Fives and Twenty-Fives
Page 28
“Well, I knew he liked shitty metal bands. But then, you knew that, too. He never shut up about that. Also, before he came to work for us, he’d been hanging out at some lake with his friends from school. Trying to leave Iraq and open a beachfront bar someplace. Didn’t work out for some reason.”
The lieutenant laughs. “He would’ve been good at that.”
“And I knew something went wrong for him. Real bad, right after our Humvee got hit, remember? While Zahn was at medical? Just before Ramadi.”
“Yeah? What was that?”
“It was one of those escalations of force. Out on Route Michigan, you know? Someone from the construction platoon shot up this old taxicab when it got too close. One of those Baghdad taxis, you know? That’s why they got suspicious. It was out too far west of the city to make good sense. Anyways, they brought the two guys from the taxi back to Taqaddum. One of them got airlifted up to Al Asad, right away, and I heard that he died a short time later. The other guy, a real big dude, he got patched up at the shock trauma center and brought over to the company headquarters.”
“Why did they bring him over to us?”
“Because Major Leighton had to give him money. The civil affairs people showed up with this stack of Iraqi money. It was our mistake and we owed the guy, they told us. Major Leighton came and got me and Dodge. He wanted Dodge to translate for him, and for me to check on the guy. Make sure he was well enough to travel, since Lieutenant Cobb’s platoon was about to take him over to Habbaniyah and hand him over to the Iraqi police.
“That whole episode shook Dodge up pretty bad. This young Iraqi, a real burly guy about Dodge’s age, was sitting in the truck all bandaged up. And Dodge was talking to him in Arabic, trying to give him all this money and saying a lot more than what Major Leighton was asking him to interpret. But the big guy . . . he wouldn’t budge. He wouldn’t say nothing. He wouldn’t even take the money. He just kept staring at Dodge with these fucking dagger eyes. And eventually Dodge just lost it, just started throwing money at him. Like, begging him to take it. But nothing doing. Big guy didn’t say a word. They had to haul Dodge away from the truck, eventually.”
I start feeling bad, like I’m talking too much, and going on too long like drunks do.
But the lieutenant doesn’t seem put off at all. He’s listening close. “Did Dodge know this guy or something?”
“Not sure. He went straight over to the intel guys in that bunker by the flight line after that. Took a week off for leave. Remember? Then, when he came back, we were back on the road before I had a chance to ask him anything. And then Ramadi . . .” I trail off, thinking he might not want me talking any more about that.
“Ramadi,” he says, picking up my train of thought. “And Gomez. And then a few weeks later, I had you brought up on charges.”
I nod my head. “Yes, sir.”
“I’m sorry, Doc.”
“Wasn’t your fault.” I mean it.
Through all his travels and adventures, and in spite of many moments of sadness and defeat, Huck will always shun pity. Even the Widow Douglas, for whom Huck has obvious affection, is brushed aside when she tries to pity him.
“The widow she cried over me,” Huck remembers. “And called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it.”
Fadi al Baquii
My flatmates spend all day making calls on the satellite phone in preparation for the next rally. They talk to journalists in France and America and tell me that tomorrow, at the rally in front of Sousse Government Center, the cameras will be there. Western journalists will come to ask questions and I will speak in English on behalf of the student committee.
I tell them the last time I spoke English for a job it went badly for everyone.
They laugh like I am making a joke for them. We love our brave Fadi, they seem to say. We love his jokes and how he tries to make us brave like him.
Then they ask me to write a letter for the cause. A press release to the American media, announcing the founding of our little chapter of the revolution.
I refuse at first. How will I even release such a letter, when it is time? The Internet works for us more and more seldom now. Ben Ali will shutter it firmly in a matter of days. Surely, before he sends the Army into the streets.
My flatmates, the committee members, say that I should use what Internet we have left to obtain telephone numbers. In this way, we might be able to use the satellite telephone to call a friend in America, perhaps the one with whom I am exchanging those Facebook notes.
“Get his phone number, yes? He can listen to the letter as you read it. Then he can write it down and send it to the media.”
Why would Lester do this for me? My flatmates labor under the misconception that fighting together necessarily makes men friends.
I should tell them about the passport of a Syrian from Michigan named Fadi al Baquii, left carelessly in a desk drawer. I should tell them about Taqaddum.
The Americans in the bunker paid me my wages in dollars. An astonishing sum, handled with indifference by these unknowingly rich men. Enough money to take me all the way to Jordan, or farther if I was economical. Then they told me to enjoy my visit with family. Enjoy your holiday, they said. Come back safe.
I signed the checkout sheet on the clipboard, placed the clipboard back on the desk, and took the long stairs up from the bunker. A patrol took me to Habbaniyah and set me free inside the police station. Come back in five days for a return escort, the sergeant, a stranger, told me.
When the Americans left, I told the Iraqi policemen a lie. I said the Americans wanted me to sleep there in the police station and to patrol with them as a sort of training for me, and way to gather intelligence about the neighborhood. I made myself sound important, and how would they know otherwise? The Americans only ever spoke to me in English.
For three days, I traveled with the policemen through town. Always, I looked down the dirt road where my father and brother lived in their borrowed villa. I looked for a time when few would be home. No militiamen or workers. Only my family.
And I asked them about a big guy, shot by the Americans and brought to the police station a week previous. What had become of him? Were his wounds healing? Where was he taken when he left here?
“Oh, him?” The police chief smiled. “Big Mundhir? Abu Muhammad took him to the house down the road. He will be fine there. Abu Muhammad is a good man.”
I nodded as though this news were of no great concern to me.
On the evening of the fourth day, I tied a cloth around my face to hide, snuck from the police station, and ran through a field protected by army checkpoints. The rat lines, the Americans called this path. A place where men who worked in the American base could run under the protection of machine guns in their guard towers and perhaps make it to their homes and families without the militias seeing who they were.
I ran with a big group leaving their work and reached the wall of my father’s home with the sunset. I walked around to the gate like a stranger, listening always for talking, but hearing nothing. No voices. No generators. No air conditioners or televisions. Against the will of my pounding heart, I climbed the gate.
My father’s house was dark, and the old Mercedes was gone. In the quiet, I heard soft crying, a woman sobbing. I snuck across the courtyard, with its silly lawn, and moved to the window of the kitchen where the sobbing became something I understood. A voice I knew. It was Nasim, my brother’s wife, crying alone on the floor of the kitchen.
She had a rifle across her lap, and she reached for it when she heard the crunch of my feet on the dying grass.
“Wait. Nasim.” I entered the kitchen. “Just me. Just Kateb.”
She stood and took me into her arms. Her wet cheek settled on my neck.
“Where is my father? Where are Muhammad and Ibrahim?”
“I do not know,” she sobbed. “They left last night. Ibrahim was sick.”
“What?”
“But where are all the men who guard the house?” I gasped.
“Sheikh Hamza took them a week ago. He needed them all to guard himself, he said. With all the foreigners making threats on his life.” She paused. “I thought you knew? Isn’t that why you sent your friend? Mundhir?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Of course. Where is he now?”
“The roof.” She started to calm. “Watching for headlights. Perhaps the sheikh’s men coming back to protect us. Perhaps not.”
I held her cheeks and told her it would be fine, that my father and brother were both smart and that they would bring Ibrahim home, soon. Then I left her in the kitchen and felt my way through the dark house, up the steps to the flat roof. Near the edge, I saw Mundhir’s back in the moonlight. He did not move, but he knew I was there. He must have heard the whole conversation with Nasim, the way voices carried at night.
“Hani is dead?” he asked without turning his head.
“Yes. The Americans told me after they took you away.” I approached him in the darkness, moving slowly. He had something sitting across his lap, and I thought it could be another rifle. “How did my father find you and Hani?”
“Find us?”
“Yes, how did he know you and Hani had been shot? How did he know the Americans had taken you to the Habbaniyah police station?”
I went to my hands and knees and crawled up to the edge with him. I saw that the object on his lap was not a rifle, but rather my father’s old cricket bat.
“Kateb,” he sighed, “he came for us the day you disappeared with the Americans. Why do you think Hani and I were on the road in that old taxi? We worked for him. Muhammad was behind us with the devices, and Hani and I were ahead of the triggermen in the scout vehicle.” Then, with a stoic tone, he added, “We did our job.”
I sat still and quiet, wanting to ask.
Mundhir was kind and did not make me. “I have not told him about you.”
“Thank you.”
“He thinks you are in Abu Ghraib because of the way we saw you taken away with your hands bound. He goes to the Americans in Fallujah once every week to look for you. But they insist that you are not on their lists. He thinks you are rotting in that place.”
“Is it good work, with my father and brother?” I asked, wishing to change the subject. “More fun than working at our rock-and-roll shows?” I thought this might make him look at me finally. A good memory.
But he continued staring out across the town and the highway with its few headlights. “Hani enjoyed it more than I do. He liked your father.”
“Does my father know what happened to Hani?”
“Yes.”
“Then might I ask you another question?”
“Of course.”
“What are you doing with that cricket bat?”
“I’m considering killing you with it.” And after a moment, he added, “You preferred for Haji Fasil and Abu Abdul to die? And now Hani? You enjoy watching Americans live on?”
“No, Mundhir . . .”
“Your brother told me the plan for that day on the lake. It would have worked, and only Americans would have died. We would have been safe.”
“My brother is lying to you.”
Mundhir wrapped his right hand tighter around the cricket bat. “I was up here when Ibrahim . . . when he became sick. Did Nasim tell you? I realized it, the first of anyone. We sleep on the roof when the generators run out of fuel and it becomes too hot in the house. Sheikh Hamza has abandoned us and taken the petrol with him. But we still have the curbstones, and people still pay for them. In fact, the Mercedes had five hollow curbstones in the trunk. Prepped and ready for delivery in the daylight. After I carried Ibrahim down to the car, in the panic to leave we forgot about them. All of us. Your father and brother drove off, taking Ibrahim to Fallujah with five hollow curbstones in the trunk.”
I swallowed. “How many checkpoints between here and the hospital?”
“At least ten.” Mundhir shrugged. “And the trunk would be searched at each.”
“How sick was Ibrahim? If the Americans have him? If they took him to the hospital?”
“You will never know, Kateb.” Mundhir finally turned to look at me.
I stood and put my hands in my pockets.
“If I see your father again, I will tell him you were here. Just so he knows you are free. And then nothing else.”
“I understand.”
“Leave and never come back. Now. Or I’ll kill you on this rooftop, so soft that Nasim won’t hear it.” I opened my mouth to apologize, but felt Mundhir pressing the edge of the cricket bat up into my ribs. “Never another word. Go.”
I admired the view for a moment before turning to leave, the river twisting north into desert with the moon lighting its path.
Doc—
Here’s a key. Stay as long as you like, help yourself to a shower and whatever else you need. But think about going after that girl, if only to apologize. I won’t have cowards under my roof.
—Lieutenant Donovan
Returned to Duty
In the early afternoon, I walk softly down the stairs and out to my car, leaving Lester Pleasant asleep on my ratty couch. The New Orleans weather is shifting, and it’s suddenly too warm for a coat. This doesn’t feel like New Year’s Day.
Following the advice of Gomez’s sister, I’ll take the interstate west to Baton Rouge, north to Shreveport, then west again all the way to Dallas. I’ll need to sleep at a rest stop along the way, but it’s the quickest route.
She was more open to the idea of a visit than I thought she’d be, Gomez’s sister. Even with the phone call coming on the morning of New Year’s Day.
“Of course! Michelle loves visitors,” she assured me over the scratchy connection.
“That’s good to hear,” I said, trying to sound upbeat.
“We’ll see you tomorrow, then?”
“Yes. See you then.”
I settle behind the wheel and look at my phone on the pretense of checking the directions, but drift back to the note from Paige. After getting Doc home from the French Quarter, up my stairs, and comfortably arranged on the couch, I’d sent her the message:
“Can I call you?”
She’d responded instantly, wide-awake at three in the morning, with a curt “You can do whatever you need, Pete.”
I examine the words again, as if it’s possible to glean some insight from their pixels that I can’t gain from their meaning.
I can do whatever I need? Does that constitute a good-bye? Is she trying to spare me the bother of what she expects will be a conciliatory breakup call? I doubt it, but for a reason I can’t quite pin down. Perhaps it’s optimism, but I let myself believe that the words are meant as strange encouragement.
“You can do whatever you need, Pete,” I imagine her saying softly.
I start the car and make a right turn toward the interstate.
“You can do whatever you need, Pete.”
Zahn went to the field hospital after our Humvee burned and spent the better part of his time there by himself, in a cold, dark room. Standard treatment for concussions, the Navy doctors told us. Give him a few days to shake it off, and he’ll be fine.
Gomez and I went to retrieve him on the afternoon of the third day, borrowing a beat-up Toyota truck from the company motor pool. Doc tagged along so he could requisition a few items from medical, but Gomez and I went into the hospital tent alone so as not to overwhelm Zahn.
“Meet us by the truck when you’re finished at supply,” Gomez told Doc.
But Doc co
uldn’t help but offer timid medical advice as we walked inside. “Sir. Sergeant. Make sure his eyes aren’t dilated in the dark, sir.”
“Will do, Doc,” I replied.
“And his pulse, sir. Make sure it ain’t elevated. Or slow. I wasn’t too sure of the reading I took on him in the field, but it seemed kinda slow. We just gotta make sure it’s back to normal, sir.”
“I’ll take a look. Thanks,” I said over my shoulder.
“And one more thing—”
“We got this, Doc,” Gomez cut him off. “Go take care of your shit. Meet us in ten.”
“Aye, Sergeant,” he said, deflated.
“We gotta get that little shit a puppy or something,” Gomez grumbled to herself.
Inside, a young Navy nurse in camouflage utilities handed me Zahn’s returned-to-duty chit and directed us through the maze of connected tents to the makeshift concussion ward near the back of the complex. This austere, vinyl cave had twenty green cots, neatly arranged in the dim light. A large, quiet fan oscillated cool air from one side of the tent to the other.
Zahn was the only patient. He lounged on a random cot, wearing running shorts, a green T-shirt, and sandals. Next to him sat a day’s worth of empty boxed meals, neatly stacked and waiting for a member of the hospital staff to come by with a garbage bag.
“Corporal Zahn,” I called out, moving with Gomez to the side of his cot. “Paperwork just came through. The docs cleared it. Returned to duty, effective now.”
“Great. Sir,” he said slowly, “it’ll be good to get back to work, you know.” He closed his eyes, as though we hadn’t fully roused him from a nap.
Gomez chimed in, dropping a light duffel bag at his feet, “Brought you a fresh uniform and boots, killer. And this . . .” She slapped an extra rifle slung on her shoulder. “Been carrying it around for you, and that fucking sucked. So here . . .”
In a single, fluid motion, she lifted the rifle off her shoulder and brought it to port arms, pulled the changing handle to the rear, locked the bolt in place, and looked inside the receiver.