Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 13

Elias




The little girl always unnerved him. She lived in the mud hut at the end of the road, a dust-caked old crapheap not fit to store a broken lawn mower, but her eyes were green. Green, like a regular person’s; faceted, luminous and edged all around with deep black kohl, even though she was only seven or eight years old. A tiny whore. Elias knew it was normal, all that eyeliner, that Pashtun kids wore it all the time. Many of the men in their families, heterosexual or so they claimed, used it, too. More than three years in the country, in and out, living in the grit and smelling their sweat and eating some of the shit they called food, and he still didn’t get these people. Savages all. Scrabbling to survive, living in the Stone Age. The children wore rags and threw rocks at dogs. They had their strange and vengeful God, their mothers whose hands fluttered to cover their faces with swaths of black, like caped vampires. More than anything, Elias wanted to get the f*ck out of there. More than anything, he believed he had fallen through the quicksand of Pashtun country and into some sort of nightmare gnome hole where the bright upper world would never look the same again.

The green-eyed girl wore bracelets—bangles that clinked when she played—and a ratty teal skirt too short by half a foot. Her auburn hair had a blaring reddish sheen that he would have thought was fake if he hadn’t known better, too rock-and-roll to be real, but nevertheless it was hers. It was thick and longish and blunt cut above those eyes. There was a permanent crust under the girl’s nose. She ran back and forth from her family’s place to the market, or to her aunt’s or cousins’, because everybody here was related to everybody else and deep in the night on patrol it made your skin crawl to think of all those ancient people plotting against you, jabber-whispering in their strange language, and all those relatives f*cking.

The problem with intel was that everybody knew things and nobody could document a single one of them. In the military there were the intel people, those whose job it was to fish for information and get it all square and pass it up to the right people, and then there were the guys on the ground, the ones in Elias’s unit, who saw things and heard them but whose knowledge was met with shrugs. Little crumbs of intelligence. Piled up together, they meant something. But nobody cared what the grunts knew. They were there to protect the Afghans, not that the Afghans gave a shit.

He saw the girl every day before Wharton died. He saw her every day after. She was one of the multitudes, but among all those other raven-haired, sand-colored children he couldn’t shake the sense that she was a plant. A crusty-nosed spy from his own tribe of real people, sent to report back about whether he performed with bravery and valor. He knew there was nothing too strange about her coloring. The region was like the hallway bathroom of the high school we call the Earth, where all the paper spitwads of every delinquent passing through merged to form a rippling topography born of every race, color and creed, and betraying none specifically. She wasn’t the only one who looked like she could have been his own mixed-blood cousin. It was the kohl that drove the point home. Look at my eyes, said her face. Taunting.

The rumor—and it came at first as one of those crumbs—was that one of the hajjis, a young man who drifted between the various homes of his kinsmen, had funneled explosives to the ones who killed Wharton. Probably it was true. The guy came and went from the town as he pleased, never collecting enough bad associations to get himself arrested or his house raided, but they knew what he was up to just the same. It ate at Elias for months, knowing that this was the one sure guy on whom he could pin the death of his brother-in-arms, and still the man walked free as a bird. Finally word came that the man was suspected in another grenade attack in the next town over, and they got orders to arrest him. On that morning, as soon as the hajji had wandered from one house to another that was easier to secure, they formed a four-man stack at the door and rushed in. Elias knew this drill. He knew his part, knew the skills so well that they were not conscious thought so much as a dance between his optic nerve and the fibers of his muscles. His eyes transmitted orders across the web of his nerves like a cyborg, and in the moment of it he felt not pride, not competence, but like a most excellent machine. Evolved above his own humanity to something better, specialized exactly, humming along its own perfect code.

They, the squad, were order in the chaos. That was to be expected. The two men in the house jumped up and started yelling, and the woman screamed. A pack of kids ran out the back into the courtyard. A shot rang out, and the older man flew backward into the mud wall beside the black barrel stove, his white caftan blooming with blood, before he slid down, slumped. The woman dropped to the floor, her body lost in a black salwar kameez curling like a snail shell over the baby. Her jeweled shoes stuck out the other side. He aimed his gun at her.

The hajji was already zip-tied and collared. He shrieked in high-pitched p-ssy Pashto. The words, which Elias could understand to a certain degree, rolled through his mind interpreted but ignored. The baby wailed its haggard newborn scream, and the woman, shaking, peeked out at Elias through the hijab she had pulled across her face defensively. They were Pac-Man ghosts, these women. Eyes floating down the street, loose and disembodied, but don’t be fooled, they’re after you. The pissed-off baby started crying with everything it had, choking and strangling on the end of every sob, like it was pulling that last bit of sound from the bottom of its intestines before jerking down another gulp of oxygen. Elias heard the clunk-clunk-zzzzzzzt of her shoes falling off and somebody zip-tying her ankles. She mumbled something to Elias in pleading, miserable Pashto, but it was muffled by the hijab. He looked at her eyes and thought about those mouthless ghosts, how they ran from you one minute, turned on you the next.

Another soldier secured the woman’s wrists and dragged her out to the courtyard with the hajji, leaving the baby on the carpet. A couple of the children had made it over the high mud walls around the garden, but three remained, huddling in a corner. They did not look as frightened as Elias thought they should. There was a boy of about ten and two girls, one dark, the other with her lined green eyes and crusted nose. The staff sergeant barked a few textbook phrases at the man, trying to milk him for information. From inside the house the baby’s cry drifted out, but listlessly, and the situation started to feel organized and under control. The hajji would implicate himself as an insurgent, killing the man in the house would be justified and they could move forward with tracking down every last bastard responsible for Wharton’s death. I have no notion of being hanged for half treason, a great patriot once said. The pure notes of this rang in Elias like the first chord of a song, not because he would commit treason either in half or in full, but because the army had shaped in his soul the belief in being all in, and in his life there would be no more half-assing. Since childhood he had fought the bugaboo of his own lethargy, that and the timidness he liked to cover up with one cocked, ironic brow—but no longer. Gone was the fat-ass kid forever getting shouldered into lockers and bleachers, who could laugh it off, who fantasized extensively about going down on the girls who struck his fancy but could not ever bridge the gap that would make it happen. Now he was the real Elias, the soldier with the M16, backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government and sporting abdominal muscles you could bounce a quarter off. His center of gravity was low and stable, he did not laugh it off and once he got out of this sand trap and into a place where sex was legal, he would make it happen. Oh yes.

The staff sergeant, still shouting, jabbed his rifle into the ribs of the hajji. Elias scanned the top of the wall. It all happened very fast. The boy in the corner, the kid, let out a Braveheart cry and rushed toward the staff sergeant, head down, arms pumping. And Elias dropped him. Just like that, he aimed and fired, and the kid fell to the ground like a duck. The woman in the hijab howled, then shrieked, stretching out her zip-tied wrists toward the boy. She flopped sideways in the dirt and began inchworming rapidly toward him, ignoring the shouts of the soldiers to wadrega, wadrega, wadrega. Then another shot snapped the air—that would be Kitson, who easily freaked—and the woman finally stopped as ordered, but not of her own volition.

The baby began to cry again.

Something inside Elias’s head, a place apart from the instinct that saw threat in the kid’s run and squeezed the trigger by reflex, began to whir like an airplane engine. Reflection was a horror. By the light of it he knew—of course he knew, it was obvious—that his shot had been unnecessary. The kid could easily have been stopped by a large adult hand or a solid kick. He was unarmed. He could have been restrained with a thin piece of plastic. The two girls huddled in the corner and he was making a grand show of being brave for them. That was all. And now the woman was dead, too. None of this was right, it was unraveling, the signals getting tangled and jammed. If you didn’t have control, you had nothing. No safety. No authority. You were just a pack of f*ckers shooting people for no specific reason.

The sister, she stood shouting in the corner, her eyes covered by the other girl’s hands. Manan, Manan, she called at the boy in a sharp voice, as though she expected her brother to get back up; she must not know yet that her mother was dead. He looked at her shouting mouth, the hands cupped over her eyes like the bulging closed lids of a lizard, then behind her to the other girl. The green-eyed girl stared back at him, her pupils tight against the light, the kohl thick and unsmudged. She was a plant. She knew he was Elias from New Hampshire, slumming in the land of the savages, faking at being an American badass. The difference between cyborg and savage lies in a single shot.

It was an accident.

He could absolve himself for each he had killed as a machine of war.

He could never forgive himself for a human failure, for that was something he owned alone.

It was one of the things he shoved down, and locked away, and carried home.