The Valley

by John Renehan

  Black looked at the tall sergeant folded awkwardly into the small chair, legs out straight before him, boots crossed at the ankles, eyes to the mountains.

  “Where’d you hear that?” he asked Merrick.

  “The people in the Meadows.”

  “Oh.”

  Merrick turned to him.

  “And you said it.”

  He eyed Black closely.

  “Laying on your ass in the woods.”

  He said nothing more. Just looked.

  Black dropped his gaze and told him about the wall.

  —

  He told Merrick how the soldiers at Xanadu, whoever they were, had obviously been tolerating the growers while they tried to stop foreign fighters coming in. Until someone somewhere got tired of all the hassle, of being unable to control a critical piece of geography, and came up with the idea of the wall.

  Told how the growers were cut off right along with the fighters and all the other growers in the Valley. How the growers flipped sides. How they massed forces with the Taliban and obliterated Xanadu.

  And how the wall stayed. How no one could punch through it. How the growers of the Valley must have made a new deal with their new allies to move their product.

  But someone else in the Valley found out about the wall. About Xanadu.

  “How?”

  Black looked away.

  “I don’t know.”

  Caine knew the growers’ predicament, but he couldn’t have known about their new arrangement. He was the reason the growers in the Meadow burned their fields that night.

  “To get out from under his shakedown,” Merrick said flatly.

  The Darreh Sin growers were getting double-shook down, by an American and by the Americans’ enemies. The American didn’t know it, and the growers couldn’t tell him. Their backs were against the wall, and their chief’s back was against the wall.

  And then Pistone. The last thing that nobody could take, on top of every other thing.

  Merrick sat in silence, his cup sending tendrils of steam into the cool air. Finally he shook his head.

  “No,” he said flatly. “The whole Valley, all those freaking tribes with their feuds and all their bullshit, they don’t all team up to take us out just because some nobody and his son get shot somewhere.”

  Black watched the coils rise from his own coffee.

  “The boy,” he said, “was the thing that made it all come apart.”

  They slurped somberly at their warm cups and shivered in the breeze spilling out of the passes and across the plain and chilling them where they sat.

  Merrick watched the disc of the sun creep downward toward the mountaintops.

  “Who the hell comes up with a fucking wall across a valley?”

  Black watched it too.

  “People very high up the food chain.”

  He cradled his coffee against the breeze.

  “In more than one country.”

  Merrick scowled and sipped and set his cup on the tabletop, planting his feet flat on the deck beneath him and crossing his arms.

  Black eyed him.

  “That’s why you kept the O.P. guys in lockdown when they came back to the FOB.”

  Merrick nodded gruffly.

  “No Americans east of Darreh Sin.”

  Officially.

  Soldiers trudged past in both directions, going about their business, alone and in pairs, rifles slung over their backs as they made for the chow hall or the M.W.R. or the gym or their hootches. The day rhythm of the FOB was turning to night.

  Merrick uncrooked an arm and took a sip of coffee. He set it back down and extended his long legs in front of him, recrossing his arms against the chill. His eyes fell to a distant universe floating in the air over the ends of his boots.

  “Pistone . . .” he murmured.

  He looked out at the mountains, then looked down again. When he spoke his voice was run through with bitterness.

  “Made an asshole of me,” he said. “Both of them.”

  Black sipped at his own coffee and set it down. The sun hung just above the line of the ridges.

  “I didn’t suspect Pistone either,” he said finally. “Until Corelli told me.”

  Merrick turned on him sharply.

  “Yeah, well, you didn’t work with Pistone every day,” he spat. “Guy walked around right in front of me and I didn’t know jack.”

  He shook his head in disgust.

  “The people even tried to tell me.”

  “What?”

  “The fucking civilians. In the Meadows.”

  He drifted into memory.

  “Said the Devil isn’t gonna take any more of their babies.”

  They both considered that.

  A Humvee rumbled by on a dirt road behind the market. Its noise faded, leaving the two of them staring at their cups.

  “Fucking nothing was right since that night,” Merrick muttered. “I knew it, but nobody would say dick.”

  Black waited for more, but Merrick didn’t offer it.

  “That’s why you tried to scare me off,” he said finally.

  Merrick scowled at the deck, his gaze boring a hole in the wood before his feet. When he finally spoke it was as though to himself, with defiance.

  “I was working it.”

  He exhaled heavily and shook his head, eyes to the deck.

  “Never even found out who he had helping him move his shit down the Valley.”

  Black looked away and studied the contours of his cup. Merrick seemed distracted and didn’t notice.

  Black had realized something, though he doubted Merrick wanted to hear it. He said it anyway.

  “I would’ve done stuff the same way.”

  “Well, then you’d be an idiot,” Merrick shot back angrily. “I let my senior squad leader and my lieutenant make a fool of me. I didn’t know what was going on in my fucking platoon.”

  He stood and stalked across to the railing at the edge of the deck, hands crammed in his pockets. He glared at the mountains and watched as the entire disc of the sun dipped below the ridges.

  It seemed to grow instantly colder as the sun disappeared. Black wished he’d brought something thicker to wear.

  Merrick spoke, facing the mountains.

  “None of them came to me.”

  Black looked up.

  “Not one.”

  He looked down at his half cup of chalky coffee and decided to tell the truth.

  “They respected you.”

  Merrick turned around, eyes narrow, the sunset panorama framed behind him.

  “Screw off.”

  “Shannon said you didn’t need to be burdened with knowing about the Meadows or any of the rest of it.”

  “That’s fucking stupid,” Merrick said bitterly. “Fucking Shannon.”

  “Shannon worships you.”

  “Shannon’s dead.”

  He went out by himself, Merrick said, to cut Caine down from the tree.

  “Against my orders,” he added.

  He came back and slumped into his chair, dark clouds roiling his brow.

  He took up his coffee roughly, sipped it, frowned, and set it back down. Black tasted his own, which was also cold.

  People passed by in the fading light. Merrick’s eyes drifted again, to the same invisible point. A minute passed in silence.

  When Merrick spoke it was in a growl, through nearly clenched teeth.

  “I tried to beat that fucker.”

  Black looked up. Merrick, his bitter gaze fixed in the distance, shook his head in disgust.

  “I tried my hardest to beat his ass.”

  Black’s brow furrowed.

  “You did beat him.”

  Someone else just . . .

 
; Merrick looked up at him, scowling. He shook his head.

  Black didn’t understand.

  “Caine didn’t get killed on the way to the station,” Merrick stated flatly. “He got killed on the way back from it.”

  Black asked him how he knew that. Merrick told him. There was little else to say.

  They drained the last of their gray coffees and rapped on the door. Kourash let them through, and Merrick wheeled Black back through the gravel and along the dirt pathways, back to Charlie Med.

  Black climbed onto his bed. Merrick watched him silently, hands in his pockets.

  “The thing that happened with your last platoon,” he said finally.

  Black looked up in surprise. Merrick looked at the floor.

  “The way it was in the papers and stuff. Was that how it went down?”

  “Yeah.”

  Merrick opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. He crossed his arms then shoved his hands in his pockets again. When he finally spoke it was in a voice with little comfort.

  “Maybe stuff in life balances out in the end.”

  Black said nothing and looked down at his sheets.

  Merrick turned to go, then stopped as though remembering something. He turned around and looked at Black.

  “They found Doc Brydon’s body in the Taj Mahal while you were out running around the Valley.”

  Black watched his own hands smooth the sheets.

  “Shot himself in the face. You know anything about that?”

  “No.”

  Merrick left. Black reached into his pocket and removed Jason Traynor’s ID card. He sat staring at it.

  49

  Only one other visitor came in the days before Black was discharged from Charlie Med.

  He came in wordlessly and sat down on a stool, facing Black. He put his hands in his lap and smiled at Black serenely, onyx eyes shining behind his spectacles.

  He sat like that a full minute, just looking.

  Finally Black let out an exasperated breath.

  “What is this?” he asked. “You’re gonna put the whammy on me?”

  His visitor said nothing.

  “Okay, fine. Don’t talk. You don’t have to. You can sit there smiling and listen.”

  His visitor just kept smiling.

  “You screwed up,” Black said, to no discernible reaction.

  He waited a moment and went on.

  “You left me your signed confession.”

  His visitor blinked once but otherwise sat rock still.

  “I know why you carried it with you,” Black pressed. “It’s your goddamned talisman.”

  “I want it.”

  The soft voice startled him. It made his skin crawl.

  “Fuck you,” Black said sharply. “You won’t have it, and you won’t find it.”

  He looked at the pale hands, clasped gently in his visitor’s lap. Then up at his eyes.

  “I know who you are,” Black said. “You’re a damned legend in the Valley.”

  The eyes beamed and burned, examining Black.

  Black leaned forward.

  “I know you by name.”

  The smile was gone, giving way to an unnameable expression. His visitor leaned forward as well, his face close to Black’s, his eyes searching the air as though he were listening very closely for something, and spoke a single word, hardly more than a whisper.

  “Try.”

  He sat back, and the beatific smile returned. He rose, placing a small metal object on the side table, shining eyes on Black.

  Pistone left quietly, without another word.

  Black picked it up. It was a metal dog tag reading WILLIAM BRYDON.

  50

  There were camps for when you were going in, and camps for when you were coming out. You’d go through one at the beginning of a deployment, the other at the end of one.

  They were basically the same place. Sprawling tracts of land in the Kuwaiti desert, cordoned off with walls, inside each one a momentary city of tents and temporary buildings and trailer-sized mock-ups of fast-food joints and prefab Americana, with gravel poured among the spaces.

  The difference was that one type of camp was filled with people contemplating their mortality while they waited for word that it was their unit’s turn to move forward to Iraq or Afghanistan. The other was filled with people enjoying the pleasant surprise of being still alive and wondering what to do with the rest of their lives.

  This one was the camp for people coming out. It was a place to spend a couple days eating free chow, showering, visiting the telephone bank or Internet café, and staring out at the desert as you waited to be called for the flight home. Most of the people on this camp were on their way from Iraq, which suited him just fine.

  Few paid him much notice. This was a place of jostling anonymity where many traveled alone, and where as a rule no one’s business was anyone’s business. No one except the proprietors of this particular camp’s Green Beans Coffee trailer noticed that he had been roaming its avenues and byways for three weeks and change, which was much longer than the usual stay.

  He hung a towel over the bar of his bunk, the lower one at the far end of a long row. It was one of the standard grab-a-rack units they sent you to when you arrived at the camp.

  The morning sun was already high as he emerged. He padded along in loafers, backpack slung over one shoulder, across the gravel toward what he thought of as the town square.

  Up the steps to the coffee trailer, hello to the Green Beans guys, this crew from Bangladesh, then back out again with a steaming cup and across the way to the U.S.O. tent. He pulled open the door and paused just inside, as he always did, to give his eyes time to adjust to the dark. No boots or shoes allowed; you left them in cubbies just inside the entrance and went in your socks.

  On the outside the Camp Alabama U.S.O. tent was your usual stark-white half-pipe semi-permanent FOB tent, maybe fifty feet high and a hundred long. On the inside was a bit of dimly lit deployment genius.

  Table lamps sprawled next to leather couches across the carpeted floor. Soft cubby areas and carpeted platforms were built against the walls; soldiers snored away. In the center a raised platform housed a self-serve café with coffee and water, ringed by a black iron railing with streetlamps casting pools of light on the tables.

  One far corner of the building was cordoned off with cubicle walls creating a miniature movie theater. Another contained banks of computer terminals. He took his coffee and headed for these.

  He found a terminal situated such that his back would be to the corner and slumped down into the chair, dropping his pack to the floor by his feet and cracking his coffee lid open to take some of the scald off of it. He logged in and waited for his e-mail to bring him that morning’s entry in a running correspondence.

  Re: RE: re: re: re: re: Stuff

  Why didn’t you tell Sergeant Merrick about Billy?

  He put the lid back on his cup and typed.

  Billy didn’t deserve that.

  He sipped his coffee and stared at the screen.

  He knew what it was to be a ghost. Let his ghost rest where it belongs.

  He sent the message and cracked his knuckles. He knew his correspondent was waiting, on the other side of the planet and many hours away, for his message and would write back. While he waited he reached into his backpack and came out with a paperback novel about a part-time Israeli assassin with too much baggage who just wants to quit and spend his time restoring the paintings of Christian Renaissance masters.

  The reply came back a couple minutes later.

  You don’t believe in ghosts. At least you don’t think you do.

  Do you really think it’s your place to decide whether his parents deserve the truth? Didn’t you tell me once that you deserved the truth regardless of what it was? Isn’t that what yo
u said to Dad?

  His little sister had stopped seeming so little a long time ago. He stared at the screen deciding what to say in response when a follow-up message came in.

  Sorry. Don’t answer that.

  [Hold on, getting more coffee.]

  Following her lead, he went and warmed up his own coffee at the streetlamp café and came back to see what else she had sent.

  Do you really think Private Corelli might still be alive?

  He hit REPLY and typed one sentence.

  I will find out.

  He hit SEND and went back to his book. In this installment of the Israeli spy’s adventures, he had managed to befriend a pope.

  The mail flashed a reply.

  Try to rest first, okay BB? The people who can look are looking.

  “BB” stood for “big brother.” He hit REPLY.

  I sent him out there.

  He didn’t know what else to say, so he sent it. The reply came quickly.

  Okay, BB, signing off for tonight. I wish you would talk to somebody else (I know, not my business) but I’m glad you’re telling me at least.

  Are you sure you should be talking about this stuff over email?

  —LS

  “Little sister.” He punched a quick response.

  No one’s listening. Have a good night.

  —BB

  He closed his e-mail and sat staring out at the dimly humming tent. In the movie theater enclosure next door a high-performance motorcycle screamed through the fourth or fifth installment of an action series featuring endless road chases and improbable kung fu.

  He closed the novel and tossed it back into his backpack. He rose and took several steps toward the door before stopping, shaking his head at himself irritably.

  His baby sister, he decided, not for the first time, was too wise for her own good.

  He trudged back to the terminal, pack sloughing to the floor again, and went back online to his e-mail folder.

  The old message was still in his inbox. The one from before he ever went to Vega.

  He stared at the message for a long time before opening the folder where he kept his saved e-mail drafts. When he was recuperating at Charlie Med, he’d had Cousins wheel him to the S-1 shop so he could get on the computer and cancel the e-mail he’d set to automatically send if he hadn’t returned from COP Vega in ten days. The draft was still in the folder.