All the moppets; eager soubrettes giggling at every turn; blondes, brunettes, redheads; flighty little things that demanded a scene, a close-up, a slow dissolve…
He shook his oversized head. Here to shop for pants not a new ingénue. But that one there reminded him of little Lucy, four, up near Crescent City. And over there, blonde pigtails and pink jumper, she more than resembled Alyssa from Salinas, age seven. Sweet Alyssa who would always be seven.
Replays bobbed up and down in the mausoleum of his mind.
With a snort he scratched at his bushy beard, regained his purpose and perused the rack of Oshkosh jeans. He was a big man, forty-eight waist, inseam a good forty. The sign read that XXX-Large cost two bucks more and that seemed prejudicial. He snatched two pair off the rack, the injustice bearable, if only barely.
As he headed for the checkout fate took him by the hand.
Black hair in blue ribbons, her little pink tracksuit decorated with blue daisies, she was staring up at him. She knew him, she must have spoken to his other angels (his casting department), her little chink face all squinty and smiley, sloped, dark eyes lovingly nestled in exquisitely chubby cheeks. He felt an urge to pinch those fleshy mounds.
She waved at him like royalty—he best pay heed. Actresses! Lord have mercy!
He smiled back, his hands yearning in the folds of the denim jeans, his mind’s eye picking over the roles, the scenes this eager starlet might steal.
Then came an awful, high-pitched screeching as a gook bitch strode over with her little important walk and pulled his auditioning actress away, lecturing the little angel in awful gookanese. He had a mind to tell her to teach her kid to speak American. She was robbing an artist of his work. Those cheeks. He just wanted to squeeze them.
He felt compelled by a Higher Power to follow the chink family around. It was gook mom, gook grandma and his future angel doing a bit of shopping, out for the day, probably loaded with cash but buying on the cheap like the gooks liked to do, taking over neighborhood grocery stores, raising prices, playing at being poor, they were sneaky. Pearl Harbor. Vietnam. Korea. Japs in the eighties. The commie job-stealing China-chinks of today.
Always observe, it’s what the greats did, then they made their move, leaving their artistic mark. One had to give in to one’s gift, to not was the sin, and Travis Parish was no sinner. He was an artist. A pioneer. He hadn’t really understood at first. As a child his gift had been obscured by misunderstanding. It wasn’t until his twenties that he began to grasp the nature of his talent, and even then not without tribulations.
At twenty-eight he had been arrested for fondling a little girl, two of them according to the courts, but the truth was he had touched dozens. As a custodian at the Children’s Hospital in Bakersfield his lot had been the terminal ward. Heaven’s Gate the janitor’s called it, and no one liked to work the graveyard shift save Parish. During his nightly duties of sweeping and mopping and buffing he would slip into many a sick little girl’s room and fiddle about, making them feel better, easing their pain, giving them something to remember on their way to meet the Baby Jesus. It had been his Curious Period, and it had been easier to do back then without the cameras that were so ubiquitous now. Caught by a fluke, by laziness, by not bolting the door, a compassionate off-duty nurse had slipped in with a Cabbage Patch doll and a smile, both doll and smile dropping as she caught him with his fingers buried knuckle-deep inside a catatonic cookie jar. Tina Ramirez, age five. Brain cancer.
His goings-on at the hospital had been something of a scandal and the powers that be had needed to save face (and their funding). He agreed to keep his mouth shut for only two years in Avenal, the new medium security prison.
Prison provided Parish with an inordinate amount of time to explore just why his forays in the children’s ward weren’t completely satisfying. His Educational Period. Providence picked a book out for him from the prison library regarding filmmaking and it all became clear: like cinema before the “talkies” he was missing a pivotal element, sound. How juvenile his efforts had been on Heaven’s Gate, how poorly thought out, how amateurishly hollow. The hospital’s atmosphere demanded a silent approach to his work but he would no longer be so silenced in the future. Not only that, he wanted to create something authentic and inspiring, have production value, darn it, he had to think, plot, storyboard. He understood now that he wasn’t a hobbyist, he was a gifted artist who had been reduced by circumstance. An artist had to grow, or his art died.
He left prison for Oakland and took up driving truck for a grocery chain, later driving for the city metro in the mornings. Afternoons he drove a school bus.
And in his off time he created movie magic. His Experimental Period. The introduction of his own “talkies” fulfilled a long empty yearning. Dolby and THX had nothing on his artistic resonance, on the raw power of his actresses’ voices. It was during this period his choir began to take form, the noises within began to harmonize, it all came together in sweet song.
In ’94 he slipped up again before he had even begun rolling. He had just cast Erin Garcia, three, enticed her with licorice to come into the alley behind her house. It wasn’t her black lab that scrabbled over a gate and grabbed hold of his pants but a neighbor’s. He had kicked it to death against the garage but not before the girl’s cries had alerted her mother. This time he pled no contest, got three years and did a full eight months in county before overcrowding with real criminals sent him to a halfway house for rehabilitation.
His love of his art only matured. Upon release he expanded his scenes, occasionally with multiple actresses, some who made more than one film. This required a delicate touch and supreme patience, it was the culmination of his education, and he produced, directed and starred alongside his angels in countless masterpieces. This was his Prolific Period.
For the next several years he worked his way up and down the coast, registering religiously, filing his change of address dutifully. Taking whatever job paid the bills, money not important, never was for a real artist. He never auditioned in his town of residence, often driving inland, possessed of a natural ability of finding talent and sniffing out the dangers of casting it. He made so many beautiful starlets become angels. Let them shine in the limelight until they no longer sparkled onscreen and they joined his choir, each one remembered as vividly as celluloid.
He developed a fresh appreciation for spontaneity. His Improvisational Period, but it was short-lived. Older now he preferred storylines, and for the most part he stuck to script. He had matured as an artist, and the Lord loved those who accepted their limitations.
Rounding a corner there she was, his little slant-eyed debutante just too darned cute for words. The mom had tired of chasing her and had lodged her in the front of their cart. Oh, smiling at him again!
A man walked past with two little boys in tow. The smaller one said “hi” to the chink girl who turned her smile his way.
He had cast a few boys in his early days but he was no sissy faggot. Truth be told they just didn’t perform as well, didn’t possess the raw flair that his actresses did.
He was getting hard down there. The audition always made his whanger hard. He wasn’t going to be buying pants today, after all. Tossing them onto a shelf of floor cleaner he feigned considering dish soap, biding his time.
The grandmother called the mother down the aisle and they left the cart, both harping at one another in nasal gook. The chorus of his angels rang in his head but this was much too risky. Timing was everything in the movie business.
But he bounded over anyway, his head bouncing side to side like a big, goofy bear. His actresses had often said he looked just like a big ol’ teddy bear, and they just wanted to hug him, and he would let them, stroking their hair, running his hand down their bodies, patting their little fannies. He had a way with actresses that most filmmakers would envy.
She laughed and pointed at him. He beeped her nose while he glanced down the aisle. Mom and Grandma were on aisle five, in a seriou
s discussion about Cheer vs. Tide. Go with Tide, they have the magic crystals, you gook bitches.
He winked and deftly for a man of his size plucked her from the cart, swung her around into the next aisle over, aisle four, greeting cards. The girl giggled and cooed. It had been a long time since he had a starlet that cooed.
The sun was just parting the clouds as he approached the automatic doors, and blindingly bright light lit his path. His angels guiding him, bless them. He made a show of eyeing the clearing weather, pulled his heavy jacket around the little girl, half-covering his face as well. It was poorly choreographed, no rehearsal to speak of and he knew the security cameras would catch him but it was too late, the singing of his angels carried him through, and there was no denying their call.
“You have a nice day, now.” The old woman in the blue CAN I HELP YOU? smock smiled as his China doll started to cry. The old lady felt like crying, too. The wet weather made her joints ache.
By the time the code was called and the store locked down he was merrily humming and driving a mile away.
CHAPTER 7
MAY
Al-Karmah, Al Anbar, Iraq
A tangerine melanoma hung obscured in the coarse haze, the air beneath it hot and thick with the stench of a witch’s brew of death and shit and rot, all stirred upon the ancient, dry, gritty breath of the desert. Plastic bags ghosted on eddies among the drab buildings; danced above the raw sewage stewing in the middle of the streets; crawled across the rancid garbage to drift among the mangy, feral and half-dead dogs feeding ravenously on the full-dead people.
Al-Karmah’s living citizenry had long since fled save those few souls who were incapable of leaving or had somehow convinced themselves to stay in the futile urban abattoir. They trudged the necropolis among its toppled tenements and sat aghast in its silent markets, their empty gaze not unlike the mutilated corpses that had been left to bake and bloat and stink in this Middle-Hell’s oven. Wilted palms wept for their city amid the chaotic latticework of power lines that crisscrossed beneath the bland, uncaring sky, connecting empty house to empty shop, bunched in sporadic nests of electric snakes that once hissed and hummed with life but now were dreadfully quiet.
All was quiet, for a pregnant moment, as if of prayer. Then it wasn’t.
The mongrels’ meal was flagrantly disrupted as they were sent loping in a dyspeptic scatter.
For their part, the spiritless bags floated on, unperturbed, heedless of the gravitas of war and the men who were about to add their share to the butcher’s bill.
“They’re goin’ after the FNG!” Craig screamed and popped off a few shots.
He screamed back at Craig to settle the fuck down, rose and saw two Muj with AKs running towards the alley where Nielsen had disappeared.
With a too comfortable ease he lined up his reticle and fired two bursts from his M4. The first took the stocky Muj in the throat. He went down hard. The second found a gangly Muj in jeans and a Michael Jackson Thriller T-shirt who was about to throw something. It tore into the Gloved One, ripping open the man’s chest, a grenade falling from his hand, the Muj on top of it.
“Nice shot, Gunny!” Sheik yelled.
The grenade exploded and the Muj’s body flew in three different directions.
“Motherfucker!” someone screamed. Out of fear. Surprise. Joy. It was hard to tell.
Twenty-nine. I’ve killed twenty-nine men. At least most of them were men.
It had been this way for thousands of years in the Cradle of Civilization. Hell, it had been this way everywhere. Kill or be killed. Wasn’t something to politicize or philosophize over. Not here. Not now.
If not here, if not now, when?
He was tired but he tried hard not to show it. The marines who followed him into battle believed he possessed a preternatural wariness, that he was uncannily keen this tour. “McConnell’s Mojo” they called it. He wondered what they’d call it when it failed them. “McConnell’s Misery” maybe.
They had returned to the FOB after a forty-hour stint serving as security for the civilian trainers en route to the NTC in Hit, eager to rack out for a few hours, but a FRAGO to immediately rejoin their rifle platoon was waiting instead. RUMINT was they were going to finally delouse Fallujah and the surrounding cities of the insurgency. It was a mixed bag. The sooner they secured Al Anbar the sooner they went home. But Al-Karmah was no picnic.
He filed his SITREP at the TOC (negative SIGACT), swung by the DFAC (more water, more Gatorade, more Spunkmeyer muffins), let the Fobbits look over the Frankensteins, and as ordered picked up the new MP for his ride-along. The squad grumbled but no one complained. What was there to complain about?
Complaints made you think about the whys. Why never got you anywhere. Why evaporated like sweat in a hot, dry wind, leaving nothing but stagnant, sour reek behind it.
Fighting and protecting a people you couldn’t relate to much less understand and who sure as shit didn’t want to understand you had become an American pastime. Why?
Because. Now be a good patriot, boy, and get the fuck on over there.
He remembered the one thing his dad had ever told him about his own war.
“In war you bring your own moral compass. It is not standard issue.”
A good many had forgotten theirs on this expedition. Some you wondered if they ever had one at all. Like Fullerton, who had sawed the three schoolgirls in half with the Fifty near Tikrit.
“You see that shit?” he had crowed. “Like slicin’ cheese! Like Arab Swiss fuckin’ cheese, man!”
Fullerton was up in Mosul, now. Good goddamn riddance.
Not that his removal restored any sanity down here.
One day you’re locking up Sunnis who blew up a hundred women and children in a market, the next you’re releasing them with bricks of cash to keep them from blowing up a hundred more. He wasn’t sure if that was the right way to fight a war but that only mattered if you still cared about the why.
He was just a dumb jarhead following orders, trying to keep his men alive. He wanted for nothing. He was a marine in war, exactly where he belonged, should be happy as a pig in shit. A part of him was. Semper fuckin’ Fi, just another Groundhog Day.
But another part of him, the one he kept private, refused the darkness and clung to a kernel of light that was a weekend in Myrtle Beach, cold beers at sunset, the swell of fair-skinned breasts and warm, wet places. Dirty-blonde hair and how it lay on a white pillow, and eyes as blue as the purest sea. Eyes that mattered. Eyes that had never seen the dust and death and shit but had seen him clean of it. That part of him could not let go of the why.
Even the abandoned buildings leaning in close above them, admonishing their presence asked why.
Why are you here? Leave! Leave now! You’ve done your worst! NOW GO!”
He couldn’t agree more.
From his position near the second vehicle’s open passenger door, McConnell scanned the rooftops, the gaping windows, returned his attention back to the ground as the desultory tattoo of Kalashnikov fire rattled against the hillbilly-armored Humvee.
In return his squad turkey-peeked and fired their own staccato at the Hajis hunkered behind a wheel-less truck resting on its axles. The noisome nastiness of burning oil and hot metal saturated the already foul air.
They had followed their grids to Jinub Square before coming around a corner and surprising a swarm of Hajis marching down the middle of the road like they owned it, which he supposed they did, but not today. Today it belonged to the United States Marine Corps.
Feeling especially Allah Akbar! they had tossed a couple RKGs that went wide with more boom than bang but still bounced them around in their seats. As they rolled to a halt, the Hajis had quickly taken up position behind the truck while a few had scrambled to the buildings to the south.
He remembered hearing his voice bark.
“Out out out! Get the fuck out! Light ’em up!”
Their three fire teams had taken position along the line of hummers b
ack among the buildings and had dropped at least five of the insurgents before they made for cover.
Thirteen marines versus maybe thirty MAMs—Military Aged Males as the REMFs liked to denote them. Those Rear Echelon Motherfuckers had acronyms for everything. Probably ninety percent of their job, come up with some goddamn acronym for this or that or the other damn thing.
“Hobbs! I don’t hear the Fitty!” He craned his neck up to where Hobbs should be lighting ’em up but there was no Hobbs.
“Corpsman up!”
Shit.
Hobbs’s was down here propped behind some steps, his face covered in sweat and wrinkled in pain as Zilkowski fussed with the man’s IPAK.
McConnell slid over, crouched down next to the corpsman.
“Won’t be fingerbangin’ his girlfriend anytime soon but he’s alright!” Z-Pac confirmed, stuffing a baggy into his med bag and wrapping the big man’s incomplete hand with gauze.
“Dino’s been pumpin’ her ass for weeks!” cackled Natterly.
“Shut the fuck up, Nads!” McConnell slapped Hobbs on the leg. “You done then? You want a dustout?” If they could even get a bird in this haze.
“Fuck no!” Hobbs grimaced. He fumbled for his M4. Z-Pac pushed him back down. “Not yet!”
McConnell thumped the medic on the dome. “Get him back in the fight!” he told the squid.
“Roger that, Gunny!”
A loud burst of fire shattered the air. Sheik had clambered up the spout and was laying a horizontal of fifty-cal into the Hajis position.
Specialist Easmat “Sheik” Tariq out of Dearborn. Their sacred cow. McConnell had fought hard to keep their homegrown Terp—his language skills had proven invaluable, defusing deadly situations that were on their head only stupid miscommunication. The Echelon Above Reality wanted to possess him, stick him into a black hole of Intel translating pages of BOGINT but Colonel Stowe had put his size fourteen down on some Ivy League POG’s neck and ended that bullshit.
McConnell had lost most of the hearing in his left ear but was comforted by the feel of muffled fire through his earplugs.
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