Minister Without Portfolio

by Michael Winter

  6

  They flew west to Toronto and then east to Frankfurt and south to Kabul. In the airport in Toronto they saw a woman with a golden retriever on her way back to Connecticut. John asked her about the dog—John will talk to anybody with a dog. She was bringing the dog to a family. She was blind and the dog was eleven years old and starting to fail, so the dog had to go and she would get another dog in two weeks. But she was heartbroken about the dog.

  The only thing interesting about the Frankfurt airport was a ceramic fly that told you where to point your stream of piss in the urinals.

  Tender Morris met them at the airport in Kabul. He was in a green jeep called an Iltis. I’m to escort you to barracks, he said. Tender a tall, rangy man with red hair and long, involved tattoos. His real name was Patrick, but he’d been called Tender since high school—he’d been their hockey goalie. You’ll stay where the tradespeople camp out, Tender said. A secure area, inside the wire. A separate facility from the army station but protected by our Canadian compound. He smacked the steering wheel hard when he said protected. Beds are better, food is better, wages: better. So fuck you and fuck your benefits. I’ll tell you the one thing before you get all superior on me: you’re not as safe. Tender’s eyes patrolling the small houses and gates and vast blank areas of sand and rock and garbage. He was a reservist who volunteered for combat and was enjoying every minute of it. He was alive. On the safety issue I got to show you something, he said. Under your seat, John.

  John pulled out a heavy padded envelope. Inside, wrapped in clear bubblepack, the shapes of flat heavy things. John tore off the tape. Two dull metallic Sig Sauer automatic pistols slipped onto his lap.

  I couldn’t find ammo and I want those back when you go home, Tender said.

  The gun was heavier than it looked and Henry shoved it in his jacket pocket and made sure the velcro flap was sealed.

  Tender drove them into Kabul. There was a pig’s head on the ground beside a shaded cart and boys on skateboards zipped through the white rubble of an old government building. Tender drove through this into a quieter neighbourhood with high metal gates and the tops of established trees, their leaves covered in dust. He stopped the jeep behind a line of new black cars and climbed out and rapped on a gate made of galvanized metal. It was very loud. The sun was just setting. A rusted slit opened in the gate and Tender told them he had two civilians who’d like to eat. They’re looking for Chinese food, a voice said, just the top of a lip available at the slit in the gate. The gate pulled open and they walked into a cement courtyard. Razorwire on the walls. The lip of the man was not there.

  Look, Tender said, and took Henry in a headlock and rubbed his head. I heard about Nora. This is a good spot to forget about Nora.

  I need to get her out of my head too, John said.

  You, Tender said, have to be good.

  The building was stucco and inside it suddenly got dark, men at small tables with white tablecloths, a music in the walls, men from various non-governmental agencies and tourists, Tender said. There were guns on the table. Two men studying the steel tang in a big knife, passing it back and forth almost in wonder as to how the metal got in there. A string of lamps shone over a buffet table with stainless steel trays full of vegetables and meat. The light bounced in a dazzle off the food but the food itself was dead. Around the buffet were perhaps a dozen Chinese women in tight tops with bare arms collecting white plates. They had red bows around their necks that somehow kept their dark hair pinned up and they were listlessly bending over the food to prepare the plates and then delivering these plates into corners of the darkness with some accelerated urgency.

  They took a table near the back wall by a hall to what was the washrooms and one of the servers came over. Her fingers touched the edge of the table. In English that was both bright and bored: What would you like, a drink? She was wearing a simple black and white outfit and you saw her midriff directly in front of your eyes—there was a lively rhinestone stuck to the bellybutton—and her shoulders were bare and a number of buttons undone at the cleavage. She was serving the food and opening up tabs on cans of beer and glasses of crushed ice and soda and small plastic bottles of hard liquor like you get on an airplane.

  This man here needs a full service, Tender said about Henry. And we’re his friends who will take care of his bill.

  I might need a little dessert, John said. Tender shoved him. Or watch some dessert.

  They ate and drank and Henry asked about the barracks and Tender said it was not a problem.

  They were all suddenly ravenous and they ordered more food. The crushed ice and little bottles kept arriving. The ice was almost the same as the ice of home but there was no doubting that everything was different here. The air rubbed the surfaces of things in a different way. He slammed her with a beginner’s zeal, John whispered. There was a burr to everything. Henry drank his drink and another little bottle arrived and the screw caps required elbow work. The cap she is very small. Henry, the next day, could only remember being led down that hallway past the washrooms where the quality of the paint and the cleanliness of things seemed to become less interested in convincing you the establishment was high grade. There was music in a grate. Lie down here, sir. A ceiling and the top of a heavy curtain that he guessed covered a window. Perhaps it gave you the comfort of a window but there was no window. He was taken care of on a rubber mattress and a cloth on his belly and then his friends brought him back to the jeep and the compound and to a bed with a thin camping mattress, the sun was already hanging over the low, flat city.

  7

  Rick Tobin came over for the first three months. He was part of a larger contingent—SNC-Lavalin—that repaired water and sewage and revamped wiring and took care of waste management for the Canadian forces even as they were participating in the draw-down of operations at Camp Julien. They provide warehousing, Rick said. Transportation, bulk fuel management, vehicle maintenance, food services, communication services, electricity, water supply and distribution.

  Rick used up all his fingers and he hadn’t even gotten to the Nepalese who took care of the cooking and cleaning.

  Everything, he said, to operate this facility and maintain it.

  Rick Tobin, believe it or not, was also a mini-soccer coach. He organized Afghan and Nepalese children on the army base, and dribbled out free soccer balls inflated by his own tire pump he’d packed in his checked baggage.

  They had to wait to use the computers to skype home. It was one of the services the trades and soldiers shared. Tender was talking to his girlfriend, Martha Groves. Stripped to his waist with dogtags on his collarbones, a tattoo of some kind across the back of his neck, Tender sat with other soldiers in the dark at blue screens manoeuvring the cursor over to the panels that allowed their loved ones to see their faces. John Hynes sat next to him, his face turned from concentration on figuring out the connection to a relief at seeing the top of his son’s head too close to the built-in camera, Silvia grabbing at Clem’s shoulders to get him and Sadie steady and then all of them synchronized to a connection no longer staggered. Tender’s girlfriend on the screen now, a beauty. The beauty came from a confidence to be on a screen projected over eight thousand miles. Henry knew Martha. She was a physiotherapist—that’s how Tender met her, a hockey injury. She wasn’t from St John’s, was she. No, she didn’t know Colleen and Silvia and Nora the way they knew each other from school. But they had included her. How vulnerable they all looked sitting on steno chairs at the little booths inside the tent that reminded Henry of a time when he took John’s kids, Clem and Sadie, to a jumpy castle.

  You want to grab this one after me, Tender said.

  It’s okay, Henry said.

  Say hello to Martha.

  Hello Martha.

  She waved at Henry while she looked a little up, into the green dot he guessed that made sure you were being screened properly. My god, Henry thought, how can it be I have no one to talk to.

  THE TOILETS WERE AT the fa
r end of the compound and these too were prefabricated and there were instructions in several languages about how to sit on the toilet and how to keep the toilet clean. Henry Hayward realized that these two sections of the compound were the most important to keep functional. Although bedding was crucial and the canteen too. But you did not think of these because there was enough to eat and the cots were adequate.

  The screen and the toilet were the furniture he would sorely miss if he were off compound overnight or on an extended sortie. If he was a soldier. Of course he did not have to worry about this, he was a subcontractor with Rick servicing the structure put in place by SNC-Lavalin. He had to push tubes full of wiring through tunnels in the ground and thread them under rivers to connect up the busted grid and listen to sonar equipment for a clear contact. But they did all sorts of work. One time they had to rewire an Afghan house. He was surprised at how modern the house was, there was not a traditional bone in its body. He was with John and Rick one afternoon when they had to cut through a door with a reciprocating saw and enter a hallway while Tender Morris, attached to their civilian unit, kept a lookout for Taliban. Got your pistols, he said. There were tea sets and some plates and small pieces of furniture that looked like they had been handed down from someone old but the rest of the infrastructure was brand spanking new. A set of particleboard bunkbeds and three teenaged Afghan boys in windbreakers dancing to a stereo and playing bongos and electric keyboard.

  8

  They worked through the spring and into the hot summer until there was trouble in the southern provinces and, after a security assessment from Ottawa, funding was restricted for the services Rick Tobin provided. A civilian support worker had been killed in a rocket attack. They were violating the mandate, Rick Tobin said, that they be used in a stable environment. It was the first of July and the minister of defence had flown into the base to celebrate Canada Day and told them directly their revised plans. The minister had served wild turkey burgers and hotdogs from a train of barbecues with red maple leaf flags on toothpicks punched into the buns. He was celebrating the draw-down in troop allocations as if this was something to be positive about. It was one of those ceremonial dinners where the minister makes sure the national papers have photographed him wearing a festive apron while doling out maple-custard ice cream.

  The minister explained to Rick that their contract was being adapted to meet the desire of operational deployment. We have to achieve mission success while operating within an imposed troop ceiling, the minister said. Certain hybrid situations for support trades were being considered. Would they ride with the military? Dressed and armed for robust situations?

  What do you think about that, Rick said to them. He had John and Henry alone in a bubble corridor. Either that, or we go home.

  Henry Hayward looked at John. You have to live on the edge, John. Or you’re taking too much room.

  Easy for you to say, John said. He was serious. You don’t have kids.

  Henry had never heard John play this card before. And he didn’t like how humourless he was. But they got on board. The powers that be pencilled in Rick’s request and that’s how they lingered on at Camp Julien. Tender Morris thought it hilarious that they would be coming out on patrols after they did small arms training and a twenty-day soldier qualification course. You have to be issued new apparel, Tender said. And a beret that needs shaping. Tender showed them how to do the shaping.

  You get a razor, he said, and you shave all that fuzz off. Use a single-blade razor and draw it over the inside and the outside. Do it lightly. Now, put the beret on and pull the string so it’s snug. Tie it off and cut the strings at the knot.

  John: Why not burn the strings?

  Tender: Trust me you don’t want fire next to a beret. Now you’re ready to shape it. Put it on and hop in the shower. Turn the water on warm and just let it run over your head. No stay in there. Ten minutes. Okay get out now and dry off, here’s a towel. Keep the beret on. Let it dry on your head. Keep pulling it over and combing it down. Leave it on until suppertime. And keep it in that shape, don’t fold it or flatten it.

  I’m going to wet mine and put it under my mattress overnight.

  Tender Morris: Wet it and blowdry it. You can shave it close and put it in the freezer, that works too.

  John: Then tie it and burn off the strings down to the knot?

  Jesus no fire. Shave it until it’s flimsy but don’t get any bare spots.

  Tender showed them how. John stood in the doorway with his wet beret on his head, pointing it at the sun.

  It’s like wearing a solar panel on your head.

  You got to remember, guys, it’s an ongoing process.

  Why not use a straight razor.

  Soldier, this is a don’t ask don’t tell army.

  It doesn’t matter if the razor was straight or not, girl.

  I use a razor that cuts both ways.

  What about a grill lighter.

  Your beret will stink.

  They received ammo and a clip for their Sig Sauers. They started going out in the jeep.

  9

  Kabul River runs from the mountains of the Hindu Kush into Pakistan, north of the Khyber Pass, where it joins the Indus River and then flows south to the seaport of Karachi. Halfway through its drift to the sea the river weaves into the city of Kabul where women bring baskets of washing and crouch in its water. Tender drove into the river, almost dry in the late summer, and up past the ruined shell of Darul Aman Palace. He gunned it around the refurbished Ghazi stadium where buzkashi competitions used to be held in the traditional days and then, when the Taliban were in power, a woman was shot in the head on the perimeter of the eighteen-yard box in front of thirty thousand spectators. Henry remembered that footage. She had killed her husband. The surface of the field was being removed now by heavy equipment as though the soil had been contaminated and new artificial turf installed and soon men with artificial legs will run here and wheelchair basketball was occurring in a cement court nearby. There are women training to be amateur boxers.

  They drove through a refugee camp and parked the jeep and children ran up to them. Rick had long wiggly balloons. He threw out a soccer ball and it bounced towards Nasem, a man Rick could trust to oversee the ball and make sure the kids shared it. The tents were set up with canvas tarps over ridge poles, the walls fired mud brick three feet high and the tarps held down with boulders tied to stays. There was a blue hand-drawn sign telling you the tribes that were in the camp. Nearby a well that was just a pipe coming out of the ground. Several families with blue plastic containers. A man carried a tower of twenty-two bricks in a tether on his back, he was hauling them out of a chalk field where lay the shells of old Soviet tanks. A brightly painted truck was covered in dust.

  They overtook bicycles and tricycle handcarts made with wooden wheels and had to show their papers to an anti-mortar platoon. Sheet metal workers hammered tin for portable stoves. A kiosk with a man braziering meat and waving a big woven straw fan in the shape of a hatchet fed the stove little slats of wood from fruit crates. Tender stopped the jeep here to eat. There was a café with open windows to the street, a brocaded tapestry of a freedom fighter on the cement wall. The air smelled of toasted sesame seeds. A boy who had survived a landmine and had no arms begged for money. Their kebabs came on an aluminum plate with naan bread in the shape of a split fish. The people here knew Tender.

  We need greenery, John said. I need to rinse the dust out of my ears.

  I’ll take you over to Lake Qargha. We can drive through Shakar Darah—you’ll love that valley, Tender said. It’s a bit like home.

  Out of the dry chalky desert rose a plain that Tender had visited many times, a valley of lush green unlike anything Henry had ever seen in Newfoundland—Tender must be out of his mind. The jeep descended into the green and the humidity rose like a soft moist brush against the face. There were flowers here and an oasis of green that the mind encouraged to creep over the land, to perhaps—in some wild biology
—be released across the homeland of the soul. We’re here to assist, Henry thought. He could not articulate the idea, but he felt a compulsion to counter the devastation he had been witnessing on the ground. Tender yanked on the handbrake.

  10

  They came upon Americans doing recon—they knew they would intersect them in the morning—and they compared themselves to these units. Tender was annoyed at the marines, how they don’t wear unit patches. The only patch a marine needs, Tender said, is the anchor, globe and eagle. That screams elite. And John Hynes hollered this out into the hot thin desert air. Yes sir, the self-centred, cocky, overbearing marine!

  Tender: And the marine recruiters, they all wear dress uniform to international events.

  Landpower, baby!

  Tender Morris: The professional ethos of the corps.

  What does the corps sell?

  All three of them with fingers in the air: Commitment, honour, integrity!

  John: And elitism.

  No education, no bonus.

  Go pound sand, man.

  It sets them off from the air force at least.

  Who show up in coveralls.

  More fingers: Many are called but few are chosen.

  You left out the thousand and one ways to annoy everybody in the room with grand tales of how great the marines are.