The God of War Read online

  I continued to watch the birds fly across the desert toward the water. Their pale wings reflected the sun like sails on a boat. Malcolm lifted his face to them as if receiving the warmth of their reflection on a chilly day. His body swayed back and forth, and I knew that in his mind he was up there with the birds, being batted by the wind, keeping graceful pace with them as if he were dancing a waltz, the steps imprinted in his muscles. I would have liked to ask him these questions: Did he wish he could fly? Would he rather fly or speak? Would he rather fly or be normal? But even if he knew, he couldn’t say.

  When Laurel was done collecting, she led us back to our trailer home by way of the rubble beach that lined the shore of the Salton Sea. Malcolm’s attention was diverted by the tide and the pebbles, crushed beer cans, and bird feathers it brought in. My mother joined me on the beach, where we sat on the broken concrete that had once been part of the foundation of a beach club, when this place advertised itself as a Riviera and had hopes for the same glamour and wealth. I had seen old brochures showing tanned men in tight briefs lifting barbells, while women wearing turbans and impossibly pointy bikini tops lounged on beach chairs, drinking martinis from glasses shaped like their breasts. My mother told me about the famous movie stars who had come here to swim and boat and fish, but I didn’t know their names, so they meant nothing to me. She said people had such hopes for this place that businessmen sold plots of land from airplanes to buyers so eager they would simply point down and write their checks. When she told me these stories, she laughed, amused by the willingness of people to believe in what they couldn’t see. She was proud to tell me she had no faith in dreams.

  Now she gathered her skirt between her legs. The veins on her pale skin were linked waterways. When I was younger, I used to trace them with my finger, imagining I was on a boat, sailing down the tributaries of the Nile that led to the delta of her ankle. I had an urge to play now, a desire to touch her. But a new ambivalence had begun to war inside me, and I knew I was too old for those games. Sometimes I wanted to bury my face in her neck and kiss the skin there. At other times her smell, or the way her throat moved when she swallowed, or how she looked when she sang to a song on the radio made my insides curdle. I was trapped between loving her and another feeling that had recently introduced itself and that I had no name for but that felt alternately like hatred, or disgust, or pity, or worse: longing.

  “My sea,” she sighed, shading her eyes against the lowering sun. She possessed the sea as though it were another of the half-orphaned children she had collected around her like Malcolm and me, the crippled fragments of the earth she had chosen to keep close while rejecting all the rest. For the sea was a castoff, too. Some sixty years before, travelers crossed the desert looking for a new home. They wanted the land to be wet and arable, like the places to the east they’d lived in before drought and blight made them uninhabitable. Those pilgrims vowed to reclaim the desert as though it had been something else in the first place: an Eden of lush, generous plants and fruits, a place where people were meant to thrive. Determined, they tried to redirect a river, but the river broke loose and flooded, the water rushing down to this place, filling it up, creating a new sea and scuttling their plans. Laurel rarely spoke about her own past, or the farm in Indiana where she was raised. I knew only a little about my grandparents, whom she left when she was eighteen, and what they did to her. But she talked about the history of the sea as if it were her own, and in that way its story became mine, those early settlers my distant relatives, their exploits my legacy.

  “Why did they do that with the river?” I said, testing out whether I was still interested.

  “Do what?”

  “Change the direction.”

  “I’ve told you.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “The truth is people don’t know how to look at a thing without trying to save it. Salvation is a disease.”

  “But you got saved. When you were my age.”

  “A guy who probably got ordained from the back of a matchbook put his hand on my forehead and pushed so hard I fell down. You would have, too.”

  “But I don’t believe in God.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  There was much she warned me of: religion, government, corporations, the way other people tried to tell you to live your life. She did not entirely trust schools, and I knew she only sent us because it was the law and because she had to work. She had no faith in what I learned there, didn’t believe it would help me in any measurable way. She scowled when I recited facts I had to memorize for a test on the Industrial Revolution, as though I had been co-opted by a cult and the date the steam engine was invented was some dark password.

  I knew this: When she was young, she grew too fast and her back curved like the shape of the holes in a violin. Her parents refused to take her to doctors and instead prayed over her.

  “Laga, baga, chaga, maga.” The words felt like marbles rolling off my lips. “Is that what it’s like?”

  “Is what like?”

  “Speaking in tongues.”

  She looked at me, but I could tell her gaze was turned inward, focusing on some memory. “No,” she said, finally. “It isn’t something you can learn like Spanish or French. It’s something that just comes on you unexpectedly, like a fever.”

  “Maybe they just make it up,” I said. “Maybe it’s all fake.”

  “I used to think so but I don’t anymore. I think that people can be possessed by all sorts of beliefs, and then those beliefs become real to them. And when those people get any kind of hold over you—well, look out.”

  “That’s why you left,” I said, repeating what I knew was the next part of the story.

  “Escaped with my life. You have to run from people who hurt you. Run as fast as you can. Get it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Good.”

  I leaned into her and smelled her clove cigarette scent.

  Her parents brought her to an exorcist to cast out the devils in her back. He was a small-animal vet who lived in the town near the farm. He held his exorcisms in the supply room behind the kennel where sick dogs were kept in cages. The vet told her that the devil of lust was sitting on her back, twisting it because of her bad thoughts.

  “Out devil, in the name of Jesus Christ,” I said, pointing to a spider crawling out from a hole in the sand.

  “I never should have told you about that,” she said, shaking her head. But she was smiling. She said those words too when the toast burned or if she stubbed her toe, and when her words solved nothing, she let go a hard, mirthless laugh, pleased to have proven her parents and a certain version of the world wrong again. Now she stretched each morning, standing in the middle of the trailer in her T-shirt and underwear, leaning forward, arching back, twisting from side to side. I’m getting the lust out, boys, she’d say, laughing at her own joke. When she wore her yellow bikini to water the outside plants, I could trace the bent line of her back with my eyes. Her spine was like a straightened paperclip, the kinks impossible to erase.

  The water was slate grey now; the low sun played gently over the tiny ripples on its surface. Malcolm walked a few yards farther down the shoreline. Laurel sucked in a deep lungful of air as if she were luxuriating in the freshness of a real seaside where wind blew in from whole other continents carrying mysterious news. “One day,” she said, gesturing to the water with her chin, “all this will evaporate, and you know what will be left?”

  “Salt.”

  “And other things. It was an Indian burial ground once. Who knows what they will find.”

  “Dead Indians.”

  She laughed heartily, put her arm around my shoulders, and pulled me close. “You don’t take any shit, do you?”

  “We could move,” I said. “To Los Angeles.”

  “When you become rich!” She said this with no longing, and I knew we wouldn’t move even if we could. The truth was, my family wouldn’t have been able to survive anyplace else. Bombay B
each, like all the half-attempts at towns nearby, was a place for people who had a provisional relationship to the world. Mecca, Niland, Wister, Mundo—those were towns of migrant laborers, drug dealers, snowbirds, or wanderers like Richard who came and went with the weather. Daily, I watched Border Patrol cars speeding south along the highway, lights flashing self-importantly, our population diminishing once again as those dark figures in the backseats were escorted home.

  “We won’t be here when the water turns to salt anyway,” I said, watching as Malcolm dragged a blanket of green-black seaweed out of the surf with a stick. “We’ll be dead by then.”

  “Bury me here. Scatter my ashes in this water.”

  “It’s dirty.”

  “It isn’t.”

  “Things die in it.”

  “Things die everywhere.”

  The thought of her dead frightened me, and I felt hollow, as though I were starving and there was not enough food on earth to fill me. I couldn’t imagine a time when it would be just me and Malcolm. What would we do? Would we live in the trailer next to this pretend ocean? Where else could we go? Who would take care of us? I knew one day I would be a man, but “man” was just a word like “perimeter” or “democracy”; I knew their meanings, but they didn’t signify anything to me except that if I spelled them correctly the teacher wouldn’t make me stay after class. I could only imagine myself and my brother just as we were, twelve and six, an unfinished equation without the presence of our mother.

  Malcolm struggled to drag the seaweed toward us.

  “Put it back, Mal!” I said more loudly than I needed to, but I meant to banish this empty, cold feeling, to yank myself back into the present where my mother was here, taking care, and I was not alone with my mistake. Malcolm’s seaweed dangled over the end of the stick like an animal pelt.

  “Let him be, Ares,” Laurel said.

  “He’s gonna bring that into the house.”

  She studied the situation for a moment. “No, not that. That’s a living thing.” She stood and walked toward him. I heard her explain patiently that the seaweed had to go back to its home because it would die if it was left out of the water. Malcolm’s protests were high, wretched sounds, his cry more bird than boy. Laurel created a soft cushion of hushed and soothing words that ran underneath his shrieks as she encouraged him closer to the shoreline. Once there, she helped him tilt the stick. The seaweed slid into the water where it floated on the surface like the hair of a drowned man. Malcolm’s howls turned some invisible screw inside me, twisting it tighter and tighter.

  THREE

  That night, I woke up falling, and even when my brain registered that I was secure in my bed, I continued to have the gut-inverting sensation that I had not yet landed, and that the worst was yet to come. I told myself not to look at the clock. But it was too late. My eyes, those betrayers, shifted to the right, and there was the warning: three-fifteen. Immediately I felt trapped in the night, and even though my mother and brother slept nearby, so close I could nearly touch them if I stretched my arms toward the laminated plywood walls of my room, I was alone. The nighttime quiet dulled the sounds of distant trucks and cars, and the star-pocked sky obliterated the daytime luster of golden arches and other neon enticements. Night restored the desert to its naked majesty. I could hear it laughing at the gas stations and schools, at telephone wires and electricity converters and irrigation canals—at all the human attempts to tame it.

  Panic flooded my body, and I sat up. I slid open the window by my bed, trying not to suffocate in the solitude. I smelled the things I knew—the mesquite in the air, the leftover smoke from Mrs. Vega’s barbecue next door, fertilizer and ammonia from the farms, the chemical odor of the sea. And there it was: the memory I woke with in the middle of so many nights of my life:

  I was seven, Malcolm just a year. Laurel pulled the Plymouth off the highway into the gas station in Niland. Malcolm had just filled his diapers, and something yellow and foul smelling leaked onto his baby outfit. The faded ducks began to look like they were swimming in mustard-colored pond scum. The smell turned sweet, disgustingly appealing, like earwax or toe crud. I slid as far away from him as I could in the backseat of the car but it wasn’t far enough and I started to retch.

  “Oh, come on, Ares,” Laurel said. “You think you never messed your pants?”

  “Not like that!” I moaned.

  The minute she stopped the car, I bolted and stood on the concrete island between the two gas pumps. Laurel expertly held the baby in one arm. A fresh diaper hung from her mouth like cat prey as she opened the trunk with her free hand. She laid Malcolm on the ripped upholstery and stripped him.

  It was late in the day; the warm air sat in place like an old man in a lawn chair with no intention of going anywhere. Those summer afternoons refused to yield; the light lingered until you wondered if there would ever be a night, or if somehow the oppressive heat had overcome nature herself. And then night would take you by surprise like a car horn slicing open silence. Laurel carried a freshly changed Malcolm toward me, holding the befouled diaper before her like a gift.

  “I’ll take him,” I said, holding out my arms.

  Laurel sighed. “It’s just the body, Ares. Everybody poops.” She shifted Malcolm into my arms and threw the diaper into the can, where it floated above the rim like a small iceberg on an ocean of crushed burger wrappers and cellophane torn from cigarette packs. Then she headed toward the convenience store. I bounced my brother up and down on my hip as I’d seen my mother do, trying to settle him, but Malcolm grew frantic, looking over my shoulder then twisting himself around so he could look the other way. He began to scream and kicked me in the stomach. I told him to cut it out or else. He put his hands on my chest and pushed himself away from me, and I dropped him.

  He went down like a medicine ball. I heard the thud of his head hit the concrete before he rolled lazily off the lip of the island and onto the cracked pavement. He came to rest beside the wheels of the car. Next, the most terrifying thing happened: nothing. Malcolm didn’t move. He didn’t make a sound. It was as if someone had pressed the pause button on the universe and everything stood still. I couldn’t hear the cars passing on the highway or the sounds of the construction equipment going full tilt behind the convenience store. All I could hear was the inside of my head, which sounded like water rushing through a wide pipe.

  Then the finger let go of the button, and everything started up at once—Malcolm’s scream, Laurel running and yelling things that didn’t sound like words, her arms pushing me out of the way as she crouched over her baby. Victor, the fat man who worked the day shift at the store, ran toward us, swaying from side to side in order to propel his body forward, his red company vest flapping like useless wings. He screamed, “Nine one one!” turned around, and did his dance back to the store while Laurel shouted, “No! No!” She got into the car and started the engine, not even bothering to strap Malcolm into his seat, but holding him on her lap, one hand pressing him to her chest so that a flower of blood appeared on her white tank top. She pulled out of the gas station so quickly that the door closed on its own, trapping the end of her Indian print skirt, which waved back and forth as if bidding me good-bye. And because I did not yet understand what had happened I lifted my hand and waved back as the car kicked up dirt and turned onto the highway, disappearing into its own cloud of desert dust.

  Later, Victor drove me to the hospital and left me in the waiting room. After what seemed like hours, Laurel walked through a set of swinging double doors. A nurse followed her, carrying something that looked like a huge roll of toilet paper but that I realized was Malcolm, bandaged all over like one of Laurel’s homemade attempts at a Halloween mummy costume. When Laurel saw me, she burst into tears. She pulled me from my chair and held me so tightly I could smell the dried blood on her shirt. She said, “I’m sorry. Oh, baby. I’m so, so sorry.” I knew she wasn’t sorry because she left me at the gas station or because Malcolm was so badly injured I couldn�
�t see his face. She was sorry because she recognized that just like my skin and my name this new fact was something that would last me the rest of my life.

  THE MEMORY WAS AS ALIVE to me as it was five years earlier. I could feel everything again: the disbelief, the fear, and that first, nearly imperceptible seed of guilt that took root inside me and prepared to grow. I was agitated and restless. I got out of bed and tiptoed to the bathroom, past Malcolm, who slept on the living room couch. Laurel slept in a room she’d made at the far end of the trailer by hanging strands of stapled playing cards from the acoustical-tile ceiling to form a curtain. I peered through the cards. She slept like a shirt someone had abandoned on the ground, her torso twisted, her arms flung to either side of her. We never talk about the day I dropped my brother, but sometimes I imagined her sitting up in her sleep like a horror-film zombie, lifting a rigid arm, pointing a finger at me, and accusing me of what I had done. Every moment of my life was pregnant with the possibility of her finally saying everything I knew was true. But until that time came, I remained trapped in my guilty life, which was like a suck of air taken in before speaking, a lifting of the foot before a step; it was the first half of something whose consequences were visible but just beyond my reach.

  I went to the bathroom and returned to my room. I sat on the bed and stared at my bookshelf, another castoff Laurel picked up in Slab City, the squatters’ outpost a few miles from our home where Richard lived half the year. Even in the dark, I could make out the dull, pseudo-gilded letters on the binding of The Gold and Gods of Peru, the lone, stalwart hardback among the shorter, stubbier paperbacks in my collection. It was a library book, long overdue. Two years overdue, I reminded myself, feeling the familiar pinch of humiliation the book induced whenever I saw it there. I had checked it out of the school library in order to write a report. Somehow, I never returned it, and two years later, it sat on my bookshelf. It wasn’t that I forgot. I thought about returning it all the time. But the idea seemed overwhelming, as if the book weighed a hundred pounds and I would be required to carry it by myself through the manila-colored hallways of my school to the library, the only room in the entire building that was carpeted and quiet and smelled sweet like new lumber. The book’s absence had escaped the notice of Mrs. Poole, the school librarian, and no overdue bills had been mailed home. I was too embarrassed to check out books and face her, so I become a reader of Dumpster literature—books other people didn’t think were good enough to keep. I read The Happy Hooker and Jonathan Livingston Seagull, as well as assorted espionage books with shiny covers. Laurel might have mentioned the Peru book but she was not a curator of the house, preferring to let objects move in and out of it—her desert discoveries, or pamphlets about Indian gurus—as if by their own will, like uninvited but tolerated guests.