Her fingers find a knot underneath this river and begin to pull outward. Out of the blue — so to speak — Sergeant Zeiger begins talking.
“The tattoo artist’s name was Applejack. But everybody called him ‘Cuz.’ You ask him why, he’d tell you: ‘Just Cuz.’ Get it?”
Well, that was a mistake, Applejack! Beverly silently rolls her knuckles over Zeiger’s shoulders. With a birth name like Applejack, shouldn’t your nickname be something like Roger or Dennis? Something that makes you sound like a taxpayer?
“Cuz is the best. He charges a literal fortune. I blew two disability checks on this tattoo. What I couldn’t pay, I borrowed from my friend’s mom.”
“I see.” Her knuckles sink into a cloud over Fedaliyah. “Which friend?”
“Arlo Mackey. He died. That’s what you’re looking at, on the tattoo — it’s a picture of his death day. April 14, 2009.”
“His mother … paid for this?”
Under the oil the red star looks smeary and dark, like an infected cut.
“She lent each of us five hundred bucks. Four guys from Mackey’s platoon — Vaczy, Grady, Belok, me, we all got the same tattoo. Grady draws real good, and he was there that day, so he made the source sketch for Applejack. After we got the tattoo, we paid a visit to Mrs. Mackey. We lined up side by side on her yard in Lifa, Texas. To make a wall, like. Mackey’s memorial. And Mrs. Mackey took a photograph.”
“I see. A memorial of Arlo. A sort of skin mural.”
“Correct.” He sounds pleased, perhaps mistaking her echo for an endorsement of the project. Beverly doesn’t know how to feel about it.
“That must be some picture.”
“Oh, it is. Mackey’s mom decided she’d rather invest in our tattoos than some fancy stone for him — she knew we were his brothers.”
The sergeant’s head is still at ease in the U-shaped pillow. Facing the floor. Which makes it feel, eerily, as if the tattoo itself is telling her this story, the voice floating up in a floury cloud from underneath the sands of Fedaliyah. As he continues talking, she pushes into his muscles, and the tattoo seems to dilate and blur under the oil.
“She circled our names in his letters home — Mackey wrote real letters, not emails, he was good like that — to show us what he thought of us. He loved us,” he says, in the apologetic tone of someone who feels that they are bragging. “Every one of us shows up in those letters. It was like we got to peel back his mind. She said, ‘You were his family and so you’re my family, too.’ Grady told her all the details of the attack, she wanted them, and then she said, ‘We will join together as a family to honor Arlo.’ She said, ‘Now, I want you boys to put the past behind you’—that was her joke.”
“My God. That’s a pretty dark joke.”
Sick, she was about to say.
His shoulders draw together sharply.
“I guess it is.”
Thanks to the tattoo, every shrug causes a fleeting apocalypse. The V of birds gets swallowed between two rolls of blue flesh, springs loose again.
“And — stop me if I’ve told you this? Mackey’s ma had another kid. A girl. Jilly. She’s a minor, so Mrs. Mackey had to sign a piece of paper to let Applejack cut into her with his big powerdrill crayons.”
“His sister got the tattoo? Her mother let her?”
“Hell yes! It was her mother’s idea! Crazy, crazy. Fifteen years old, skinny as a cricket’s leg, a sophomore in high school, and this little girl gets the same tattoo as us. April 14. Arlo in the red star. Except, you know, scaled down to her.”
His scalp shakes slightly in the headrest, and Beverly wonders what exactly he’s marveling at, Jilly Mackey’s age or the size of the tragedy or the artist’s ingenuity in shrinking the scenery of her brother’s death day down to make a perfect fit.
He waits a beat, but Beverly cannot think of one word to say. She knows she’s failed because she feels his muscles tense, the world of Fedaliyah stiffening all at once, like a lake freezing itself.
“Plenty of guys in my unit got tattoos like this, you know. It’s how the dead live, and the dead walk, see? We have to honor his sacrifice.”
Pride electrifies the sergeant’s voice. Unexpectedly, he gets up on his elbows on the massage table, cranes around to meet her eye; when he says “the dead,” she notes, his long face lights up. It’s like some bitter burlesque of a boy in love.
“What does your own mother say about all this, if you don’t mind me asking?”
He laughs. “I don’t talk to those people.”
“Which people? Your family?”
“My family, you’re looking at them.”
Beverly swallows. “Which one is Mackey? Is this him, in the palm grove?”
“No. That’s Vaczy. Mackey’s burning up.”
Zeiger pudges out a hip bone.
“He’s — this red star?”
“It’s a fire.” The sergeant’s voice trembles with an almost childish indignation. “Mack’s inside it. Only you can’t see him.”
The truck has just run over a remotely detonated bomb and exploded. Still burning inside the truck, he explains, is Specialist Arlo Mackey.
“Boom,” he adds flatly.
Why on earth would you boys choose this moment to incarnate? Beverly wonders. Why remember him — your good friend — dying — engulfed?
“You were with him on the day he died, Derek? You were all together?”
“We were.”
And then he fills in the stencil of April 14 for her.
At 6:05 a.m., on April 14, Sgt. Derek Zeiger and a convoy of four Humvees exited the wire of the FOB, traveling in the northbound lane of Route Roses, tasked with bringing a generator and medical supplies to the farm of Uday al-Jumaili. The previous week, they had driven out to Fedaliyah to do a school assessment and clean up graffiti. As a goodwill gesture, they had helped Uday al-Jumaili’s son, a twelve-year-old herder, to escort a dozen sweaty buffalo and one million black flies to the river.
Pfc. Vaczy and Sgt. Zeiger were in the lead truck.
Pfc. Mackey and Cpl. Al Grady were in the second vehicle.
From the right rear window of the Humvee, Sgt. Zeiger watched telephone poles and crude walls sucked backward into the dust. Sleeping cats had slotted themselves between the stones, so that the walls themselves appeared to be breathing. An orangeish-gray goat watched the convoy pass from a ruined courtyard, heaving its ribs and crusty horns at the soldiers, its pink mouth bleating after them in the rearview like a cartoon without sound. At 6:22 a.m., a click away from the farm in Fedaliyah, the lead Humvee passed a palm grove within view of the Diyala River and the wise-stupid stares of the bathing jammous. Zeiger remembered watching one bull’s tremendous head disappear beneath the dirty water. At 6:22, perhaps fifteen seconds later, an IED tore through the second Humvee, in which Pfc. Mackey was the gunner. Sgt. Zeiger watched in the mirrors as the engine compartment erupted in flames. Smoke flew into the gash of his mouth. Smoke blindfolded him. On his knees in the truck he gagged on smoke, its oily taste. Incinerated metal blew inside the vehicle, bright chunks raining through the window. His head slammed against the windscreen; immediately, his vision darkened; blood poured from his nostrils; a tooth, his own, went skidding across the truck floor.