He regretted now taking the medication this evening. He hadn’t, for days, because of this; since before they’d deployed to Guantanamo Bay. Since before they’d left the States. He’d thought he’d need emotion in Haiti. And he’d been proven right.
The Army’s reaction had rattled him. He’d pulled the med bottle from the bottom of his ruck on the chopper flight out of Pétionville tonight, dry swallowing a tablet.
He wanted to believe it was meant to be, some part of this meant something and was meant to be. He’d legitimately saved three lives today; you couldn’t sneeze at that. And now, to Jacmel. There was death and crisis in Jacmel, and he would lead the relief.
He thought about it, hand rubbing his smooth skull, eyes roaming blind the darkness of the hangar beyond his mosquito netting.
Voices, in the corner. A card table set up. Talking low, but funny how things bounced in this hangar. He thought of saying something, announcing his presence and intention of sleeping; but then why bother. Officers were no different than enlisted, no different than little kids. Everyone pumped to be here, for their own reasons. Everyone up and edgy and giddy like Christmas. Everyone talking it to death.
Marc Hall closed his eyes, trying to draw his breaths out, trying to find sleep. Or, at least, midline center.
—never seen nothing like it. The stink alone so bad I could barely stand at the gate.
Can’t escape it.
Look where they put us.
It’ll be better when we go out to the bush.
—ain’t getting to the bush, champ. We’ll sit here six months doing nothing but smelling the place, just so they can say we’re here.
Dunno, man. The snake eaters ain’t unpacking. They say they’re going to the bush…
I don’t see a green beret on your head, champ. Maybe they are, but I’m telling you, Division ain’t moving.
Fucked up day, anyway—
Who ever heard of the Army riding an aircraft carrier?
—micromanaging’s kicking my ass. I haven’t made a decision since I packed lunch for my boy a month ago.
You made any decisions today, champ?
No decisions.
I got a decision for you: top or bottom?
Blow me.
—the deal with that black guy, the one who took Harrison’s company in 2nd Battalion?
Harrison’s a broke dick—
—but what’s the deal with that black guy?
Hall.
—thought it was Call.
No, man, Hall.
That was a balls up, champ.
—had a fucking pistol to this Haitian officer’s head, I heard. Right on his temple and squeezing the trigger. His sergeant had to pull him off the guy.
Hey, one less—
Watch it, champ.
Yeah.
Who gets a convoy lost, anyway? How the fuck do you get lost?
—dunno, but I’ll give him that. You guys ain’t been out there yet. Once you hit the city it don’t make no sense. We got all turned around—
Still—
—the guy’s loose, I think. That’s all I know. Baric told me, the guy’s loose.
Baric?
—that old bitch fullbird gives me the fucking creeps.
Yeah but if he says you’re loose, then presto motherfucker you’re officially loose.
Why they’d even bring Hall down?
He’s fucking Haitian, champ. They need him cause he speaks boukie.
—great, I’ll rub mud all over my face and start speaking some fucking voodoo chant and maybe I’ll be important, too—
You gotta watch that man—
—keep it down, champ, keep it down.
Yeah.
I gotta get some sleep, gents.
Yeah.
Without opening his eyes, Marc Hall reached his arm below the cot, pushing his hand into an outside pocket of his rucksack. He found what he needed at the bottom, a prescription pill bottle. Eyes still closed, he opened it, fingering a pill. He was breathing hard, and tried to get himself under control. Finally, without opening his eyes, he popped the pill and dry swallowed. Maybe he’d get some sleep.
Chapter
12
The passage at the bottom of the stairs was filled with female soldiers, the ones Tory had seen from the bridge wing, coming through the pilot door. They were here for the shower. Helmets and rucks and rifles at their feet, lined up outside the latrine door, all of them from Harbormaster’s office and Group headquarters.
“Hey there, Harris,” one of them said, a sergeant.
It took Tory a second to place her, then she said, “What’s up, Liz.” The sergeant’s name was Ross. They knew each other a little, through Junior Davis mostly. Liz had dated one of the Mike Boat guys from the 1098th, a PFC snipe who was wounded in Somalia and got out right after. Junior Davis had claimed not to like either of them—Liz Ross or her boyfriend. But Junior Davis didn’t like anyone, and Tory had always thought Liz was all right. She had the distinction of being one of only two women in 7th Group who’d earned a Purple Heart in Mogadishu, the result of shrapnel from a midnight pipe bomb thrown over the wall from the city. “You kids been here long?” Tory said to her now.
“Flew in this afternoon—yesterday afternoon, I guess. Got to port around five or six. We’ve been setting up headquarters all night.”
She yawned—loud. As she talked Liz was taking her hair out of the neat bun she’d had it in, shaking it out, getting ready for her shower. All the women here—and most of the female soldiers Tory knew—kept their hair like this. Women were allowed to have long hair, they just had to keep it pinned up to neck level. Tory couldn’t be bothered. She’d had her hair—almost but not quite blond—cut off right before she joined the Army, and it stayed that way. Close to a guy’s high-and-tight; never more than an inch on top, and shaved up the back of her neck. Junior Davis had claimed not to like it, but she didn’t really believe him. “Feels like I’m sleeping with a boy,” he’d say. Tory always remained silent to that.
“You guys are lifesavers,” Liz said now, hooking her thumb to the latrine door. She had a handful of hair clips, and shoved them in her front pocket. “It was weeks before I had my first hot shower in Mogadishu.”
Tory smiled. “Take all you want,” she said. “We’ll make more.” Which was true.
She two-finger saluted and excused herself through the group of women. Her cabin was next to the latrine. She opened the door to the black room, closed it behind her, flicking the light switch on.
“Hey!”
“What?” She turned, not having expected Dick Wags to be in here and sleeping, ready to apologize—but it wasn’t Dick Wags. Snaggletooth and Shrug were up on Dick Wags’s bunk, Shrug with his face pressed to the bulkhead, Snaggletooth right behind him.
“Get the fuck out of here,” she hissed.
“C’mon, Tory, we was just—”
“That’s Sergeant Harris,” she hissed, as loud as she could whisper. “And get out.”
Shrug took a last look and jumped down, a noticeable bulge at the front of his BDU pants. Snaggletooth was red and laughing and he slid off the bunk, too, both of them slipping out the door. Tory turned off the light and climbed up onto Dick Wags’s rack. A few months ago he’d tried to put in a shelf over his bunk, but misjudged where the thin part of the bulkhead was. The drill had gone right through to the shower stall, leaving a quarter-inch hole that was almost impossible to see from inside the shower. Word spread, as word does. Tory herself just never used that stall anymore, sticking to the second one in the latrine. She was the only female on the crew; it hardly mattered to her. She put her eye to the hole now, looking in at a female PFC she recognized by face but didn’t know. The water was off, and the girl was drying herself with a brown Army towel in the curtained stall. Tory had never appreciated before just how completely you could see someone through the hole.I should charge admission, she thought. She watched for a minute as the girl toweled off, then pushed h
erself off the top bunk and dropped to the deck.
Lights back on, she clicked the lock on the door and began unbuttoning her uniform. It was 0500; she had four hours to get something to eat and take another nap, a longer one this time if she got to it quickly. Boots and pants still on, she pulled her brown T-shirt up and over her head, leaving just a black sports bra. She’d discovered these a year or so before, and wore nothing else now in uniform. They kept things nice and compact—no movement to slow her down or draw attention.
She looked at herself a second in the small mirror mounted on the bulkhead, turned away, then turned back, remembering how she’d scared herself in the mirror at the airport yesterday. It felt a century ago, wandering the tarmac and hangars half the day. She still wasn’t completely sure why she’d done it. Not to see Marc Hall; that was a powerful impulse, but it hadn’t occurred to her until later in the day. The impulse keeping her at the airport in the first place, walking and watching, had been even stronger, even more difficult to explain. She just wanted tosee.
This is what they all wanted, most of them, whether cocky or scared or some combination—they all wanted to be here. Partly just to say they’d been here. They wanted the difference that set you apart from other soldiers—the patch on the right shoulder, to have gone for real. To be in its face. That’s what she’d wanted yesterday—to be in its face. To see the machine up close. And she knew her time was limited, her time in Haiti. All their time was limited, but hers was truly limited. How tight she didn’t know; a few weeks maybe. Certainly it wouldn’t take more than that for it all to catch up with itself, for all the pieces to come together. She didn’t know how it would come out, and she no longer really cared; but it was inevitable, she knew it.
Tory sat down in the desk chair, leaning over to untie her bootlaces. She glanced up as she did, at the peephole over Dick Wags’s bunk, the portal to the naked and clueless showering next door.
I really should charge admission,she thought. Her hated cadences kicked in, from the depths of her sleep-deprived brain:If we’re all naked by morning sun / then we know the war was won.
A fist pounded the door. “Roomdog!” It was Dick Wags. “You dressed?”
If we’re all naked by morning sun…
“No.”
“Grill’s open. Breakfast. Let’s go fuck up a plate of hot chow.”
…then we know the war was won.
“Two and two, baby,” she said.
Didn’t we already eat breakfast?she thought. They had. At midnight. It didn’t matter. It was 0500 now. Time for breakfast.
Is it war or is it not?
Almost the whole crew was up for chow; those coming on duty in BDUs, those headed for sleep—like Tory—in PT clothes: gray Army shorts and T-shirt with what they called shower shoes on their feet—plastic flip-flops. The mess window was wet with air-conditioner condensation, and through it the sky was streaked and fully light now. When T.K. opened the hatch to the deck the smell of morning poured in, warm and Haitian.
T.K. stood in the open hatchway, and Tory—handing her dirty dishes to Cain—had to will herself not to step on deck. If she stepped into the morning, she thought, she’d want to be in it and there’d be no sleep. She needed sleep. Tory made for down below, padding down the stairs, flip-flops flopping soft on her soles.
The females were gone now, showered and back to their cots in the warehouse. Liz Ross had been to Mogadishu, but Tory thought most of the privates and specialists who’d been with her had a rude awakening round the bend: There wouldn’t always be a 7th Group boat in port, or a skipper willing to give away his precious ROPU water to a bunch of land troops. They were a little bit special, some of those headquarters chicks, and there was not much special about living in a warehouse for a year.
At the end of the passage, near the hatch where they’d waited for battlestations twenty-six hours before, Riddle stepped out of the cabin he shared with Pelton. He waved her over.
“Haircuts, Ms. Harris,” he barked.
She put her hand to the back of her neck and rubbed. In the tiny cabin, Pelton stood like a crazed artist, bare-chested with towel round his waist, electric clippers raised high in right hand, old mustached Bear in the chair under him with head bent down.
“How’s it going, P?” Tory said.
“Life is good, Sergeant,” Pelton said, grasping the top of Bear’s skull and putting the little clippers to the back of the thick neck. “It’s a great Army day.”
She thought of Pelton in the passage yesterday before battlestations, slowly losing it with face pressed to bulkhead. And then in the park, hours later—this Waterborne troop with but the barest of combat training—standing down the FADH, then wanting to lower the dead Haitian from the tree.We’ve all come a long way, she thought.Pretty quick. Always suspicious of time acting differently in the Army, she thought now time had ceased to exist altogether for them.Twenty-four hours.
Xerox and Shrug were up on the top rack, Pelton’s bunk, the two of them slowly turning through the pages ofHustler. Temple was stretched out on Riddle’s bunk, the bottom rack. Riddle, in the passage, had dropped and started a series of push-ups.
“Hey P, you crap your pants in the city yesterday?” Temple asked, in his slow Temple way.
“Yeah he did,” Riddle yelled from the passage, not breaking stride with the push-ups. “Can’t you smell it?”
“Bite me,” Pelton said, running the clippers up the back of Bear’s neck. “I did check my drawers pretty close when we got back to the boat, though.”
“I couldn’t take it if I crapped my pants,” Temple said. “I think I’d rather they just killed me.”
“You crap your pants automatically if you get shot,” Xerox said, without looking up from his magazine.
“Nah, that’s bullshit,” Pelton said.
“That’s what all the Nam books say. You lose muscle control and crap yourself.”
“It’s bullshit,” said Temple. “What do you think, Bear?”
Bear was ancient, older than dirt—as old as Top and the Skipper—and so the final arbiter of all important questions. But Bear didn’t answer. He’d fallen asleep getting his haircut.
“Hey, Bear!” Pelton reached around with his left hand and smacked him light on the cheek.
“What?”
“You’re sleeping.”
“Damn, Bear,” Tory said. Bear was a sergeant first class, the ship’s bull oiler, second only to Top on the enlisted side of life. He was Dick Wags’s boss, in theory; but Dick Wags ran the show. Bear spent most of his time sleeping. He said he had Lyme disease.
“Lordy lord,” Riddle said. He was still pumping out push-ups.
“You’re done anyway, Bear,” Pelton said, the old sergeant rising to his feet, wiping hair snippets from his shoulders.
“Did I miss anything good?” he said.
“Your life, passing you by,” Riddle said, panting. He’d been doing sets of push-ups for the better part of half an hour, his arms tight and bulging.
Bear grunted, squeezing Tory’s shoulder as he stepped from the room, grinning then kicking one of Riddle’s hands out from under him. “Have Specialist Riddle bathed and brought to my tent,” he said.
Shrug laughed out loud. “That’s as wrong as two boys fucking.”
Xerox, shaking his head, said, “Thatis two boys fucking, Shrugster.”
Riddle rolled onto his back, lying in the middle of the passage, too winded to hand Bear a proper comeback. Bear was gone anyway, back to this own cabin, his dark den. To get some sleep.
Tory sat in the chair, hanging a towel around her shoulders. “Okay,” she said, “just a—” then felt something sharp, like a pin in her neck. Pelton, barefoot, had slipped as he was laying the clippers to her neck, the sharp edge of the metal slicing her skin half an inch.
“Hey!” she said, slapping her palm to the back of her neck, half standing.
“Christ I’m sorry, Jersey. Let me see.”
Tory lifted her pal
m, Pelton’s fingers moving to her neck. “It’s just a little bit—” he started to say, but she cut him off as she saw blood in her palm.
“Give me your hand,” she snapped, spinning around.
“What?”
“Give me your hand.” She clamped on the wrist of his free hand, the one he’d touched her neck with. It was clean; he’d touched just to the side of the small wound. Face to face with Pelton, her back was to the passage. Sitting upright now on the deck, Riddle could see a thin line of blood flowing free down her neck, under her shirt. “Talk about friendly fire,” he said, but no one heard him. On the bunks, Temple, Xerox, and Shrug were all watching this, not sure what they were seeing.
“Hey, Jersey,” Pelton said, but she cut him off again.
“Give me the clippers.”
“Hey, let’s settle down,” he said. She was almost hyperventilating.
But Tory pulled the clippers from his hand, finding wet blood on the gleaming sharp edge of the metal. She wiped it quick across the front of her T-shirt, leaving a streak on the brown cotton fabric over her belly. She eyed the clippers, saw more blood, and wiped it again. She looked up at Pelton, staring him in the eye. He waited for her to say something, but she wasn’t really seeing him. Finally he opened his mouth but she immediately cut him off.
“It’s clean,” she said.
“Yeah,” Pelton answered. “Of course it is. Not a big deal, Tory.”
She nodded, and dropped her eyes.
“How’s this?” Pelton said, trying to reach to the back of her neck. She swatted his hand down, then grabbed her towel and clamped it against her skin back there, holding hard. She was aware suddenly of all of them, all five of them, silent and watching her.
“Sorry,” she said. “I—” But she couldn’t finish, and holding the towel in place ducked out of the cabin, moving quick down the passageway. Closing her own door behind her, she stood stock still, not turning on the light, but locking the door. She didn’t move, her head throbbing so hard she couldn’t think at all. She stood there, didn’t know how long, then reached over and flicked the light switch. She pulled the towel from her neck, looking at the black stain on it. With one quick motion she rolled the ball tight and threw it, hard, against the bulkhead, picked it up and threw it again, then jammed it down to the bottom of her laundry bag. When she finally sat down she put her hands to her eyes, pressing hard. She sat like that five minutes, not moving, then killed the lights and crawled into her bunk, and—exhausted, lungs hurting, eyes unfocused—set the alarm, staring wide-awake.
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