Song for Night Read Free Page A

hardly any and I have forgotten the names of the constellations and their relationships anyway. The only thing I can remember is the phrase, follow the big drinking gourd home. I try to make out the big dip of its shape, but clouds and treetops are occluding everything. Honing my fear to an edge, I step off, sinking into the depths of the forest.
    I pause to light a cigarette, trying to make out the forest in the dying light: matches are too few and precious to be wasted solely for trying to see. I suck on the filter, singeing the tip into a red glow. In the distance I hear a nocturnal wood dove. I press on, crashing through the forest with the finesse of a buffalo. Bugs bite, sharp spear grass rip at my skin. It finally gives way to wetlands, the beginning of a swamp. The blood from my cuts attracts leechlike creatures that suck on my arms and feet as I splash deeper through what turns out to be a mangrove swamp. I must have traveled in a curve, following the forest back to where the river cut through it. I must have because that’s the only way I can be trudging through a mangrove swamp. It is not fun but we passed a mangrove swamp on the way in yesterday, so I must be retreating the right way. Into safe territory.
    I hate mangroves though. The trees skate the water on roots like fingers, so human and yet so hauntingly bewitched they terrify me. The water levels aren’t uniform. Sometimes only ankle deep, sometimes thigh deep, sometimes the ground sheers away beneath my feet submerging me gasping in the chocolate thick brown water.
    Exhausted, I find a tree with a few low-hanging branches and climb, high as I can, until the swamp and river below are no more than a black shimmer in the night. Building a nest of branches, something we learned from the monkeys, I tie myself carefully to the thickest one. We might have learned some tricks from the monkeys, but we aren’t monkeys. Sleep is a two-by-four catching me straight between the eyes and knocking me squarely into oblivion. Rest though is another matter. I haven’t rested since that night. There has been exhaustion; sleep even. But not rest. Not since my unit stumbled into a small village, or what was left of it, several huts falling apart at the edge of a bomb-pitted strip of tar. We saw a group of women sitting around a low fire, huddled like every fairy-tale witch we had been weaned on. Armed to the teeth with AK-47s and bags of ammo and grenades, mostly stolen from the better U.S. –armed enemy soldiers we had killed, but still wearing rags, we stood close together, watching the women, unsure what to do; or whether to approach. The women were eating and the smell of roasting meat drove us on.
    “Good evening, mothers,” we said, respectfully.
    The women paused and cackled, but didn’t reply, and why would they since they probably didn’t understand our crude sign language. We noted that one woman, not as old as the others, was lying on the ground. She was bleeding from a wound to her head and looked dazed.
    “May we have some food?” I asked. I was the unspoken, unranked leader of the troop. “We are brave warriors fighting for your freedom.”
    This time my gestures, pointing to the food and miming eating, seemed to be understood and the old women waved me over. I approached and reached down to the metal brazier with meat on it. I recoiled from the small arm ending in a tiny hand, and the tiny head still wearing its first down. It only took a minute for the women to calculate the cost of my alarm and revulsion, so that even as I was reaching for my AK-47, they were scattering in flight, not forgetting to grab onto bits of their gory feast. I emptied a clip into them, as my platoon cheered at the snapping of old bones and the sigh of tired flesh, even though they didn’t know why I was killing the women. The woman holding onto the head let go as she fell and it hit the ground and rolled back toward me.
    It is that little face, maybe a few months old, that