The Right Side

by Spencer Quinn

  “I want another look.”

  “No problem. No problem at all.” He wriggled free of her grip. She let him. Her old strength receded, or maybe departed. She tried to feel it somewhere inside her and could not. “You all right?” said Stallings.

  “Yes.”

  “Looked like you were uncomfortable there for a sec.”

  “I was not.”

  She studied the photo. There was an otherness shared by all Afghan men that you had to get past if you were going to accomplish anything over there or simply tell them apart. This otherness was strongest when they were having their pictures taken or confronting western women. It pretty much disappeared when they smiled, which hadn’t happened often in LeAnne’s experience.

  The man in the photo was not smiling. He wore a President Karzai–style karakul hat, a lamb’s fur hat, as she’d learned from her studies, made from aborted fetuses. Why not, if they were dead anyway? But it had bothered her when she’d found out and it bothered her now. Did everything have to get used? Could nothing be spared? The man himself had a narrow face, prominent ears, and deep-set eyes, dark and highly intelligent, like he was the one doing the examining.

  “Change your mind?” Stallings said.

  “No,” said LeAnne. “Never seen him before. Who is he?”

  “Name’s Gulab Yar-Muhammad. At least, that’s the name we’ve got. Yar-Muhammad means ‘friend of Muhammad,’ which could be real—not at all an uncommon surname over there—or could be just sending a message. A nom de guerre, if you’re familiar with the expression.”

  Her gaze slid down from the photo over to his wrist, slightly reddened from her grip. That was good.

  “We have information that may tie him to the events of that night, January seventeenth.”

  “What kind of information?”

  “Sorry, some of those details are classified.”

  “What the fuck? I have clearance.”

  “Unfortunately,” Stallings said, his eyes zeroing in on the patch, no doubt about it, “we’re in kind of a gray area on that score. But,” he went on, possibly seeing some change in her expression, “how about we let the lawyers squabble over the pros and cons?”

  LeAnne lost the thread. Stallings went on and on about Gulab Yar-Muhammad, things he may or may not have done, people he may or may not have known. LeAnne made a few slight movements of her left hand, movements that made no sense unless you knew she was holding a pole. Her wrist still remembered, still had the goods, still knew how to get her that extra inch or two of height that meant winning instead of coming second. Oh, to be vaulting under a full moon! She could feel a daydream about that waiting in the wings. Actually more of a night dream: it lurked behind her right eye socket, where night prevailed. That hit her pretty hard: now she had night inside her, twenty-four seven.

  “Getting a bit tired?” Stallings said. She focused on him. He was looking at her with concern.

  “Nope.”

  He extended his hand, like he was going to pat her knee but then thought better of it. “Let’s continue another time. More info to come, in any case. Just want you to check out one more of these.” He produced another five-by-seven from the stack.

  “That’s Katie.”

  “Katie?”

  “Of course, it’s Katie. My terp. You must have known that.”

  He nodded. “Just confirming. Tell me about her.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  LeAnne took another look at the photo. Katie—her real name was Khatena, but everyone, meaning all the Americans, called her Katie—was gazing dead ahead, her eyes blank, and none of her funny side apparent, although her physical beauty still was. She was a tiny woman and feisty, always whipping off her burqa first thing when they were inside a dwelling with just the women and kids. Outside, in the presence of men having some kind of confab, she would comment in English from behind the veil, her voice cheery, her accent that of a British TV newscaster: “Imbecile. Blockhead. Dunces all.” In those moments, LeAnne knew winning was both possible and very distant.

  “Did something happen to her?” LeAnne said. “They told me she was okay. And she wasn’t on the list.”

  “Nothing happened to her. For which she owes you big time. No matter what.”

  “No matter what? I don’t get it.”

  Captain Stallings put the photos away, zipped up his briefcase. “We’re in the early stages here. I hope to have more for you in a few days.” He rose. “Meanwhile, just concentrate on getting better.”

  “But what are you saying about Katie?”

  He smiled. “More to come.”

  After he left, she got up, rummaged through a drawer, found the list. When had she gotten it? Here? Landstuhl? Before? Who had given it to her? Why? LeAnne could answer none of those questions. She checked the list. Katie wasn’t on it. There were six names, in alphabetical order, five Afghans and one American—Cray, Captain Jamie R., age thirty. Cause of death: hostile—explosives. Her mistakes, numbers one and two, meeting up.

  Marci came back to the room, not on crutches. Instead, she wore an artificial leg, black and silver, very sleek and high-tech-looking.

  “Wow,” LeAnne said. “Is that the kind for running real fast?”

  “Fuckin’ better be,” Marci said. She stumped over to her bed and sat down, her lips pursing.

  “It hurts?”

  “Like a son of a bitch, but that goes away, supposedly.” She gazed down at her feet, real and not, but both now shod in bright red sneakers.

  “You got new sneaks?”

  “Free. Good to know there’s free shit in this life, LeAnne. Things are looking up.”

  LeAnne went over to Marci’s bed, sat beside her. She put her arm around Marci’s shoulder. They looked at Marci’s new leg together.

  “It’s kind of beautiful in a way,” LeAnne said. “I mean that.”

  “Some men find them sexy. At least, according to the PT lady.”

  “I believe it.”

  Marci nodded. “Nothing about men surprises me anymore.”

  LeAnne laughed. Marci joined in. Hey! Leanne thought. Is my laugh still a party invite? She stopped at once.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Want to go outside?” Marci said sometime in the next day or two.

  “What for?” said LeAnne.

  “I’m supposed to walk around. You can criticize my technique.”

  “What’s wrong with walking inside?”

  “Inside the hospital? Where do you want me to start?”

  “I . . .” LeAnne tried to remember the last time she was outside, meaning outside and conscious.

  “What’s with all the thinking?” Marci said. “Yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  They put on robes over their pajamas, took an elevator down to the lobby, and stepped out into a warm spring day. Warm and sunny. LeAnne had always loved being in the sun, but now the glare was unbearable even though she wasn’t looking in the direction of the sun or anywhere close. She squinted her left eye almost shut. It did no good. She was feeling the glare on the other side.

  “Something wrong?” Marci said.

  “Be right back.”

  “Huh?”

  LeAnne turned around, reentered the hospital. The glare faded, but real slowly, like it didn’t want to go. She found the gift shop and charged a pair of cheap sunglasses to her room, the oversized kind of sunglasses you get from the eye doctor after he’s given you the drops but you still need to drive home. In the mirror behind the cash register she saw that the sunglasses covered the whole patch and maybe one third of the scarring. What she needed were still bigger sunglasses, like . . . like a veil. The thought made her sick. She almost puked right there, almost puked all over the cashier’s sensible black Oxfords.

  Back outside, Marci was sitting on a bench under one of those cherry trees. LeAnne sat beside her, the glare pretty much gone. Because Marci had taken the spot by the right-hand armrest, LeAnne was forced into having her on the b
lind side. This was a first, a first she should have seen coming. She almost circled around a few times like a dog in search of the exact right spot to settle.

  She felt a slight movement on Marci’s part, maybe glancing over at her.

  “Going Hollywood?” Marci said.

  That was a good one.

  “Actually,” Marci said, “you remind me of that actress, what’s her name.”

  In the distance LeAnne saw—but how much distance? She realized she had no way of knowing. It was like watching the world through some early version of a new technology, before the updates.

  “Give me some help here,” Marci said.

  “Help? What’s wrong?” LeAnne turned to her, which meant twisting far around to get her eye in play.

  Marci looked a bit alarmed. “Hey. Nothing. Just trying to remember the name of that actress you look like.”

  “I don’t look like any goddamn actress.” LeAnne faced away from her, shifted a few inches down the bench.

  “Cruella De Vil,” Marci said. “Although come to think of it, she was a character, not an actress.”

  By then LeAnne was barely listening. She was watching what she’d spotted in the distance, a high school track team out for a training run. LeAnne counted them—she’d developed the habit in her job of pinning down exact numbers in groups. In the dwelling in that compound the night of January seventeenth, for example, there’d been sixteen people, including her and Katie, plus two chickens. There were fourteen runners on the track team, boys and girls, pretty much in all the possible human colors, a few of the kids effortless looking and talented, but each and every one without worldly cares, which was the beauty of long runs if you were doing them right. LeAnne knew high school track.

  “Potential pole vaulter, huh?” said Mr. Adelson. Mr. Adelson was the track coach at Fremont High. He’d been a shot-putter in his own track days, had the thickest wrists LeAnne had ever seen.

  “I hope so, Coach,” she said.

  “Tony Iglesias seems to think you’ve got potential, for what that’s worth,” said Mr. Adelson. “What do you think of him?”

  What was this? One coach was asking what she thought about another coach?

  “Come on,” Mr. Adelson said. “Gotta have opinions in this life. Unless you’d rather be a sheep.”

  This was new, and couldn’t be right. On the other hand, LeAnne didn’t want to be a sheep. “He’s great!” she said.

  “Didn’t say to go overboard,” Mr. Adelson said. “Reminds me—how are you with falling?”

  “Falling?” Or had he said “failing?” He had a funny accent, like he was from somewhere else, somewhere back east like Boston or Philly.

  “Exactly. The body in uncontrolled motion from up to down and landing hard.”

  “I’ve fallen off the beam like a million times, Coach. I guess I’m used to it.”

  “A million times?” Mr. Adelson took a crumpled envelope from the pocket of his sweats, smoothed it out, checked some scribbling on the back. “Then how come you won all those championships?”

  “I never won any of the big ones.”

  “Because of falling?”

  “Well, no, sir. Just someone else being better that day. There are so many little things in gymnastics.”

  “So all this falling went on in practice.”

  LeAnne had never thought of it that way.

  “Okay,” said Mr. Adelson. He nodded his head a few times. “Okay, okay. And how are you at push-ups?”

  “Mr. Iglesias loves push-ups.”

  “Loves doing them himself?”

  “It’s possible,” LeAnne said. “But I’ve never seen him.”

  “Ha!” Mr. Adelson made a very loud noise, part laugh, part bark, startling her. “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s see a demonstration.”

  “Of push-ups?”

  “What else are we talking about?”

  “Here?”

  “Floor not clean enough for you?”

  LeAnne got down on the floor. A dull green linoleum floor, and actually not that clean.

  “Talking real push-ups now,” said Mr. Adelson. “From the toes.”

  “Are there other kinds?” LeAnne said, facedown on the floor, ready to go.

  She did a hundred, could have done a few more before the effort started to show, but Mr. Adelson stopped her. “Enough. Enough already. You’re hurting me.”

  A fountain stood in a little grouping of cherry trees. It wasn’t running, but there was water in the basin, with cherry blossoms floating on top.

  “I’m supposed to be walking,” Marci said. “But I don’t feel like it. Know what I feel like? Getting wasted.”

  Getting wasted? LeAnne hadn’t done much of that in her life. The night of the senior prom, where the track kids always ended up on a houseboat on Lake Pleasant; once down in the Florida Keys, also on a boat, but this one very fast; and the last day of her first weekend leave in Qatar, where she and the other CSTs had gotten off the base with its three-beer minimum and checked out a rooftop hotel bar in town, robed Saudi businessmen on one side of the dance floor and American soldiers in T-shirts and jeans on the other. And that was it.

  “How would we do that, exactly?” LeAnne said.

  “Get wasted? We’d need booze.”

  They looked past the U-shaped entrance to the hospital and out to the road, the high school runners now gone.

  “Any chance there’s a liquor store down that road?” LeAnne said.

  “Even if there is, so what?” said Marci. “No way in hell I can walk there.”

  A breeze sprang up. A tight little squadron of cherry blossoms took flight, wafting down into the basin of the fountain.

  “How about we train for it?” said LeAnne.

  “Huh?”

  “Today we’ll try to get to that fountain and back. Tomorrow we’ll add a little more.”

  “You sound kind of perky all of a sudden. I think I prefer your real self.”

  They rose and made their way toward the fountain. LeAnne moved around, getting Marci on her left side.

  “How you doing?” she said.

  “My knee wants to bend,” Marci said. “But it’s fuckin’ gone. How stupid is that?”

  LeAnne dropped back, studied Marci’s stride. “Maybe reach out more with the new foot.”

  “Fuck you.” But Marci seemed to be reaching out more with her left foot, seemed to be lurching a bit less. Her breathing grew louder, and after a few minutes they took a break on another bench, almost at the fountain, LeAnne keeping Marci on her left. That had to be the MO from now till forever: everything on the left.

  “I’m getting all these wicked thoughts,” Marci said after a while.

  “Like?”

  Marci took a deep breath. When she let it out, LeAnne heard a sort of thrumming, like a muffled baby rattle. A strange sound, and new to her. Was her sense of hearing stepping up in some sort of compensatory way? Maybe a whole auditory world was about to open up to her. That thought got pushed aside by the memory of her first look in the mirror after the bandages came off, the memory rising up without warning, like a tsunami, overcoming anything the least positive.

  “Like I wish it was someone else,” Marci said. “Someone else and not me that it happened to.”

  “What’s so bad about that?” said LeAnne.

  “How about if it’s someone specific?”

  LeAnne said nothing.

  “Makes one hell of a difference, huh?”

  “I’d have to know more,” LeAnne said. “This was in Iraq?”

  “For Christ sake! Where else? I told you I was in Iraq, told you the very first day.”

  LeAnne turned on her. “Amp it down, little lady,” she said. That led to a pause, kind of grim. LeAnne got a bit of a grip, lowered her voice. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Marci shot her a quick glance and turned away. “You’re one scary motherfucker, you know that?” LeAnne gazed through her oversized sunglasses at the
cherry blossoms floating in the fountain. “I told you I was in Iraq,” Marci went on, her voice also lower. “You told me you were in Afghanistan. The first day.”

  “What first day?”

  “Monday. The first day you came to the room.”

  “What’s today?”

  “Thursday. But I’m talking about the Monday before.”

  LeAnne thought that over.

  “Thursday was always my favorite day of the week,” Marci said. And then, after a silence, “Want to know why?”

  “Sure.”

  “Because you’re getting jazzed for Saturday night, making plans, looking forward to everything. Which is usually better than what actually happens, but that’s okay, too. By the time the next Thursday rolled around, I was all set to be jazzed again.” She put both hands under her leg, where the prosthetic part met the stump, lifted up, and shifted its position a little. “The someone specific is Eddie Mears,” Marci said. “He was on the drive schedule, but he got the shits. I filled in. But who doesn’t get the shits? It’s a hellhole.”

  “Iraq?”

  “And probably Afghanistan, too, but Iraq’s all I know firsthand. It’s like hell is down below, but sometimes it pops up through the ground. That’s Iraq. Like the IED’s the perfect symbol of the whole goddamn situation. Which is what did me in.”

  “Motor transport?”

  “Correct. Deuces, back and forth on the Baghdad Airport Road. It gets swept all the time. But . . .” Marci raised her hands, let them drop slowly to her sides. “Who doesn’t get the shits? Tell me.”

  LeAnne rose. “Break’s over,” she said, extending her hand and helping Marci up. “Let’s go.”

  They set off for the fountain.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Hey, Champ,” said Coach Adelson. “Been looking all over for you.”

  LeAnne, trying to maneuver her pole through the school bus door so she could get it safely laid down the center aisle before the rest of the team straggled up, turned to him. He was with a tall woman LeAnne didn’t know.