Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips Page B

Animnida. She drags him slowly, barely able to move him. The boy’s white shirt, he thinks. Take off the kid’s white shirt and rip it into a flag. Find something to tie it to and get to the tunnel opening at first light. If an American soldier is seen with a flag of surrender, they’ll cease firing and send someone for him. Whoever’s alive will get out, but not unless it happens soon. He tightens his grip on his revolver, shoves it into the waistband of his fatigues, under his shirt.
    He tries to think clearly. Tompkins was farther to the rear when the planes opened up. He wouldn’t have run for the tunnels, there wasn’t time; he might have run for the trench shelter of the creek bed and crouched there, shouting into the radio. He must have survived the strafing; Leavitt heard him transmit a cease-fire order, This is not enemy, heard him yelling over the scream of the attack, but it made no sense. If there was such an order, the planes ignored it and returned for another pass. They were firing again, strafing survivors of the first hit as refugees poured into the tunnel behind Leavitt. Tompkins was too far down the line to see Leavitt go into the crowd for the girl, see him enter the tunnel, but the tunnel was there and the refugees were inside. Only Tompkins might think Leavitt could be with them, could have helped someone to shelter and been shot to hell when troops emptied their automatics on fleeing civilians. Scared kids with weaponry do evil things, but if Tompkins is alive and conscious, he’ll be looking for Leavitt. The girl pulls him slowly, crouched low. He tries to quiet his breathing, calm his mind so that he can talk to her.
    He loses track. Sees the refugees moving beside him before the strafing. He feels Lola near him. He doesn’t want her here as the onslaught unfolds and tries to imagine them in another place and time, in a future, but they slip backward, into their own embrace. Before the baby, before the war, they made their way into her body under the slow turn of her bedroom ceiling fan like they would never get anywhere else.
    In the endless battle of the retreat, he’d told himself Lola was his protection. He’d reconstructed this time and that one, walking with her, cooking in her tiny kitchen, lying in bed. The sound of their breathing ticked off time, speeding or slowing a wash of arousal he was often too tired to feel and watched inside himself like a story. He holds on to the story now and wakes up inside it, her thigh flung across him on the bed, smoke of her cigarette ascending over them. It’s amazing how real it seems: the comfort he feels, the happiness. Her sketches taped on the walls are drawings of him. Line of his shoulder, torso, loins. Back of his head. His hand on a bottle of beer, the dark glass beaded with cold from the walk-in freezer downstairs. Never his face. He was too beautiful to draw, she said, for her anyway, the next girl he found would draw his face. She mostly drew shapes, pieces of things or structures, as though she never looked at anything full on. The same images repeatedly, like she was trying to get them right. Chiseled stones of a wall or curved arch, the mortar between the stones. Tracks crossing in a rail yard. Small town signage: MURPHY’S FIVE AND TEN CENT STORE. Leavitt hears typewriters, dozens of typewriters. Their keys clack faster and faster like staccato artillery ratcheting toward explosion.
    The drawings and the walls dissolve. He sees the Korean girl looking at him through the moving crowd of refugees, through the dust and whining heat and the sound of syncopated footfalls on the tracks, fixing him in her mind. She knows all of it, sees the disjunct images of his thoughts move around and through him, and dismisses them. Her gaze bores through him in the blazing instant of hesitation he felt before he moved toward her. He’s standing in front of her again on the gravel between the tracks, and she gives him the boy. The child is in his