy had fed him when he himself lay bruised and bleeding, beaten and raped, on the hard-packed sand road? This road? The road he and she would walk to Damascus. No, Baghdad. But he knew Baghdad had been destroyed.
Politicians and troops had used the language of their fathers, of Vietnam—“We had to destroy the city to save it.” Yes, before he was captured, Adam had heard another soldier explain it just that way, and then his head was blown off, and from the stem of his neck, blood leaped up high into the air like a fountain.
Adam began to hum and to match the words to the rhythm of his walking, but he did not sing the words aloud: There is a fountain filled with blood / Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins. /And sinners plunged beneath that flood/Lose all their guilty stains.
“What is a sinner?” he had asked the chaplain at the mental hospital in Idaho.
The man had explained it.We are all born sinners. Because of Adam and Eve. When we are born into this world as human beings, we are born stained with sin. But there is redemption. Ask forgiveness. Believe that Jesus, fully human and fully divine, is in fact the Son of God.
“Was there ever a child who never committed a sin, aside from being born?”
“That was Jesus. And only Jesus.”
“The Son of God, or the Child of God?” Adam had interrupted to ask.
“Certainly the child of God. But Jesus was a man. The Son of God. We can all be children of God. Believe in Jesus as the Son of God, and ye shall be saved.”
“Ye?”
“You. It means you.”
What have I done? Had Adam actually asked the question of the chaplain, or only thought it? He knew what he had done. He had disobeyed his father. Adam had hated his father for his rock-hard tyranny. He had lusted after his mother. He had fornicated with innocent girls. He had drawn lewd pictures of female bodies. He had masturbated. He had shirked his work and resented the unending labor the farm required of him. He had felt deprived of money and of the culture of the city. And yet he despised the city and its wickedness, and the intellectual pride of the university and the smug professors who had recognized him as Piers Plowman and mocked his rustic ways behind closed doors.
What had he done? He had lost his mind. He had contended with God.
How had he failed? He had failed Riley, his friend, and many others.
Adam looked down at the front of the shirt. There was the name, upside down, since seen from above: “F. Riley.” But he was not F. Riley. And her? What was her name? It changed: it had been Eve; it had been Lucy. She was particular about getting names right. When he had murmured, “the road to Damascus,” she had corrected him. Baghdad. She had not heard the news about Baghdad. Saul was on the road to Damascus when he was converted and his name changed to Paul. Saint Paul, the Catholics called him. Before he saw a great light on the road to Damascus, Saul had persecuted the Christians. And then he became one. But before and after—was he the same person, or different?
Was he, Adam, the same person he was as a little boy full of brightness?
And this woman beside him dressed in orange, her brow beaded with sweat. Who was she? He thought her nature was a good one. But damaged. Burned.
Purified? In the Refiner’s fire?
The music of Handel’s Messiah began to dance in his brain: For unto us a child is born, unto us …
“Adam, Adam,” she said. “Is there any water along this road?”
“I don’t know. I was blindfolded when we passed this way. I heard something sloshing in the truck. They might have had a five-gallon jug of water, or gasoline.”
“‘No blood for oil,’” she mused. “That was the slogan on the signs we carried when we marched on Washington, Thom and I, before we went to Iraq.”
“Thom was a soldier, too?”
“No. I meant ‘we, the United States.’ Before the United States went to war. Thom was a scientist.”
“What did he want to know? From his research?”
“If there was life—some sort of real life, not little green men from Mars—in the far-flung reaches of space.”
“You said he was dead, Lucy.” He was amazed: sometimes her name came to him without thinking. Other times he was confused and afraid of offending her. “I remember that right, don’t I? He’s dead. What happened?” He glanced down at her. He took her hand. She was short, barely came to his shoulder, and he had noticed there was something childlike about her, something stunted.
“He was crushed to death, in Amsterdam, by a grand piano that fell on him.”
Adam began to laugh. He couldn’t help himself. He took his hand away from her and put first that hand and then the other one over his mouth, like a bandage or gag to try to stifle the laughter, but he couldn’t. The laughter flew out of him, spit, too, and he staggered drunkenly as he laughed and choked on laughter.
She hung her head and said nothing.
Finally he got control over his laughter. He knew it was inappropriate. Sometimes he had laughed at his father that way. Adam’s exuberant, spurting humor made the old rancher bite his own lips and clamp them together in disgust. To Lucy, Adam managed to say soberly, “God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to conceal.” Then he spurted again with painful mirth.
Wonders—was that the word? Or was it horrors?
“Where are we going?” he continued. “I mean, Lucy, where did you say we were going?”
“To Baghdad. To civilization. To see some friends in France. To give them this.” She lifted up the black case.
He had forgotten about it. He wished it were a keg of water. “Here,” he said politely, “let me carry that for you.”
She stopped and transferred the French horn case to his hand. Her face and neck red with heat, she looked dangerously hot, he thought. He looked away, scouring the landscape with his eyes for relief.
“Look,” he said, “there’s a palm-leaf hut. Maybe people are there. Maybe they have water. We’ll sit in the shade. I’ll fan you.”
She nodded.
The hard-packed sand road smelled of scorching. He remembered that odor from his mother’s iron. In a debased kind of way, he had rather liked the odor of scorching, as a boy. Once he had gotten into the brewer’s yeast she had used to make bread, and he had eaten it by the spoonfuls. He had felt debased then, too. He had done something else in his mother’s world that he shouldn’t have done. Once he had taken Rosie into his parents’ bed. He had imagined she was his mother that time, just for the forbidden fun of it. He had been afraid that Rosie and he had left their fluids on the sheets, but he saw they were already stained. His father had been there before him, recently, and Evie, Evelyn, had not changed the bedclothes (as she called them) before they went to town.
“I’m so sorry about Riley,” she said.
Yes, Adam could see the sorrow and trouble in her face. More than grief, the footprint of trauma was in her eyes. “He was a good boy,” Adam said. All you could have said, all anyone can say, the chaplain had consoled him, is something simple and true. “It’s sad,” Adam added.
“Sort of an all-American boy,” she answered. “Even had the freckles.”
Adam could tell her tears were flowing. He wanted to say to her, Don’t waste the water, or catch your tears with your tongue, even if they’re salty. Made of poles and large leaves, a hut sat green and wilting on the sand.
He could hear bees buzzing all around the palm hut, and Adam remembered Riley had wanted to rob a hive. Perhaps these desert people had done just that. On the horizon, he saw an emerald line of forest. There were trees ahead—palms and acacia and maybe Russian olive—and that meant the likeliness of water. Still—No, the buzzing insects were not bees, but flies.
“Wait,” he said. He led her to the back of the hut where it cast a short shade and told her to sit down and to rest in the shadow.
After he left her there with the black case, he went around to the frail front door, the only door. It, too, was made of palm leaves, each one hanging down from a wooden slat at the top and another slat across the waist of the frame. He started to open it, but then he saw the long palm leaves sway, and instead he just took a finger and gently pushed one aside so he could see in. Like the pendulum of a clock, the long leaf was something you could move to one side with the tip of your finger.
There lay the family on the floor. He stared to understand. They were dead, and the sandy dirt floor was soaked with their blood. Their hands and feet had been staked to the floor. Then they had been severed at the wrists and ankles, each with a single blow, he thought. Now their hands and feet, even the baby’s, were still staked to the floor, but they were no longer attached to the bodies. These people had known a secret. Or soldiers had thought they knew a secret. Probably they had started with the baby, just one foot, and moved up the line, ending with the father, and then started again.
Adam could hear the voice of the father roaring like a lion. His mouth—still open in the hollow shape of a curse.
At their feet, before the threshold like a doormat, Adam saw the sign of a cross.
But he felt sure that Christians had not done this. Someone, he felt sure, had made the cross to cast blame, to create a scapegoat. There were other marks inside on the dirt floor: the crescent moon. And that tangle of lines and points—the Star of David.
Yes, Adam thought. The idea seemed to split his brain: They all did it. He staggered and took a step backward. He worked his jaws and gathered what saliva he could, and then he parted the leaves with both hands and spat through the opening, randomly, toward their political signs. To be sure of the reality, he looked once more between the palm leaves. There, there, the crack in the wall behind them? Down low. Wasn’t that her eye, just an eye, unblinking, peering in?
When he walked around to Lucy, he simply said that they were all gone. And there was no water. “But ahead—”
She interrupted him. “How many were there?” Her brow was corrugated with puzzling—as though their number was the only question to ask.
“Five,” Adam answered. “And the parents.” He knew he had not really counted. “Five or six,” he amended truthfully.
“I saw,” she said.
Now, now, he looked into her eyes, filmed and dazed. He drank from them as though his own eyes were flies come to gather at those unprotected pools.
She was holding out her hand to him, for help. Yes, he could do that. He could help her rise. He caught her wrist instead of her hand and pulled hard. She seemed to rise miraculously. She was very light, or was it that he was very strong? We are weak, but He is strong—they’d sung that in Sunday school the year he came as Superman, five or six years old. He was not weak. He’d been a strong boy. Superboy. Leaping, almost flying. He was a strong man now. When anyone saw his manly jaw, they recognized him as Superman and gave him tight-fitting blue and red to wear.
Like a marine’s colors. But he had been a foot soldier, in camouflage imitating the hues of olive green, dry rock, desert sand.
“Let’s walk,” he said. “It isn’t far.”
“‘Come down to Kew in lilac time / In lilac time, in lilac time. / Come down to Kew in lilac time— / It isn’t far from London,’” she quoted.
“Shakespeare?” he asked.
“No. Alfred Noyes. Also wrote ‘The Highwayman.’”
“‘The road was a ribbon of moonlight …,’” he quoted.
“No, it isn’t,” she said. “The road is a white-hot poker.”
She stumbled, and he caught her quickly under her elbow and took the black case from her again.
After walking, trudging, stumbling, in silence in the broiling heat, Adam thought he could see oil oozing out of his skin, or melted fat, not just sweat. When he looked up from his skin, there was the bubbling green of the tops of trees, probably acacia trees, surely visible at the meeting line of sky and earth.
“Broccoli,” she said suddenly. “I always think of that when I see the tops of trees from an airplane.”
Like a brand on the buckskin flank of sand, a black circle off in the desert distracted him. He pointed to it. A black doughnut. Large. “Looks like a campfire once,” he said.
The stones were arranged very nicely so that the inner edges of the flat stones created what appeared to be a perfect circle. The ash in the center of the circle was gray, and sometimes it wafted in a ghostly way up from the circle in a twisting column. He wished the breeze would come over to the road.
“They’ve been cooking, like good Boy Scouts,” she observed.
Yes, he could see two Y-shaped sticks, and a horizontal rod resting at the bottoms of the V’s of the Y’s, passing from one upright to another.
“They’ve left some meat, I think,” he said.
“It looks charred,” she responded. “Inedible. A waste of energy to go there.”
Hadn’t he warned her about waste?
“I want to see,” he said. “You’re probably right. The stones are probably black with soot. The rocks around here are white, or gray.”
“The sticks must be some kind of rebar, construction iron.”
He told her to keep walking; he would catch up. Did he hear her murmur, “And I—I had just wanted to cry?” Maybe there would still be some moisture in the meat. He was hungry, anyway. Then he saw the place where an army jeep, or some other vehicle with heavy treads, had left the road to drive over to the campfire. He hurried along, but he looked back to check on the woman, his companion. She was shuffling like an old woman, but he had remembered her as someone pretty, desirable, though he’d acted the part of a gentleman.
The terrain was beginning to slant upward; the circle of stones had been constructed just before the crest of a sand hill. He couldn’t see what was on the other side. For a moment he worried that men might be lying out of sight, hidden, with their rifles stretched out in front of their bodies, with the sights of the guns waiting for him. But the imprint of the tire treads looked old to him. He had a mounting curiosity about the site; he had been in 4-H, not Scouts, but he had made just such campfires. The other boys loved to set their marshmallows on fire. They claimed to like the black char and almost-liquid goo inside, but he always carefully browned his marshmallows. They were goldensided, deliciously browned, never burned.
He stopped. Not hands. Not feet. But human parts had been skewered. He would not name those parts, but he knew their shapes. Parts such as he had drawn. Parts such as he had touched on his own body. He retched once, twice, but no bile was left in him.
He would not look there again. He turned and went back, not following the tracks but cutting across diagonally toward her new position on the road. He took note of the speed of her progress and calculated how to angle his path so that he would intercept her at the right moment. He had played football. He had been a quarterback. Not his mind but his body knew how to calculate the intersection of two trajectories moving at different speeds. Only this was slow motion.
The principle was the same. At the movies, he had always loved the mysterious moment of sudden slow motion. It sanctified things, sometimes.
When he caught up with her, they would be close enough to see the brown trunks and limbs of the bubbling broccoli trees. Maybe a clean blue creek would flow near their bases.
When he reached the road, and Lucy on it, shuffling, she tilted her bowed head, looked him square in the eyes, and greeted him.
“Hi, gal,” he said. He would not remember what he had just seen. Erased. A blank. Even the crossbar spit was gone, and he saw only two upright Y’s. “It was nothing,” he said. “I should have listened to you.”
“Let’s camp in the trees,” she said. “Maybe it’s an oasis. Maybe there will be fruit trees. Or dates or olives.”
Not until close range could they see that most of the trees were thorny acacias; some were yellow acacias, and the tips of the branches drooped with sprays of lovely yellow leaves. Beyond the trunks was a ribbon of blue water. Eve broke into a trot. “Come on,” she called, like a teenager—eager, full of her own energy.
Then she stopped and began to sob. Walking rapidly to her, he saw blanched bones; human and animal rib cages arched up in the sunlight, beautifully white with the blue water flowing through. Threaded with scraps of cloth, purple and red, many human skeletons lay in or near the water, where the sandy bank was almost white.
“Never mind,” he said. “Never mind, Lucy.” He made himself call her by her right name. “We’ll just walk upstream a bit. Out of sight of all this. Upstream, where the water is clean.”
“But, Adam,” she said, “suppose it’s poison. Suppose they died because they drank poisoned water.”
He took her hand. “Come on,” he said. He made himself smile. It was a flirt’s smile. He remembered how to smile that way. He’d never known a high school or college girl who could resist that careful, no-teeth, fragile smile. It melted resistance. “Let’s go see.”
They trudged through the loose, fine sand, their feet sinking almost up to their ankles. “We’ll just take our time,” he said. “Don’t try to hurry now.”
Despite his encouragement, she finally sank to her knees.
“This is just the place I thought we should stop,” he said. “Here, let me carry you to the water.” He put down the French horn case and scooped her up in his arms. Black spots appeared before his eyes, in a rectangular grid. Deprivation spots, he thought, but he was not afraid. They were too close now. Whether the water was poison or not, now they would drink. Eve would understand. They would do it together, at the same time.
The sun was setting rapidly behind them, and their own shadows stretched out long across the sand toward the trees and water. The short, shaggy trees looked humped, four-legged, like a distorted camel. How light she was in his arms, her arms around his neck. He still carried the French horn case. Among the trees, he saw shaggy movements with humps. Two creatures. One golden as a sand pile, the other dark, almost black. Two camels. Two wild camels. He named them Day and Night.
He sat Eve on her feet.
“Look, darling,” he said. “Wild camels, among the trees.” But he savored the word darling, delicious as a fig or a date on his tongue.
“Are they dangerous?” she asked, and answered herself, “They’re beautiful.” To steady herself, she clasped his arm.
“See what they’re doing?” he said. “They’re drinking. The water is safe. Let’s just wait. Then they’ll move. They might not be wild. They might have escaped from a caravan.”
“Like us,” she said softly.
As the camels lifted and curved their long necks, water streamed silver from their muzzles.
Slowly, their big bodies began to glide on. Adam listened to the gritty sound of their large splayed feet sinking a little, compacting the sand.
What the humans wanted most was to drink. Then they wanted to submerge their bodies in the cool, flowing water.
Automatically they pulled off their orange and camouflage clothing: the hand-sewn blouse and skirt, the borrowed shirt and army trousers. Orange parachute and tan camouflage fluttered to the ground. Over her head, Lucy lifted the black cord and the titanium-cased memory stick and placed them on top of the soft mound of orange. They looked down at their bare, worn feet and laughed. Their feet would be the first part to relish the water. Yes, happy tadpoles for toes, wiggling and laughing. Then there was a plopping down, female and male, bottoms first into the water, which was beautiful and cool, clear, only—say—ten inches deep. But it covered and refreshed their private parts, male and female. And then there was nothing else to do but to lie down fully in it. Sometimes on their backs with their necks tilted up so they could breathe. Sometimes on one side or the other, with a bent elbow to prop up their heads. In that posture they talked and laughed and every utterance was joyful, in praise of water, which they gulped by the handfuls. Then they flopped onto their stomachs, and he let the scant hairs in the center of his chest over his heart have their fun, and she let her breasts float and bobble.
When they propped again on their elbows, facing the stream and catching the flow of it on their chests, they might as well have been kissing. They cupped their hands into scoops and splashed their faces. Finally they sat up and wetted their hair, bowing the crowns of their heads into the stream or bringing water to their scalps with their hands. For each other, they made bowls of their hands, filled them, and then opened the seamed bottom of their bowls to let water drop down on each other’s heads.
“God is good; God is great,” they chanted. “And we thank him for this food.”
“What food?” they both exclaimed, and laughed.
They tilted their heads and exposed their throats to the air and looked up in the sky for manna.
Skyward, sustenance did sway among the branches of fruit trees. Fruit ripe and ready.
What they envisioned were men hanging head-down from trapezes without lines, their bent knees hooked over the lineless bars; trapeze artists free as angels were swooping down and bearing in their hands white china platters filled with fruit—oranges, lemons, pears, apples. Or maybe the woman and man had climbed the trees and picked the fruits. In any case, mercifully, magically, sustenance appeared. Lucy and Adam sat down on the sand beneath the trees, reached into the branches, took, and ate. This is Eden, they insisted.
Any oasis is Eden, they amended, their mouths full of the mush of fruit.
Shall we put on our clothes now? they asked.
We’re dry now, they agreed.
And the air is chilly.
It’s night. And they covered their bodies again, he with Riley’s clothes, and she with the orange ones she had sewn herself for the journey back. She replaced the memory stick around her neck.
But look at the stars.
A starry, moonless night is the most blessed of all nights.
Diamonds.
Worlds unseen.
Stars galore.
The word galore—it comes from some place deeper than the throat.
From the belly of God. When he’s generous.
“Lucy,” he said. “Make love with me.”
She smiled at him. A smile she had never given anyone before. She felt its newness on her face.
“Tonight, for this moment,” he said, “I know you for who you are, Lucy. I know your name. Let’s make love while I know who you are.”
“I’m new,” she said. She laughed a little. “Clean and fresh, refreshed,” she said, denying the warning implied by his invitation. “Adam—”
He held his finger, upright, sealing his lips. Shhh—he signaled, shy of his own name.
She reached to his chest, to the smooth button beside the label F. Riley. “Adam,” she whispered again despite his signal for silence.
He nodded. She unbuttoned the first button. Gesture was the only language. Down the row of buttons, each slid more easily from its fastening than the one before; each felt more silky to her fingertips than the others and more precious than pearls. He pulled the tail of her orange blouse from the waistband of her skirt and lifted loose handfuls of blouse over her head. She drew the black silk cord over her head and laid the old talisman among the orange puffs. There were her breasts for him to kiss. To cherish by starlight.
Before he leaned toward her, with a single downward glance he memorized the shapes of her breasts as he had not done before. In a future, given soft pencil and creamy paper, he would draw them.
But now was bliss, as she folded her arms across his shoulders and pulled him closer. Then there was kissing. Sweeter than the berry, she thought, an echo of a half-forgotten song.
Finally she said softly, “Stand up now,” and she reached to unfasten the army trousers. “Country people in the South say, ‘Shuck out of them pants.’ That’s country talk.”
“Like shucking corn?”
“Like shucking an ear of corn of its wrappings.”
“In Idaho, we grew wheat.”
“But you’re stalwart as Iowa corn. And golden. Sweet.”
Smell the air.
Perfume. Lemons.
“Anoint my head, my hair with lemon juice,” he asked.
She reached for a half of lemon they had squeezed and sucked for its sour piquancy. He knelt on one knee, and she squeezed the juice into his dark hair and rubbed it in with her fingertips.
“The stars should smell like lemons,” she said.
Lie down again.
Hold me.
Hold me.
Your body.
Your body.
You.
You.