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    They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel
    They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel
    They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel
    Ebook179 pages2 hours

    They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

    By Hilary Plum

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    About this ebook

    A veteran of the US war in Iraq commits suicide, and his brother joins with four friends in search of ways to protest the war. Together they undertake a series of small-scale bombings until an explosion claims one of their own. This grave and elegant novel is an elegy for these two deaths and the war itself.

    They Dragged Them Through the Streets is a bold meditation on idealism, anger, and the American home front’s experience of today’s wars. This is an innovative work in the great tradition of war literature and a singular chronicle of one generation’s conflicts.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Alabama Press
    Release dateApr 15, 2013
    ISBN9781573668408
    They Dragged Them through the Streets: A Novel

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      They Dragged Them through the Streets - Hilary Plum

      pending.

      A

      A recruiting center? This was the first idea, an obvious choice. It wouldn't be enough, of course we all knew this, it would be only a gesture. But we imagined the smoke and stink, the heat, we pictured keyboards popping apart—it would say something. We told each other.

      Those nights in that room, all our words, mingling in the fluorescence where moths swooped and died: I found them, wings shuddering, on the table, on the floor in the morning. I nestled them in the compost to whisper among the onion skins and lettuce hearts. The beginning.

      A beginning. A. Yes, it was my house where we gathered, my living room with the road close on one side, on the other the hill descending into brambles, deer paths crisscrossing. I got up, fetched the meal or the weed, finally sat on the stool by the table. Our sense of ourselves as protagonists: Ford stretched out on the couch, announcing his every idea; Vivienne in the chair in the corner, her quick replies; Sara arguing from the floor where she sat like the martyr she insisted on being—no, that was unkind; she stroked the dog's head and he loved her. And Zechariah on the wooden chair pulled close to Vivienne, when he was not on the phone pacing the kitchen, his crisp speech floating out to us.

      The bowl making its rounds, what is flame is air is blood. We faced one another.

      Those nights ended, Ford and I slept in the room with no door, only a curtain, I never felt I was rid of their voices. In the morning I walked the dog down the hill, where the stream bank was mud and protruding roots, a violence of spring melt water. The dog hunted out an abandoned deer carcass, a femur with flesh clinging.

      A beginning. Ford would say: A plane taking off, that's how it always begins. Or a ship embarks, a city of soldiers.

      Vivienne would summon up an opening line, stand to recite it.

      Look, Z would say, and unfold a newspaper.

      V          

      Someone should tell Z's story; I don't disagree; but I won't; how could I? There was no end, which is needed for stories; and I am no storyteller, I insist on this.

      I am a woman of sentences.

      Of semicolons.

      A woman who stops before going on.

      I shouldn't be trusted with anything continuous: I am no salmon leaping up a long river. I am a woman of puddles, of nests. A perfect blue egg or a chaos of tadpoles.

      I sat in my corner of A's living room as everyone talked, and I waited for the gaps, the depressions I could flow into, brim over. How loosely their logic was looped together, I thought. I would pull the knots tight at their most absurd. The ideas were enormous but the executions just wet explosions, a thump jarring the stomach, then nothing. This is what I thought then, Z at my side, his laughter whenever I desired it; I was victorious.

      Z of course could defeat me, anytime. But he did it quite reasonably, a glance over the breakfast table. And then he died.

      Who would have known—isn't it fair to ask?—that this was the direction, how we would conclude? Who would aspire to such divination? This is why I won't tell a story, insist a prophecy play itself out. I will keep to my sentences; within the space of a sentence I can hold back. I can earn what I have always wanted: no more than Z's checkmarks next to the best lines. The lines like small revolutions.

      So that even now I await Z's applause, sudden and lovely, birds taking flight off a pond.

      In the space of my life I am algae and eutrophication. Then she was sick, as they say politely.

      In bed insane weeks passed.

      I recovered; Z waited for me; we went on. But there have been these pauses.

      But—weren't we like anyone, a past no one had the right words for, a future we would not wish to know? We armed ourselves: A with her diligence and nostalgia. Ford—I think he chose to be handsome, swathed himself in good looks as I did in irony, then parried from behind, sharp quick jabs. Sara wanted to be merely useful, and after all she wasn't wrong.

      And Z?

      Z. The times were violent. It's true. If we tried to see this, which in our best moments we did, the mind opened into chasm, and reason slipped down, and love and hope followed after, though they were the best of ourselves—

      But that's no story, end only, no beginning. This is what I mean, what I have been trying to say.

                F

      Start with the tree in the backyard. Where the swing was when we were kids in what weren't quite the suburbs. Our yard backed up to a swamp, the kind of land that's preserved because nobody wants it. But we weren't far from town; if Jay went with me I was allowed to walk the fifteen minutes to the convenience store, in the summer went and got slushies. Purple tongue, blue tongue. When we were older Jay would buy beer for me there but first make me sit in the passenger seat and listen to his big-brother lecture. Years later he told us he'd hang himself from the tree, and he did. We were on the phone with the VA, all the clinics, everyone all the time. They said, we won't take him, we can't help him until he stops drinking. He won't stop drinking until someone helps him, my dad said, reasonably. He was the reasonable one, my mom shouted or cried.

      Then Jay was dead, ending this chicken-and-egg conversation. I don't know how much he was even drinking by then; I found a half handle of vodka under his bed and a thirty-rack untouched in his closet. I think he'd been drinking just enough to go on, then stopped. That seems reasonable, I told the VA when we went to the appointment they'd made for him, which was two weeks after we found him hanging from the tree where he had said he would go. It was a reasonable reaction, I told them.

      When we were little, we twisted the swing around and around so it got higher and higher then Jay would shove it in the other direction and I'd spin like crazy, feet out, screaming. All the neighborhood kids came over for our swing ride. One day a kid threw up and we had to stop giving them. One day the swing broke and the branch was ready for Jay.

      You could say this is what radicalized me. Everyone likes verbs like that, -ize verbs, which show what regular words can do to people. The brother's suicide. But I don't know what it meant, to see his shadow on the patch of dirt our feet had kicked bare as children. And I was against the war already before he came home. Before he threw up in the car because we went over a pothole, and he said, Over there, the bumps were people. Kids even. He said we couldn't stop for them, we were ordered not to stop, not even for kids, because it might be an ambush, so—front tires, back. He wiped the vomit off his face and apologized.

      You can't say what something like that would make anyone do, you can only say afterward—well, this was because of that, because you can't think of another reason, because you can't believe how in one moment everything looks like a cause, in another moment an effect. It's true that it did something, but I don't know what and neither does anyone. When I'm dead they might say something convincing and reasonable and wrong. But I saw his shadow, I saw what his eyes had become.

      When I moved into A's house and she helped pack my things, later I found that same plastic bottle half full of vodka under her bed, she'd put it there for me, pushed it to the wall. I don't know what she meant by this.

      S

      I'm the only one who works at the shelter who doesn't wonder why some of the homeless won't come in, why they prefer the streets—wandering, troops losing strength. Many have in fact fought in wars, and even those who haven't tell the stories. They're such accomplished scavengers they can't help it, I think. They collect stories as they collect everything discarded, cans, clothes, boxes—coins tossed at them out of guilt, not hope. I wonder, though, at the ones who say things I know can't be true, I wonder where these fictions come from. I think they may be telling stories on behalf of the dead, that there are a handful of stories they preserve among

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