“Why is that, sir?”
“Not thirty minutes ago someone else came by to see me with the same claim. A fairly plausible one.”
My heart tries to climb up my ribcage and out of my mouth.
“About Ahmed?” I ask, barely able to respond. “Sir.”
The lieutenant laughs. It is a dry sound. A jackal barking in the winter dark.
“No, Private Durrant,” he says, wearing his smile like a crooked necktie, “and, I might add, I find it somewhat disingenuous of you to suggest it.”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“Of course not.” He stops rinsing his legs for a moment, so he can study my face. “And how, Private Durrant, did you arrive at this conclusion? Ahmed hasn’t left the base for the past two days. I had Sergeant Guzman check the sentry logs. Then how did he warn the insurgents? Smoke signals? Did he fly?”
“No, sir, he went through a door in the perimeter wall.”
This surprises the lieutenant in a very satisfying way. His hand pauses midway between bucket and leg. Water dribbles from his fingers. I fight to keep the smile off my face.
“Explain.”
I tell him about the night I saw Ahmed leaving the motor pool and exiting the base through a door in the wall. And what I think it means.
“A magic door?” He purses his lips together.
“No, sir, a normal door disguised to seem like part of the wall. It looked very old. If you don’t believe me, it would be simple to show you.”
The lieutenant grabs my wrist to examine my watch and grunts with irritation when he sees that it’s unreadable.
“If you’re wrong, Durrant—” The lieutenant leaves it at that.
63
We take a Humvee. A very skeptical Sergeant Guzman drives. I sit alone in the back. The wind blows just hard enough to fill the air with dust, lowering the visibility to about ten feet. The locals call this wind a dourma, which is their word for coffee dust. A dourma lifts up only the smallest particles of dirt and sand, turning the air into a thick soup. It is worse in some ways than a hard wind, because the dust doesn’t blow away. It just hangs there, suspended. I ask the sergeant to drive along the wall. In the dark, it’s a good deal harder than I thought it would be to pick out the spot where I left the cigarette butt. I hadn’t expected the lieutenant to want to look tonight. But here we are.
“It’s going to be a bit tricky to find with all this sand blowing around,” I suggest.
“Already starting with the excuses?” The lieutenant smirks.
Sergeant Guzman laughs. This irritates me more than it should. The men consider Sergeant Oliphant a brass-licker, but I always figured Guzman to be on the side of the enlisted. I feel betrayed.
“No, sir,” I say, worrying now, “it’s just that it might take a while. I marked it with a cigarette butt.”
“A very distinctive marker. And just when was it that you saw this magic door? Last night? I heard you locked Ahmed in a closet last night.”
“No, sir.” This won’t sound good. “It was several nights ago.”
“What?” The lieutenant nearly yells this. Even Sergeant Guzman looks around in surprise. “If that’s true, why in the hell did you wait so long?”
“I’m not sure, sir.” Which is true. “I wanted to make sure that—”
“You waited for three days after finding an enemy breach in the perimeter?”
We pass a section of the wall that’s faced with purple stone instead of mud bricks. I ask for the sergeant to slow down. This looks like it might be the right part of the wall, but it could be anywhere along this hundred-yard section. A terrible apprehension perches on the crown of my head like a large, ungainly bird. I have them stop the vehicle so I can get out. The sergeant turns on the floodlight attached to his outer rearview mirror. I raise my hand to thank him. The wall stretches on and on with an awful sameness. A cigarette butt! What the hell was I thinking? I trudge along for some time, feeling the stones with both hands and straining my eyes for any sign of the metal keyhole or the cigarette butt. It’s impossible.
The lieutenant sits in the Humvee and watches this for thirty minutes. Once I hear his muffled laughter. The wind scours my right cheek and fills my ear with dust. Every few minutes I stop and knock the side of my head with the heel of my hand the way I would to clear my ear of water. I wish I had a scrap of paper I could use to block it up. My tongue feels like it’s coated with thick, grainy paste. I berate myself in rhythm with my steps. A cigarette butt? You are a worthless son of a bitch. A fucking cigarette butt. I don’t hear the horn at first. I’m too busy searching for my phantom cigarette butt.
“Private,” Sergeant Guzman shouts, “get your ass in the vehicle.”
I run a list of excuses through my head as I drag ass back to the Humvee. None of them sound too good, especially after the way I acted back at the water truck. I’m fucked, but good. No one speaks on the drive back. Five minutes seem like five hours. They drop me at my tent.
“Report to Common Tent 1 tomorrow morning at 0630.” Sergeant Guzman barks this out like a parade drill call. It almost sounds as though he’s been practicing it. Maybe he has.
“Yes, Sarge,” I say.
The truth, I think, is not setting me free.
64
A dark figure slips out of the left latrine. The wind is rising. Larger grains of sand now whip across the open space between the trailers. This blowing sand has turned the moon to mud. I yell over at the person who just came out. He either doesn’t hear me calling or doesn’t want to respond. I shout again. “Hey, guy, slow up.” But he hunches over and runs off in the direction of the motor pool, quickly disappearing in the murky night.
OUT OF SERVICE. One of the two holes has this sign pinned to the canvas curtain. It flutters and flaps in the wind, and I have to grab the paper to read it. The handwriting is a jerky scrawl, the penmanship that of a spastic second-grader. It takes a few seconds for me to puzzle out the words. I don’t know how in the hell a hole over a fuel drum can be out of service. It seems unlikely they’d be full already. I emptied both yesterday. Great, I get to kiss butts with whoever it was that just left. I duck inside and give the plywood seat a quick inspection. Taking a shit is not the primary reason soldiers use these latrines, and it only takes one sticky surprise to make you forever diligent. The tarp flaps violently in the wind. Thankfully, it also blows off some of the stink from the barrels.
After a few mikes, I hear a noise that tugs at my attention. A sort of fizzing sound. I stand up and flash my light around. Something isn’t right, but I can’t quite place it. I tilt my head and listen. The fuel drum explodes. A hollow boom. I’m instantly covered in liquid shit. The smell chokes me. Putrid brown gunk drips from my face and hands. My hair is soaked with it. I’m still not sure what just happened to me. I tear open the tarp and step into the wind. Within seconds I’m coated with grit. I kick off my pants and pop a button pulling off my shirt. The wind catches it and sucks it away into the dark.
I look around for the perpetrator. Was this supposed to be a joke? I shout at the sky like an angry dog. The moon is the same color as the gunk on my arms. I take off at a run toward the water truck. I’m washing this off me, water ration or not. The parade ground is empty. Just as well. Had I seen even a hint of a smile on anyone’s face, even the lieutenant’s, I would have attacked him. Instead, I take out my rage on the water nozzle’s flimsy lock. I hit it with a rock so hard, I nearly knock the toggle switch clean off.
65
“An MRE bomb,” Rankin says, knocking his flip-flops against the stack of tires he’s sitting on. “Got to be.”
Rankin sniffs when he thinks I’m not looking. At least he tries to hide it. He can see where my head is at tonight. An eggshell filled with nitroglycerin. I walked back from the water truck naked but for my boots. The rest I threw away. I would have thrown my boots away too if I thought I could get some new ones. Rankin wouldn’t let me back into the tent until he was sure I’d cleane
d myself off completely, so he gathered up all my antibiotic cream and the germ-killing gel Clarissa sent me, and we moved operations over to the motor pool’s garage. Rankin sits a short distance away and watches me rub hand gel over my entire body. A single fluorescent tube lights the room, making my shadow look gawky and frantic. At least the smell of dirty oil and spilled diesel cancel out some of my stink.
“MRE bomb. No, man, it—” I try to explain, but Rankin won’t let me.
“You’re still able to sit on that skinny ass of yours, ain’t you? Well, then, it couldn’t of been all that big of an explosion.”
“It was big enough.” I stretch my arm out and rub gel in as hard as I can. Rankin watches, disgruntled.
“You ever seen one go off?” he asks.
“Of course, man. I’ve made one myself. It’s just a tiny—” I make a little pop sound with my mouth.
“Listen here, if you take the powder out of a few of those plastic sacks and pour it into a two-liter emergency water bottle and then you put glow-stick juice in there, those fuckers are loud. What did this one sound like?” He picks at a rubber nub on the tire and thinks this over.
“Big, Rankin. Big.” I splash myself with cloudy black water from the bucket where Cox washes his hands after work. “If I hadn’t of gotten up to look for the sound, it would have knocked me off the seat.”
“Shit,” he says, solemn and insincere, “that’s big.”
I pace around the room. My arms are raw from scrubbing, and now they sting from the alcohol in the gel. My face hurts. Back at the water truck, I didn’t have any soap, so I scoured my body with sand. It took off plenty of skin, but it didn’t do a whole hell of a lot about the smell.
“Why’d you get up off the pot?” Using a broken strip of an aluminum measuring tape that he’d picked up off the floor when we first came in, Rankin points to a place I missed on the back of my neck. The man’s not touching me for anything, not even with a two-foot piece of metal. I rub in more gel.
“I heard something in there.”
“Like what? Make the sound.”
I make a little hissing noise by blowing air through the gap between my front teeth. “That ain’t quite it, but—”
Rankin chucks the tape across the room like a wobbly spear. It hits a stack of worn engine belts and they tumble onto the floor. Something about this makes him grin. “You’re right. That don’t sound like an MRE bomb. Let me marinate on it a bit.”
“Marinate?” I say. Rankin has two words that drive me crazy, and he knows it. Marinate and conversate. He attended college. He knows. He just doesn’t care. Let me express myself in the manner I choose, he usually says to me when I mention it. Always in his most proper voice.
He ignores this. “Maybe Cox would know. I think he took a demolition course. He wanted to be a sapper.”
“Think we should tell him about this?” Wind whistles in through a broken window on the other side of the garage. I shiver. My legs are covered with goose bumps and starting to turn purple. I want to go to bed.
“Maybe you’re right: after all, someone did try to. . . .” He doesn’t even want to say it. He stares off into space
I walk back and forth, rubbing my arms for warmth. The plastic gel bottle is empty, so I squirt a little antibiotic cream into my hand and work that onto my legs. “What I don’t understand is how they knew I’d be there. Maybe it wasn’t for me. I don’t know. Am I being paranoid? I did see someone come out just before I got there.”
Rankin laughs quietly. I glare at him.
“No.” He jumps down from his stack of tires and picks up the measuring tape again. “I’m laughing because anyone who’s spent a week around you would have known.” He pokes my ass cheek with it and I jump. “Your ass is like a cuckoo clock. 2100 hours. On the nose. Every night.”
“Is that right?” I say. This surprises me. I think about it for a moment and decide it’s true.
“Whoever did this set it up for you. The little sign. The time. All for you, D.”
“Lopez?” The obvious choice.
“No, man, this ain’t his style. He’s a dick, but he ain’t vicious, at least not like this. Besides, he’s too fussy to fuck around in a field latrine. The problem is a hajji wouldn’t know about your alarm-clock asshole.”
“This is true.”
I’m out of medicinal cream of any sort. Rankin watches me try to squeeze out the last little blob from the tube. “You ain’t done yet. I can still smell you.” He digs through his knapsack for a few seconds. When he finds what he’s looking for, he grins and tosses me an aerosol can. It’s jock-itch spray. As I’m spraying it onto my back, I realize I need to tell him about Ahmed. The whole story. Including the hidden door. So I clear my throat and spill it all. When I finish, he squints at me for a long time.
“We need to fix this shit,” he says. “And soon.”
66
I stand at attention and stare at the wall of Common Tent 1.
“We have reports,” Sergeant Oliphant says, “of you driving off into the desert after your shit-burning detail.”
The sergeant’s about as angry as I’ve ever seen him. And, believe me, this means something. This is a man I once saw tear in two a weapons manual the thickness of a small-town phone book with his bare hands during a monumental rage over proper rifle maintenance. Today his neck, which usually looks like the bottom half of a broad pyramid, has flexed and widened so far that his head appears to sprout right out of his lungs. The thumb-thick blood vessels on either side of it pulse and throb. Every word he shouts is wet with spit. For some reason this morning’s anger seems personal, and for the life of me I can’t figure out why.
We’ve been here in Common Tent 1 all morning. Lieutenant Blankenship, the captain, Sergeant Oliphant. Sergeant Guzman even popped his head in a couple of times, and now who should arrive but Lopez.
It is 1100 hours. I haven’t eaten anything since dinner and my head is pounding. The AC unit in the tent keeps sputtering out. The air is hot and thick as engine oil. A bit of grit got into my right eye last night, either while searching the perimeter wall for the door, or more likely when the latrine exploded, and now it’s swollen shut. During the last couple of hours, Sergeant Oliphant has gone over the log books from the sentry box for the last three weeks day by day and discussed every detail I’ve been a part of for the same time period.
“Where the fuck did you go, soldier?” Sergeant Oliphant pushes his face right up into mine. I find it difficult not to eyeball him back.
“Who told you that, Sarge?” I say, looking over at Lopez. He doesn’t meet my eye.
“Just answer the Goddamn question,” Sergeant Oliphant shouts. He clutches the legal pad in his hand so tightly the cardboard backing tears away. “Is something wrong with you? Having trouble understanding basic English this morning?”
Sergeant Oliphant rolls the pad up into a tube and whips it back over his shoulder like he’s going to smack me with it. Instead, he taps me lightly on the nose. A drop of sweat drips down from my sideburn to the tip of my chin. The itchy tickle it causes makes me want to yell.
“No, Sergeant,” I say. What can they prove? Nothing. If they had a witness, then they’d have said so by now. Never volunteer anything.
“No, what?” Sergeant Oliphant yells.
For whatever reason, the lieutenant has allowed Sergeant Oliphant to do all of the questioning up until this point. He and the captain sit and watch the proceedings in silence. The captain has not acknowledged my presence at all. This hearing is about a lot more than just me.
“No, I did not drive out into the desert after the burn detail, Sergeant.”
The lieutenant leans forward and looks at me, hard. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’re in, son?”
Son? Son? This man is a good two years younger than me. God, I wish we were back home in some bar, any bar, both of us dressed in civvies. I take a deep breath. I’m afraid of what I’ll say if I don’t cool down for a second.
“No, sir, because I don’t know what any of this is about.”
The captain laughs. We all look over at him and wait, but he says nothing.
“I find that very hard to believe,” the lieutenant says.
“What about the day you were late to the mission briefing? What about that?” Sergeant Oliphant asks.
“I explained it to you that morning.”
“Well, explain it again, Private. That’s why we’re here.”
“Yes, Sergeant. We did not have a sufficient amount of fuel to do the burn. I considered all of my options and decided to siphon some fuel from the truck. This took some time. Ahmed had difficulty accomplishing the task. If you don’t believe me, then ask him.”
“We did,” the sergeant says, “and he told us you dropped him off an hour and a half before you arrived at the base.”
“That’s a lie, sir. First, Ahmed does not own a watch, and secondly, he was visibly ill from swallowing fuel. I doubt he knew what time it was for the rest of the day.”
“What possible reason would Ahmed have for lying to us?” the lieutenant asks in a mild voice.
I want to pull out my hair and scream. “Every reason, sir. He’s spying on us for the insurgents.”
He gives me a blank look and lets out a long sigh.
“Lopez,” he says in a bored voice, “why don’t you explain your suspicions about Private Durrant’s behavior.”
Lopez reels off a series of places and dates, never once looking me in the eye. He’s made this speech before, maybe even this morning. I wonder if he’s been coached.
He starts with an incident I’d totally forgotten about. Several months ago while working a traffic patrol on the highway at the edge of Kurkbil, I tripped on a rock while waving a car through the road block and bumped into an elderly man. He was on his way to the village with a basket of eggs, and when I stumbled into him, I knocked it out of his hands. All of the eggs broke. Yolk dripped from his pants. The poor man was frightened and angry. I felt terrible about spoiling what was probably his family’s only source of income for the next few weeks, so I pressed a wad of bills into his hand, far more than the eggs were actually worth, and apologized several times. Lopez leaves out the part about the eggs, but he goes into great detail about the money and triples the amount of time I spoke with the man. When I attempt to explain, Sergeant Oliphant screams at me. Lopez goes on to describe several other times he’s seen me speaking with village men. Once, he tells them, he even saw me writing a message in Arabic for a man at the town café. In actuality, I’d been trying to learn how to write my name in script. The café’s owner, a man I’d become friendly with during my area patrols, was kind enough to correct it for me. Another time, Lopez says he observed me speaking to a young man at the FOB’s main gate for over an hour while I was on sentry duty. It’s true that I pointed out something inside the base and then talked with him for a while about it, but it sure as hell hadn’t lasted for an hour. Twenty minutes, more like. I remember that day clearly. The young man had come looking for a job. I explained that we already had all the employees we needed for the time being, but I’d speak to my CO. I did. In fact, Sergeant Oliphant had been there when I talked this over with Sergeant Guzman.
The Sandbox Page 21