EXCERPTS

An excerpt from Green Fires by Marnie Mueller

from Chapter Twenty-One

I was dreaming that Gala and I were on a subway. We sat on one long seat with a tiny white coffin between us. The train rumbled softly, almost comfortingly, and then it became louder. I covered my ears. Even so I heard the din of a hundred calling birds over the racket of the train. Suddenly the birds quieted and the train took over.
Kai sat straight up out of his sleep.
"Der Bomber," he said.
I struggled to the surface to find him staring down at me. "We must wake the others," he said in German.
He was answered by a shout from Mingo from inside the house. " ¡Señor, señora! They are coming back!"
I'd worn my tee shirt to bed, and I grabbed my skirt and slipped it on. I ran into the house carrying my shoes. Kai was already there. Mingo was pulling on his pants.
"Wake don Jorge and María. Go!" Mingo shouted at me. I crossed the room and lifted the blue cloth without knocking. Häberle and María slept soundly, his tanned body curled around her black-brown flesh, his hands cupping her breasts.
I rapped hard on the wall. "Don Jorge. doña María."
They both sat up directly out of sleep. Her face looked young and open, until she heard the motor. Without saying a word, they reached for their clothes.
I found Mingo and Kai on the porch in front, Kai scanning the sky with his binoculars.
"They changed direction," Kai said, cupping his ear. "Over there." He pointed to our right.
Mingo struck his fist on the railing. "They're going to the settlement. They've found it."
"So I heard." Häberle's voice was thick with sleep as he came up behind us. He was dressed in long pants and a long sleeved, patched, blue shirt. "Then we go there, too," he said in a resigned voice. "We have no choice, my boy. We had better take medical supplies. They must mean to do harm, coming back a second time and going to the settlement. Well, friends, do you join us and give a hand? Señor Kai. Frau Schmidt? Do you think you have the stomach for it? I'm afraid you have another little war to contend with." He looked pointedly at Mingo. "Isn't that right, chico? Isn't that correct what I say?"
Mingo didn't answer him, but went over to where María was lifting the lids off the benches around the table.
"I'll go," Kai said in a low voice.
"I'll go too," I said.
Kai frowned.
"Kai, if you go, I'll go, and that's that."
Mingo scrutinized us through the open door. He seemed jittery, continually running his hands through his hair. They shook as he buttoned his shirt.
María pulled out day packs from the hollows of the benches. She unzipped one: it contained first aid kits, fire extinguishers, and ancient looking gas masks. Two larger bags were dragged out. Häberle hoisted one on his back. Kai said he was accustomed to carrying heavy packs. Without hesitation, Häberle helped him on with it. Mingo didn't put up an argument, but instead took one of the smaller carriers and with nervous jerky movements put it on and buckled it around his waist. Four of the Indian men from the day before appeared on the porch. Häberle quickly loaded them up, and María and I took what was left.
A few words were exchanged between the Roani and Häberle.
"What is it?" Mingo asked sharply. He was becoming more agitated.
"They say that Awae and the others have gone ahead. The women are remaining here. If there are any problems, the women know how to protect themselves." Häberle's eyes narrowed as he looked at Mingo and he shook his head, his lip curling in disgust, before he walked out to the porch. He seemed a very solitary man as he stood, his back to us, his arm around a supporting pole.
What had he meant, know how to protect themselves? Again I sensed a subterranean current that I couldn't read.
"Good," Mingo said, grimacing. "Vámonos. Let's go."
"And Max?" María went out to her husband.
He put his arm over her shoulder. "Don't worry, my love," I heard him say. "Max knows what to do in time of war."
The Indians led the way through the forest, sometimes wielding their machetes when we got close to the river and had to fight through the underbrush. Otherwise it was clear going. As we ran, the plane would periodically circle close to us and then move off. We proceeded, accompanied by its threat, for over an hour. Suddenly it became silent. I was stunned by the change. Where one minute there had been the roar of the plane fading into the distance followed by rising forest noises, now there were no screeching monkeys, no birds, nothing cracking and crackling around us. It was as though we were suspended, not breathing, not touching anything, listening only for the plane's motor. But now that was muted, barely more than an insect's buzz, almost as though it was hanging, waiting, leaving. Then came the whistling. The whining. The explosion.
"Aiiiee!" María called out in front of me as her hands shot skyward.
We stopped. Kai's arm went around my shoulder. Mingo stood to one side, his chest rising and falling. The Indians were like statues, poised, in the green ahead. Another explosion. Another. Another.
"Come," Häberle shouted angrily, beginning to move. "Mingo, chico. María. We cannot stand here like babies crying for our mothers. They need us."
We ran even faster, green flying by like water. Time collapsed. But the moment came when I knew we were almost there. I knew by the horrid lung blasting fumes.
Black smoke poured toward us, obliterating our view of trees, blocking out sunlight, burning our eyes, searing soft membranes. Screams consumed what air was left.
"The masks. Everyone get your masks." Häberle put his pack down, knelt, opened it and lifted out World War One gas masks. "Use them yourselves. There are five extra." He started to cough. "Use the extras only on those who are not too burned. Be merciless. Triage. Remember triage."
Then from the swells of smoke, a shrieking child emerged covered with flames. I gagged and choked from the smell of him as he passed. I started after him. Someone grabbed me back. It was María.
She lifted her mask. "Don't go, señora. Put your mask on. The child is going to die. Too much fire. His body is too small."
Gagging, I bent forward. Nothing came out, only dry heaves. This time Mingo and Kai came to me.
"Annie," Kai said. "Annie."
"Calm yourself, señora," Mingo ordered.
"Don't get sick, chica," María said in a harsh voice. "We have no time for your sickness. Your mask, chica. Your mask is what is needed."
I knelt down, opened my bag, and attached the mask over my face.
I looked up at Kai. His blue eyes stared at me in horror through the glass covered circles protecting them.
The entire settlement was only one hundred by one hundred meters, with some thirty people living there. Four extended families, Häberle told us. We couldn't enter the clearing because the smoke was too thick. It spilled out, black and toxic, pushing us back. We could only skirt the edges, hoping to find those who ran out, on fire and screaming. I got to a woman first. Her hair was one long flame, shooting up red and white into the air. The stench of burning flesh and hair penetrated my mask. I ran after her, spraying the dry substance from the extinguisher onto her hair, onto her back where the hair stuck and burned into her skin. Onto her legs where the hair fell burning. She threw herself to the ground and rolled in the soil. "Arrrh, arrrh," she screamed. I tried to tell her not to roll, that I would spray her, but I couldn't be heard through the mask. I was afraid to remove it. Häberle had said it was too dangerous. She finally stopped and just lay there. Her eyes were wide-open, staring. Her hair had been burned completely off, leaving black charred skin over her head. She was still breathing so I put an extra mask over her face. Her eyes stared at me as Kai's had. But hers were black and beyond fear.
Another woman ran toward us. She was moving around the outside of the fire zone. She ran holding her arm high like a torch. She screamed warning. She fell a few feet from me. I ripped off my mask. I yelled, "Don't put your arm in the soil. I'm coming." But I realized she had no idea what I was saying. I felt the fumes enter my mouth, my throat, my lungs. A tearing burning. I was going to die. I put the mask back on. It felt as though I were going to suffocate. Again I saw the woman with the burning arm. It was flaming. Even rubbing it in earth hadn't helped. She made a horrifying, hoarse, braying sound. I crawled over, aiming at her with the extinguisher. She moved her arm away. I climbed on top of her and pinned her to the ground. She bucked me. She was strong. I smelled her burning flesh. I grabbed her upper arm with one hand, trying to keep out of the way of the flailing, burning part. I aimed the extinguisher with one hand. I succeeded this time. I sprayed and sprayed as she tried to buck me off. She hit me in the breast. I sprayed until the fire went out.
The smoke was subsiding so I tried to enter the clearing, but it was covered with a slick coating of black oil. I slipped and fell, my hands catching me. My flesh burned where the oil touched me. I tried frantically to wipe the lethal slime off.
"Annie." It was Kai. "Come out. Don't stay in there."
"Help me." I cried. My voice emerged all muffled inside the mask. But he grabbed me, yanking me to my feet, half-carrying me out of the slime. I cried, feeling his body next to mine. I cried as he wiped at my hands with the tail of his shirt. I could hear him repeating, "I have to get this off. I have to get this off."
A huge explosion threw us apart and onto the ground. It was followed by the pounding of smaller detonations reverberating under the surface of the earth, and a roar of fire. Smoke rose again, this time with a yellowish tinge, and smelling of sulfur, reminding me of the acid yellow of Kai's nightmare skies. "Don't cry, sweetie," I crooned, scrambling over like a land crab to cradle him.
He lifted his mask. His face was a pink circle outlined with encrusted black soot. "I'm okay, Annie. Let's take care of your hands and then get back to the others."
I soon forgot the pain of my hands as we spent the next hour spraying our extinguishers on the shrieking people. The easiest ones to put out were those who were furthest gone. They didn't run. They just lay writhing on the ground, their skin peeling like cellophane off a pack of cigarettes. Like the bark of a birch tree in spring. Like dying leaves.
We fashioned stretchers out of chonta palm leaves and lianas and branches. We all worked: Häberle and María and Mingo and Kai and I and the four Indian men who'd come with us and three others including Awae and five other Indian adults from this settlement who hadn't been burned or were burned only slightly. I teamed up with an Indian man, and he and I twined the vines around the branches. He had the usual stocky body, short strong arms and legs, and thick black short hair. His penis hung long and thin between his legs. His face and arms were painted with dashes and darts. Communicating with our move-ments, we concentrated only on saving as many lives as we could.
When we had finished the stretchers, we lifted the wailing people onto them. We held them by parts of their bodies that were not charred or blistering. Their burned skin bled. What hair was left on their heads was in tiny islands. The smell of them was unbearable, foul, more as though they'd rotted than burned.
While we were putting out the burning flesh, others had been getting water from the river and extinguishing the brush fires. But the screams continued. The weeping and wailing. There was no extinguishing that. Mercifully, one of the communal houses had been saved. It was twenty feet long, with open sides and a thatched roof. It was the cooking house and worked well as the hospital. There was a fireplace in the center to boil water. There were hooks to hang the intravenous glucose bags that Häberle and Kai had carried in their large packs. As best we could, we transferred the people once again to gauze covered mats. Though when we picked them up off the stretchers, much of their skin remained stuck to the palm leaves.
Sometimes I worked beside Kai. I was impressed with how brave he was. He never faltered. He carried when he had to carry. He comforted when he could. I saw him, at one point, kiss a wailing man on the forehead. The man's piercing screams subsided for a moment, but then he began again.
There were ten people in the hospital, four children, four men and two women. Two of the children and one of the men were burned over eighty per cent of their bodies. That's what Häberle said. He said that there was nothing we could do for them. They would be dead soon. "No medicine can save these children. Not even a miracle."
A young woman was writhing on the stretcher to which she was bound with strips of bandages. She had a wet bandanna across her nose and mouth. She must have been seventeen, no more. Even in her agony she didn't look older. Another woman, who also wore a cloth mask, was sitting beside her applying mud packs to her arm. Steam rose from the pack each time it was applied. The mud went on wet and sloppy and in minutes it was dry and smoking.
Mingo saw me looking and came over. In a low voice, he said, "It's white phosphorus. When it explodes, the shrapnel goes deep inside the skin. It makes a flame that can't be put out. It burns and burns. That's why it dries the mud. I've seen it burn for days in a person's body." I stared at him in disbelief. He brushed his hand across my lips. "The woman wears a mask not to be poisoned by the fumes. Here are your killing fumes. It's better if you don't stand too near." He led me away.
The others had less serious burns, if you call an entire back not so serious. Or both legs. Or an arm. They looked as though they had been spattered with fire. Brown leathery spots and translucent areas of various sizes were beginning to form on their skin. "Napalm," Häberle said. "The gasoline jelly splatters when the bomb explodes and attaches to the flesh."
Once we got them inside under the roof, out of the sun, resting on sterilized gauze with liquids dripping into them, Häberle said there wasn't much more we could do. We couldn't pick the dirt out. We had very little antibiotic medicine. He had had a small supply of morphine in the packs, but he had used it up in one set of dosages. "The women are gathering pain-killing herbs, a forest remedy that works moderately well," he said.
We left Awae and the woman who applied the mud packs to watch over the patients. The rest of us walked a hundred feet back behind the longhouse to sit under living trees, waiting for the less injured Indians from the settlement to join us. A woman with both arms bandaged suckled a seven-year-old boy, a child who hadn't been breast-fed in years. A mother who presumably had no milk but could still give the comfort of her breast. She rocked back and forth, humming tunelessly. A white-haired woman cradled a young girl, who might have been ten, against her wizened, flat, hanging breasts, rocking and intoning as the other woman did. With her free hand, the old woman hit against the protruding bones of her chest. The children whimpered, and some babies, too, even with breasts in their mouths, sobbed and curled in closer, their fingers in tight little fists.

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An excerpt from Green Fires by Marnie Mueller

from Chapter Twenty-One