Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery Page A

could hear the guerrillas there shouting orders to each other, but could not make out the words. For Ketcher, it was as though he was trapped underwater in a churning sea. A hurricane breaking the sky in two over his head. He curled on the ground, a rope of mewling sobs uncoiling from his throat. Fumbled with his gun, could not get it or his hands to work. Could not see as well as he wanted, could not tell that it was because he was crying. Then the noise ended, and there was the sound of the guerrillas retreating along the bank of the highway. Shouting to each other, fading away. The stuttering moans of the wounded. From where he lay between the trucks, Ketcher could see soldiers moving along the rising land, shooting the wounded guerillas who could not get away. One of them turned just as the soldier reached her.
    “Why are you doing this?” the guerrilla said.
    “Why are you?” the soldier said.
    “You burned down my town,” she said.
    The soldier paused, lowered his gun. Put his hand on his helmet. Ketcher could not see his face, but he felt his resolve breaking. They both fought for family killed, land lost, farms razed and houses burned to ash. For animals butchered in the road. For cities brought to ruin. They were one step away from each other, the soldiers and the guerrillas, one side fighting to keep the small things they had left, the other fighting because they had already lost them.
    “She knows the rules and so do you. Shoot her already.” The commanding officer’s voice. Ketcher could not tell where he was. Maybe back inside the truck already. The soldier raised his gun, and he and the guerrilla seemed to have a short conversation. She closed her eyes, and the soldier shot her in the forehead. Then the soldiers dragged all the bodies into a scorched hole left by a rocket and began dousing them with oil.
    “Half hour,” Lieutenant Tenenbaum called. She sounded tired. “Piss if you haven’t already.”
    They milled along the side of the highway, a gray stripe of pavement that had been painted over stitched patches of small farms the monsoons later turned to mud. A haze of gray smoke all around them, a gauze thrown over the earth. Someone set the pile of bodies alight. Ahead of them, an upraised hand from a robed sleeve, a part of a bearded face, smiled from a half-burned billboard. The word JESUS, and then below it, IN YOUR TIME. The rest of the message obliterated by fire. The highway next to them broken by black craters, until it escaped and rose to execute a graceful curl up a long slope to the north. Ketcher had a feeble thought. That was the resistance, putting holes in things, getting killed, and fleeing. It was easy to see that they were on their way out. If they felt their loss so hard, wouldn’t it be best to surrender, kill the war? For it was the war that ate houses and towns, left the bodies of children in the street. The war, not the army. He could not bring himself to examine the connection between them too much, for it brought him closer to accepting his complicity.
    He had joined the army to escape from a farm in Maryland that seemed to fade more and more into the air with each day. The weeks of training had been refreshing, even energizing, though they had been too short, with not enough firearms practice. We can’t spare the bullets anymore, his officer had said. Preserving Ketcher’s delusion that the war would never be dangerous for him. But now he was here, and moving northward, the stench of this place burrowing into his skin. He could feel the front ahead of him, a creature as wide as the horizon, and was terrified. Wanted to talk about it with someone. Knew it could not be Tenenbaum, who had no patience for such abstractions, the idea of the war as a singular entity, a monster. There is no war except in our heads, she would say, or in our commanders’ heads. The reality is simpler. The bullets are flying or they aren’t. Things are on fire or they aren’t. That’s all.