Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Twenty-One

Five years ago Ruby set up a wireless security camera in front of the entrance to the tunnel at the back of the cellar. The tunnel had been breached six times, through guile or someone piercing a piece of crumbling rock and slithering a serpentine finger through the hole onto the petroglyphs that covered the keystones. Ruby did not know how many of the Old People escaped, but each instance was followed by bizarre crimes in the Pacific Northwest that remain unsolved.

We go into her living room, where she turns on the fifty-inch television and uses the security-camera app to pull up a video, the images blurred and fixed in place. The light from the ancient fixture in the ceiling is muted; the room smells faintly of dust and old wallpaper, in essence, the past. “You ready?” she says.

“Sure,” I lie.

“You got it,” she says. She picks up Maxwell Gato and puts him outside. “You want the sound on?”

“Why would I not want the sound?”

“Ask me that three minutes from now.”

She starts the video. The landscape on the screen seems infinite, dotted with burned cities, backdropped by a red sky from the horizon to the heavens. The earth is scorched and the roads threaded with lines of refugees and ox-drawn wagons that have wooden wheels and starved horses half-dead in their harnesses and donkeys and mules who are being beaten with whips. But the screen does not limit itself to one historical period. Roman soldiers plow salt in the ruins of Carthage; Vikings set fire to merchant ships whose sails are painted with the star and crescent moon of Islam; English soldiers called “the goddamns” are executed by Joan of Arc’s soldiers after they have surrendered; the Imperial Japanese use blindfolded Chinese peasants roped to wood stakes for bayonet practice; and on a distant hill, three figures are nailed on crosses against a red sky.

The images are kaleidoscopic, the severity of their visuality an assault on the sensibilities, the kind of material that television producers incongruously warn their viewers not to watch. If the images possess a theme, it’s very simple: The present is no different from the past, and in some ways it is worse. The most haunting images are the flash-burned shadow of a child on the wall of a roofless house at Hiroshima; a Jewish mother leading her three children to a crematorium; and a white mob descending on the Black district in Tulsa, Oklahoma, murdering many and burning out ten thousand, the fires smoldering and the stench clinging for days.

But I quickly discover I do not possess sufficient moral authority to judge others. An event of sixty-seven years ago appears in the lower-right corner, then the images expand until they cover the entire screen.

“I don’t know how that got there,” Ruby says.

“It’s all right.”

“No, I’m going to turn this off,” she says.

“Leave it.”

It’s night on the screen, the monsoon season just beginning. Thirteen other soldiers and I are up to our ankles in an irrigation canal on the edge of a rice paddy. The rain is clicking on my poncho and steel pot and blowing in my face. A Chinese probe is coming toward us inside the fog. They move slowly, spaced apart, their burp guns slung from their necks. A trip flare pops and drifts over the paddy, hissing with smoke and a brilliant incandescence. The Chinese freeze and turn into stick figures, looking at the ground so their faces don’t reflect the light of the flare. Someone down the line coughs, then a Chinese soldier clanks a potato masher on his helmet to ignite the fuse and flings it into the canal. It blows water and mud into the air but hurts no one. Regardless, everyone opens up, a thirty-caliber streaking tracers across the paddy. A Chinese soldier carrying a captured American flamethrower on his back lights us up, arching intermediate bursts of liquid flame into the canal, boiling the water and turning our medic into a blackened cipher.

In my peep sight, I catch the soldier with the flamethrower and burn the whole clip. Even though I’m looking through iron sights and the stock is jerking against my shoulder, I can see his face clearly. He’s no older than I am. Though three rounds hit his tanks, they don’t explode; they leak before fully igniting. The Chinese soldier struggles to get the canvas straps off his shoulders, then is enveloped in flame and runs blindly through the paddy, his mouth open, his pain so intense it absorbs his screams before they can leave his throat.

“Fucking A, Broussard!” the sergeant yells. “Fucking A! Now let’s kick some ass!”

I see myself smiling on the screen. Ruby turns off the television. “That’s enough,” she says.

I look at the floor. My hands are gripped under my thighs.

“You okay?” she says.

“Yes,” I say. I stare at the darkness of the television screen. I see my reflection, but I’m not sure it’s me. My face looks twisted, like those of the gargoyles who live in my sleep.

“I’m going to bring Maxwell Gato back in,” she says.

“You don’t let him watch TV?”

“He’s afraid of the set,” she says.

But I’m not thinking about the cat. I lean forward, a pain like a shard of glass in my stomach. It passes, but instead of feeling relief, I want to drink, and I mean drink: Scotch and soda, vodka with Collins mix and cherries and orange slices, Jack Daniel’s with a Heineken back, buckets of Champale, and the real deal when you want to cook your head, absinthe distilled from wormwood.

Ruby comes back into the room with Maxwell Gato cradled in her arms. “What are you thinking about?” she asks.

I rub my nose with the back of my hand. “Nothing.”

“I worry about you.”

“Don’t.”

She puts Maxwell Gato on the coffee table and sits down next to me on the couch. “We have a lot in common,” she says.

“We’re loners?”

“I’m not like other people. Neither are you. Why should we pretend?”

“I’m old, Miss Ruby. You’re young and beautiful.”

“What does it take for you to stop using the word ‘Miss’?”

“Search me.”

She stands up and looks at me a long time. “Is there something wrong with me?” she asks. “You think I’m immoral?”

“No, ma’am.”

I don’t know what to say. I can’t quite tell her how I feel. “How about some ice cream?” she asks. “Would you like that?”

“That would be fine.”

“You’re a strange man.”

“Could I use your bathroom, please?”

“It’s just off the dining room,” she says. “Yes, you can certainly use it. Please.”

She walks away, her back stiff with either hostility or dismay. The bathroom door has a milk-glass knob on it, probably one made in the 1890s. I go inside and turn the key in the lock. The floor is made of wood that has never been painted and for years has probably been cleaned with a wire brush and bleach and vinegar. The ceiling is plated with stamped tin; the bathtub has claw feet and a long streak of orange on the porcelain under the faucet. The simplicity of the room and its resistance to time is comforting in a way I can’t adequately explain. Perhaps simply because it’s far from the canal near the Thirty-eighth Parallel. Or maybe because it reminds me of Yoakum, Texas, when I stayed with my grandfather at the end of the Great Depression and woke in the morning to birdsong and the smell of smokehouse meat. Damn the century in which I was born. Would that I could return to the natural world, one of flowers and fruit that could be picked from the tree, one in which the gift of life was gift enough.

But what does this really mean? The truth is, I can’t look at my reflection because I fear I will see the face of an eighteen-year-old who laughed after he incinerated a peasant who probably wanted nothing more from life than a few more bowls of rice for his family. Somehow the callousness I showed in the canal is linked to my inability to find Fannie Mae, as though the absence of goodness in my deeds has empowered my enemies and left me in their sway. I sit on the side of the tub, my angst so great that I see myself loading the M1 again, and this time I tuck the muzzle under my chin.

Then I realize something is wrong, something whose potential is worse than the footage I watched on the television screen.

I go into the kitchen. There are three bowls of ice cream on the table. Ruby has waited for me, but Maxwell Gato has started in on his two scoops of vanilla, his tail straight up, his pink seat pointed at me.

“That scene in Korea is not how it happened,” I say.

“I don’t understand,” Ruby says.

“I took no pride in killing the Chinese soldier who carried the flamethrower. The sergeant was KIA the previous week. I remember him well. His name was Geissler. He was a good fellow from St. Louis. He was not in that canal. Somebody is trying to put my head in a vise.”

“You’re accusing me of doing something like that?”

“No, it’s the nature of evil. It makes you resent yourself. It fills you with guilt. It steals the sunlight from your life.”

“So what am I supposed to do with the video?”

“Destroy it.”

“You think that’s going to get rid of what’s under my house?”

“No, but we don’t have to let it ruin our lives,” I reply.

“You said ‘we.’ ”

“I guess I did. Would you stand up, please?”

“What for?” she asks.

“Just stand up.”

She gets up slowly. I put my arms around and press her body against mine, my chin resting on the top of her head. “You’re a really nice lady, Miss Ruby.”

“Thank you,” she says.

I pull her tighter. She steps on top of my shoes. I can feel my heart beating against her cheek, her fingernails seeking purchase in my back. I pick her up on my chest and bury my face in her neck and want to stay there forever.