by John Renehan
“Me.”
“How come?”
“I’m going up there tomorrow night.”
“Bullshit. You don’t go nowhere.”
It wasn’t an insult. Toma was just pointing out the truth.
“I’ve got a fifteen-six at a COP up there.”
“Okay, you got a fifteen-six. So?”
“You’ve been up there.”
“Bullshit.”
“Bullshit, ‘bullshit.’ I know you’ve been up there.”
Black did not actually know Toma had been to the Valley, but he assumed that before he’d taken the master gunner gig on the FOB, a guy with Toma’s experience and qualifications had been dropping artillery rounds and calling air strikes all up and down those mountains.
“How you know that?” Toma asked, squinting.
Black put on his best conspiratorial grin.
“I know more about you than you think.”
It was a lame and risky thing to say with Toma, but he laughed.
“Bullshit. You’re guessing. So what if I was up there?”
Black wasn’t really sure what he wanted from Toma. It wasn’t like he needed some special piece of gear to hunker down in an outpost and stay out of the way for a week. He didn’t have anything Toma needed, and he didn’t pretend that he and Toma were friends.
He mostly just wanted to see what Toma had to say. Toma’s opinions of junior officers were quick and arbitrary, but for whatever reason he seemed to have decided that Black was one of the okay ones. In the past he’d always been cool.
“I don’t know, man. Maybe just if there’s anything I need to know.”
Toma considered.
“Sucks,” he concluded.
“Yeah, I figured. What else?”
Toma considered further.
“What’s the fifteen-six on?”
Black gave the ten-second version. Angry crowd-type situation; warning shots. According to his paperwork, somebody in the village had given an earful to an Army Civil Affairs officer—Toma snorted at hearing this—who was passing through town on a goodwill mission. He put the complaint into the system, and the 15-6 came out the other side.
Toma took this all in, sitting staring at the wall for so long that Black almost asked him if he was okay. Finally he spoke.
“What town?”
Black scanned his memory.
“I think it’s called Darreh Sin.”
“Never been to that one,” Toma said tersely. “You gonna see the chief?”
“The who?”
“The chief,” Toma said, exasperated. “The town chief. Jesus, cuz, you been on the FOB a long time.”
“Why am I seeing the chief?”
“Somebody complained, right? Somebody from the town complained to the Civil Affairs fag. That’s the chief.”
“How do you know?”
“Civil Affairs dude is gonna be a captain or higher. Town chief is the guy that would make a formal complaint to an American officer.”
“Okay.”
“But he ain’t gonna talk to anyone lower than a captain now,” Toma explained. “Beneath his station or whatever.”
Black was confused.
“Okay, so the chief complained to some American,” he said. “Why do I need to talk to him?”
He’d been picturing your standard interview-the-soldiers-involved-and-write-it-up type of situation, not some kind of summit meeting with an Afghan chieftain.
“You need to talk to him so you can get the fuck out of the Valley.”
“I don’t get it.”
Toma pointed at him.
“I know your boss. Gayley, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Asshole Boy Scout.”
“So?”
“He ain’t gonna accept no write-up with just soldiers’ statements. He’s gonna expect Afghan statements too.”
Black hadn’t thought this far out.
“You radio in that you talked to the soldiers and they said everything was cool and tell him you’re done,” Toma went on, “and see what happens. That motherfucker is gonna keep you out there another week and tell you to do it right. Right?”
Toma was right, of course. Gayley had shown no signs of particular love or sympathy for the Afghan people, but he had a taut and highly refined sense of honor and an extreme concern for procedural niceties. When it came to avoiding at all costs the slightest appearance of impropriety, he was a card-carrying Goody Two-Shoes. Investigating a situation involving Afghan civilians without talking to the civilians themselves definitely would not fly. Gayley would expect him to run the thing all the way to the ground, no matter how trivial and silly.
“Right,” Black finally responded.
“So you’re fucked. Chief won’t talk to you.”
“Why?”
Toma pointed at Black’s chest.
Right. Lieutenant. Beneath his station.
“Okay, so the chief won’t talk to me. I find the guy whose house it was.”
“He won’t talk to you either.”
“Why not?”
“No one in the town is gonna talk to you without the chief’s permission, and he ain’t gonna give it. The Army sending a lieutenant is an insult to him after he complained to a captain.”
He raised his cigarette and lighter.
“No offense.”
Black considered all this.
“Okay, so what do I do?”
Toma hauled his bulk out of his chair, leaving his smoke behind.
He slumped over to a padlocked trunk in the corner, opening it with a key he wore on a chain with his dog tags. He came back and tossed a small paper-wrapped package at Black, who caught it with both hands.
It was oblong, five or six inches long, about the thickness of a two-by-four but with more heft. The paper was folded around it but not sealed. Black pulled it open.
Inside was a rectangular object wrapped in something like cellophane. It had a brown hue like wet sand. It looked like compressed clay.
Black had seen pictures before, but he stared at it for probably a full ten seconds before it clicked that he was looking at the real thing in his lap.
“A fucking brick of heroin?”
Toma had eased himself nonchalantly back into his chair.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Black demanded.
Toma lit up his smoke.
“For the chief.”
“What?”
“Straight money.”
“I don’t get it.”
Toma blew a long cloud into the room.
“Chief sees that, he knows you got the juice, even though you’re just an L.T. He’ll talk to you then.”
“What, so I’m supposed to sell the chief some heroin?”
“No, cuz.”
Toma shook his head, exasperated.
“It’s a present. Like a tribute. You ain’t gonna walk into the chief’s house and try to sell him one sorry-ass brick of heroin. He’ll laugh his ass off before he shoots you for wasting his fucking time and insulting him.”
Black tried to process. Toma continued.
“You go to him and you show him your respect and all that, and do it up good. You give him the brick like a gift, like you’re showing you know he’s the guy. Then he knows you’re for real too, you got access to shit, and you guys can do business.”
“I thought the poppies were pretty much gone from these mountains,” Black said. “Because of the Taliban.”
Toma looked pained and pitying all at once.
“Okay,” Black said, relenting. “So I give it to him and he thinks I wanna, what? Help him move heroin?”
“Probably. You think it ain’t happened? But don’t worry, you won’t have to make no deals or nothing.”<
br />
Toma took a long drag.
“He don’t need you for heroin. If he’s in the business, which if he lives in the Valley he is, he’s got all his poppies up in the hills and wherever. This is just a get-to-know-you. It’s a dance, going through the motions. You give him the gift and he figures out where you’re coming from. Figures maybe you can help keep the Taliban off his back over the heroin, right? Or just do some good trading for other stuff. Those dudes all want electronics and shit. Anyway, doesn’t matter. You play nice and say how you wanna see him again in the near future and all that.”
“Okay.”
“You won’t have to see him because you’ll be gone from the Valley by then,” Toma went on. “But you flirt with him, right? Then before you go, you say you wanted to talk about one other thing.”
“The complaint.”
“Right. Then you get his statement about the complaint. Probably he tones it down some because you guys are boys now, and you won’t have to investigate any more. Then you go back to Vega and you’re good to go. You turn in your paper to Gayley and he’s happy.”
He drew a smoky-handed flowchart in midair.
“Gayley sends it up to Brigade. Then the Civil Affairs pussy probably goes back out with a wad of cash for the dude with the goat and a wad for the dude with the bullet in his damn mud hut. Civil Affairs bro feels like a big shot. Gayley gets a medal for winning hearts and minds.”
He crossed his ankles and leaned back in his chair.
“Circle of life and shit.”
Black was shaking his head.
“What if the chief tells the Civil Affairs guy or someone from Vega about the brick?”
Toma looked at him like he was deeply stupid.
“Chief ain’t gonna tell on you.”
Black realized he was right. What on earth would the chief gain by doing that?
“It’s still crazy,” he said doubtfully. “I can’t go walking around with that kind of contraband on me.”
As soon as he remembered who he was saying it to, he felt foolish. Toma just looked annoyed. He pointed at Black.
“When was the last time someone stopped you on the FOB and searched your shit, L.T.?”
Black said nothing.
“When was the last time someone made you open your ruck and your duffel and do a layout like you’re a soldier?”
“Okay, I got it.”
“Look, cuz, you do what you want. I’m just saying, you can take it with you, like insurance.”
He took a pull on his smoke.
“If you puss out and don’t use it, just toss it in the river before you come home.”
“You don’t want it back?” Black asked.
“What the fuck I want a brick of heroin for?”
“I don’t know, I just—”
“You think I’m fucking dealing?”
“No, man, I just . . .”
Black changed the subject.
“Where’d you get it anyway?”
“Don’t worry about it. But I didn’t fucking buy it and I wasn’t going to fucking sell it, all right?”
“All right.”
He put up his hands. Mercy.
“I just thought you might need it sometime like you’re telling me to use it,” he said.
“I don’t go noplace now, L.T. You know that.”
Black wrapped the thing back up and felt its weight in both hands.
Hell with it.
He put it in his jacket pocket and stood up.
“All right. Thanks, Smoke.”
He used the artillery honorific for the senior sergeant in a howitzer platoon. Toma hadn’t been a platoon sergeant for a lot of years, but the name stuck. The only kind of people who called him Sergeant Toma were straight-arrow commanders who didn’t know the difference between a supply sergeant and an acquisition specialist anyway. To anybody who knew him he was Smoke.
“You got it.”
Meeting adjourned. Black headed for the door.
“Hey, L.T.”
Black stopped.
Toma had come back from his trunk with a second object, which had been sitting in his lap the whole time. He turned in his chair and tossed it over his shoulder to Black.
It was a little black canvas zip case, small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. Black reached for the zipper pull that ran around the outside of it.
“Just take it.”
Black slid the case into his jacket pocket, giving Toma a squinty Okaaayyy look.
Toma blew another cloud and settled back into his chair, turning away from Black.
“‘I know more about you than you think,’” he said in the same mock-conspiratorial tone Black had used on him. “Will.”
Black let himself out.
He walked, hand on the brick in his pocket, the Valley and its possibilities forking out before him. He was so distracted he’d gone halfway back across the FOB before he realized he had forgotten his other stop. He checked his watch.
It was getting late, but he knew by then that sleep was not going to come anytime soon. He turned and trudged back the way he’d come.
This one would be a quick stop. He veered off into a sparsely populated flatland of motor pools and maintenance sheds.
He found the hootch he was looking for, behind a shipping container at the end of a squat line of hovels. As always, a scratchy recording of classical strings swelled from within and spilled out across the storage rows and parking areas.
Black banged loud enough to be heard over the music.
“Yeah!” came the voice from inside.
He pulled open the plywood door and looked in at the violinmaker of Gandamak.
“Hey, L.T., whatcha doin’?”
The violinmaker sat behind a worktable facing the door. Her hootch was dark except for the warm pool of light from her work lamp, illuminating her hands and her wood.
“Hey, sorry to bug you.”
“No sweat. What’s up?”
Black stepped in. A vinyl record player spun in the corner, linked to modern speakers.
The violinmaker was an odd one. The craft had been in her family literally for four or five generations, going back to Italy. Only sons had known it, but she had no brothers and had started learning the trade from her father when she was a teenager.
She’d been in the Army for ten years now, a staff sergeant and a medic. She brought her wood and her tools on every deployment. She had a good situation this time around, working graveyards at “Charlie Med,” the base’s emergency hospital.
Black knew she worked a couple hours every night before going on shift. She hunched over her table shaving wood in boots, T-shirt, and fatigue pants, hair back into a tight bun, ready to go on shift except for the camouflage coat, which hung on a hook near the door.
He felt bad taking her from her work.
“Hey, I’m just taking a trip and I was hoping to get some new stuff.”
“Where you going?”
“Valley.”
“Fuckin’ A.”
“Yeah. Whatta ya got?”
“Whatta ya like?”
“I like this.”
A brace of violins pulled a chord across a darkening sky, carrying it to night. Lower strings surged from oceans below. He heard tones of deep orange over black horizons.
“Ralph Vaughan Williams. He was English.”
“What is it?”
“Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.”
“Cool.”
“The snobs didn’t like him.”
“Got it on digits?”
The military required its own slang for many ordinary things. He meant: on your computer?
“Of course.”
“I’ll take it.”
Black pulled a little memor
y stick from his pocket and tossed it across to her. She caught it and thumbed it into her laptop computer, clicking open her own vast digital music library.
“What else?” she asked.
“How about more like this?”
“Nothing’s like this.”
“Surprise me. You know my tastes.”
“Pedestrian?”
“Har.”
A few years before, Black had tossed all of the music he had grown up listening to into the trash and started from scratch. The violinmaker was filling out some of his horizons.
She clicked a number of files and dumped them onto the flash drive.
“I saw you at chow tonight with your book,” she said to her computer as she worked. “You shoulda come over.”
Army people always assumed if you were reading a book you’d rather have company.
“Next time,” Black said, though he knew better than to do that to the violinmaker when she was with her pals. To make her be seen associating with him.
She tossed the flash drive back at Black, who thanked her and stuffed it back in his pocket.
“No sweat. See ya later, L.T.”
“You too.”
“But not at Charlie Med. Stay low.”
Black gave a grim laugh and left her to her work.
Back at his hootch he tossed the memory stick onto his bunk next to a pocket-size music player and headphones. He pulled the brick out of his jacket and set it on a shelf in the corner, on top of a leatherbound book with a title in Latin.
He still hadn’t opened the case Toma had given him. He pulled it out and unzipped it, surveying its contents briefly before closing it up again. He considered it for a long moment before tossing it onto his bunk too. He regarded the brick in turn, but left it where it sat and pulled his PTs back on. Ignoring his bed, he pushed through the door and disappeared into the night to run again.
He ran and ran.
5
He woke in midmorning after very little rest, feeling like he’d slept a year. He lay in his bunk and felt stillness. It felt familiar.
There was only one thing he really needed to accomplish, and there was no rush about that.
He took his time showering and walked the short distance to the market on his side of the FOB. He bought a pack of smokes at the little PX—the “post exchange,” or FOB store—and shoved them in his pocket without opening them. Afterward he sat for a long time with his book at the unfamiliar Green Beans Coffee stand there.