“And the fucker who paid for the operation,” Clarissa says, speaking faster with every word, “the one who told me I should just clean the slate and start over—that’s what he actually said, clean the slate— where do you think he’s gone?”
“Jack?”
“I knew you wouldn’t forget that name. Well, then, you’ll be pleased to hear this next installment of Days of Clarissa’s Life.”
“I didn’t mean it like—”
“Oh, you never mean shit, do you? Shut up and listen for a second. After Jack’s check to the clinic bounced, so did he, along with all two of my credit cards, my grandma’s cameo brooch, and, let’s see, what else did he take? Oh, yeah, right, my fucking car!” She takes another pull on her cigarette and speaks as she exhales. “Don’t worry. They found it in a rest stop outside Jacksonville. Just to set the record straight, the police told me his name isn’t really Jack. It’s Frederick Vander-something or other. They told me I’m lucky. The last woman he did this to got a broken arm in the bargain.”
“Jesus, Clarissa, I’m sorry.”
“Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” she says. “Sorry doesn’t count for shit.”
Neither of us speaks for a while. As if to make up for the awkward silence, the phone fills with a rolling hiss of static that sounds like breath exhaled between teeth. Please don’t let me get knocked off the line now. Please.
When the line clears again, Clarissa’s voice sounds calm, steady. “It’s odd. We’re talking right now, but you could be anyone. We’re basically strangers. You know that? What’s the longest time we spent together? A week? Two weeks? All right, you’ve told me what you haven’t called about; so what the hell do you want, then?”
“Want?”
“If you didn’t want something, you wouldn’t have called. What is it?”
“I’m in trouble.”
“You’re in trouble?” She laughs, an ugly brittle sound. “What’d you do? Punch somebody again?”
“No, it’s not like that.”
“Hey, if you’re lucky, maybe they’ll send you home. God knows the Army hates violent men. But don’t come sniffing around here if they do. No drunken midnight booty calls. No surprise Sunday visits. I don’t want this any more. I don’t want any of it.”
Sergeant Guzman chooses this moment to step out of the office. As he passes, he taps his watch. “Forty-eight seconds.” His cigar trails a thin stream of blue smoke. He cracks the front door and peeks out. If he’s surprised by what’s being said on my end of this phone call, it doesn’t show on his face.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have called,” I say.
“Now you decide this.” She’s right. I don’t know her. This isn’t any Clarissa I’ve spoken to before. This is some new person who shares her name. Even her voice sounds different today, somehow lower and raspier. “Just go ahead and spit it out, Toby, whatever it is.”
“I’m being accused of treason.”
“Oh, poor Toby.”
“It’s all a mistake.”
“It usually is.”
“I mean it. I’ve been set up. It’s all a very, very complicated mistake. They’re making me out to be the fall guy.”
“Why would anyone bother to set up a lowly private fuckup like you?”
“Because I am a lowly private.”
“Well, if someone is setting you up, it’s only a mistake to the one taking the fall.” She lets out a breath, probably thick with smoke. “In this case, you.”
“Jesus, Clarissa, why are acting like I’m your worst enemy? You sound like you hate me. Even your voice sounds awful. I barely recognize it.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“All I wanted to do was see if you were all right and tell you what was happening. I thought maybe—”
“You thought maybe, what? You could win me back by telling me you’ve become a traitor? Or maybe I’m supposed to feel so sorry for you that I’ll rush back into your arms when they let you out of prison twenty years from now? Or is treason a firing-squad offense?”
“I just didn’t want you to think what they’re saying about me is true. Believe it or not, I still care what you think. Listen, I might of broken some rules, but—”
Again, that terrible new laugh. A wave of white noise crashes. Somewhere in the whoosh of static I hear another conversation. A woman speaks rapidly in Spanish. Pendejo, pendejo, pendejo, she yells. A man makes consoling sounds. And then they’re gone. Some other trouble, some other place. Misery is in the air all around us.
When these other voices fade away, I go on, but my voice sounds weak and pathetic, guilty, even to myself. “But I’m not a traitor.”
“Okay, you convinced me. You’re not a traitor. Is that it? Have you said everything you wanted to say?”
“I guess so.” I’m no longer sure why I called. What was it I wanted to happen? Was I really expecting her to pat my head and tell me everything would be all right?
“Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you on CNN sometime soon. Or will anybody care about this?”
I’m more than a little surprised to find that this doesn’t make me angry. Anger seems beside the point. All the words I’d saved up over the past few days to tell her, shiny and hard and mean, polished to a high gleam with spite, seem unnecessary now, ridiculous. I needed them then, but they’ve outlived their usefulness. I wish she could set her own anger aside for ten seconds or so, just long enough for me to say good-bye. I doubt I’ll ever see her again. I didn’t know this until I heard her voice.
“You don’t want to talk to me,” I say finally. “I get it. That’s fine. I’m almost out of time anyway. Let me tell you one last thing, even though it’s probably stupid to say it at this point. I am sorry about all this shit you’re going through, everything. I wish there was some way I could make it right, and—”
“Here’s how you can make it right: say good-bye and mean it. Whatever point there was to—”
“—and, listen, for whatever it’s worth, I love you.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.” She takes a ferocious drag on her cigarette. “That must suck.”
“Yeah, it does.”
Hard. Guttural. Fast. Final. And that’s that. We’re all through. My battered old organ stops thumping altogether. The blood drains. The tissue dries. The cells blow away. I’m left with a dry pink cave between my lungs. But for some reason, I keep on talking anyway. Longing moves the muscles in my mouth much the same way that, after you’ve run it down with your car, a dead deer’s leg will continue to twitch.
“I doubt if I’ll see you. . . .” I say, and then can think of nothing more.
Clarissa’s voice softens. “I did warn you. Remember that day when you were driving me home after our little adventure in the woods? I told you, ‘My life’s a slow-motion car wreck, but it’s usually the other passengers that get hurt.’ And you probably thought I was only joking.” She sniffs and clears her throat. When she speaks again, her voice sounds even lower. “I didn’t mean what I said about the firing squad. I’m sorry about that. I’m sure all this will—”
A shrill buzz blots out the rest. Buried somewhere in the squall of sound, Clarissa says something about a change of heart, or maybe she says “heart transplant”; but before I can ask her what she means, the line goes completely crazy. Bleeps, gurgles, squeaks. I think I hear Clarissa’s voice, tiny and sharp, yelling, “I’m sorry, you’re right, it’s just that I need you near me now.” Maybe I don’t hear this. Probably what she said was, “I’m sorry you have to hear this, it’s just that I don’t need you now.” But then again maybe I don’t hear that either. Maybe it’s not even Clarissa speaking. It could be some other soldier’s girl telling some other soldier the end has come. The earpiece gushes so loudly that I have to pull it away, and then the line is dead.
When Sergeant Guzman sees me tapping the phone against the wall, he steps out of the office and takes it from me. I avoid his eye. He gives a sad little nod and hooks his thumb in the direction
of the office trailer, where the lieutenant and Sergeant Oliphant and the captain and all the rest of the shit that will soon be raining down upon my head await.
85
Outside, Sergeant Guzman jams a cover onto my head and smears a finger or two of greasepaint under each of my eyes. “It’s my ass if they catch you out of that cell,” he says, wiping his sticky, brown fingers on my neck.
The base looks exactly the same as it did when I went into the Comm Trailer, but it’s not. Tent canvas flutters in the wind, the American flag flaps on its splintered pole, sandbags still surround the office trailers, the old fort continues to crumble bit by bit into the desert floor; but nothing is the same as it was before, and it never will be again.
The evening feels heavy, dense. As warm as unspilled blood. A physical thing that weighs on my shoulders and head. As Sergeant Guzman walks me back to my cell, an explosion rumbles in the distance somewhere north of the base. Both of us look off toward the Noses. Neither of us says it, but I’m sure we’re both thinking it. HQ has finally decided to give us air support. Sergeant Guzman smiles. A splash of water hits me on the cheek. I look around to see where it came from. We’re still about fifteen yards from the fort’s bay doors. Sergeant Guzman hustles me across the parade ground, pushing the center of my back with his palm. Another drop of water. I look up, and when I do, the heavens crack open and an ocean comes down all at once. A storm the likes of which I haven’t seen since the summer I left Savannah. Lightning forks the plain. Water falls in thick sheets. The rain is so heavy that within seconds, the motor pool disappears behind a curtain of gray. I turn my face up and drink it in. Sergeant Guzman grabs me by the crook of my arm and pulls me into the entrance to the old fort.
86
A couple of hours go by. I mark the time by counting off the seconds between falling mortars. At first I thought it was thunder, but then one landed close, maybe even hit the old fort, and I knew they were shells. From the sound of it, we’re really getting hit hard. I wonder what the guys are doing, if they’re all right. I hope we’re giving them hell up there. It pisses me off that I’m not fighting beside them. I try to sleep, but it’s no good: I’m too keyed up.
“Hey.” Someone raps a hand on metal. “Hey.”
The door opens. Rankin gives me a strange look. About an hour ago, I heard Rankin relieve Sergeant Guzman of guard duty, but this is the first I’ve seen of him. If they weren’t so shorthanded and Rankin wasn’t injured, there’s no way they’d let him watch my cell. Even now, it strikes me as odd. The lieutenant must be desperate. He steps aside and in comes Lopez behind him, dripping water on the floor. Rankin winks at me over Lopez’s head and shuts the door. I notice that the Judas hole is open now, but it is eyeless. A mortar round lands nearby. It shakes centuries-old grit loose from the ceiling. Lopez puts a hand on the wall to steady himself. I haven’t really gotten a good look at him since the night of the fuckup by the wall. And that night it was too dark to see him clearly. One side of his face has swollen up where I popped him. The skin around his eye is purple with splotches of green and murky yellow. He notices me looking at it and touches his face gingerly. I offer an apologetic smile.
“You don’t look much better,” Lopez says, but there isn’t any heat in his voice.
“Probably not,” I say. “But I bet old Ahmed’s sporting a shiner himself. And a pretty good headache, I hope. I beaned him in the face with a nice-sized rock before he got away.”
Lopez shifts from foot to foot, jangling something metallic in his pocket. It makes a hollow clank, like a handful of spent cartridges. I can’t for the life of me figure out what he’s doing here. So I ask him. He stares down in a dazed sort of way, tightening the muscle in his injured cheek, then letting it go slack.
“I need to talk to you,” Lopez says. The swollen eye makes him appear to be squinting, as though he’s trying to make do after losing his glasses. “I think I might have made a mistake. A big mistake.”
When I’d thought about Lopez over the last couple of days, I imagined that a scene like this would bring me immense satisfaction. But I don’t feel much of anything. Lopez looks as though he hasn’t slept in days. Dark stubble has sprouted on his chin and jaw. His boots are scuffed and his fatigues are wrinkled. I’ve never seen him like this. A brown splotch that looks like Salisbury steak gravy covers the bottom half of his shirt pocket. The whites of his eyes are a mess of painful-looking blood vessels. He rubs his upper lip in the place his moustache used to be.
I don’t say a word.
“I got the lockbox that night, right? But I didn’t give it to the lieutenant. I meant to, but I didn’t. Something you said bothered me."
I nod.
“I looked at that darn thing and I looked at it. Something, I don’t know what, just wasn’t right. So I prayed on it. I couldn’t stop thinking about the stupid thing. Something about this felt very wrong. Finally, I couldn’t—I mean, well, I had to know.”
“You opened it.”
“Yeah, I did.” He continues to stare at the ground.
“What’d you jimmy it open with? A screwdriver? Ahmed already had it open somehow. Did he bust the lock?”
“No, I don’t know how he got it open. I used the combination.”
“How’d you get the combination?” I’m amazed. Does Lopez have safe-cracking skills?
“I’ve gotten to know the lieutenant pretty well. I even know the year he graduated from West Point. He should really have used random digits.”
“I would of used a hammer,” I say.
“Of course you would.” He unbuttons the top button of his shirt, thinks about it, and then buttons it up again. This is getting weird.
“So?” I ask.
“When the lieutenant told me to go look for it, he said he’d taken it from Lieutenant Saunders. He said that’s the real reason we were going to Inmar the day we got hit.”
I say, “I thought the meet with the sheikhs was an excuse for Saunders to take the box to Six Zone HQ. Lieutenant Blankenship was supposed to think the real reason for the trip was to talk with the sheikhs. A hearts-and-minds thing. The rest of us were going to try and shake loose some supplies and video—”
“Wait, wait, what did you just say? Back up a second.” Lopez reaches for my arm; but when he realizes what he’s doing, he pulls away again. “Who told you that about taking the box to HQ?”
Oh, shit. There’s nothing for it now but to tell him. What difference does it make at this point? “The MI guy, that new captain.”
“The captain?”
“He was planning to leave tomorrow with the box,” I tell him.
“How do you know?”
“I stole it from the lieutenant for him.” I run a hand through my hair. Here we go. I explain how the captain had me backed into a corner, that I could either steal the box and get his help or not do it and have him lie and say I did all those things Lopez thought I was doing. When I tell Lopez how Ahmed stole it from me after seeing me bury it, he gnaws at his lip. I continue: “The captain went batshit. But I wasn’t positive Ahmed had it, until we went after him last night. Nevada and Rankin didn’t know anything about the box. We wanted Ahmed for other reasons.”
Lopez frowns and fidgets. I’m not sure how to read this.
“I know you don’t believe me,” I say, “but that’s the way it was.”
“I believe you. I just don’t know what to do,” Lopez says. “Right is right and wrong is wrong. But this, I don’t know any more.”
“Have you told the lieutenant that you have it?”
“No.”
“Well, he knows now.”
“Did you—” Lopez jerks back like I’m fixing to smack him one.
“I’m sorry.” And I am, although I’m not sure why. He doesn’t deserve it. “I didn’t think it mattered any more. I was sure you’d already given it to him, and he didn’t say otherwise.”
He shrugs.
“I’m surprised you didn’t—”
�
��I opened it.” Lopez examines my face. “And now I’m all mixed up about what—” His voice falters and then trails off.
“What’d you find?”
“Pictures mostly, and some other stuff, stuff I don’t quite understand. Or I think I do, but if it’s what I think it is, then—”
“What kind of pictures?”
“They’re strange. I didn’t get what the big deal was at first, but then I recognized some of the—” Lopez seems to be trying to make up his mind about something. “—people.”
“And?”
The photos, he says, are of a bunch of locals around a table. Two of them are leaders of militia groups. They’re the ones who’ve been causing most of the trouble up in the capital. He recognized them from CNN. They’ve been in the news for months. The third is a religious leader who is supposedly hiding out in Iran or Pakistan now. He heard about it on Army radio just last week. As he tells me this, his voice becomes odd and contorted.
“I don’t follow,” I say.
“There’s a big-shot U.S. Army general in the pictures too. One of the main leaders of ground forces during the initial invasion. He’s sitting across from them, smiling.”
“Are you telling me the general was a traitor?” I ask.
“No, not really. I don’t know.” He looks completely lost. “In the pictures, there’s money on the table. Lots of it. It looks like they’re negotiating something. In one of them, a man on the general’s staff is pointing to photos of machine guns. But I don’t think they were selling them to the militia. It didn’t look that way. One of the photos was of a Chinese-made AK. I got the feeling they were giving these guys advice. But that doesn’t make much sense either. I don’t know. It’s—I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I don’t know why I’m talking to you at all. Ahmed, or whoever went through that door in the wall last night—”
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