Song for Night

Roll Call Is Fingers Counting off a Palm

Roll Call — another chapter from the lost manual of John Wayne.

In my platoon there are only twelve of us left so there is no real need for roll call, as one glance takes in the whole group, but I am doing this for me. It hasn’t been that long since I was separated from them but already their faces are unclear. I trouble the cemetery on my arm. This is an exercise in survival. I close my eyes and begin the roll call in my head, one that will include the dead, my fingers counting off in the air.

Ijeoma. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Skin dark as time-worn wood and smooth to the touch. Eyes that never turned hard, no matter what they were beholding, as if she had an infinite capacity for forgiveness. Teeth that stayed white and fresh from the stick that she chewed on almost constantly. It hung from the corner of her mouth like a cheroot in the old black-and-white movies I saw as a child. I remember she tried to smoke a pipe for a while, in the manner of the older female soldiers, but she kept choking so she gave it up. She had a laugh on her that was infectious, like the sudden pealing of a bell, and she was smarter than all of us. She would draw a circle in the dirt with a stick, and picking a star from the sky, she would chart the direction to follow. Even in the middle of the day, she could tell from the shadows what time it was, and she was the only one of us who understood the arcane markings on maps. How concentric squiggles were hills and how high they were. I miss her.

There was Nebu — short, stocky, and angry. Nebu never enjoyed killing, but for him it was his duty so he carried it out methodically and effectively. In a way, this made him seem more ruthless than the rest of us. This kind of dispassion was frightening to us. But he was dependable. A good soldier, and I felt sorry about the mine that just killed him.

Hannibal has a giant personality. For someone no bigger than a Star Wars Ewok, his laugh reminds me of a gorilla. He is also the practical joker of the platoon. He would bury defused mines under us while we slept and let us wake up to the panic that we were resting in a minefield. He also tied an arm or leg behind him and pretended to have lost a limb. He got us every time.

Isaiah is our prophet. He always wears an expression somewhere between the beatific and the deeply frustrated. I can understand that. In camp, before he lost his voice, he would quote from the Book of Psalms, and only the Book of Psalms, but our sign language was too crude for phrases like: I have longed for your salvation, O Lord (Psalm 174); Mercies come unto me, that I may live (Psalm 119); He willnever forsake his children (Psalm 174); How long Lord, shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked glory?

American Express, or Amex, is the kid who can find you anything, anytime, and anywhere. He isn’t one of us in the sense that he wasn’t with us in boot camp and he doesn’t diffuse mines. He is just a kid who has been following us for months now. He is only seven or eight, and in his bedraggled clothes that are several sizes too big, he looks like a scruffy elf. The.45 automatic he lugs around would be funny if it wasn’t real.

Vainly I try to recall the rest but cannot. This is terrible and I feel caught somewhere between helplessness and guilt, betrayal even. How can I not remember people I have fought and died with over the last three years? People I have played cards with, played at soccer, danced with, pillaged villages with? What kind of leader forgets his men? Maybe that is why I cannot catch up with them.

I watch shooting stars like flares filling the sky.