Just as Pig Eye was wondering what had happened to the other men, Finch stood up in his turret, his face bloody and his helmet skewed. C’mon Finch, get down, he thought. Then a spray of bullets and Finch was reeling drunkenly in a slow collapse. After that the guns were mostly silent and everything was mostly still, but Pig Eye knew the Iraqis were out there waiting, invisible behind the wall.
Where the hell were the other men? The same marine who had taught him about using vegetation for camouflage and moving through the landscape undetected had said, “If you don’t fight back, you die.” But they were mechanics and drivers and communications specialists. Still, they couldn’t retreat, so why the hell wasn’t anybody firing?
Pig Eye tried to recall what his truck was carrying. The tables and chairs and sheets of galvanized metal had been unloaded at the school, along with a toilet and sink and the books they had collected. If only he had studied the cargo list as carefully as Danny had studied it. There had to be something he could use to lay a trap for the insurgents the way the insurgents had laid a trap for them. But if he stood up to look for it, the men with the guns would see him. He was bellying back toward the bed of the truck when he saw it — a hand grenade nestled in a patch of brown weeds like a prehistoric bird’s egg in a nest.
4.6 Joe Kelly
Waking up was like coming up from the bottom of the creek in Wimberley, up from the deep pool where the creek bent around a grove of cypress trees, like coming up through the muck and the slime and over a slick of limestone rock, up through the fronds of light that penetrated from the surface like bendable knives, up through the heavy quiet, measured not in decibels, but in pounds per square inch or atmospheres. It was like breaking through the tensive surface to the air above, and once the broken water had healed itself, it was like seeing the trees soaring up toward the clouds and also down through the glassy water and not knowing which set of trees was real.
Kelly could hear his mother calling to him: “Joe, honey, you still asleep?” Her musical voice echoed off of what he presumed to be bathroom tile. He tried to swim up and out so he could answer her that he had been awake for a long time, but it was hard to call out from down at the bottom of wherever he’d been — where he still was. He could measure it in atmospheres, but not in seconds, not in inches or miles or feet.
He must have gone back to bed, which is why she thought he was sleeping when he wasn’t. He couldn’t be sleeping because he heard her talking to his father, who everyone called Joe Senior even though he kept saying, “Call me Dad, son. A boy should call his father Dad.”
“Okay, Dad, okay.” He was awake. It was the month they had moved to New York, the week he had started his new school. “Whatchu you lookin’ at?” asked a police officer who had been staring at him from the opposite corner as Kelly crossed the street. “Whatchu lookin’ at?” he asked again as Kelly mounted the curb and headed toward the brown brick school building with plywood still nailed over the window where a rock had been tossed through.
“Keep your head down,” Joe Senior was always telling him. “Don’t act like you know everythin’. When I was your age, I thought I knew everythin’, and nothin’ good ever came of it, so however you act, don’t act like that.” His hair was grizzled and his face was gaunt, and it was hard to believe he had ever been young.
“Okay, okay,” said Kelly.
“I walked around like I was king of the world, but I wasn’t king. I wasn’t nothin’, and then I went to prison, and I was less than nothin’. So keep your head down. That’s the way to stay out of trouble.”
But that day in the Bronx, Kelly’s head was up. He was looking around at the other stragglers, who were loaded down with satchels full of books or not loaded down and kind of slinking in the shadows as if they too were deciding whether to go to school or bolt. He was looking at the blinking traffic signal and at the passing cars, at the way the morning sun painted the bricks the color of dried blood and at the cop who was kind of snarling at him and rocking back on his heels with his thumbs stuck in his belt.
“Smile,” Kelly’s mom had told him. “That’s the way to make new friends.”
“You hard of hearing?” asked the cop.
Kelly gave the cop a neutral smile. He didn’t want new friends. He wanted his old ones, but they were back in Wimberley, probably still lolling around in bed because of the time difference.
“Answer me when I ask you a question, boy!”
“I’m lookin’ at you ’cuz you’re lookin’ at me.” Even though it was true, Kelly suspected it was the wrong thing to say.
Kelly’s head was up when he looked at the officer, and it was up when he climbed onto the Toyota and rammed his fist into the air the way Tommie Smith and John Carlos had done at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City the same year the Reverend King was assassinated in Memphis and Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles and anti-war activists seized five buildings at Columbia University to prove the people were ready to take their country back, all of which Kelly knew because it was also the year his father was born, and his father liked to talk about those things as if his lowly birth to an unwed teenager was part of some grand and inspiring civil rights trend.
In Mexico City, the two track champions had stood shoeless and determined on the podium, fists thrust into the air and heads bowed prayerfully while “The Star-Spangled Banner” played and while the Australian silver medalist stood beside them in silent support for which he was later ostracized at home. But first, Carlos and Smith were evicted from Olympic Village and suspended from the U.S. team. “But they stood up for themselves,” Joe Senior said every time he talked about them. “They stood up for themselves and eventually their medals were returned.” There was a lesson in it, that’s the thing he wanted his children to remember. “What’s the lesson?” Kelly wanted to know. “Justice prevailed,” his father always replied. “Don’t you forget that justice prevailed.”
Kelly heard his mother calling him to come for breakfast and then it was his father, reminding him to vote. “I lost that right when I went to prison, so you have to vote for the both of us,” he was saying. “Every Election Day, you make sure to get up early and exercise your constitutional right.”
For some reason, one of their new neighbors started a rumor that Joe Senior had killed a man back in Texas, which is why he’d come to New York. “It explains a lot of things,” the neighbor would say, and the other neighbors would nod sagely to each other. “That would certainly explain it,” they said.
Kelly preferred to believe his father had been locked up for killing a man than for bungling a robbery, but either way, Joe Senior hadn’t been home much, and then, suddenly, he was. He was home and they were moving across the country for a fresh start and a job. Another story went around that Kelly was the one to throw the rock through the school window. What would you expect from a boy whose father was a killer? They were only rumors, but once a story took hold, it didn’t matter if it was true. So Kelly started to say, “I’ll set my old man on you,” whenever anyone gave him trouble, and whether it was that or the fact that he grew four inches over the course of that first year in New York, no one gave him trouble anymore. He didn’t need his old man to handle things. He could handle them himself.
It was handling things that led to his first night in jail. It was a minor scuffle over a girl that did it, but Joe Senior sat up late, wringing his hands. “They’ll take away your vote if you’re not careful,” he said. “You ain’t a real American if they take away your vote.”