Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates
And they’d touch you with a rod or a stick that was sharp?—meant to tickle?—like the sole of a foot—(but which foot?)—and you’d have to guess what this was. And was something “hot” or “cold”—was the texture “smooth” or “rough”—wildly he guessed or sometimes just said Whatever to signal it was OK with him whatever—whatever it was.
Loyalty. Duty. Respect. Selfless Service.
Honor. Integrity. Personal Courage.
Army Core Values.
Corporal Brett Graham Kincaid Property U.S. Army.
Intraocular lens in his mangled left eye. Titanium implant holding together the broken skull. The skin/skins of his face stitched together and a rash like stinging ants itching like hell but you must not scratch the stitches for you might tear them out and the skins would loosen and bleed and become infected. Tight-strung wires in the lower part of the body (bowels, groin) and a cath-EEE-ter stuck up inside his limp-rubber cock to drain the poison-piss so he wouldn’t turn mustard-yellow like some of the guys in the hospital you couldn’t guess how old they were—his age, or his father’s age.
Jesus, he’d been a happy kid! Didn’t realize at the time, his mother suffered such misery and bitterness backed up in her like a stopped toilet—(and their toilet on Potsdam Street was always getting stopped up, Ethel complained and wept trying to unstop it herself with a filthy toilet plunger)—but Brett made friends easily, in grade school; one of the taller boys, quick on his feet, a natural athlete but not a bully or boastful for the sadness in him, his father had gone away. People were likely to say that he took after Graham, good-looking, wavy fair-brown hair and pale brown eyes and a quick smile, rarely sulked or brooded or talked-back to adults for adults naturally liked and trusted him.
Basically Brett was just a nice guy. Everybody liked him—kids, adults. He never mouthed off like the other guys, he’d be quiet thinking his own thoughts. He didn’t judge people, he never made fun of people. A cripple-kid—Brett would be nice to him. A teacher having trouble keeping the kids in order, Brett would help maintain discipline. He’d had to work at school like with math and English but actually he got pretty good grades—mostly B’s. He’d be loyal to his friends like Duane Stumpf, Rod Halifax and what’s-his-name—Weisbeck. They’d been little kids together in the neighborhood along Potsdam so it was like they were brothers. Why he’d defend Stumpf when Stumpf got into trouble, you’d have to know their background. Duane Stumpf had this round pudgy face, little-boy-face when he was a young kid, he’d break you up saying some crude really dirty things like he had no idea what the words meant.
Those guys didn’t act toward Brett Kincaid the way they acted toward other kids. They sort of sucked up to Brett, they were admiring of him. None of them was any kind of athlete like Brett.
Brett was the kind of guy you’d ask for a favor if you needed it. And he’d do it if he could—wouldn’t ask questions or act like it was some kind of imposition on him or afterward make some joke or snotty remark.
He wouldn’t lend money but he’d lend other things—his bike, for instance. He worked after school at least two jobs—grocery store bagging, tree farm—had to save what he could, his mother didn’t have any money she was always saying. Why Brett enlisted in the army—he’d get paid, he was going to apply to be an officer and take courses at one of the SUNY colleges, after a few years. He’d give his mother what money he could.
Brett’s crazy mother Ethel! She’d come outside front of their house in just a bathrobe—something like you’d see in a movie all shiny and silky and nothing beneath so you’d have a glimpse of her breasts and thighs shaking like Jell-O, and a snatch of hair between her legs you’d look away from quick not wanting to see.
In a porn magazine or video you’d want to see this but in actual life—another guy’s mother!—no.
Brett was embarrassed of her. But Brett was protective of her, too.
This time we were in tenth grade. Things were fucked-up at my house. My father was drinking and sick and my mother was always saying how she’d like to swallow all the pills she could get her hands on and I’d been missing school a lot. And Brett didn’t say much just kind of hung out with me. On his way home from work or football practice he’d drop by our house. He wouldn’t come inside, I didn’t ask him inside—we’d hang out in the driveway, or on the street. Or we’d go over to the 7-Eleven parking lot. Brett wouldn’t ask why I hadn’t been in school. He never asked any questions. He never wanted to smoke a joint with me—just said no thanks. He never criticized other people much. One day I was feeling pretty shitty and he said hey why didn’t I come over to his place for supper. He seemed to know there wasn’t likely to be any supper at our house, my mother wasn’t in any condition to make a meal, or even to eat a meal. I said no thanks! Nobody had ever invited me to supper at their house—not before, and not since. Brett said his mother would be OK with having me. So I said OK—it was, like, the nicest thing anybody’d ever asked me to do. The surprise was, that night Brett’s crazy mother wasn’t like what you’d expect. Maybe because it was just me alone and not other guys, too. Maybe she felt sorry for me, Brett must’ve told her about me.
We had frozen pizza Brett brought home from the ShopRite where he worked. Pepperoni and cheese and tomatoes and Mrs. Kincaid mashed up some canned tomatoes to add to it, so it wouldn’t dry out in the oven. The three of us sat watching TV—ER which was Brett’s mom’s favorite TV show. She liked seeing people worse off than her and how they dealt with it and later I thought—That’s why Mrs. Kincaid likes me around. But that was OK, I could relate to that.
That year I went over to Brett’s place maybe five times. It wasn’t always supper, sometimes we’d just hang out. One of those times Mrs. Kincaid was drinking beer and she said to me, Your name is Budny, isn’t it?—and I said yes—and she said this strange thing, I always remembered: Your mother used to be a friend of mine in high school. But I don’t hold that against her now.
Meaning I guess she was angry at my mom for not staying friends with her. I think that’s what she meant. But if Mrs. Kincaid had known my mom then, she wouldn’t have said such a thing. My mom was so fucked-up anybody was a friend of hers, or a relative, they’d run like hell in the opposite direction.
There never was anybody married and in a family, that we knew of, that didn’t get fucked-up sooner or later.
Brett was, like, a real Christian I guess you could say. He never talked about things like religion, he’d have been embarrassed as hell but maybe that was it. “Do unto others—” like they say. He tried that—why he got in over his head in Iraq, maybe. And then, “disabled” like he was, and taking some kind of powerful drugs—also drinking, which you aren’t supposed to do taking the drugs. This is what people are saying. But his main weakness was, he couldn’t say no to his old friends like Stumpf and Halifax and Weisbeck—just couldn’t.
If anybody wants testimony like in a trial—a “character witness”—I will do that. If there is a trial.
Somebody said you can’t arrest anybody for murder if there isn’t a body so maybe there will never be a trial. But if there is, I will stand up for Brett Kincaid no matter what they’re saying he did. Or even if he says so himself finally. Because Brett Kincaid who is my friend would not ever have hurt anyone and if it turns out he hurt that Mayfield girl, then that wasn’t Brett Kincaid but somebody else not known to me.
AMID THE EARTH/RUBBLE spilling off a shovel you’d see miniature bits of colored glass, might be “gems”—meant to signal There is beauty within ugliness. There is good within evil. Have faith!
Hard to believe this wasn’t so. In his innermost heart, he could not believe otherwise.
As in basic training he hadn’t been scared like the others. Seeing how the drill sergeant cast his steely gaze over the recruits determining which ones are OK, reliable, mature, focuses his attention on the weaker recruits it’s his responsibility to toughen, plus a few inevitable fuckups he can humiliate, beat down and break in the presen
So when it was time, knowing, or guessing, that the guys in his platoon who knew what he knew about what they’d done to the Iraqi girl and her family and (possibly) what he’d been telling the chaplain were conspiring to kill him if not outright then to set up circumstances in which (possibly) he’d be killed—“in combat”—yet on patrol at the northern edge of rubble-strewn Kirkuk he’d come forward when summoned by his sergeant, obeyed his superior officer’s command as he’d been trained for he had seen no alternative as a soldier.
And now he’d died, he didn’t have to testify at the hearing. Army Criminal Investigation Command.
Neurologically impaired—“retrograde amnesia”—incapable of remembering with any degree of clarity, accuracy, confidence what had/had not happened in the early evening of December 11, 2004, at the northern edge of rubble-strewn Kirkuk, Iraq.
Not even who’d taken the knife, sliced the girl’s cheeks. No-face and no-name.
Wouldn’t need a lawyer.
Wouldn’t need to travel—to be “shipped”—to D.C.
Wouldn’t need an attendant to accompany him on the plane, in taxis and to the hearings in the Pentagon. Help him walk, count out his meds, keep him from alcohol and from killing himself in a hotel bathroom, wipe his leaky ass.
NOR DID HE NEED to beg Juliet to take him back so that she could accompany him to D.C.—help him walk, count out his meds, keep him from alcohol he’d lap like a dog if he could, wipe his sad sick leaky hemorrhoidal ass insisting she loved him, would always love him, sickness and in health and in the life to come if only he’d let her.
WHAT DID I tell them honey I told the truth—it was an accident.
Slipped and fell and struck the door—so silly.
At the ER they took an X-ray. My jaw is not dislocated.
It’s sore, it’s hard to swallow but the bruises will fade.
I know, you did not mean it.
I am sorry to upset you.
I am not crying, truly!
We will look back on this time of trial and we will say—It was a test of our love. We did not weaken.
HE’D SAID NO. He didn’t think so.
Grinning-clown face so close to her, she was spared seeing it.
SERIOUS CHARGES. BETTER be certain what you are claiming, Corporal.
Your safety and security can’t be guaranteed if you pursue these charges.
Lieutenant C_ staring at Corporal Kincaid as if a bad smell were leaking from him.
THE JEEP WRANGLER had been impounded by police immediately. Every inch of the vehicle was examined. Only Jake Pedersen’s persistence resulted in the Jeep being returned to its owner who after all hadn’t (yet) been arrested.
Gathering evidence. Ongoing investigation.
Now it wasn’t clear that Brett Kincaid should have been driving. Or should drive now.
His therapist-friend Seth had said he thought it might be OK. If someone else was always in the vehicle with him.
Vision corrected to twenty-forty in the right eye. In the left eye . Which met the minimum state requirement for a driver’s license.
Left leg wasn’t strong but right leg OK—the crucial leg: foot, gas, brake.
It was (possibly) true: the corporal’s reflexes were not so coordinated as they’d once been. Peripheral vision you could say frankly shot to hell.
Still, he could drive a vehicle. Had the right to drive a vehicle.
Wasn’t going to beg. Ethel would beg for him.
Saying You can’t take my son’s driver’s license from him, too!
All that you already took from him, his health, his life—the rest of his life—capit’list bastards can’t take that, too.
MUST’VE BEEN A DREAM he had buried her alive.
Mouth filled with earth but trying to scream.
He woke screaming in terror struck at her with the shovel.
Threw rocks onto her until she was still. Then more rocks, pebbles, clumps of mud carried in his two hands and dumped onto the little body until it was still and the face covered.
OR MAYBE IT WAS STUMP fooling around. You had to laugh at Stumpf—Stump. One day in ninth-grade civics which was on the second floor of the school they looked out the windows—across a concrete walkway—and there, on the roof, was Stumpf! He’d climbed some stairs only the custodian was supposed to use. Found a way out onto the school roof where he was walking kind of stooped-over so he wouldn’t be detected, or detected too quickly. “Hey! Look!”—Rod nudged Brett.
At the front of the room Mrs. Nichols was talking. Or some girl was giving a presentation at the blackboard. And out the window, and on the tar paper roof across the way, there was Duane Stumpf and what does the crazy fuckhead do, crouched behind a brick chimney it looks like he’s pissing down the side of the building.
Before he got to high school, Stumpf—“Stump”—was famous.
Senior yearbook he’d be voted class clown.
Sometimes Stump wasn’t so funny. But sure, Stump was fun-ny!
The guy with the sewer-mouth. The guy who farts in class.
Dead maggoty squirrel he’d carried on a shovel, dumped in the front seat of Mr. Langley’s car behind the wheel.
Things he did to girls. Female teachers.
Some of it Stump did with other guys but mostly alone.
Some of it was never revealed. No one ever knew.
One of the stuck-up girls in their class. Good-looking, cheerleader, beautiful face, fluffy angora sweaters. Her daddy owned the Cadillac dealership. They lived up on Cumberland Avenue near the fancy limestone church. Valentine’s Day Stump left for “Debbie” a clump of actual dog shit in a velvet wrapping tied to her locker.
Mrs. Gordiner, tight little drum of a (pregnant) belly clearly visible through her clothing they’d tried not to stare at, and some of them resented, some of the guys resented, but also some of the girls. So anyway—lots of jokes about Mrs. Gordiner who taught junior-senior English and advised the Drama Club. Crazy Stumpf downloaded a photo of an actual human fetus in formaldehyde he’d found on the Internet and this, in a pink envelope, also a quasi-Valentine, he’d left on Gordiner’s desk on Valentine’s Day.
Pictures of girl classmates—girls’ faces on nude female bodies—some of the bodies really fat, really nude—Stump emailed, posted on the Web. Still, Stumpf had girlfriends, later in high school. And later, after high school. Mostly pigs, he called them. Sluts.
Brett didn’t think Stump was so very funny. Didn’t think “Coyote” was funny.
Once, they were alone together, Duane Stumpf told Brett something he’d never told anyone else, he said.
“When I was a little kid, my father taught me words like shit—cocksucker—motherfucker—to make people laugh. He’d take me with him drinking, like we’d go to Herreton Mills and get some things for the house or the yard and afterward he’d drive out to Wolf’s Head and he’d lay me out in the backseat of the car so I could sleep, sometimes he’d forget me—wouldn’t get home till way after dark. My mother didn’t know where the fuck we were, she’d be real upset. The summer before I started school they’d had a fight and Pa walked out and took me with him—like he’d just thought of it and hadn’t made any plans. He’d call her, he hadn’t kidnapped me exactly, but we didn’t get home much. I cried a lot at first then it got so I really dug it, surprising people and making them laugh. I mean—really shocking them, like. And women, too. Girls. They’d call over other people to hear me, a crowd would gather around us at the bar, Pa was really into it, like somebody on TV, and I felt so—it was so—great . . . A little kid saying these ‘dirty’ words like he didn’t know what he was saying, that’s really funny. There was a joke we did together kind of—forget how it went but I was ‘little cocksucker’—people laughed like hell. Pa said, my little cocksucker
“’Course other times, Pa would get drunk and just kind of forget me out in the car. And forget to feed me, too. And this was the opposite of that.”
ASKING WHAT HE’D DONE with her. What he’d done with her body.
And he’d said what was true: he didn’t remember.
Some things he remembered, a swirl of things like dirty water rushing down a drain, but it was not possible to attach names to these; and it was not possible to shape the words, the sounds of the words, with his mouth.
Between somewhere in his brain and his mouth/tongue there was slippage.
. . . make things easier for us, and for you. The judge would be lenient considering your service to the country. And the girl’s family you would allow them to bury the body it’s the only decent thing and you are a decent person corporal and still young—out on parole in eight, nine years.
What do you say, son?
Here was a surprise: they released the corporal.
Could not comprehend this! Had to be a mistake.
For now, there was a lawyer—“representing” Brett Kincaid.
He’d been adamant: he hadn’t wanted a lawyer. Thinking if his father knew, if Staff Sergeant Graham Kincaid found out, that his son had a lawyer, required a lawyer, in this situation he was in, his father would be disgusted. He believed that retaining a lawyer is an admission of guilt and so was ashamed to have a lawyer “representing” him—like a criminal.
Shaver, Muksie, Broca, Mahan, Ramirez—all had legal counsel.
Army prosecutors had negotiated with Ramirez, only nineteen and the youngest of the men: plead guilty, inform on the others, sentence will be less than twenty years.
Ethel had been furious claiming her disabled hero-son was being railroaded into prison—to Death Row.