Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  No. There were too many who needed her here, Ma Thiri decided, right there in front of Leila. And because Ma Thiri was speaking in this stripped-down way, she did not disguise the brag inside her reasoning. “I am too important here,” she said. “No one else can do this.” And it turned out that there was a sister and brother to think about as well, and an ailing father.

  “Yeah, I have those too,” said Leila. But it wasn’t like Dylan or Roxana had ever kept her anyplace, or held her back; it wasn’t like her dad was sick.

  By the time they were done, Leila had gotten Ma Thiri to say she would give the idea more thought. But Leila knew that this woman’s mind was made up and that this concession was a politeness. Leaving the clinic, she felt like a confused Ed McMahon walking back to the van with his enormous cardboard check.

  That night in Myo Thit, Leila was the only one in her hotel. Not just the only guest—the only human soul. The man she’d assumed was the proprietor left the building, and the lady who had been washing sheets on the roof left the building. Leila lay beneath a mosquito net on a dank foam mattress in a giant room with five other beds, each one shrouded in netting so that it was extra-easy to imagine behind their scrims ghosts or rapists or murderers with machetes or ghost rapist-murderers with machetes. From the bathroom came the blink and buzz of a fluorescent tube and the plang of a dripping valve. A wet brown moth probed her net’s perimeter. Every hour a generator chugged flatulently outside. She wished she had objected more fiercely when Aung-Hla insisted on staying in some taximan dormitory down the street. How much cheaper could that place be than this one?

  In the eventual morning, Aung-Hla came to collect her. She told him about spending the night with no one in the building, which she shouldn’t have, because it made him ashamed for having left her there. He yelled at the proprietor, using a kind of Burmese Leila couldn’t even catch scraps of.

  “Let’s blow this Popsicle stand, Aung-Hla,” Leila said to her driver in English when they pulled away. He laughed, probably figuring that she had just said something clever.

  But at a checkpoint ten kilometers outside of town, two young soldiers decided to scrutinize Leila’s foreign-visitor terrestrial-passage permission form. They made her sit in a white plastic lawn chair in their stifling wooden shack beside their bent, barber-pole-striped, concrete-counterweighted road barrier while they wrote down every number she had on paper that she could attach to herself, including the digits from an expired membership card to the YMCA pool in Oakland, California. They made Aung-Hla sit in his taxi.

  After half an hour, Leila saw that Aung-Hla was standing just outside the door to the shack. He motioned to her—silently, pantomimically—that they should go. She stood up. He came in and started speaking to the young soldiers quickly and with force, cutting them off when they tried to answer back, the way you need to speak if you have any hope of bluffing armed teenagers. He gathered up the contents of Leila’s travel wallet from the soldiers’ laminate desk and sort of reverse-shepherded her out of there, then retreated with Leila to the taxi outside, the soldiers close behind. He saw Leila into the backseat, and, still talking sternly to the soldiers, Aung-Hla himself lifted the barrier across the road. This was too much for one of the soldiers; he unholstered his dull brown pistol and started yelling. Aung-Hla pointed directly down the road and said something ferocious-sounding to the gun-holding boy soldier. It must have been ferocious, because it quieted him, and Aung-Hla took a moment before he turned his key and pulled away from the checkpoint at a dignified speed. Leila fought the urge to sink low in her seat as she had seen people on TV do to duck bullets.

  Once he had them out of range, Aung-Hla drove at an increasingly less dignified speed. Leila could see the fear in the back of his neck as they rounded the rutted roads. Those soldiers were drunk, or maybe high, Leila came to understand via Aung-Hla’s explanatory charades from the front seat. He made the drink-from-an-upturned-bottle-the-neck-of-which-is-your-thumb gesture. He made the drawing-on-a-joint-pinched-between-thumb-and-index-finger gesture. Then he raised an index finger before him and ticktocked it back and forth, like a metronome on ninety beats per minute, to indicate no, negative, not to be done, nope, don’t, dangerous. He did it well, this manual negation, keeping his hand still beneath his tocking finger, keeping eye contact with Leila in the rearview.

  Aung-Hla left the main road and turned up a wide gravel one that ribboned up a clear-cut hillside into the forest. Leila noted that she was now trusting her driver way past the point of soup. Aung-Hla was trying to explain to her where they were going. Here is what she got: “The drunk soldiers’ bosses work up here. If I complain about the drunk soldiers before they report a gate-jumping taximan carrying a white girl, we will be fine. No trouble.”

  Maybe Aung-Hla knew someone up here. His brother-in-law. Or nephew. Or great-grandfather. Kinship words in Burmese were a bitch.

  When another checkpoint hove into sight, Aung-Hla tossed into the backseat a sort of cotton sarong and told Leila to cover up. She wrapped the sheetish thing around herself and cowled the top part into a hood. Aung-Hla pulled to the side of the road in front of the checkpoint, cut the engine, and told her to stay in the car. In perfect English: “Stay in the car,” he said. He left the taxi and strode up to the checkpoint house, which was a more impressive affair than the last: it was made from a modified shipping container and raised off the ground; a sweaty air conditioner was bolted to its back, and a telescoping mast lifted a mean-looking and satellite-laden antenna twenty feet into the air. The antivehicle device was not a crappy lift gate but a metal deck with those retractable one-way teeth that you just knew would rip the shit out of your tires. Leila saw Aung-Hla greet one of the checkpoint men with body language that was hearty but submissive. He was led inside the container office by the man he greeted, but he managed to give Leila a no-look thumbs-up sign just before the door closed behind him.

  Leila sat in the car. It was only ten in the morning, but after a few minutes, the car was so hot she felt like a Pop-Tart. She looked hungrily at the shade beneath a nearby tree. But Aung-Hla had told her to stay put, and she intended to stay put. She drooped the cowl of her sheetish thing over her brow, tried to keep exquisitely still. Heat this hot was conducive to Buddhism, she realized; it encouraged stillness. Her exhalations stirred the cloth near her chin. Her eye found the photo of Aung-Hla’s daughters rubber-banded to the visor. They were seated triangularly against a fake alpine backdrop. They were, at time of snap, what—six, eight, and ten? Then she saw the already-fading printout of the digital photo she’d taken of the car she was sitting in. (In the picture, there was a weeping green tree behind the car, and clean black tarmac beneath its wheels. She had done a good job with the composition.) There was an analog clock Velcroed to the dashboard. The vinyl warmed; the car ticked hotter.

  A big Mitsubishi pulled up to the checkpoint. The tire-hungry teeth of the drive-over plate were retracted posthaste, and the Mitsubishi clanked across. Two men debouched from the rear of the car. Leila thought they were a strange pair: one looked Burmese and about fifty; the other looked like a hipster in a Starbucks—T-shirt, square glasses, big headphones, a laptop satchel. They both walked quickly into the container-fort-office thing, the older man holding the door for the younger. Leila was roused from her mild meditation by the event. Then two more white dudes got out of the front of the Mitsubishi and each man started—digging something from his teeth? No, they were both installing plugs of chewing tobacco in their lips. Leila had tried that once; puked. The men were fifty feet away. They were talking, but she couldn’t hear what they said. Leila tried to lull herself back into the fugue. She was getting better at recognizing situations over which she had no control.

  The two men were leaving their vehicle and walking nearer to hers. They made it to the shade tree she had been coveting. Once they reached it, they didn’t so much stand under it as lurk beneath it. They had the hunch of security men but wore no insignia or uniform. They were fiftee
n feet beyond her open window. They both wore black, wraparound glasses, from behind which, she was sure, they were scanning the perimeter. One, the younger man, clocked her, and then Two, but they both seemed to look right past her. Through the sheer fabric of her wrap she could see them plainly, but they were talking as if they were alone. They spoke English in American accents.

  “…little prick thinks we’re butlers?” said One. He spit a brown splat on the dirt at his feet.

  “Doesn’t matter what he thinks we are,” said Two.

  “I mean, he’s fucking tech support. He’s here to install software. You know that?”

  Two snapped: “No, I do not know that. You don’t either. You know he’s the package. You get him in, you get him out. That is all you know.”

  “I know that little shit sent me back for his suitcase, for face cream or whatever. I know that,” said One. “This whole shit is bullshit, is all I’m saying.”

  Two said nothing to this last critique. But he spit, better than One had, a glob missiled at the ground. A tiny shake of his head told Leila he was rolling his eyes behind the viperous shades.

  One hadn’t finished. “We’re not allowed to carry. That’s bullshit. These eight-week rotations are bullshit. And the food is definitely bullshit. If that was chicken, I’m Pat Sajak.”

  “You getting paid?” Two asked One. Veins stood out on his arms, his neck.

  One was indeed getting paid, apparently, for the line quieted him. But he was still mad, Leila could tell, watching from behind her veil. He was standing in a tough-guy pose, and when he spit, he squinted like he was pissed at the tobacco. “That job with the Pakis—now, that was a job.”

  “Boy,” said Two—they both looked like hammers, but Two was older—“if you just want to be muscle, you got about five years left in this business.”

  “Nothing wrong with being muscle.” One sounded hurt. “Better than being a fucking taxi driver.”

  At that, Two shot a quick glance at Leila. He was appraising her. Had she looked listen-y? She needed to appear oblivious. From her fancy knapsack, which was out of the men’s sight, she took the sunflower seeds that she’d brought from Mandalay. Noisily, she rustled them out of the newspaper envelope they were wrapped in, but she brought them to her mouth delicately, one by one, in the slightly feral way she had seen women eat seeds here. It seemed to work—Two quit looking at her and plucked flecks of tobacco from his lip. Leila dialed her ears up to ten.

  “I’m just sayin’,” said One, sulkily. “I didn’t sign on to be a bellhop in Burma.”

  “We’re in China,” said Two.

  “Yeah, right. China,” said One.

  Aung-Hla came out of the office, down the metal steps. He was effusively thanking the man in the office. The security men tracked him to the car. Don’t speak English to me, Leila was thinking hard at Aung-Hla as he opened his door.

  “We are hunky-dory,” he said to her loudly, smiling because he had just accomplished something rather complicated. The security men stiffened at the English. Two looked at Leila again, harder now.

  “No more English, Aung-Hla,” she snapped at her driver, in Burmese. She pitched her voice high and nasal, in a way she hoped sounded convincing. Burmese was a tonal language, but Leila, like most Indo-European speakers, was reluctant to attempt the tonal part, because she thought it made her sound like an aggrieved crow. “Those men no good,” she cawed quickly at Aung-Hla. “Talk Burmese to me. Now.” And he did. He understood her meaning and spoke a rapid Burmese paragraph, which she did not understand.

  “Leave now. Us both,” she said. And they did; Aung-Hla executed a quick three-point turn and they headed back down the road they’d come up. Leila found her fancy running watch in her knapsack and pressed the MARK POINT button.

  She tried to explain to Aung-Hla what had happened. It was difficult. She didn’t know how to say contractors in Burmese, or mercenaries. She managed soldiers who don’t work for the government. And when she told Aung-Hla that Americans were not allowed to work in Myanmar, he said, “But you work here.”

  That night, after they got back to Mandalay and Aung-Hla had dropped Leila off, she filled out the Helping Hand paperwork that would allow her to pay Aung-Hla as not just a taximan but a “required national.” She put the equivalent of three hundred dollars in an envelope, managed to copy Aung-Hla’s name in Burmese script on the front of it, and put the envelope in her knapsack. She looked forward to giving him the money and tried to think only of the benefit it would bring him, not of the stark difference in power between them that it would make plain.

  Chapter 2

  Portland, Oregon

  Turning his head to look at the Fremont Bridge sparkling in the sharp light of the November morning, Leo felt his chin rasp across the collars of his two woolen shirts and his canvas work coat. The outfit thickened the upper half of his tall thin frame, which even at rest had a teetering quality. Hunched into the wind, proud over the handlebars of his bicycle, he looked like a heavy kettle on a high shelf, and most in his path gave him wide berth. But it was early yet, just light and still cold; there weren’t many in his path.

  As he did most every day now, Leo wished that he were biking over the Fremont Bridge instead of the bridge he was biking over, the Broadway Bridge, which was a more workmanlike affair, maroon and million-riveted; a bascule bridge with chunky block piers like galoshes. The Fremont Bridge was so beautiful, massive and graceful at once, a marvel of engineering. A brisk wind in the seagullosphere snapped the flags at the apex of its arc. The river below was a deep, churning green.

  One morning six months back, Leo had found his car skewed and curb-jumped before his house. So it was no dream, he’d thought, filled with shame and dread and panic. It was easier to quit driving than drinking, so Leo had transformed himself into a committed cyclist. But now, the fact that there was no pedestrian or bike path on the Fremont Bridge was an affront to him. Leo knew well that driving over the top deck of that bridge, especially at speed, was a real zooter. A state-subsidized roller coaster for the auto-addicted, he thought to himself as he looked at the Fremont’s graceful trajectory, which lay along a much shorter path between his home and workplace—another affront, to be denied not only the most glamorous but also the most direct route to his destination. Why should so much of the might of the state go to flinging out these ribbons of concrete so that citizens can zoom around in their private metal zoom-arounders?

  He was getting indignant. Leo was good at indignant. Also burdened; he could do a good burdened. But indignant was one of the few aggressive postures he could strike convincingly—something having to do with the mix of blue-blood Yankee yeoman farmer and Mayflower screwball and tough prairie Protestant in his pedigree. A crackpot uncle of his, in Maine, had twice handcuffed himself to heavy equipment to obstruct the construction of cell phone towers. There was a gene Leo wouldn’t mind expressing.

  Yes, he thought as he passed too close to a shuffle-jogging man upholstered in a damp terry tracksuit, pedaling over the Fremont Bridge in the morning would be an excellent start to the day. Maybe he should lead a political campaign to get a pedestrian and bicycle right-of-way added to the bridge. Maybe by his efforts the bridge would become a century-defining nonmotorized boulevard and, upon his death, from kiteboarding or something, would be named after him. A man who looked like a teddy bear was cursing at him. Why?

  Now a gust came up off the water and flung the tassel-terminated strings of his woolen hat behind his head. He biked faster. The gust brought him news—yeast and pine gum and benzene and bleach and fir and mud and pulp and slurry. Atop the Fremont Bridge, you could probably smell for miles, thought Leo as he coasted across the humbler bridge, filling his lungs with air and his eyes with light.

  Then a cloud scudded before the sun and the bridge quit humming beneath him and the wind ceased to carry meaning and in countless other ways the grandeur fled, like shining back into shook foil. The strange brew of neurotransmitters that had e
ncouraged the bike-activist fantasy sloshed up against some limiting mechanism and began to recede; the recipe was tweaked, and chemicals brushed past one another, exchanging glances, methyl groups. Leo started the process, which would increase in period and intensity throughout the day, of telling himself that he was a loser and a failure.

  Where to begin? People who get bike lanes added to bridges are committed people, five-year-plan people. Tireless campaigners who probably cared more about ideas than they did about themselves. How do you care about something more than yourself? Leo wondered. Daydreaming about bridges bearing his name? Please. He hadn’t voted in years, he wasn’t wearing a helmet, he had only one brake, he was late for work, and he worked at a preschool.

  “Fuck. I hate myself,” he whispered, spit drying on his chin.

  Leo waited at the traffic light at the end of the bridge. He marveled at the vast post office—was that Soviet architecture? Brutalist? The place seemed big enough to hide a mining operation. The light turned green and he went right, dropping down into a neighborhood sprung full from a salesman’s case. A dry-cleaner, a dog boutique, a sandwich shop, and an optician were the only businesses along one block. In front of the dog boutique, a FedEx truck chugged at idle, its hazard lights bleating carmine auras into the morning mist. He ghosted over silky new pavement through an empty public square that featured a sunken, dry fountain and pebbly planters full of exotic grasses and reeds. On four sides rose new apartment buildings, the kind with exposed structural elements and balconies at dramatic angles and valuable parking and panoptical security systems. These were condominiums for the creative class, or for any taxpaying and easily policed types of citizens: potentate drifters, wealthy retirees, and leisure merchants. But the whole thing was about a minute old, and only a few souls had moved in.