by Ronald Malfi
At night, they set camp.
“I was hoping you could help me, Lieutenant,” Bowerman said. He was spread out in the dark, his hands folded behind his head, his head down on his pack.
“I could shoot you.”
“Yeah, that would be it.”
“Shoot you in the ass, send you home.”
“That would certainly be it, boy.”
“We could do it. We could set the whole damn thing up.”
“Could you make me a hero?”
“I suppose I could make you anything you want.”
“Who would refute it? It’s almost a miracle I haven’t taken one in the ass yet.”
“They’d just patch you up and send you back out.”
“What about in the leg, then?” Bowerman said. “Anyway, the ass would be too embarrassing.”
“Prop you on the ground, angle your leg for the best shot. We could do it.”
“You can’t be a hero taking a hit in the ass like that, I wouldn’t think...”
“You want to take it in the upper thigh or down low on the shin?”
“I’m thinking…I’m thinking the thigh. Up high.”
“You’ll bleed a lot but you’ll walk again.”
“And it’s not as embarrassing as taking a slug in the cheek.”
“We might need a couple guys to hold you down, keep you steady.”
“Definitely upper thigh. Not too high, though.”
“Strong guys. You’d lose your nerve and we’d need strong guys to hold you down.”
“I wouldn’t lose my nerve,” Bowerman said.
“You think you’d want it to go all the way through or would you prefer to have it lodge in you?”
“Hmmm. That’s good. Good thinking, now. I don’t know.”
“Have it lodge in you,” Nick suggested. “Greater sympathy. Get the Medical Review Board to cough up some pity pay.”
“Fat chance.”
“Course,” he amended, “then you got some fresh-faced cherry digging into your leg with a piece of dull metal and some tweezers, hoping he doesn’t do more damage than the round in your leg’s already done. Hand vibrating like a goddamn seismograph needle, poor bastard sweating like a pregnant hostage...”
Bowerman snorted in agreement.
“Karuptka would do it,” Nick said casually.
“Shit,” said Bowerman. “Victor Karuptka would do it, all right.”
“Karuptka would love to do it.”
“Why? He got it in for me or something?”
“Christ, Bowser.”
“Yeah, I know. Forget it. Never mind.”
“Christ.”
“Anyway,” Bowerman said, “I don’t know if I could do it deliberately.”
“Take a shot in the leg?”
“I mean, I could deal with it if it, you know, if it happened. If it happened, you’d have no choice but to deal with it. But, I mean, I don’t think I could just, you know, just hunker down and take it. Knowing it’s coming, I mean. So, yeah—you’re probably right. I think I’d lose my nerve. Goddamn it.”
“Have you ever listened to yourself talk?”
“Why?”
“You’d shoot yourself for sure if you did.”
He heard Bowerman chuckle in the darkness.
“What is it?” he asked Bowerman. “What did you want to ask me?”
“I guess, well…I guess just your advice, Lieutenant.”
“I don’t know about that. I don’t think I’d be comfortable giving you advice, Bowser.”
“Why’s that?”
“Look at me, Bowerman. You see me lying out on the beach somewhere? You see beautiful women flocking around me? You see me getting up in the morning, dressing in a shirt and tie, kissing my wife goodbye and going off to the office? No. I’m here just like you. I’m here just like everyone else and just like you. What advice could I give?”
“You like it here?”
“What kind of stupid question is that?”
Bowerman was silent.
“Hell, Bowser, I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I was just thinking.”
“Go ahead. Ask me whatever you want.”
“It’s just…I mean, you have a girl back home, right?”
“I got someone.”
“Some of the other guys got a girl at home, too. Some guys, like Karuptka, they got a whole bunch of girls at home. Some got wives, even.”
“What is it, Bowerman? What do you need my advice about?”
“My girl, she’s pregnant. I just got a letter yesterday.”
“It happens.”
“Two months pregnant.”
“Oh.” Nick did not need to do the math in his head. “She wrote this to you in a letter?”
“My sister did. My sister wrote me. I hadn’t gotten a letter from Rebecca—that’s my girl’s name, Rebecca—I hadn’t gotten a letter from Rebecca in some time. I asked my sister about her, about why she stopped writing. She lives in our neighborhood so I figured my sister could, you know, could go and see her. I said I was worried because Rebecca had stopped writing. So my sister went to see her. But I guess maybe my sister didn’t want to tell me because I had to ask her in two separate letters before she finally answered me.”
Nick said nothing.
“I been doing some thinking, Lieutenant. I been doing some thinking, and I don’t think women are ever truly disgusted by anything,” Bowerman said. “We’re out here and we’re killing people. We don’t have the time to stop and think about all that right now, so we do it and it’s automatic. There’s no thinking about it right now, is what I mean. But I know me, Lieutenant, and I know I’ll think about some of the stuff I’ve done and some of the stuff I’ve seen here until the day I die. Once I get back, I mean. Once I get back and, you know, have the time to think about those things. I know that, Lieutenant. It’s automatic now and there’s no time for reflection. But it won’t always be that way. Women are different, though, I think. I mean, that’s what I been thinking since I got that letter. They should maybe be out here, not us. Women aren’t repulsed by anything. Repulsed—it’s a good word. They can do repulsive things and turn around and be perfectly happy and not ever for one second think about the horrible, repulsive things they done. They wipe it all clean and it’s that easy for them. Men can’t do that, though. I don’t think so, anyway. I’ve never met a man who could do that. Have you?”
“I think some men can do that,” Nick said.
“Yeah, well, maybe. But not most men. Not real men.”
“Maybe not real men,” Nick agreed.
“It ain’t their fault, though, and that’s the other thing I been thinking. I mean, I think women ultimately want to be content in their lives. I think they know this from the beginning and they know that sometimes they will have to do repulsive things to get to that contentment. They are okay with that. Men, though—we get caught up in the particulars. That’s why suicide is primarily a man’s sport. We never make it okay for ourselves.”
“Maybe women are just smarter that way. They get what they want and they have the ability to not reflect on their past.”
“Maybe,” said Bowerman. “She’s two months pregnant, Lieutenant.”
“That sometimes happens.”
“We were going to get married.”
“What was it you wanted to ask me?”
“Huh?”
“You said you wanted to ask me something, Bowerman. What was it you wanted to ask me?”
After a moment of silence, Joseph Bowerman said, “I guess nothing.” Another pause; more silence. “I guess I just wanted someone to listen.”
Nick closed his eyes, shutting out the stars.
“Repulsed,” Bowerman muttered beneath his breath. “That’s some good word, I’ll tell you what, boy.”
“Sure.”
“Hey,” Bowerman went on, “what do you think that woman said to Granger this morning? That Iraqi woman?”
“I don’t know.
”
“Seemed to shake him up, all right.”
“It did,” he agreed. In fact, now, he could easily summon the frightened and confused look on Myles Granger’s face as the woman grabbed him and cried something to him.
“I wonder what it was,” Bowerman continued, not letting it go. “Granger, he’s good with the language. I know he understood her. I asked him later what she’d said and he said he didn’t know, but I think that’s bunk. He’s a smart kid and knows the language well, and I know he was lying to me, saying he didn’t know.” Reflectively, he said, “I wonder what it was.”
“I don’t know,” Nick said.
“Lieutenant, you smell that?”
“It’s white phosphorous.”
“Stinks when it burns. I hate when it burns like that.”
“Close your eyes and get some sleep, Bowser.”
“My eyes have been closed the whole time, Lieutenant.”
“Then take advantage of it and go to sleep.”
“Goodnight, Lieutenant.”
He did not answer.
—Chapter XIV—
Fever-stricken, he spent the next two days in bed. After opening the patio doors and ordering him a light lunch for noon via room service, Emma would leave him alone for most of the day. When she returned close to dusk, her skin was slick and oiled and tan and she looked very young and healthy. The first night she stayed with him in the room. She ordered herbal teas, which she would set out for him on the nightstand in a cup and saucer. Though he never touched it, she would periodically check the tea’s temperature and, if she found it had chilled, would dump it into the bathroom sink and refill his cup. This occurred as ritual, and Nick could almost count down on the alarm clock to the next dump-and-refill session. For that first evening, she had taken up residence in one of the wing-backed chairs across the room, her feet tucked up under her bottom as a child would do while she read her poetry books to herself. At one point, she asked if he would like her to read aloud to him.
“No.”
“It isn’t trouble,” she said back. “You used to love me reading the poems to you.”
“Not now, please,” he said groggily.
When he felt sleep beginning to overtake him that first night, he prayed silently for a dreamless slumber. He knew he had been dreaming recently of Iraq, although he could not remember anything specific about these dreams. It was just the empty, wasted, disemboweled feeling such dreams left behind as their calling card that made him aware they had been capering around inside his head while he slept.
“You talk in your sleep,” Emma told him as she dressed that second morning.
“What did I say?”
“It was funny,” she said. “Maybe I didn’t hear you right.”
“What did I say?”
“Something about a baby,” she said. Standing before the curtained patio doors, she adjusted her blouse while looking at herself in the armoire mirror. “Something about a baby in someone’s belly.” When he did not answer, she said, “Are you still feeling bad?”
“A little.”
“Is there something I can get you?”
“Just open those doors a little more, get some of that air in.”
“It’s lovely out there today,” she said, widening the doors. “It’s too bad you’re sick.”
“I’ll be up soon enough.”
“Would you like me to stay and have lunch with you today?”
“No,” he said. “Go out, enjoy the beach. I’m not hungry, anyway.”
“I already ordered you lunch. You need to eat something, Nick. Don’t cancel the room service like you did yesterday. Promise me.”
He promised. She left.
Alone, he tried to watch television but could not get into it. He took a cigarette out on the patio. It was nice out. Down below, he watched the great white swans drift lazily across the surfaces of the three courtyard fountains. Further out, he could see the beach. There were many people on the sand, soaking up the good weather. His eyes fell on all of them, or so it felt that way to him. There were many. He wondered, as he went from person to person, if he would recognize Emma from such a distance. And if not, had he already spotted her and moved on?
When Emma returned around lunchtime, she found him still smoking on the patio. Coming in to change out of her bathing suit and into Capri pants and a fresh halter-top, she did not say anything to him. From the patio he just barely turned his head at the sounds of her dressing in the room. That exact moment happened to signify to the both of them that there was no longer any sickness here, and that there probably hadn’t been for some time now. Yet neither bothered to address it. They ignored it the way people will sometimes think it necessary to ignore a visibly ugly scar. Until she was getting ready to go out again—
“Don’t stay out there too long,” she said coldly. “Breeze might make you sick all over again.”
Fifteen minutes later, showered, groomed, refreshed, he rode the elevator down to the lobby and situated himself at the restaurant bar. Roger was there, quietly going through a checklist of inventory. It took some time before he finally came over.
“Lunch menu?”
“Just a coffee for now.”
“I’ll have to heat some up.”
“I’ll wait.”
Roger went back to his checklist. When Nick looked up again, the bartender had disappeared into the kitchen.
Isabella came through the restaurant wearing very little clothing. Her body was taut and brown. She had her hair pulled back, framing her face. All shoulder and upper chest, red-brown and sleek from the sun, a wraparound pair of red sunglasses covering her eyes, he could not tell if she saw him seated at the bar. Her legs seemed to slide from her abbreviated shorts as she walked and, when she paused in her stride to examine the framed menu on the wall of the bar, her thighs left just the slightest and most perfect wink of space between them.
“Isabella,” he called.
“My Nicholas,” she said, coming over. “You’ve been lost to me.”
“I’ve been sick.”
“Honeymoons will do that to a man.”
“Can I buy you a drink?”
“What are you having?”
“Coffee.”
“I will have the same as you.”
“It’s being brewed now.”
“I will wait with you.” Smiling, she allowed her eyes to drift about the room. “The wife is not here with you?”
“I’m alone.”
“Did she run off with a sailor? That sometimes happens.”
“Not to my knowledge. Anyway, I don’t think she’d tell me if she did.”
“It would be good for you, anyhow,” she said, her tone casual.
“Is that right?”
“Oh, yes.”
“How’s that?”
“Marriage is improbable.”
“Is that what you think?”
“It is what I know.”
“How do you know?”
Tapping a cigarette from a pack she had fished from her purse, not offering him one, she said, quite elementary, “I just know.”
“Have you ever been married?” he asked.
“No,” she said, “but almost.”
“What happened?”
“It was a few years ago, when I was still young and naïve. Now,” she added with a wry smile, “I am just young.”
“This was back in Spain?”
“Yes, in Madrid,” she said. “But he was an American boy, very light-skinned and handsome. I was enthralled and found him completely unique. Which was unique in itself because very rarely, even during my sadly misguided youth, did I find anything to be unique. People most particularly.”
“What was his name?”
“I won’t tell you his name. He was a writer back then and is, I suppose, somewhat of a writer now, too, although his ideals, unfortunately, have changed.” Lips tugging on her cigarette. “Either way, you would recognize the name, so I won’t tell it.”
“So what happened?” he asked, watching the reflection of his own lips move in the lenses of her dark sunglasses.
“Something was lost,” she said, simple enough. “Something in him, something in me. What usually happens?” She removed the cigarette from her mouth and pouted her lower lip, as if to acknowledge her own question with a deep sense of consideration and concern. There was lipstick on the filter. “Do you know what a civet is, Nicholas?”
“A—civet? No…”
“A civet,” Isabella explained, “is best described as a cat-like monkey or a monkey-like cat. In Indonesia, plantation owners feed coffee beans to civets and the civets ingest them, digest them, then—how do you say?—discard the remains in their waste.”
“They shit them out,” he said.
Isabella’s smile widened, showing many teeth. She slid her sunglasses a half-inch down the bridge of her nose. Fawn-colored, dark eyes settled on him, held him. “Yes,” she said, still holding the smile, “they shit them out. Mierda. Shit.”
“Mierda,” he repeated.
“Going through the digestive tract of the civet, the coffee beans are purged of their proteins. The Indonesians then package the beans and sell them for over a thousand dollars a pound.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Oh, yes. Jesus Christ, Nicholas. Over a thousand dollars a pound for mierda—for shit. That,” she went on without pause, “is what happened to my handsome fair-skinned American writer.”
“What?” he asked.
“That somewhere, somehow, in so many ways, the man lost himself. He started as a great and very proud writer. Reading his words, I found myself very proud of him, too, and I am not proud of much. Do you see? But unfortunately there is little money set aside for the great and the proud and the talented, only the commercially successful, and so my handsome fair-skinned American writer came to a crossroads.” She frowned and drew her long, raven eyebrows together. “Crossroads, yes? That is correct?”