12
Lieutenant Blankenship sits at his desk, drinking what appears to be fruit punch out of a Little Mermaid souvenir glass. He’s a thick-necked man with steel-rimmed reading glasses and dark brown hair cropped to less than half an inch. Old acne scars pepper his jaw line and dot his long narrow nose. Although he’s younger than I am, he sometimes acts like he’s in his late middle age. I’ve only been in this trailer office a couple of times before. Usually when I do requisitions forms and whatnot for the lieutenant, we meet in the storage Conex. Sandbags are stacked neck-high all around the office trailer and piled on the roof. It looks like an igloo. But inside it’s more like something you’d find parked in the muddy lot of a construction site. A water cooler, an overworked window AC, worn green linoleum on the floor and fake wood paneling on the walls. Walk ten more steps, open the pebbled glass door, and there’s another room, pretty much the same. The lieutenant sits behind a standard issue green metal desk between a filing cabinet and a bookshelf loaded with manuals. The only other piece of furniture is Sergeant Oliphant, behind me, who smells like a dirty sock filled with chopped onions. He’s close enough for me to feel the moist heat on my neck when he breathes. I stand at attention for a good ten minutes while the lieutenant flips through a folder. I can only assume it’s mine, and it’s not too hard to imagine what he’s looking at:
NAME: Tobias Jacob Durrant.
RANK: Private E2.
HEIGHT: 5'11".
WEIGHT: 160 lbs.
EYES: Green.
HAIR: Brown.
DISTINGUISHING MARKS: Tattoo of a seahorse on left shoulder.
NEXT OF KIN: None.
HISTORY: Two juvenile arrests: public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. A six-pack after a football game and a fight on Broughton Street during the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Three semesters of college at Armstrong Atlantic University in Savannah, GA. Scholastic probation. Three months as an ice cream truck driver. Six months working for a locksmith. Enlisted in Army. Data Analysis course. Accepted to Airborne School. Dismissed for assaulting a fellow soldier. Entered Language Institute and studied Middle-Eastern Languages. Dismissed after several months for missing classes. Then on to mobilization at Fort Polk and a flight to the sandbox.
“Tell me again why you got out of your vehicle today, Durrant?” He flips a page, pushes his glasses up on his nose.
“I got sick and I didn’t want to—”
“You should have just leaned your head out the window.”
“Yes, sir.” There’s no point in arguing or trying to explain something I don’t really understand myself. It’ll just sound like a lie. And then he’ll wonder why I’m lying.
“Is that the real reason you left the convoy?”
“I wasn’t thinking straight, sir. The grenade explosion had me feeling whacked out. All I knew was I had to get away and be sick.” I pause for a moment. “Sir.”
“Even so, it was an exceptionally stupid thing to do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And that was the only reason? You didn’t perhaps—” The lieutenant stops speaking suddenly and studies my face. He’s looking for something there, and I get the feeling it’s something very specific. I wish I knew what it was he wanted to hear, so we could end this game. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to answer him, so I remain silent. The air in the office feels dense. I want to unbutton my shirt or even take it off.
“H’mm.” He picks up a silver mechanical pencil and taps my file with it.
“You said something about a kid, Durrant. What was that all about?” This comes from just behind my right ear, from the sergeant. Instinctively, I turn my head. He cuffs me lightly with the back of his hand and I straighten to attention once again.
“So?” the lieutenant prompts, raising his eyebrows. “What about this kid?”
“I saw a child on the factory grounds, sir. That’s pretty much it.”
“A child?” He smirks.
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me make sure I understand you. You say you saw a small child all alone in an abandoned factory about twenty-five klicks from the village. Is that what you’re telling me? And this child wandered out there all alone? To do what? To play?”
“When you put it that way, sir, I realize it sounds a little odd, but—”
“A little odd?”
Sergeant Oliphant permits himself a chuckle.
My face feels hot. It takes all my self-control to keep from bolting, just getting the hell out. I force myself to think back to that moment in the factory grounds. I puked. I saw a flash of movement, and then I saw the kid on top of that brick pile. I can picture the kid. Long black hair, a dress made of purple rags knotted together, scabby little stick legs. There’s no way I could have imagined all of that. I remember the child too clearly. And then the nastier part of my brain starts to pick at it. Well, your eyes were still blurry from puking. The sun was bright. Broken glass can throw all kinds of crazy reflections. You’d just gotten knocked out by the concussion from a grenade. There’s a chance you just might have imagined some—no, Goddammit, I saw her. I know it.
“You realize,” the lieutenant says in a quiet voice, “I have to punish you for this. Do you understand why this kind of behavior is a problem?”
“I put my fellow soldiers in danger, sir.”
“You left the patrol without permission.”
Sergeant Oliphant coughs and shifts his feet behind me. I wonder if this is a signal of some kind. The lieutenant looks up and then back at the file.
“Outside of this incident, I’ve had no problems with you.”
I almost say yes, sir, but stop myself.
“You will be assigned to the latrine burning detail for a month.”
I make a sound deep in my throat. It is involuntary. My mouth wanted to form the words, one month, and I caught myself just in time. Instead, I force out a cough to cover it.
“Do you have something to say, soldier?” For a moment, in the dim green glow of the desk lamp, the lieutenant looks like a twelve-year-old boy. I wonder what the sergeant thinks about taking orders from him. This is obviously the lieutenant’s first time in combat, maybe even his first leadership position, while the sergeant is an old warhorse. If it bothers him, he hides it well. I wonder, not for the first time, what it is that connects these two men. The bond they’ve formed seems to go well beyond their professional relationship.
“Just clearing the sand out of my throat, sir.”
He glances up at me over the rims of his glasses. “Yes, well.” Then my file takes up his attention once again.
Behind me, the sergeant shuffles around. Lieutenant Blankenship sighs and looks over my shoulder at him again. He purses his lips in disapproval. The wind shrieks outside the window, which usually looks out on the parade ground. Right now it looks out on dark swirling grit. He gives me an appraising look and points to a folding chair in front of his desk.
“Sit down.”
I do.
“You’ve been working as a clerk.” It isn’t a question. Most of this work I’ve done has been for him. “You did a Data Analysis course and some Language School. How good is your Arabic?”
“I can speak about as well as a four-year-old. But the local language is harder, sir.”
“Yes,” he says, staring at my face without making eye contact. It isn’t a comfortable feeling.
“Would you be able to tell if a translator was doing a reasonably accurate job?”
“That might depend, sir.”
“On?”
“How fast the subject spoke, the dialect he used, the level of vocabulary—”
He breaks in. “But you could tell whether the translation was an outright falsification.” His eyes narrow and his voice goes very flat. I can feel Sergeant Oliphant scrutinizing the back of my head.
“I think so, sir, yes.” I watch his face to see if this is the correct answer. The lieutenant gives nothing away. Something odd is going on here. Most of what we’ve
gone over is information he already knows. I can feel him leading me up to the real question. But I haven’t a clue what that might be.
“Very well.” He pushes up his glasses and rubs his eyes with the heels of his palms. Then he shuts my file. “Do you think you can get back to your tent without the sergeant’s guidance?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, feeling both irritated by the lieutenant’s implied insult and unaccountably relieved to be leaving. I’m not sure I want to know what he’s really after.
“You are dismissed.”
When I turn, the sergeant holds the door open for me. He smiles. Smug, crafty, amused. “Good night, Durrant.”
The door shuts with a click. I walk to the end of the trailer’s front room and stand for a moment. Lieutenant Blankenship says something I can’t quite make out, but the frustration in his voice is unmistakable. I pause. The sergeant answers. It is a neutral sound. I take three steps back. Careful. Heel to toe. Then another three.
“It didn’t even happen in the right fucking place.” The lieutenant’s words come out in a harsh rasp.
“It’s not your fault, sir. You signaled to them to move away,” the sergeant says.
“I feel bad about Gerling and Kellen,” Lieutenant Blankenship says, and it sounds as though he means it. “It was unnecessary. Those fuckers had their instructions and—”
The entire trailer shudders and sways. An empty metal can thunks into the window screen. I flinch. The sandstorm’s many noises synchronize into a single piercing peal of pain. As the wind blows harder, the sound rises in pitch. Without quite knowing why, I brace myself for something horrible to happen when this shriek hits its highest note. And then, as quickly as it came together, the sound unravels into a hundred sobbing voices. My face is slick with sweat. I shift my weight and prepare to leave, but then I don’t. Something inside the office shatters. The lieutenant curses. Another half a minute can’t hurt.
“If this storm doesn’t let up,” the sergeant says, “I don’t see that we have any choice. We’ve got to at least give the appearance of—”
Lieutenant Blankenship mumbles something.
“He’ll work just fine, sir. With a little guidance, of course.”
They both laugh. It is anything but lighthearted. The lieutenant has never taken me aside and spoken to me like he did tonight, and I’m unnerved by it. Usually he ignores me, and this is exactly how I like it. Sweat is slowly turning the grit on the back of my neck into mud. It’s time to go. I put on my eyepro and head out, closing the outer door as carefully as I can.
13
Rankin engages in his post-mission ritual back in our tent. After every safe return, he washes his face and hands with soap. Not just a splash, a thorough washing. He fills the metal cup we were all given along with our rucksacks and desert uniforms and the rest of our basic infantryman gear just before we left Fort Polk, moistens his hands, coats his palms with Lava soap, and gives them a furious rubbing. My grandfather told me that back during his war, he used his helmet to do this kind of thing. Now we just get a cup. Once the suds have formed, suds thick enough to shave with, he massages them into his face and neck. Finally, with a small green handkerchief his grandma monogrammed and sent over in his first care package, he dabs away the soap and rinses his face. The whole procedure lasts a good twenty minutes. He does it slowly and with great precision. With all this sand and grit blowing around, I know it can’t be pleasant. Rankin gets these little bumps from shaving, so rubbing sand into them must sting like hell. When I first saw him doing it, he just said, “Being a soldier is a dirty business. You got to keep clean.”
We also have a pre-mission ritual. Five minutes before go time, we meet at the mobilization spot. Rankin lights up, and even though I’ve quit, we both take a big drag, hold it a moment, and as we’re exhaling, we repeat the words, “This is not our time, this is not our time, this is not our time.” Always those words. Always three times. I can’t remember exactly when we started this, but we’ve been doing it so long now, I’d feel naked and uncomfortable out on a mission if I didn’t. The hope is that whatever bad luck we’ve been infected with will blow away with the smoke.
All of us have these little rituals, and some of us keep talismans. If back home someone had told me I’d be doing this kind of thing and doing it with utter seriousness, I would have said bullshit and laughed it off. But once you’re in-theater, luck becomes a serious business. Theories abound. There’s one school of thought here at the Corn Cob that basically goes like this: we all have a certain set amount of luck, and once that’s used up, there’s nothing you can do. You’re literally shit out of luck. A soldier can use up his luck in a number of ways, but the biggest is the near miss. Any time the enemy throws lead at you and the bullet or shrapnel comes close enough to tear your uniform or hit something near your body or land in a space you recently inhabited, a chunk of your luck goes with it. Because of this, for some soldiers good luck is almost as terrifying as bad. Boyette has told me on numerous occasions that he’d rather have a flesh wound than a near miss. And this is because the same school holds with the idea that a minor injury preserves luck. But there are many other theories about how to stem the flow of good luck and how to inoculate yourself against bad luck. As many, in fact, as there are men.
And yeah, I’ll admit it, I’ve got my own fetishes too. Just before I left Fort Polk, Clarissa cut off a lock of her hair for me. A soft little snip from just behind her left ear. It’s my favorite ear because there’s a tiny scar on the lobe from the time her puppy nipped her when she was four. I was supposed to get this cool titanium vial to put it in, but I didn’t have time, so I wrapped it in a square of tin foil. The other thing, well, it’s a bit more embarrassing. When I went AWOL from the Language Institute after I found out Clarissa was pregnant, I made her take another one of those drugstore pee tests, just to see the results with my own eyes. The whole experience got me so excited that I wanted to memorialize it somehow, so I plucked the plastic test wand out of the trash and cleaned it up. I wrapped this in tin foil too, and now both ride in the cargo pocket of my pants on every mission. My family.
14
The sun does not rise. When Rankin shakes me awake, I find my blanket covered with a thick layer of dust and sand. We both slept with our earplugs in. Rankin even wore his goggles. I wish I had. My eyeballs feel as though they’ve been scoured with steel wool. The storm continues to howl outside. If anything, it sounds worse than yesterday.
“MREs for breakfast today,” Rankin says. He looks unaccountably happy.
“What’s got you so cheerful?”
“It’s like a snow day in Savannah.”
I laugh.
When I thump my boots for critters, a large black scorpion comes rolling out. It’s nearly the size of my palm.
“Damn,” I say, lifting up my boot to mash it.
“Wait, D, wait.” Rankin dumps a pile of letters out of a Tupperware container and uses this to trap it. “She’s a beauty. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one this big.”
“What in the hell do you want with it?” I ask.
“I think you might just have found a way to get our money back from Nevada.”
Suddenly I understand, and it makes me laugh so hard that I cough up sand.
15
Kurkbil is the village a klick or so away from the base that we are supposedly keeping secure. It lies on the main north-south highway that runs from the capital down to Inmar. The Turkish Highway. Route 6A. I doubt if there are more than a thousand citizens all told. Strung along this one paved road is the business district, as the lieutenant optimistically calls it, which consists of a six-table café, a butcher shop, a garage that literally uses one of the town trees as a hoist for engine blocks, a drygoods shop, and a public fountain. Calling it a fountain is a bit misleading. It’s really just a rusty spigot that dribbles water into a shallow concrete trough.
The only buildings that aren’t constructed from mud bricks are the café and the dr
y goods shop, which are made of cinderblock and corrugated green fiberglass. Packed dirt paths wiggle off from the paved road like earthworms after a rainstorm. This is where the town’s inhabitants live, mainly in single-story mud huts surrounded by fences made of sun-baked bricks or woven palm mats and rows of planted cacti. Each family seems to own at least a half dozen chickens and a goat. The more prosperous among them have a donkey or some sheep. Kurkbil’s animals outnumber its humans by nearly three to one.
The town’s most prized possessions are its five trees. The largest is an ancient fig tree growing beside the fountain. The townspeople refer to it as Grandfather. This confused me at first because whenever someone gave me directions, Grandfather always figured in. For a while I imagined an impossibly old man who had sired everyone in town.
The citizens were happy to see us at first, but now they don’t pay us any more mind than they would one of the countless pariah dogs that patrol the town. When they do take note, it is usually to cross the street when they see us coming or to dart away into the maze of paths behind the shops. This is especially true of the women. All of them, even the teenage girls, dress in dark clothes and keep their faces covered. The young women used to giggle when they saw us walking into town; now they hunch their shoulders and scurry off onto one of the side paths. The men stare at us until we turn and notice, then they pointedly look away. On my first area patrol, Sergeant Guzman told me to remember that someone is always watching, no matter how late the hour or how empty the town looks.
The Sandbox Page 6