The Wide Night Sky

The Second of September

Chapter 1

He’d been born in this house, not in a hospital. Five decades within these walls, under this roof—precisely fifty years, almost to the minute—and he’d never loved the place more. The drafty rooms, the windows that rattled, the crooked drawers that jumped their tracks, the cupped floorboards: he loved every splinter, every nail, every flake of alligatored varnish.

Sometimes, at a certain time in the afternoon, with the sun slanting through the western-facing windows at just such an angle, casting skewed rectangles of milky light on the kitchen floor, Leland found himself leaning against the island, just like this. With the chill of the granite seeping into the palms of his hands, he looked across the kitchen, looked down the hallway—gazed, really—and his heart swelled with longing, the peculiar longing of fully requited love, a possessive craving for this beloved place he already owned.

Daydreamer. Woolgatherer. Fool. He’d stopped in the middle of tidying the island, clearing away the cutting board, the knife, the papery scraps of onion skin. He’d thought he should put on some music, but then he’d gotten stuck. He had yet to take a single step toward the corner shelf, where his iPod lay between a pair of softball-sized speakers. Sometimes, at a certain time in the afternoon, he found himself doing this, yes, but these moments of abstraction, these sentimental idylls of his—they were coming upon him more and more often, weren’t they, and stretching themselves out longer and longer?

Going to the shelf, he picked up the iPod and slid the wheel around with his thumb. The gadget chittered, pip-pip-pip, pippip, pip. His thumb brushed back and forth on the wheel, clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise again. Album titles rolled up and down the tiny screen, but Leland wasn’t reading them. He barely saw the words at all. His mind was elsewhere, everywhere, nowhere. He gave up and laid the gadget down again and returned to the stove, where he’d left several pounds of sliced onions caramelizing in a stock pot. He rattled the pot, dug a wooden spoon into it, stirred. The onions hissed their sweetness into the air. The whitish-yellow slivers he’d dumped in by handfuls had half-melted and taken on the color of maple syrup. He breathed deeply—the smell of happiness, of home, as agreeable in its way as the scent of cinnamon and apples and pastry dough. The smell of happiness, and he was a happy man, after all.

Wait. He’d been going to the iPod for a particular thing he’d wanted to hear. He laid the spoon aside and crossed again to the corner shelf. He’d meant to find a recording of his wife’s voice—Strauss’s Four Last Songs, in a performance she’d given five or six years ago with the Charleston Symphony Orchestra. This time, Leland’s thumb had a sense of purpose, and he easily found the album, the songs, the undulating strings, Anna Grace’s clear voice.

She was his first and second wife: That was the running joke of their long marriage. They’d met and married young, had a child, divorced, and married again. The second time, Corinne, their daughter, had been their flower girl. Surly and unforgiving—though endearing in her blue lace and white Mary Janes—the child had stomped down the aisle, doing her damnedest to smite the carpet with her handfuls of petals.

When Leland and Anna Grace had married the first time, now almost thirty years ago, her singing had driven him insane. In the highest passages she’d unfailingly sounded as if she were chiseling the notes out of a granite wall. Oh, if only I could scatter the clouds from Il Pirata, Kundry’s curse from Parsifal, No Word from Tom and Quietly, Night from The Rake’s Progress—all so sharp, so shrill. For months, leading up to a concert performance of Ariadne auf Naxos, she’d filled the house with arpeggios, trills, vocalises. She’d distracted Leland from his research and his writing, and once or twice he’d taken Corinne and fled from the house.

As she’d aged, Anna Grace had lost a bit of her top range, but with it the metallic harshness that had always raised his hackles. Leland knew what vibrato meant, of course, and timbre, and chest voice and head voice, and even if he didn’t understand how the words applied to what his wife had been training herself to do all these years, he could, and did, appreciate what her voice had become. As she nimbly climbed to the first high notes of the Strauss song—the words having something to do with the sky—he heard only clarity, solemnity, restraint, beauty.

Although the song was called Frühling—Spring—to Leland it sounded strikingly autumnal, valedictory, even slightly morose. Even so, the lovely tone of his wife’s voice—austere, but somehow lavish, too—lifted his mood. A feeling of tenderness, of joy, bubbled up in him. For half a second he teetered between laughter and tears. He cleared his throat.

Humming tunelessly along with the music, he returned to the stove. The onions were darker now, but also duller, more gray than golden. They weren’t ruined, but they were past the point of perfection. He cut the heat and dragged the pot off the burner. Stupid, wasn’t it, to make onion soup for a party? Hardly the ideal finger food. But at lunchtime he’d had a culinary vision of sorts—a mental image, clear as a snapshot, of some otherwise unremembered party his mother had thrown some thirty-five years ago, and of a tray of ramekins bubbling over with melted Gruyère. His tongue had bristled ahead of time with the salty tang of the cheese and the meaty savor of the broth, and he’d set to work with his best chef’s knife and a big mesh bag of onions.

Behind him Anna Grace sang a downward-leaning melody. The orchestra played a stuttering rhythm. Anna Grace had somehow managed to match the clarinets’ tone—a smoky plumpness, Leland might call it—and by some acoustical miracle the instruments seemed to be singing close harmony with her, not just in pitch but in words too.

This was the second song of the four. September, it was called, and it was the reason he’d wanted to hear the Four Last Songs. It was his birthday, and he’d wanted music that celebrated the day, or at least the month—September, the best month of his year. But Strauss’s song was a lament for the death of summer. Leland tried to remember the exact translation, tried to recall the words from the program, all those years ago. The garden is in mourning—wasn’t that the first line? Here in the American South, in Charleston, the garden was in full flower. Outside, a battalion of snapdragons, the color of sangria, bobbed their heads. In Germany, though: Summer awaits his peaceful end.

On the recording there was a cough somewhere in the audience, in a far corner of the auditorium. It was the dry clap of wood against wood, the sound of that cough. And now, because of it, Leland could place himself in the audience again, looking up from the gray half-dark to the stage, where Anna Grace had stood poised and calm, confident, cool and gleaming as a jewel. He pictured the fulvous wood of the acoustical shell, the familiar backdrop of Gaillard Auditorium curving around behind her, arching above her. She’d worn a blue-black gown, the color of night itself, and when she’d turned for a moment toward the conductor and the silk had glinted under the lights, Leland had thought, How sweetly flows the liquefaction of her clothes.

How sweetly. How sweetly flowed the music, the voice, the clarinets, the smoky plumpness of Anna Grace’s voice, the surprising softness of the German syllables. How sweetly flows—

His father, all those years ago, had made the onion soup, not his mother. In the seventies, his father had taken up cooking. Starting from nothing—from how to boil water—he’d learned to make French onion soup, chocolate mousse, cheese soufflé, beef Wellington, and all sorts of odd meats in strange sauces. He’d baked endless quiches and pies and tortes. Once he’d roasted a goose for Christmas. Where would he have gotten a goose?

Leland kneaded the tight skin at his temples. His head was in such a muddle. His thoughts kept wriggling away from him. This morning, as she’d left, after wishing him a happy birthday, Anna Grace had said, "They say fifty is nifty. I say there’s a sucker born every minute." She was fifty-one.

Corinne had gotten married in June. She wanted to have a baby as soon as she could. In December, Ben would come home from Afghanistan with a record of honorable service and, presumably, all his limbs. John Carter had just begun his freshman year of college. Someday he’d be a serious musician, perhaps the Glenn Gould of his generation. How could Leland fail to be happy with such a year—with such a life—ahead of him? Why shouldn’t fifty be nifty?

He stared into the pot of onions. Stringy, lifeless, unappetizing. Ruined after all. He lifted the pot and took a step back from the stove. His knees buckled. His eyes rolled in their sockets. Helpless suddenly, limp as a drooping leaf, he tripped backward and crumpled to the floor. His hipbone, and then his shoulder blade and the back of his head, cracked hard against the tile. The last thing he saw, before he passed out, was the big aluminum pot spinning through the air above him, and the slivers of caramelized onion pouring out of it.

Chapter 2

The Humvee’s headlamps scraped a few meters of light out of the black. Baker drove slowly, leaning so far forward that her chest nearly touched the steering wheel. Littlefield’s head bobbed like an ear of wheat on a broken stalk. Above and behind them, in the gun turret, Evans watched the road and swung side to side in his creaky harness.

Littlefield felt a yawn blooming at the back of his throat, but he was too exhausted to open his mouth. He stared at his watch. Seven minutes past midnight. After a series of sluggish, half-assed calculations, he reckoned he’d gotten ninety minutes’ sleep in nineteen hours. That didn’t take into account some five- and ten-minute dozes he’d had here in the Humvee—but if he tried to add those in, he figured, he’d put himself to sleep for sure.

A stainless steel mug of black coffee sat on the seat between his legs. When he’d brewed the stuff, just before they’d left Camp Dwyer, it had been so hot that he’d immediately burned his mouth. His tongue still felt numb and barren, and as if to prove it to himself, he kept dragging the tip of his tongue across his teeth.

Evans said something. Littlefield didn’t catch it, but Baker heard, and she started braking. Motes of dust swirled up into the beams of the headlamps. A pair of tiny green lights cut through the rising fog of dirt. LEDs. What else could they be, if not LEDs?

Now Littlefield was awake.

Even before the Humvee had come to a stop, he swung his door open. He slid to the ground, his boots landing with a pair of soft thumps in the powdery pale dust. He set his mug on the floor of the vehicle and hoisted his weapon. With a flick of his little finger, he disengaged the safety.

I got ya, Evans said.

Littlefield gave a thumbs up. Good to go. He nudged his door closed with his hip.

Now that he’d left the Humvee, he couldn’t find the green lights again. He walked forward, watching the ground for wires, for signs of digging, for anything too messy or too tidy. His boots crunched in the grit. The road was in poor shape, yes—rutted, strewn with sharp rocks, pocked with potholes—but it was, after all, just what you’d expect of a dirt road in a shit-poor district of Afghanistan, a torn-up narrow track stretching from the north end of nowhere to the south side of fuck-all.

He heard something. Froze. Cocked his head and closed his eyes. Strained his ears.

The sound had come only once, whatever it had been. And what had it been? A wheel with faulty bearings? A swinging gate with a rusty hinge? A soft-spoken bird?

It came again, quieter this time, lower in pitch. Littlefield felt for his helmet-mounted scope and tipped his night sight forward on its pivot. The landscape in front of him brightened and turned green. A dozen or meters ahead, in the middle of the road, lay a bushy-haired, broad-nosed dog. Littlefield moved closer. A mutt, brindled on its neck and head, dingy white everywhere else. One haunch was matted with dried muck or blood. The dog looked up at him and folded back one of its pointed ears. The other ear twitched. Light flashed off the backs of its eyes. No LEDs, then. The eyes of a dog, that was all. And no birds, no ball bearings, no hinges—only a whimpering stray.

Littlefield turned. He’d come farther than he’d thought—fifty meters or more. He cupped a hand around one side of his mouth and called to Baker and Evans. "It’s a fuckin’ dog."

Evans hollered back. "I know, Littledick. That’s what I said."

Fucker, Littlefield muttered.

What the fuck, Littledick? Let’s go.

"Eat a bag of buttholes. It’s a fucking dog."

"Jesus fu—" If Evans finished the word or said anything more, the wind carried the sound away.

Hunkering down, cradling his rifle against his belly and chest, Littlefield duckwalked forward. The dog eyed him warily, but let him come within an arm’s length. He held out his hand, knuckles first, to give the dog his scent. Staring up, it whined and licked its chops, but it didn’t sniff him. It turned its head away.

Lifting his night sight, Littlefield stepped aside to let the headlamps shine fully on the dog’s haunch. It was difficult to see—the distance, the glare, the floating dust, the trembling shadows—but he was fairly sure the mutt’s flank was covered in mud, not blood.

Without warning, the dog yelped and leapt up. Littlefield yelped, too—he could hardly help it. He tumbled backward, landing on his ass and sending up a billow of dust. He froze. His heart flailed in his chest. The dog backed away and stood on three feet. It kept the mud-caked leg tucked up against its belly.

Evans’s voice came to him, high-pitched and urgent: What happened?

And then Baker: You all right out there? Littlefield?

Littlefield raised his arm high above his head, waved, and gave a thumbs up. When his breathing had slowed, he returned to his squat and yelled over his shoulder. Unharmed. All clear. If the dog had been part of a booby trap, or if it had covered one, both it and Littlefield would be dead. That sufficed for an all clear.

Laying his weapon on the ground at his feet, Littlefield clapped and whistled. The dog looked at him sidelong. It seemed ready to bolt. On the other hand, it had yet to touch down that injured leg.

Littlefield remembered that he had a Clif Bar in his breast pocket. He took it out and ripped away the foil. Twisting a hunk from the bar, he offered it to the dog.

"Come on, puppy. It’s food. Yummy-yummy. Good for you. Ten grams of protein. Builds strong bones and— To himself, he said, Speaking English to a foreign dog. Fuckin’ brilliant, Littlefield."

But the dog came closer. It smelled, then licked, the lump of food. After some moments of hesitation, it bared its teeth. Littlefield had never been much afraid of dogs—he loved all dogs, more or less—but at the flash of the white eyeteeth he shrank back. His hand shook, and he had to stop himself from jerking it away. But the dog gently took the sticky slab of food, that was all. Though its tongue flicked out, it never touched Littlefield’s fingers.

In two bites, the bit of Clif Bar was gone. The dog came closer. Now it touched Littlefield, freely snuffling around his fingers and the back of his hand and the cuff of his sleeve. He broke off another piece of the bar, a bigger one this time, and the dog grabbed it. It circled away, its back to Littlefield, and sat down to eat.

Behind him, the lights flickered and jumped. Littlefield looked over his shoulder. The Humvee rolled toward him. It couldn’t have moved any slower if a single marine had decided to push it from behind. Evans swung the spotlight around. Blinded, Littlefield held up his hand, palm out, to shield his eyes.

Just a fucking second, asshole, Littlefield shouted. He turned his hand and raised his middle finger.

The dog was looking for more food. Littlefield pinched another chunk off the Clif Bar. This time, just as the dog reached for it, Littlefield yanked it away. The dog paused, then stepped forward. Its bum leg quaked, reached vainly for the ground, and sprang back up. Littlefield lured the dog closer and again closer. He reached out to scratch under its chin, and it consented. He rewarded it with another piece of the Clif Bar. It let him stroke the top of its head, and he rewarded it again.

Moving swiftly but—he hoped—not too aggressively, he scooped the dog into his arms. It thrashed and nearly broke free, but he opened his hand to show it the last chunk of Clif Bar. The dog snapped it up and licked Littlefield’s hand clean and nestled against him. Skinny as fuck, poor mutt.

Littlefield crooned into the dog’s crooked ear. You’re all right. Good boy. That’s it.

Tucking the dog under his left arm, picking up his rifle with his right hand, he walked back to the Humvee. Baker was waiting for him, standing a couple of paces in front of the vehicle, her feet planted far apart, her arms folded across her chest.

The fuck you think you’re doing, marine?

I can’t just leave him, Littlefield said.

Sure as fuck can, Evans said from the turret. Sheet far.

With time and careful attention to context, Littlefield had learned that sheet far—or, on occasion, sheesht far—was Tennessean for shit fire. Littlefield shot Evans a dark look but didn’t answer him. He turned instead to Baker.

Look at this poor guy. He twisted his body so that the light of one headlamp fell across the dog’s body. He’s nothing but dirt and fur. And I think he’s injured.

After a moment’s thought, Baker said, How do you know it’s not crawling with bubonic plague or some fucking—

We’ll get a doc to look at it. The dog strained and whimpered. Littlefield nearly lost his grip on both the dog and his rifle, but he shifted and juggled and got them both under control. Fuck, he said. I’m done fucking around. He carried the dog to the side of the Humvee. Kiara. Open my door? He banged the door with his knee—lightly, just for emphasis.

It’s against regs, asshole, Evans said.

Says the asshole who makes pruno in his CamelBak. To Baker, he said, Please?

For the better part of a minute, Baker stood put. But then, with a terrible sigh, she came around and popped the door open. Littlefield laid the dog on the floor of the Humvee. It curled up and yawned and chewed its foot.

Baker said, You do know it’s actually a female, right?

Littlefield poked his head in through the door. The dog lay with its tail toward him and its hind legs spread, and sure enough—female. He’d grown up thinking all dogs were boys and all cats were girls. Some habits never die. The dog stopped gnawing her foot long enough to stare back at him. Her eyes were wide and—he might be imagining it—reproachful, as if he’d violated her privacy.

To Baker, he said, I never said I was a fucking biologist.

If she pisses or shits in my vehicle, said Baker, "I’m rubbing your nose in it."

Littlefield climbed in and slammed his door behind him. The dog flinched, and he ruffled her neck to comfort her. Baker rounded the Humvee. As she crossed in front of it, she glared at Littlefield. He tried to grin.

Evans crouched down in his harness. Littledick, what the fuck’s your dysfunction?

Baker took her seat at the wheel and shifted into gear, and they started forward. One of the rear tires almost immediately hit a pothole. Evans thrashed in his harness, but he laughed. It was a full-on hearty guffaw that showed his gums and his gapped teeth.

I knew you were hard up for female attention, Littledick, he said, but this is—

Another bump, and this time Evans cracked his head on the edge of the hatch. His helmet must have absorbed most of the shock, but still, he cussed up a storm—a whole weather system, in fact.

Baker pounded the overhead. Get up there and watch the road, numb nuts. Holy Christ.

Littlefield shifted his feet, planting one boot on either side of the dog. She curled up against his right calf. But—fuck—he’d kicked up something wet. Whatever it was, it seeped through the cloth of his trousers. He leaned forward and felt around on the floor. There was—fuckety-fuck—a puddle. He swiped his fingers through it.

Baker was staring at him. You heard what I said. Her piss, your muzzle.

Already grimacing in anticipation, Littlefield raised his fingers and—fuckety-fuck-fuck—sniffed. Coffee. He was so relieved that he had to stifle a laugh. Wiping his fingers on his pants, he said, "I knocked my coffee over. Or she did. Come to think of it, maybe you did, when you hit that pothole."

Before Baker could say anything, Evans rapped on the roof. Got a row of rocks.

Baker stopped the Humvee. When Littlefield got out, the dog whimpered and hauled herself up on her three good feet. Littlefield scratched the top of her head and eased her back down. He closed his door gently. No need to startle her again.

From the turret, Evans called down, If it’s another fuckin’ dog, man—

Fuckin’ Christ, Evans, you got an off button?

Nuh-uh. I’m the motherfuckin’ Energizer Bunny. I go on and on and on. Don’t take my word for it. Ask your mama.

Fuckwit.

Littlefield didn’t need the night vision to see what Evans had seen—a row of flat rocks, laid end to end along the side of the road. In another place and at another time they might resemble a decorative border, though for sure a half-assed one. On a cliff above the Helmand River valley, if you saw a dozen clean rocks strung out at the edge of the road, you were looking at something that might kill you.

Littlefield turned and motioned for Baker to fall back. The Humvee moved away, ten meters, twenty meters, thirty, fifty.

The rocks lay on top of a long low hummock of loose dirt. Beyond that, the ground sloped downward and away from the roadbed. Littlefield fished his flashlight out of his pocket. He shone the beam along the rocks, the berm, the scrub-strewn hill. He caught sight of a brown, slender thing that glimmered when he held the flashlight a certain way.

For a second, he thought it must be one of the vipers that hid in burrows during the day or buried themselves in the sand. At night they climbed trees or flew over the ground, the sidewinding little cunts—or they coiled around themselves, rasping their scales together in warning, making a sound like a slab of bacon frying on a griddle. Some of the vipers were gray, some greenish, some rust-colored. Some were just this shade of shit-brown. But this particular shit-brown thing couldn’t be a snake, or at least not a living one, or by now it’d be somewhere else.

Littlefield stepped over the rocks and over the mounded dirt and walked crabwise down the bank. The brown thing was, after all, an electrical cord. Here it lay on the bare soil, there it was covered with another row of stones, and further along it had been heaped