Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (25 page)

In 1973, forty-eight years of military records, from 1912 to 1960, burned in a fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, echoing a similar event that happened in September 1940, when the War Office repository in London burned in the Blitz. Sixty percent of British military records from World War I were gone. The events have taken on new meaning ever since trauma scholar Judith Herman wrote about how our ordinary response to atrocity is to banish it from consciousness.

We drive out of the city at dusk, through stretches of dead fields, places where the corn is green and quiet as cocoons. Everywhere hay bales glow solid and white.

In Centralia, Caleb slumps in his seat. He spreads his hands apart as if introducing me. “This is where I would’ve ended up. Working on a corn farm. Maybe in jail. Steve’s in jail. Roy’s in jail. Sandra’s a coke addict.” Old friends. “It blew her mind I had a job.”

He asks if I know about last roll-call ceremony. It’s the ceremony where the commanders call the names of the soldiers one final time. They play “Taps,” or “Butterfield’s Lullaby.” “Saddest song I’ve ever heard,” he says.

The sun looks like someone took a fork to it and rubbed it all over the horizon. Clouds, orange with its light, gather like fumes on the edges of trees.

“Kip Jacoby,” Caleb calls out. “Kip A. Jacoby,” he says. “Sergeant Kip A. Jacoby.”

We wait.

“See,” he says. “No response.”

Caleb thinks he saw his dead friends the other day, all of them standing in a line on a grassy hill. And he describes them right there with his eyes closed, his hands moving in loops ahead of him, as if he were drawing them out of the sky. They were wearing their flight suits.

“What does it mean?” I say.

“It means they were all home,” he says. “They were finally home. I asked Kip if he could talk. I said, ‘Please, buddy.’ But Kip said no. ‘Well, why not, Kip?’ And Kip said, ‘It’s different over here.’ ”

I imagine the first time Caleb put on his uniform, getting it caught in the wind, making him look falsely full and big, a kite ready to sail.

•  •  •

After his children are tucked into bed, we take his mother’s car, a Lexus with leather seats softened with a weekly oil. He gives me a distant look. “Are you tired?” I ask. He laughs. “I haven’t slept in a long, long time.” We’re like teenagers or thieves. We drive into the dusk. Caleb starts talking about post-Vietnam Harley gangs. “Loyal to their gangs,” he says. “What now?” He says that after war, soldiers still have to find ways to vent their soldierness. “Contracting is one of those things. Sixty-day rotations, home thirty days. That’s what I’m doing. Venting my soldierness.” He changes the topic. “The spoils of war,” he says. “Have to give spoils to guys. If you don’t you’re not going to have guys to fight the war. Back to the Greeks and the Romans, to now. Always gave away land or something.”

“What does America give you?”

“America gives you pain-killers.”

We’re somewhere outside Columbia, a suburban area where the restaurants are bright at closing time. Caleb pulls over on a steep side street. It’s crossed by railroad tracks and disappears into the woods. We find a dim café to order drinks. It’s already dark. We sit down and the air-conditioning dries my eyes.

Caleb pulls a plastic bag of tobacco out of his pocket and gathers enough for his cheeks. “I told you not to go see April,” he says. He taps the table. “What’s been going on?” His eyes wander in the spaces around me. He leans forward and whispers, “Did I tell you what I saw?”

“You didn’t tell me anything.”

“Did I tell you about the big old bat that’s been following you around?”

“So I told you about the bat?”

He pets his chin. He shakes a finger at me like I’m playing a joke on him. “I told you about the bat?”

I didn’t tell him about the bat. I pour salt on the table. I press my thumb into it. “Did I tell you about the bat?”

“You didn’t tell me about the bat?” he says.

I take out my notebook and draw a picture of the bat in my dreams. “Okay, it’s your turn,” I say. He makes a waving motion with his hands. He doesn’t want to look. “Freaks me out,” he says.

A group of truckers walk by and crowd a booth across from us. Caleb lowers his voice so they can’t hear. “What I saw,” he says, “is this big old bat wrapping its wings around you. Its nails were long, rawhide, and dirty.”

I mention the real bat and the rabies shots.

“
That fucker,”
he says in a low hush. “You know, I’ve heard of this—” He pauses. “This
bat man.
He fucked with my buddy once. It flew over his truck. Wing span big as a plane.” Caleb gathers his hands beneath his chin. “Well,” he says, “it hasn’t attached.”

For a while we don’t speak. We stare into light streaming through dirty windows.

“This is just the way life works after deliverance: horrible, scary thing. Life pans out. Another horrible, scary thing. Life pans out. For a few weeks following deliverance I was a failure at everything. I failed at this and this and this. But it was just a test. After I got through that, it just went away. It didn’t come back. But I honestly believe the demons come back sevenfold.”

I tell him the son of Jesus thought it was the suicide demon.

“She doesn’t know shit. She thinks everything is suicide. Every time we do deliverance everybody has suicide. She’s always knee-deep in suicide.” He scratches his skin, yellow like wax in the streetlight; like maybe it could come off and get stuck under his nails. “When the Destroyer came after me,” he adds, “it was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.”

The waitress says they’re closing. A janitor sweeps the floor with her eyes closed. We take our drinks outside to a small iron table chained to other tables overlooking an alley. Yellow umbrellas bloom from their centers. The streetlights leave only a small circle of black above us, faint with stars.

“It was hard for you to come here, wasn’t it. I know.”

“Why do you think that?”

“There’s something,” he said. “Following you.” He pointed at the space behind me. “I saw it on you when you arrived. It’s from talking to Brian’s sister April. It transferred. I’ve been trying to get through to you. I check up on you every month or so.”

The janitor stops to look at us through the window.

“You still don’t know why you met me, do you.”

“Did you know they used to shoot people with PTSD?” I say. “These young guys in the trenches.”

“You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”

He starts speaking in metaphors without context. I don’t know what he’s saying. “There’s a broke-down train,” he says. “Okay, now get it from point A to point B.”

“I don’t know,” I keep saying. “I don’t know.”

“You still don’t know why you met me, do you.” He shakes his head. “Tell me what you thought of me when we met. You think I was a dumb, crazy guy? Is that what you thought? You can tell me. Tell me everything. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. First tell me, why did you meet me?”

“Are you worried?”

“Simple question.”

He says it as if he wants to take all of me, arrange it on a table, and look at my organs in harsh light.

“I knew you were demonically tormented,” he repeats. “You laughed when I told you about the demons. I knew your generational curse line was very strong. Some occult shit in there. Oh, and I don’t know, I can’t explain it. I guess I figured you were a man-hater or something. It seemed like you never even wanted to talk to me. I felt bad for you. I felt very bad, in fact, because I knew it would take you a long time to learn what this all meant.”

He sucked his straw black with Coke. “I’ve told you the intimate details of my life. The things I’d never tell anyone else. You never tell me anything about your life.”

I’m drawing shapes in my notebook and trying not to look at him.

“What do you want to know?” I ask.

He’s silent and hunched with his head up like a turtle. “Have you figured out your objective?” he says. “Have you figured out why you met me?”

“There are demons,” I say, hoping that’s the answer he wants.

“That’s a little obvious by now.”

He drags his fingers from his cheekbones to his chin the way someone might remove a mask.

“You don’t understand any of this,” he says. “You don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into. You went and saw that gal. I warned you. I said this thing is going to come after you. You’re kinda fucked right now, but I can help you.”

I’m writing down what he says in my notebook until it’s darkened by the shadow of his hand. He pulls my pen from my fingers. He closes my notebook. He takes it. He hides it in his lap. “This has nothing to do with the goddamned book,” he says.

The headlights of a passing car catch Caleb’s face, and his eyes stay wide and motionless in its glare. He waits until it passes. “I’m frustrated with your rational background. You ask too many questions. You see everything too logically. This is freaking spiritual warfare.”

He spreads his legs and sinks between them.

“You’re my subject.” This word quiets him.

“What?” He leans back, deflated, as if someone took a pin to him and some air seeped out.

“Give me my pen.”

“You’ve never trusted me. You’ve never trusted Caleb. All this time and you’ve never trusted Caleb.”

“I got in your truck. I drove with you to a trailer in Portal.”

He shakes his head. “I want you to figure out why you met me.”

I tell him he clearly has an answer to this question and that he should just tell me.

“Will you let me pray,” he says.

“Why?”

“I can help you,” he says. “Take my hand.”

I flex my hand into a ball and set it in his open palm. Then I pull it away. “I don’t want to.” His eyeballs move beneath closed lids like things turning over in the womb.

He stands up, heads into the street, and starts jogging. He stops before the railroad tracks beneath a streetlight. In the solitary yellow glow, he raises his arms. He could be a demon now himself.

“What?” I shout.

“Nothing,” he says. He jogs back. “Just wait.”

A long stream of prayers comes from his mouth. The streets are wide and sleek and black like rivers. A moaning rises from the distance. The wind is coming, coming down from across the agricultural fields sour with the smells of opossum and corn rot.

“What’s happening?” I say.

I have the sensation that we’re lying down, or that the world is moving and we’re standing still. Bits of trash scrape the asphalt and gather by the tracks. A gathering of cups and soda cans swirls and rises like a tower.

One by one the streetlights darken.

I lean toward the dark.

“Power outage?”

“They’re here.” He drums his hands on the table.

“Who?”

“The whole fucking army is here.” He reaches his arms above his head and opens them like a ballerina.

“What does that mean?”

He describes something from a war movie I’ve never seen, a movie where horses die and men are blown apart in trenches and the air is full of screaming.

A figure darts between bushes across the street.

“Wait,” he says. He recognizes my stare. He recognizes it as his own. “You see them, don’t you? That’s what I asked,” he says. “That’s what I prayed. I want you to see them. Just a little.”

“It’s just a person,” I say.

“I can see you in the spirit realm,” he says. “I can see you right now. It’s amazing. You know who you are? You’re fucking Joan of Arc.” He talks like a general who’s already imagined the slaughter and the victory.

“You need to hold my hand,” he says. “The only way to defeat this army is to do it together. You can’t do this alone. I can’t either.”

His hand is there, calling to me, dark from the sun in Afghanistan.

“I don’t want to hold your hand.”

“They will hurt you if you let them. You’re letting them hurt you. Don’t let them hurt you. Please, hold my hand.” He breathes with the delicate throbbing stress of a small animal. “Join me,” he says. “Please, join my army.”

He quiets to let his words settle and arrange themselves. A moth flickers by his head like a small, loose flame.

“You think Afghanistan is scary? You think a fucking IED is scary? Rockets? Dead guys everywhere? It’s nothing compared to this war. This war is much,
much
worse.” His fingers wave me in. “Take my hand. There’s no good way out. Take my hand,” he says. “Join my army.”

I try to imagine what he sees: the army dying in waves on flat, burning fields.

“I know what you’ve been going through with the enemy,” he says. “You’re the skinny guy with an AK-47 and you’re getting pummeled by a huge army. You’re getting shot in the face. You’re wounded. There’s fire all around you. You’re on the ground, limping. Don’t you think it would be better to gather an army? Resupply. Move under the cover of darkness?”

Now he’s pacing back and forth, gesticulating like a deposed king in a tragic play.

“We both have weapons. If we put them together, we’ll at least have a chance against the enemy. You’re taking some serious fire. I’d love to put up some cover for you. I’ll cover your back if you cover mine.”

Finally I take his hand and he quiets. He whispers to God in the dark. An oily twist of hair on his forehead curls like a hook. He releases. “Now,” he says. “I have to pee.”

We stand to leave. As we approach the car his hand flutters in front of mine. “Give me your cup.” I set it in his hand and he throws it in a garbage can’s open mouth.

“See,” he says. “I’m a gentleman.”

•  •  •

Caleb is staying with his mother and I’m staying at a hotel. He’ll drop me off. “Father,” he says, “show us the hotels.”

Father shows us dead ends, neighborhoods thick with two-story homes, and the parking lot at Taco Bell. I nod off, forehead smashed to the window. He flicks my shoulder and I jerk awake in the parking lot of a Best Western.

Blue pool light shimmers up the hotel walls. There’s the faint sound of a late-night swimmer. The murmur of television from an open window. The asphalt sparkles around us, same as the sky.

He asks if I’m afraid. I say I don’t really know. He investigates shadows between cars. He insists on walking to the desk with me. He says it’s following me.