After his encounter with Serena Jane, Bob Bob found himself dreaming more and more often of my sister. This wasn’t unusual—she’d populated his dreams for years—but the intensity of the dreams had changed. This new, nocturnal Serena Jane was no longer a dimpled teen queen, but a banshee with glowing eyes. It was a facet of Serena Jane that only I knew existed—wild, primal, utterly unforgiving—and he was shocked to make its acquaintance.
Bob Bob always woke from these dreams violently, the tube of his throat tensed, but with the sound still stuck inside of it. Sometimes the moon would be pouring its gauzy light into his window, and he would rub his eye sockets with the heels of his hands and blink up at the ceiling, wondering what his nightmares meant. The stuff in the jungle was easy, he figured. Every day, more and more boys were coming home zipped into the never-ending darkness of body bags. The TV and newspapers, magazines—even comic books—were crawling with the lush horror of Vietnam. When it came to the war, Bob Bob wasn’t the only one with night sweats.
But the other dreams, the ones where he was just going about his business only to be blindsided by a snarling and unfamiliar Serena Jane, well, those visitations had him stumped. At school, I watched him watch her, but to him, she didn’t appear any different. Her nose still tilted with the charm of Tinker Bell’s. Her chin still had a dimple right in its center. And every day, she looked right through him, just as she always had, just as people looked through me.
Then one night, Serena Jane came to him as a crow with a stuttering beak. She perched on his shoulder, gripping his flesh with scaly talons, and clacked her bill in his ear, tweaking the lobe when she was finished as if to admonish him. He twisted toward her in indignation and saw that the crow was holding a small looking glass, the oval of it swaying and glittering like a jewel. He peered into its frame and was surprised to see the wan face of an infant peering back at him, its sloe eyes wet, its tiny fists pummeling the air, as if fighting for breath.
Bob Bob woke from the dream sweating. His room was cold, but his mother had snuck in and covered him with the family quilt that normally hung on the parlor wall downstairs, scalloping him in folds of heat until he almost couldn’t breathe. He hated the thing. It was enormous—embroidered in a riot of flowers and vines by Tabitha Morgan, his great-great-grandmother, who everyone said was a witch. Waking up under Tabitha’s quilt, Bob Bob could understand why. His skin felt as if it were crawling with sets of bony fingers.
It was the beginning of April, but he could see out his window that a freak snowstorm had blanketed the world, cosseting all its hard edges into sterile white mounds. In the upper corner of his window, the moon was full, reflecting itself ghoulishly against all the white.
It was the same light he’d found in the little county morgue that he’d visited a week ago with his father in preparation for medical college, the kind that left little room for nuance or shadow. The kind of light that belonged to the dead. His father was verifying some last minute work on the autopsy of one of his patients—an old woman from town Bob Bob hardly knew. On the slab in the morgue, her cronelike body was covered with a dingy sheet, but her feet were sticking out, scaly and gnarled as a chicken’s. Probably they had looked much the same in life, as had her few pieces of hair and the gummy line of her mouth. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about death, it’s that it merely enhances what was already there before it.
“Come here,” Bob Bob’s father instructed him, putting his hands on his son’s shoulders. “Don’t be afraid. I want you to see.”
Bob Bob shrugged him off. He wasn’t afraid—he wasn’t even impressed. As far as he was concerned, the old woman was like the dried-up beetle shells that appeared on the garage floor at the end of every summer, their withered legs tucked up into their bellies, their wings desiccated and blown to dust. If he ground his sneaker over the top of her, he bet, she would crunch and crumble, and that would be the end of it. Bob Bob remained as still as he could, counting the woman’s waxen wrinkles, until his father deemed he’d seen enough and pulled the sheet back up over the woman’s face. He turned toward Bob Bob. “Well?” The question was a fishhook hanging in the air.
Bob Bob shrugged. “It’s not that bad.” Overhead, one of the room’s pallid bulbs flickered, irritating his eyes. He blinked, hating this one weakness.
Dr. Morgan squeezed his son’s shoulder. “It gets easier,” he reassured him. “Why, after you go through anatomy, death will be like second nature.”
Bob Bob didn’t say anything, but he thought he might already be way ahead of his father. For the most part, he liked the morgue. It was pleasantly temperate, no one would spend hours yakking your ear off about some stupid problem, and everything was in its place. As far as he could figure, death was no big deal. After all, you had it coming to you whether you liked it or not, and the sooner you got comfortable with that, the better. Really, he thought, it was nothing to worry about.
He followed his father outside again to the car, blinking in the brilliant spring sunlight, brushing a few seasonal midges away from the vicinity of his nose, scowling at a pair of wilted daffodil heads leaning on their spent stalks. Surreptitiously, he flattened them under his sneaker when his father wasn’t looking. Death wasn’t that bad, but the process of dying was tedious—a feeling I happen to share. He felt the flower bulbs crunch and climbed in the car beside his father, relieved when they pulled away. Bob Bob closed his eyes and decided that it was best to deal with either the living or the dead. Ushering people from one state to the other held very little interest for him.
When he was alone in his room, however, freshly woken from his crow dream of Serena Jane, the hard skin of Bob Bob’s carefully cultivated emotional detachment began to crack. Confronted with the unreliable moonlight flooding his walls, he suddenly found himself infused with an unfamiliar melancholic longing—as if homesick for a distant shore or the long-absent arms of a lover. He shook his head and turned away from the window, settling the bulk of the quilt over him. It was the unseasonable snow making him turn foolish, he decided, or the drop in barometric pressure. There were no such things as half-truths, or bird-women, or spells. And love was the most ridiculous trick of all. My sister had taught him that. In the end, underneath all the layers of hair and clothes, she had been just like any other girl—an arrangement of skin, and bones, tongue, and teeth. A warm sack of flesh. Nothing more than a little voice he was trying to ignore in the dark.
In contrast, Marcus never got the chance to see that Aberdeen spring. In March he had left for Vietnam with underwhelming fanfare, except for a special trip out to the Dyerson farm to see me. We stood miserably together under the half-rotten windmill, which spun only under the duress of a hard winter wind.
“Why are you doing this?” I demanded again. “You don’t have to do this. Just go across the border. Lots of boys are doing it. Or go to college. Maybe the army will give you a cushy job. Like behind a desk or something.”
Marcus tucked his chin down against his neck. “Nope. I don’t want to do things that way.”
“No offense or anything, but how are you going to manage? I mean, how come the army even took you in the first place?”
Marcus scuffed his toe in the dirt and snorted. “C’mon, Truly. I’m small, but I’m not deformed or anything.”
I took a wounded step back from him. “You mean like me.”
“No, no, I didn’t meant it like that.” He rubbed one of his hands through his thick black hair. “What I mean is, the army’s taking everybody these days. Big, little, they don’t really care, just as long as you can shoot straight.”
“And what makes you think you can?”
Marcus took another step toward me. “Don’t be like this now.” But I knew how enraptured Marcus was by the conflict overseas. His childhood obsessions with Russian space animals and the intricate anatomy of insects had been replaced by a hunger to know all the obscure details of modern weaponry.
“The newest grenade is the M61,” he told me, pointing out a mention of it in the newspaper while we shared a float at Hinkleman’s. He dug a pen and pencil out of his backpack and drew an oblong shape. “See how it’s shaped like a lemon?” He added a squiggle inside. “And this thing here is a notched steel coil. When you pull the pin, the coil explodes into high-velocity fragments. It’s lethal.”
“I guess that’s the point,” I mumbled, hogging the last of the ice cream in the glass. But Marcus wasn’t finished yet. His hand kept moving, sketching out a rough version of a helicopter with two blades.
“This baby here is the HueyCobra. That’s short for AH-1 Cobra. It can go two hundred nineteen miles per hour, which is pretty good considering it’s almost seven thousand pounds, empty. It goes up to eleven thousand four hundred feet at a rate of one thousand two hundred thirty feet a minute.” He flipped the newspaper page. “Oh, look, here’s another story about Khe Sanh.” My mind struggled with the unfamiliar sounds of another language, while Marcus ripped out the article and stuffed it in his pocket. In an empty cigar box under his bed, I knew, he was hoarding clippings about battles and attacks. He’d flattened and folded the pages of a Life magazine with a photo essay on the soldiers. The black-and-white helicopter blades and rifles sang out to him, and the soldiers sweated and grinned, and every time Marcus looked at them, I just knew that his heart was hammering blood through his body like the blasts of a machine gun. War, war, war, the beat pounded, a staccato heartsong as ancient as it was young. A song just for Marcus. His chance finally to do something heroic and big.
So far, Ebert Vickers’s son had been killed by mortar, his body shipped home in pieces like a puzzle. His friend Henry’s older brother, Frederick, was garroted by a Vietcong spy outside a village and found a few hours later by a local woman, the wound on his neck picked clean by ravenous sparrows. In Vietnam, it seemed that even the birds were starving. Mandy James sent weekly letters describing her life as a nurse. Whenever her mother received another letter, her nose and eyes swelled and reddened like the poisonous berries on a holly bush, and the whole town knew then that things were not going well for our troops. I looked into Marcus’s round, expectant eyes, the empty lane leading down the Dyerson farm stretched out like a ribbon behind him.
“Aren’t you afraid? You watch the news.” I looked for a flicker of fear or uncertainty, but all I saw were my own bulbous features reflected back at me.
“I have to do this, Truly. I’m sorry. I’ll write, I promise.” He tipped his chin up, and I knew that he wanted me to kiss him, but I was too mad. I turned my back on him and started walking to the farmhouse, so furious that I didn’t turn around and didn’t even say good-bye.
At first, his letters were full of bravado. Dear Truly, he wrote, lots of fellows have been homesick, but I haven’t. I can do fifty pushups now. I know how to clean and oil a gun. Charlie won’t get this American! During basic training, I learned, he figured out how to shoot craps for cigarettes, whistle a hornpipe, and spit polish his boots. Once overseas, he was assigned to drive ambulances. He didn’t know how to drive a stick, he said, but he figured he’d tackle that problem when he got to it.
Soon, however, his letters grew shorter. Dear Truly, I’m alive. I’m still here. Time had become a game of do or dare to him, I could tell. Even his handwriting started to look tired and pissed. One day, I received a letter with a story in it that finally made me write him back.
In the central highlands, Marcus wrote, the only thing marking the remains of former villages were the skeletons of rice silos. Sometimes ten feet or more of them were still standing, or sometimes the whole structure would be toppled, the rice long since devoured. Huddled in an emergency first-aid post that used to be a barn, Marcus clapped his hands over his ears and bowed his head as yet another shell screamed to an explosion on the horizon.
Marcus looked outside at the smoking sky and then down at the cracked wristwatch banding his arm. Two more hours until nightfall, when he could load whoever was left onto the ambulance and get the hell out. He sank into a pile of straw, settling himself against his pack, and drew his knees up to his chest. It was late spring, but the weather in Vietnam was that of the underworld—pregnant with a heat so wet and heavy, Marcus said some men just gave up and died in it.
“Thompson! Time to load up! The mule train is good to go.” Connelly, his section leader, shook his shoulder. Night had arrived, and with it all the paraphernalia of the maimed and wounded. Canvas stretchers. Syringes filled with morphine. Yards of sheer white gauze that could transform a solider into a drugged mummy.
“You’ve got three down-boys tonight,” Connelly barked. The ambulance could accommodate three gravely wounded on stretchers or six sitting soldiers. Connelly grappled with the handles of a stretcher, upon which a human form writhed. “Lie still!” he brayed at it. The soldier paid him no mind and continued twisting on the canvas, as if being manipulated by an invisible puppeteer.
“Goddamn bleeders,” Connelly wheezed as he started toward the cluster of cars, crouching as a shell exploded nearby. “They leak all over the damn place. I prefer the corpses. They’re less work.” Corpses were what they called the almost dead. The ones with open throats, with half their skulls crushed in, with no feet.
Marcus put the car into gear and started down the heavily camouflaged road. The full moon glared at him through ragged clouds, orbital and bright as a fish eye. On either side of him, tall fences of brushes and weeds rustled messages and threats. He patted the tool kit on the seat next to him, making sure it was still there alongside his gas mask, and then foraged in his coat pocket for his flask.
Abruptly, he pulled the car to a halt, idling the rattletrap engine while he assessed the tree branch lying in the middle of the road. Behind him, Connelly braked, followed by Swanson and Smith, their little convoy rounding up like wagons at a hostile pass. “What, ho?” Connelly called through the darkness.
“Tree branch in the road, sir,” called Marcus. “I’ll remove it.”
“Mind yourself, Thompson,” Connelly ordered. “Could be a booby trap.”
“Yes, sir,” Marcus said. As if the thought hadn’t already occurred to him. He jumped out of his car, then inched his way forward through the darkness, wishing he could turn on his headlights. At least the moon left enough light to see by. He leaned over the gnarled branch, running his eyes all around it, then took a deep breath and kicked it out of the way. Nothing. Little bullets of sweat clustered on his forehead, slicking him with relief.
Marcus stood up on the road and opened his mouth, but the most enormous percussion suddenly erupted in the air, filling his open throat with a poisonous roiling that stung his lips and eyes before snaking into his lungs, making it impossible to breathe.
“Mortar!” Marcus heard Connelly scream, and he fumbled back to the cab of his ambulance, groping for the salvation of his gun, his tongue blistering, his eyes two bilious swamps. He pulled his shirt over his mouth. He felt his stomach heave, then vomit filled his shirt. Leaning against his ambulance, he let the sick pool up around his chin, breathing through it as best he could. The shell had struck about a hundred yards ahead of them, a little ways off into the woods.
An ambush. It was the worst eventuality, the thing that made even the atheists into believers, the thing that stole life like a quiet thief and replaced it with a death scented with the lingering tropical odors of tamarind and coconut.
The air in front of Marcus began to clear slightly, the haze subsiding enough for him to find his torch and switch it on. Worrying about the light now was pointless with the woods in flames feet away from him. He swung his light in panicked arcs around him, flashing on grisly tableaux with each movement of his arm. There was a pile of soldiers convulsing by the side of the road. Marcus stumbled over a pair of boots and found Swanson facedown in the mud, the back half of his skull smashed open like a candy Easter egg.
Marcus was startled to see that he was still breathing. Swanson’s hand dropped the gun and clawed at Marcus’s wrist. Marcus peered into the lolling bed of the ambulance to assess the damage. Those men were certainly dead. Swanson’s fingers dug into Marcus’s arm, as if taking his pulse. He squeezed. He fluttered his eyes—the semaphore of the dying. Marcus squeezed back. He understood.
As fast as he could, before Connelly saw him, he rummaged in his pocket for his handkerchief. He hesitated a moment, then he pressed Swanson’s nose, pinching the nostrils closed, and laid his other hand flat over Swanson’s mutilated mouth. Swanson gasped and squeezed his arm, but Marcus stayed still. Maybe, he wrote, I could have saved him. Maybe I could have got him out. Maybe I shouldn’t have done it.
In the distance, Connelly was yapping his name. “Thompson… Thompson! Why have you left your wounded? Forget Swanson. Get back to your car.”
Marcus left his friend and stumbled back to his car. He didn’t bother to check whether or not the soldiers he was carrying were alive. He would find out when he got to the field hospital and handed them over to the nurses, beautiful and calm as milkmaids. I pictured Marcus putting his foot down on the accelerator and roaring off through the mist, crunching over sticks and stones, leaving the irritated screaming of Connelly behind him like the crows back in August’s fields, and for the first time since he left, I let myself really think about him, and I realized how much I missed him. I was sixteen and just waking up to the peculiar rules of love—how what’s left unsaid between two people can be a far more complicated language than what’s written on the page.
I tucked his letter in the rough flannel pocket of my shirt and waited for Amelia to go down to feed the chickens so I could compose something back to him. I gazed out over the broken stony fields and wondered what I had that I could tell him about. A line of weak corn that I’d planted? The crows that fed off of it? Maybe something as simple as the earth itself. When you get back, I finally wrote, let’s lay ourselves down in the fields outside, and sleep there for the night, whatever the weather. We’ll let the crows roost on our shoulders and skulls, let them nudge our necks with their wings, and pick at our earlobes, nibbling all the rotten bits out of us until we’re nothing more than sinew, bone, and teeth. Until we’re so pure, you can see right through us down to the roots and dirt. Until even our memories are eaten alive.
I licked the envelope and sent it, but maybe I said too much, for I never got a reply, and the next thing I knew, I heard that Marcus was in a hospital in Maryland, recuperating. I heard his leg got blown apart, and one of his hands, too, changing the whole shape of him, making it difficult for him to walk and even more difficult to write. Or maybe he just had nothing left to confess. Maybe the shell had taken care of that.