Elegy on Kinderklavier by Arna Bontemps Hemenway Read Free Book Online Page A

I don’t like to believe it. Douglas Reeter was the only one of the men allowed to come back before their tour was done.
    Finally all the boys were back in, splayed out in the bleachers, and we were listening to Brother Reeter, having finished his pep talk, settle in to one of his stories.
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    Pat Lincoln, John Hedis, and Peter Powers are walking alongside the Humvee, which rolls along in the caravan across the dirt road out in the desert. Along one side of the road is a kind of olive orchard, the men think. The trees are not much taller than they are, and scraggly. Along the other side of the road stretches an open, undulating green field. You can never tell what Iraq is going to look like, the men think. Sometimes it looks like this, sometimes something else entirely. Hard to know which is the real country. It is very hot. This is the road that runs behind the orchard of olive trees; on the other side, somewhere through the trees, is the main, paved road that the coalition supply caravans keep getting attacked on. The insurgents are using the olive orchard as cover, the officers think. So now the men are pushing along the back road, trying to flush the insurgents out.
    Are there shadows between the layers of slender trunks? Does the sandy soil shift in the breeze, as the loose end of a scarf maskinga face would shift? A stray goat idles in the roadside ditch. Scott Holdeman, who is all of eighteen years old, is up in the vehicle’s turret, slowly swiveling the machine gun back and forth. Doug Reeter is driving the Humvee behind them, watching. His windshield is like a video screen when the explosion goes off. The spray of dirt against the thick glass is unexpectedly gentle in the space after the great sundering, like rain against a house’s window.
    Then they are all out of the vehicles, someone is shouting IED, IED, half of the men are flat on their stomachs taking cover in the ditch, which is now a chaotic landscape of dirt. Is anyone down, is anyone down, someone screams. Reeter is out of the vehicle now, staring at the road in front of them. The road is gone, just a big crater, but placed in it, spanning it actually, like a toy car some giant child has put there, is the Humvee, and the men who were in it are tumbling out, coughing but OK. Reeter, along with everyone else, looks wildly around for the men who were walking alongside it. John Hedis and Peter Powers have fallen together, their limbs tangled, into the opposite ditch, which they are crawling out of, stunned, maybe concussed, but whole. Reeter looks again at the crater. People start screaming Pat Lincoln’s name.
    They can’t find him. They don’t see him. The thought is there in the back of everyone’s minds; they’ve heard about the larger IEDs, guys on patrol being partially or wholly vaporized by the force, especially if they were the ones who triggered it. Then a figure appears across the field, three hundred yards (swear to god) away, and the men on the road almost open fire.
    â€œFuck, no, shit that’s him, that’s him,” someone yells, waving his arms. The figure staggers, but waves back. There’s no helmet but they can make out the uniform. He starts to jog toward them in the thick soil, and they can see it is him, it is Pat Lincoln, unharmed. The men stand there, stilled on the road, and stare in amazement.Just at that moment there is a heavy, loud, close, wet sound, and they all fall down again in panic, only to realize that the wild goat’s head, apparently airborne this entire time, has landed on the hood of the stalled vehicle.
    Brother Reeter sat back on the bleacher plank, as if in disbelief at his own story.
    â€œI mean, can you imagine the trajectory?” he said, reverently, and it was unclear whether he meant the goat’s head or Pat Lincoln’s flying body.
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    Later the next day, Samuel Lincoln sat up on my bed to go. We were there in our underwear, my upper-floor