God Lives in St. Petersburg by Tom Bissell Page B

vehicle. Its tires had melted and its doors were gone. The empty cab and bed were both largely intact, though they had been parted from each other after sustaining what looked like a direct hit. There were no craters, Donk knew, because this campaign’s bombs were designed to explode a few feet above their targets. Donk walked farther down the blasted line. He did not see any bodies at all until the penultimate vehicle, a nearly vaporized Datsun pickup so skeletal it looked like a blackened blueprint of a Datsun pickup. The charred driver was barely distinguishable from the wreckage around him. He was just a crispy torso of shrunken unrealness. His face and hair had been burned off, his head a featureless black oval. Donk reached for the camera he did not have and stepped closer, discovering that the reason no one had moved his body was because it was melted to its seat. His stomach gurgled and turned. Something in him clenched. He did not have his camera. The image would never swim up at him from the bottom of a plastic platter filled with developing fluid. It would stay exactly this way. . . . Donk forced the thought away.
    “Mister Donk!” Hassan called.
    He turned, rubbing his beating heart through his chest. “Yes, Hassan. What is it?”
    He pointed at the Beards. “They say the grass is nearby.”
    Donk took in this information. He felt the same mild surprise he remembered experiencing when he had learned, thanks to a concert Tina had taken him to, that people were still writing symphonic music. Surprise that he would be so surprised. The grass actually existed. How unaccountable. “Where?”
    Hassan pointed across the valley. “They say over there.”
    Donk looked. At the far side of the valley stood a sparse stand of trees, the first trees he had seen all day. They made him feel better, somehow. Around the trees was a long squarish field of desiccated grass the color of wheat. The road this annihilated convoy had been traveling along would have taken them right past that field. They walked, Black Beard and Red Beard having now unshouldered their weapons. Walking across this valley felt to Donk like standing in the middle of an abandoned coliseum. Above, the sky was getting darker. The day was silent. Donk noticed, as they grew closer to the trees, that they had not yet completely shed their leaves, little pom-poms of bright orange and yellow still tipping their branches. The setting sun was pulling a long curtained shadow across this valley. He realized, then, that even if they pushed themselves they were not going to make it back to the village before nightfall. He hurried himself ahead, and Hassan and the Beards jogged to keep pace with him. He did not care to learn who or what ruled these hills at night.
    “Mister Donk,” Hassan said, “please slow!”
    “Fuck off,” he called back. Donk’s thoughts suddenly felt to him alien and disfigured, exalted by fear, disconnected from the internal key that transformed them into language. He veered off the road and sprinted toward the trees through grass abruptly growing all around him. His boots were scything up great cheerful swaths of the stuff. He did not know why he was not gathering up any of it. He was not certain what might make one kind of grass more restorative than another. He had a quiet, appalled thought at all the things he did not know. He then remembered to believe that the grass was not going to help Graves. Not at all.
    “Mister Donk!” Hassan called again. Donk turned to see Hassan following him across the field of grass in an unsteady, not-quite-running way. “They say we must be careful here! Mister
Donk
!” Black Beard, now shouting something himself, endured a moment of visible decision making, then left the road and followed after Hassan.
    Donk’s head swiveled forward. He was almost to the trees. The grass just under the trees looked especially boilable, thick and tussocky. Then, oddly, Donk seemed to be looking at the trees and the