by Laila Lalami
“In a minute,” I said, avoiding her eyes.
After she stepped out of the bathroom, I stayed in the tub. Maybe I should stop thinking of my time in the war as a story and tell it to her the way I remembered it late at night when I couldn’t sleep, in fragments, sometimes in order and sometimes out of order, stopping in places where the remembering got too close to the reliving. By now the bathwater had grown uncomfortably cold and I shivered as I dried myself. In the dark of the bedroom, I found her sitting on the bed, already dressed in the blue shirt and linen skirt she’d worn for dinner at the Italian restaurant we went to in Palm Springs. “You’re leaving?” I asked.
“I figured you wanted to be alone,” she said, slipping her feet into her shoes. She reached for her watch on the bedside table and stood up. The clasp clicked in the silence. “It’s getting late, anyway.”
“Don’t go,” I said, crossing the room toward her in the sliver of light. “Please. Stay.”
I was naked and cold, and she looked at me for a moment before taking her shoes off and lying back on the bed. I nestled against her, draping my arm across her hip and tucking my knees against hers, soaking up the warmth of her. When I spoke, my voice was barely above a whisper. A month into our second tour, Sergeant Fletcher received some information about the whereabouts of a sniper who’d killed one of our guys and wounded four, a shooter so skilled that we were all speculating he must have been trained in the Iraqi military. The target was supposed to be hiding in an apartment building on the eastern side of Ramadi, and we rolled out at zero four hundred, when the neighborhood was shrouded in darkness and the air still cool. The first to dismount was Perez, whom we nicknamed Chewie because of his red hair and mustache, then the rest of us followed. We’d gone maybe nine or ten yards when Perez got blown up. All we could find of him later was a leg that landed on the hood of our Humvee, and his intestines hanging from a tree. The sergeant had us collect what we could into a bag, which would be shipped to Perez’s family in Texas for the funeral.
A couple of days later, Sergeant Fletcher took us to see the informant who’d told him about the sniper’s hiding place. His name was Badawi, a former clerk at the Ministry of Interior. He had a nice house, with blue trim on the windows and an addition above the kitchen that he was still building. There was a whiff of burned bread in the hallway—that was the smell I could still smell in my dreams—and the only people inside were Badawi’s wife and children. Aside from making tea when we came to visit, the wife had never spoken to any of us. When Fletcher asked where her husband was, she said she didn’t know, that he hadn’t come home the night before. She was in a green housedress with a geometric pattern, and her hair was in a kerchief tied at the nape of her neck. Her kids sat on the floor, playing cards, the presence of Marines no longer a novelty to them, yet she could barely disguise her contempt for us. Her eyes were full of blame. Each question Fletcher asked, she answered with a clipped yes or no.
“Maybe she can’t say anything in front of the kids,” Fletcher said. He took her into the back room, and Fierro and I stayed behind, keeping an eye on the children. The game they played was unfamiliar to me, and I tried to figure out the rules by watching them. Not ten minutes later, the terp came out, walking past us to the front door.
“We done here?” Fierro asked.
“No, but the sergeant doesn’t need me. That woman speaks English.”
Fierro and I looked at each other, stunned. In the six months we’d been coming to this house to visit the informant, his wife had never given any indication that she understood us. Now I wondered what we might have said in her presence, whether it had any intelligence value, whether it might have been used against us. And there were other comments, too, comments about her, obscene things we were confident our English concealed. From the back room came the sound of a chair being dragged against the floor. “Sergeant?” I asked. But there was no answer: Fletcher had turned off his headset.
I went down the hallway, keeping the kids in my line of vision. Even with the sound of the nature documentary that was showing on television, I heard the pop clearly. I reached for the door, but it flew open and Fletcher came out, his body filling the frame. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“She tried to reach for my sidearm.”
Behind him, the woman lay on the floor, a bullet hole through her cheek, choking on her own blood. I walked into the room, yet her eyes didn’t track me, they were fixed on a spot in the ceiling. A minute later, she stopped moving. We mounted up and left, but all the way back to camp I ran through the sequence of events that had started with the killing of Perez and ended with the killing of Badawi’s wife. The story, or what I could make of it, had an arc that my instinct told me was wrong and, once we were alone in the barracks, I tried to ask Fierro about it.
“What the fuck does it matter?” he said.
“It doesn’t bother you that she didn’t have anything to do with this?”
“You don’t know that.”
“You don’t know that she did, either.”
“One of our guys is dead and you want me to worry about her? Go the fuck to sleep.”
At chow the next morning I sat next to Fletcher, found a way to bring the conversation back to the night before, but he only shrugged and said the wife had gone crazy when he’d told her he’d find Badawi no matter how long it took, and that’s when she’d reached for his weapon. “And you couldn’t stop her?” I asked. “A tiny woman like her?”
“I did stop her,” he said with a frown. “What’s the matter with you, Gorecki? Take some time to think through what you just implied here. Think it through carefully; you might have a different perspective.”
My perspective wouldn’t have changed if I’d stayed where I’d been ordered to, in the living room with Fierro. I wouldn’t have seen or heard anything. But I’d taken four inquisitive steps down the hallway, and those four steps made me doubt everything. Fletcher wasn’t trying to win the war—that was something for the higher-ups to worry about. He cared only about protecting his men. And he wanted to avenge them, too. But my questions had clearly irritated him and I found out just how much when he posted me on shitter cleanup duty for three days. Three whole days. I remember pulling out the first tub, pouring fuel over it, and before striking the match to light it up, doubling over to puke.
“What was her name?” Nora asked. “The woman Fletcher killed.”
“I don’t know. He filed a report, but I never got to see it.”
At some point while I was telling her the story, she’d turned around to face me. Somehow, she had removed all my pretenses. It was as if she had found the right key to unlock a rusty old safe, and the contents spilled out. But I couldn’t tell if I had gone too far, told too much. We were quiet for a while. Eventually, she closed her eyes, and I held her until the morning, when she got up to go to work.
Nora
I was wrestling with the lock on the medicine cabinet in the storage room when Veronica walked in with a half-empty bag of Dixie cups. She tied it in a knot and hoisted it easily onto the top shelf, where it landed with a loud, crinkly sound that set my teeth on edge. My head was throbbing, and the lock wasn’t cooperating. Veronica watched me for a minute and then, in a practiced gesture, readjusted the key and opened the medicine cabinet for me. “There,” she said. “It gets stuck sometimes.”
“Thanks,” I said. Inside the cabinet were bottles of antiseptic, antibiotic ointment, and bandages of all sizes, but no painkillers. “We don’t have any Ibuprofen?”
“We must’ve run out.”
On the wall next to the cabinet was a framed picture of the Pantry staff, taken the day my father had opened for business, twelve years earlier. Marty, still with a full head of hair, held a menu, and a younger Veronica, looking prim in her new uniform, smiled shyly at the camera. From the kitchen came the clatter of glasses being loaded into the rack.
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br /> “Ask Rafi,” Veronica said. Her tone suddenly turned vicious. “He’s always helping himself to stuff around here. Maybe he took it.” Then she pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from her apron pocket and stepped out.
I slammed the medicine cabinet shut. Managing the restaurant these last few weeks had opened my eyes to all the petty grievances the workers nursed toward one another: Veronica didn’t like Rafi, who had a crush on Renata, who was sleeping with José, who thought Marty was out to get him. I couldn’t keep up. I walked back to the dining room, where a couple with three young children was being seated, the toddler screaming, refusing to sit in the high chair. My head throbbed.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the counter to drink it. The night before, Jeremy and I had stayed up late talking, and I had gotten little sleep. I didn’t know why I was spending so much time with him. He wasn’t the sweet kid I knew in high school; he had fought in a brutal war, a war I hated. Hearing about the terrible things he had seen or done in Iraq made me feel implicated, something I hadn’t grasped until it was too late. I didn’t know how to navigate back to my state of ignorance. There was no map I could follow.
I was taking the trash out to the dumpster later that morning when I saw a blue station wagon pull up in front of Desert Arcade. The car had a broken taillight, a yellow ribbon decal on the back window, and a bumper sticker that said PROUD PARENT OF AN HONOR ROLL STUDENT. A family of four got out. Father, mother, two girls. “Mommy, can I get a Skittles from the machine?” the older girl asked. Her hair was plaited and pinned on top of her head, in a style that made her look like a milkmaid. The younger girl had dark hair and walked blindly behind, her eyes never leaving the comic book she was reading.
A happy family.
I was so drawn to them that when they went into the bowling alley, I followed. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to Desert Arcade’s dimly lit lobby. A floor-to-ceiling advertisement for Budweiser Beer was pasted on the far wall, though its colors had dulled with age and one of its corners was peeling. On the stereo, the chorus of a pop ballad I didn’t recognize was playing at top volume. A huge flag hung over the front counter, where the family stood, waiting for bowling shoes. When they ambled away to their lane, the clerk turned to me. “Can I help you?”
The sound of a pin strike drew my gaze to the bowling area. In one of the farther lanes, two older men, their sunglasses resting on the visors of their baseball caps, were looking up at the screen for their scores. The family of four had just sat down in lane 5, and the father was entering names in the machine, while the mother helped the girls choose bowling balls.
“Can I help you?” the clerk said again.
I turned back to say no, that I was about to leave, but then I saw A.J. standing next to the concession stand at one end of the concourse. He was speaking on his cell phone, but his eyes were fixed on me. Did he work at the bowling alley now? He certainly looked it, in his black polo shirt and name tag. Perhaps he was taking over the business from his father, just as I was taking over the restaurant from my dad. My skin broke into goose bumps. It’s just the air conditioning, I told myself, that’s all it is. I wasn’t sixteen anymore, A.J. didn’t scare me.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Can I buy a game, please?”
“What size shoe?”
“Seven.”
“Here you go. Lane 3.”
I paid and took the red-and-blue bowling shoes to my lane. I didn’t have socks, and the insoles of the shoes felt rough and scratchy. No matter. I tied the shoelaces and stood up. Nearly all the bowling balls on the rack were too heavy for me, but I chose one anyway, for its color, a deep red. Walking to the foul line, I threw the ball down the lane. It fell with a loud thud and ended up in the gutter. The next ball missed, too, and the one after that, but I persisted, and eventually I hit one pin.
“Nora.”
I turned around to find A.J. standing not five feet from me. He fixed me with a stare that pinned me to the spot. Time stopped. It seemed to me as if we were in that school hallway again, me standing at my locker, the slur scribbled in blue, and him with his arm around Stacey Briggs. The other students walked hurriedly past on their way to class. No one came to my side, no word was spoken in my defense.
“You’re doing it all wrong,” A.J. said in a measured voice. “You need to straighten your wrist. Let me show you.”
He picked up a bowling ball and placed it in my hands, maneuvering my fingertips into the holes, first my thumb, and then my ring and middle fingers. The resin was dry and as he pushed my fingers into the ball, it scraped my skin painfully. Fear and revulsion raced inside me. “The trick,” he was saying as he gripped my hand and mimed swinging the ball, “is to keep your hand straight, otherwise when you pitch the ball, the arc is off.” He was so close I could feel his hot breath against my neck. My pulse quickened. I managed to free myself from his grip and, with all the power I could muster, pitched the ball down the lane. It hit four pins.
“See? That’s much better already,” he said.
The sweeping bar cleared the fallen pins and reset those that remained. A.J. walked up to the foul line with a new ball, a blue fifteen-pounder. He raised it to his chest for a moment and then, with a fluid but powerful movement of the wrist, released it down the lane. The remaining pins fell in a clatter. He turned to me. “Like that.” Then he smiled. “Enjoy the rest of your game.”
I waited until he’d walked away, then went to the counter, turned in my shoes, and rushed back to the safety of the Pantry. My heart was beating so fast I had to sit on the wooden bench at the entrance. That was where Veronica found me a moment later. “I have something for you,” she said, brandishing a bottle of Ibuprofen.
“You’re a lifesaver,” I said, taking it from her and walking to the counter for a tall glass of water.
“Rafi had it stashed in his cupboard.”
“I’m sure he just forgot to put it back.”
She gave me a look that said I was naïve, but maybe someday I’d come around.
A.J.
I couldn’t wrestle in this town, not seriously anyway, so I ended up spending all my free time with my collies, Gordon and Annie. I walked them, played with them, taught them how to steer clear of rattlesnakes and scorpions, and sometimes after I got home from work, I took them out to my parents’ backyard and trained them to gait properly. I was seriously considering showing them, the way my mom and I did when I was a kid. I’d loved traveling to different parts of California with her, taking care of the dogs, watching them compete. We made the perfect team: my mom would fill out the paperwork and talk to the handlers and breeders and judges, and I would groom the collies and keep them company until the show.
One time, we traveled all the way up to Fresno for an AKC competition. It was the farthest we’d gone from home, but we thought it was worth it because our dog Royal was doing so well that year that he had a good chance at winning first prize. A lot of people watch conformation shows on television and think that winning is about appearance, but the truth is that it’s about much more than that. A dog can look great and never win, because aside from appearance and behavior, what the judges are really looking for is purity, the kind of traits that will be passed down the line to the offspring. Not that appearance doesn’t matter. Of course it does. It was my job to make sure Royal looked perfect, that his fur was smooth and shiny, his ears clean, his teeth bright, all of that. When he won Best of Breed at the Fresno show, I felt as if I had won something myself, that’s how much work I put into it.
But late that Sunday night, when we came back home, my dad was waiting up for us. I remember that David Letterman was on TV, and that the volume was cranked all the way up, because my dad was starting to lose some of his hearing.
“We won,” I hollered, just so he could hear me over the sound of the Top 10 List, and held up
Royal’s first-place ribbon as if for proof.
My dad turned off the TV and struggled out of the armchair. He was a big guy, and he had to look down to meet my mom’s eyes. “Do you know what time it is?” he asked her.
“We didn’t leave Fresno until late,” she said. She put down her purse on the coffee table and unzipped her fleece jacket, but didn’t take it off. It was a cold night in February, and my dad hadn’t turned on the heater. He was cheap like that.
“You told me you’d leave by four at the latest.”
“Oh, I know. But there were so many people to meet after the show. One of the judges is from Ashland, and she said we should enter Royal in a show up there.”
“Ashland. All the way in Oregon?”
“Yeah.”
I came closer so I could show him the ribbon. It was blue and yellow and had the AKC logo on it. “We won first prize,” I said.
Who knows what set him off? Maybe it was the sound of my voice, or the fact that Royal was jostling him, trying to take his seat on the armchair. “First prize, huh?” he said. “And how much did this cost?”
I had no idea. I glanced at my mom for help, but he put his heavy arm on my shoulder and, pushing Royal aside roughly, made me sit down in his armchair. On the coffee table was a yellow notepad filled with his scribblings, and he tore out a page from it and told me to write down the cost of everything we had spent that weekend: gas for the van, lodging at the dog hotel, our meals, the show fee, everything.