by Matt Dean
Chapter 6
In the small hours, they arrived at the patrol base. A marine stood guard outside an enormous gate the color of honeydew melon. Above him, stacked terraces—two corbeled slabs with iron railings all around—sat on pairs of concrete posts. A ten- or twelve-foot wall, also concrete, ran away on both sides.
Evans called from his turret—“Friendly, friendly”—but the guard barely seemed to care. Slack-jawed, he watched the Humvee roll to a stop.
Littlefield opened his door and got out. The dog stirred and whimpered. Lucky bitch—she’d had an hour’s solid sleep. He stroked her head and scratched her under the chin. She licked the palm of his hand.
Baker handed him a clipboard with a stack of papers on it. Tucking it under his arm, Littlefield knocked his door shut with one hip. Somewhere a windsock slapped the breeze.
The guard—one PFC Jones, according to his nametape and insignia—was puffing a lumpy hand-rolled cigarette. When he turned his head into the light of the Humvee’s headlamps, Littlefield spotted some brownish fuzz on the kid’s upper lip, more wishful thinking than mustache.
Littlefield said, “PRP from Dwyer.” Jones blinked slowly. “Personnel Retrieval and Processing? Mortuary Affairs?” Nothing. Littlefield wondered what the kid could be smoking, in addition to or instead of tobacco. “We’re here for—” He held the clipboard up to the light and scanned the page for the name of the deceased. Valery Lyubovich. Jesus. The fucking-with that poor chump must have endured in middle school, not to mention boot camp. “We’re here for Lance Corporal Lyubovich.”
Finally, Jones’s porch light came on. “For the body. Hold up.” Propping his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, he pounded on the gate. “Purdy!” he called. “Dude’s here for Lube Job.”
The green gate opened, and Purdy, also a PFC, stepped through. He waved the Humvee forward. “Thanks for coming out,” he said. “IED got him. Probably an old one. Been quiet ‘round here long as anyone can remember. The guys on patrol with him brought him back.” Purdy grimaced. “Well. Most of him.”
“Most of him?” Littlefield said.
“They couldn’t find— Well, follow me.”
They passed through the gate into a floodlit courtyard. A man came toward them, his boots crunching in the grit. Skinny. Bearded. Pre-MARPAT cammies. Dust-streaked black T-shirt. Civilian.
“Howdy,” he said, squinting and craning his neck forward. “Corporal Littlefield?”
Littlefield narrowed his eyes. “Have we met?”
The civilian shook his head and gestured toward Littlefield’s chest. “Saw your stripes and your name tape.” He stuck his hand out.
Chevrons, Littlefield thought, not stripes, but he kept his mouth shut. He shook the man’s hand. Big hand, firm grip.
“You guys’re PRP?”
“You know my name, sir, but I don’t know yours.”
“Jimmy La Flamme.” While he dug around in his hip pocket—whatever he was looking for, it wasn’t there—he mumbled something.
Littlefield cocked his head. “Sorry, I didn’t—”
“Hilo Free Weekly,” Purdy said. “That’s the paper he works for.”
“You’re an embed?” Littlefield said.
“Following up on a series I did in ‘oh-one,” La Flamme said. “Afghanistan: A Decade Later—that’s the gist of it. I happened to be on patrol with the guys when Lyubovich, you know—” He glanced at Purdy, cleared his throat. “I was wondering if I could”—he cleared his throat again—“observe.”
Littlefield turned toward the Humvee. Evans had gone around to the far side of the vehicle to take a leak. The dog poked her head out into the light and sniffed at the air. When she spotted Littlefield, her tongue lolled out of her mouth and her eyes brightened in an unmistakable display of doggy adoration. Baker stood with her legs and feet together, her arms steepled, her head thrown back, her spine arched. Even in boots and utes, she held the pose solidly and with grace, and Littlefield helplessly felt his dick start to pudge.
With no sound but the seething of Evans’s piss in the dust, the six of them, counting the dog, stood in a pair of dioramas. It occurred to Littlefield that they represented just about the entire range of animal endeavor—love, sex, death, exertion, excretion, and journalism. Give Purdy a sandwich, and it’d be a done deal.
La Flamme was snapping his fingers. “Hey, champ. Everything okay?”
“Sorry, sir,” Littlefield said, “I don’t think we can let you observe.”
Shrugging and putting out his hands—no harm, no foul—La Flamme backed wordlessly away. Littlefield and Purdy walked to the Humvee.
Nodding toward the dog, Purdy said, “Made a new friend, eh?”
“Found her in the road,” Littlefield said. “Maybe your corpsman—” Baker glared at him. “Where’s the angel?”
Purdy made a face.
“The body,” said Baker. “Lyubovich. Did you bring him back here?”
Purdy nodded. “This way.”
Baker pulled a cadaver pouch from the Humvee and followed Purdy. Littlefield grabbed a folded stretcher and hustled after them.
Purdy took them to a doorless storage room filled with wooden crates and flat-packed HESCOs. Four crates had been pushed together to form a makeshift bier for Lyubovich’s body. Someone had covered the dead man’s face with a red bandanna. His left foot and about half of his right leg were missing. The room was thick with the ferric smell of the man’s blood and the sour-sweet reek of bad meat.
Leaning the stretcher against the wall, Littlefield turned to Purdy, but Purdy had vanished. Littlefield found him outside, where he stood with his back to a concrete column and his forearm covering his nose and mouth. His eyes were wild.
Littlefield took the PFC’s elbow, spun him around, steered him out into the open. “Fuck, man, it’s tough the first time. You can’t prepare for it, not really, but I should’ve warned you.”
Purdy gulped the air. He moved his head oddly—not quite a nod, not quite a shake. Tears puddled at the corners of his eyes. “Fuuuu—”
“That about sums it up.”
Purdy blundered forward and puked.
Littlefield touched him lightly in the center of the back. “It’s okay,” he said. “Happens to everyone. I swear.”
Purdy held up his hand. “I’m fine.” He hawked and spat and hawked and spat again. “You can go back. I’m fine.”
Bending over beside Purdy, Littlefield said, “We’ll be bringing him right by here. Just so you know.”
Purdy nodded. Littlefield moved away.
In the storage room, Baker had shoved crates together, building a second bier parallel to the first, and she’d unrolled the stretcher and spread out the cadaver pouch. The bag lay unzipped, open, ready. With a nod, Baker pointed Littlefield toward Lyubovich’s head. She tossed him a pair of nitrile gloves. Staring in silence at the thickset body—the dome of a gut, the ham-sized forearms, the bulky thighs—Littlefield blew into a glove to open it up. He wriggled his fingers into it. He lifted away the bandanna.
There were ragged tracks along Lyubovich’s left cheek. A hunk was missing from his left ear. If he’d lived, he’d have lost his left eye.
Even if you imagined all that away, you weren’t left with a good-looking kid. A short, sloping brow, a crooked nose, a weak chin. Poor fuck had probably been the biggest loser in school, the last picked for kickball, the kid whose ass got thwacked with rolled-up towels in the locker room. Probably joined the Marines with something to prove. A dream of making himself into a hero—or at least A Real Man, whatever the fuck that was. Now here he was, blasted apart, stinking like a side of rotten meat—Valery Lyubovich, a.k.a. Lube Job, fuck you very much, PFC Jones.
After he’d put on the second glove, Littlefield opened Lyubovich’s collar and unbuttoned the top buttons of his blouse. The dead man’s dog tag rested in a deep cleft between his pecs. Holding the tag to the light, Littlefield read the name, the blood type, and the social secu
rity number. Baker read each item back from the clipboard. Everything matched. Outstanding. Good to go.
Littlefield looked at Lyubovich’s mangled legs. “I can take that end if you—”
Baker shook her head. “He’s heavier on your end.”
Cradling Lyubovich’s neck against his forearm, Littlefield jimmied his hands one by one underneath the shoulder blades. He grabbed fistfuls of fabric at the back of Lyubovich’s blouse. They eased the body to the very edge of the crates. Now came the hard part, the lifting.
“On your go,” Littlefield said.
Baker nodded, renewed her grip, nodded again. “One. Two. Go.”
Rigor hadn’t fully set in. When they lifted the body, it sagged at the waist.
“Up,” she said, grunting.
Littlefield held his breath, set his jaw, stood up on the balls of his feet, and cocked his forearms. Huffing with effort, Baker lurched upward as well. They hoisted Lyubovich’s body across the gap and laid him down with a series of thumps on the second set of crates. In the transfer, the cadaver pouch had gone askew, but it was good enough.
Baker was breathing heavily. “I didn’t think we’d make it.”
“I thought there was a weight limit in the Corps.”
“Come on now, you know it was mostly the angle.” She kicked the side of a crate. “Fuck. Why’d they put him up so high?”
“Maybe they haven’t been lugging bodies around for eighteen fucking months?”
Baker turned and looked toward the door. “Where’s Evans?”
“Not sure. You think we need him?”
She nodded. “I’d hate to drop him ‘cause one of us loses a grip and there’s no backup. I’ll finish up here. Go get him and move the Humvee as close as you can get it.”
Out in the compound, he found no sign of Purdy or La Flamme, no sign of the dog, no sign of Evans. Hard to know where to begin looking. The Humvee, at least, was where they’d left it, with its front doors still standing open. There was no reason to expect otherwise, but still.
Maybe Evans had curled up in the back of the vehicle to sleep. Littlefield made for it. As he walked, the hard earth crunched underfoot. But it was strange—the rhythm of the crunching didn’t exactly match the rhythm of his steps. He stopped, and the noise continued. It was getting louder and faster. He looked around. Evans emerged from the shadows on the far side of the courtyard. Running. He was, for no conceivable reason, running. He’d tucked the dog into an empty backpack, and she bounced along behind him, a paw on each shoulder, her tongue bobbing on one side, saliva drizzling down the back of Evans’s blouse.
“Dude,” Littlefield said. “What the fuck?”
Evans trotted toward him. “What the fuck, what the fuck?”
Littlefield drew a breath to answer, but then let it go. Not worth it—so fucking not worth it. He reached up and petted the dog’s head. She licked his wrist.
“You need me?” Evans asked.
“He’s heavy as fuck.”
“I thought he was in pieces or some shit.”
“Nope. The remains are nearly entire. And heavy as a fuckin’ bag of bricks.”
Evans tipped his head back. The dog licked the bare crown of his scalp. “Help me get her down.”
“Dude, what the—?” Nope. Still not worth it. “Turn around, fucker.”
When they returned to the storage room, Baker said, “We’re never getting rid of that dog, are we?”
The mutt had hopped after them on her three good legs, and now she stood watching them. She sniffed the air and looked up at Littlefield. Her brown eyes gleamed.
“I can think of worse things,” Littlefield said.
“You planning to name her?”
Evans answered. “I was thinking Mary.” He looked from Baker to Littlefield and back again. “Short for Marines. Marines, Mary, Mary, Marines? Get it?”
Baker scowled at him. “One of you get his head, please?”
As she’d promised, she’d finished filling out the paperwork and had zipped the body into the black bag. She’d even managed to shove or tug Lyubovich’s body sideways, to correct the slip they’d made earlier. Littlefield moved to the head of the stretcher. Evans went to its foot and stood facing away from Littlefield so that he could take the lead without walking backward. If Baker had intended to carry either end, she didn’t insist on it now.
On Littlefield’s count, the two men lifted the stretcher off its platform of crates and carried it out through the door.
Baker followed them. “Littlefield, you didn’t move the fuckin’ Humvee?”
“Fuck, I forgot all about it.” He could feel her glaring at him. “It’s the middle of the night, goddammit. I’m lucky I’m remembering to motherfucking breathe.”
“We got this,” Evans said. He tugged forward—unexpectedly, so that Littlefield nearly stumbled and lost his grip. “Just fuckin’ walk.”
The body was off-balance—maybe they hadn’t compensated properly for the missing limb—and the whole way to the Humvee, the stretcher jerked forward and back. Baker went ahead of them and opened the rear hatch. Coming up alongside Evans, she took one side of the stretcher. He moved aside.
They lifted the stretcher up until it was parallel to the rack in the back of the Humvee. Evans and Baker set their poles down. Littlefield pushed the stretcher forward, and Evans and Baker helped guide it along. The stretcher slid neatly into place in its slot.
Laying his hand on the cadaver bag—on the dead man’s shoulder, or thereabouts—Evans said, “Sleep tight, Marine. Sleep well.”
Baker closed the hatch, and then they stood silently. Littlefield’s heart still pounded from the effort of the long swift carry. Baker had a moony, far-away look on her face. She fiddled with her ID tag and stared deep into nowhere.
“You know,” she said, “we have to find his foot and leg.”
Littlefield said, “Not saying I disagree—but wouldn’t they have brought them back if they’d been there to find?”
“You’d think so,” Baker said. “But they ain’t us, after all.”
“We’ll find some specks of something, at least,” Evans said. “We gotta go out.”
“Affirmative.” Littlefield slumped against the Humvee. “We need to catch some sleep though. I can’t fuckin’ see straight. Better to wait for light anyway, right?” He turned to Evans. “You know where Purdy went to?”
Evans pointed toward the gate where they’d come in.
“I’ll see if there’s a spot where we can get some sack,” Littlefield said.
He was already on his way, backing off across the courtyard, but Evans shook his head. Littlefield halted.
“I asked already,” Evans said. “Motherfuckers don’t have a place except the storage room.”
“I’ve slept in worse,” Littlefield said, shrugging. “Haven’t we all?”
“He means the storage room,” Baker said, cutting her eyes toward the back of the Humvee.
Shielding his eyes from the floodlights with his flattened hand, Littlefield looked around the compound. On the second-floor terrace of the nearest building, there was a ladder leading to the roof. “Got an idea,” he said, again backing away.
Up top, above most of the floodlights, it was reasonably dark. And there was a low wall all the way around: If they bedded down right against it on the courtyard side, they’d lie in deep shadow. He was about to lean over the parapet and holler down for Baker and Evans to join him, but he heard something—the scrabble of boot soles over the concrete. The ladder was the only way up, he was sure of it, and accessible only from inside the courtyard. No need for alarm, but when he went to investigate, he kept his hand on his sidearm.
In a far corner of the roof, La Flamme had tucked himself into a slot between two walls. Quite a setup he’d made for himself, too. A bedroll, inflatable pillows, a nightstand made from a busted-up crate, a battery-operated lantern, a Toughbook, a pouch of tobacco and a packet of rolling papers—and who could say what oth
er comforts he had hidden in his seabag? Sitting cross-legged on his bed, holding a spiral-bound sketchbook on his knee, where it caught the light of his lantern, he stippled some lines with a pencil.
“Thought you were a writer,” said Littlefield.
Tapping the page with the blunt end of his pencil, La Flamme said, “This too.”
Littlefield took a step closer. “Can I see?”
La Flamme handed over the sketchbook and set to rolling himself a cigarette. On the page, three Marines carried a stretcher toward a Humvee. The stretcher and vehicle were incomplete, but the three human figures were meticulous. Their gear had real weight. Their bare heads were damp with sweat, their jaws tight with effort. Littlefield could almost hear the creaking of the boot leather. Add ink and color and the thing would be ready for print.
Through a puff of white smoke, La Flamme said, “Your companions are calling.”
It was true. Evans was yelling Littlefield’s name.
Handing back the sketchbook, Littlefield said, “Night, sir.” He started across the roof, stopped, paused, went back. “You don’t need me to tell you this, but that’s beautiful work.”
He returned to the parapet and waved to Baker and Evans. They grabbed the bedrolls and made their way up the ladder. Evans brought the dog. As they settled in, Evans tried to get Mary to lie next to him, but she moved away and curled up in the open, where the shadows weren’t so deep. Littlefield and Baker lay head to head. Baker lay toe to toe with Evans.
Baker said, “I’m-a say this once and once only, and then I’ll deny it forever. Littlefield, you’re a genius.”
“Smarter than he looks,” Evans said. “But then he’d pretty much have to be.”
“Sleep tight, assholes,” Littlefield said.
The sky was bright with unfamiliar stars. He lay on his back and stared straight up until he felt dazzled, hypnotized, dizzied. He willed his eyes to stay open in the hopes that the effort, paired with his exhaustion, would put him to sleep. He looked for stars and planets he could name—Jupiter, Mars, Rigel, Polaris. But the constellations turned in the sky above him, alien and unrecognized.
At some point he woke to the arrhythmic ticking of Mary’s toenails on the concrete. She snuffled around him, bumped him with her body, and laid herself alongside him. Half-awake, his eyes half-open, he stroked her dirty fur and whispered into her pointed ear, “Mary, Mary, Mary.” She grunted, and he took it as a kind of acceptance, a bond sealed with a name.
The next time he woke, the stars had vanished and the sky was yellow-gray. Littlefield nearly wept. Dawn, and he was so fatigued, so sleep-deprived, that he wasn’t sure he could speak in sentences—forget the business of PRP.
But then he woke again with Baker crouching over him and the sun well up in the sky.
“We’re going,” she whispered. She held out his steel travel mug. “Coffee. The real deal. Fifteen percent Kona. That guy, La Flamme, has all kinds of crazy shit in his seabag. You take it black, right?”
Again, Littlefield felt close to weeping, but this time it was because everything made sense. He’d awakened in precisely the spot where he’d lain down. The dog sat gazing at him as if he’d invented kibble. And sixteen ounces of real brewed coffee steamed in front of him. It was almost like any morning anywhere.
“Black,” he said, and took a sip. “Right.”