Youngblood

by Matt Gallagher

  “She gave birth to six children, but Karim and I were the only ones to survive the first year. So we were close. The three of us, at least. My father was always away, working. We rarely saw him. He was a figure, a shadow we feared.”

  “What was he like on the arch?” I asked. “Stern? Omniscient?”

  She knocked at her forehead again. “Om-niss-ent?”

  “Someone who knows everything.”

  “No, not at all! They only called him the Cleric after he died. Here, people become perfect after death. Especially old men. Especially old men like my father.”

  I laughed while she sipped her chai, a coy shine on her face. I asked about her brother.

  “Karim was four years older. My protector, he thought. Especially after our mother died. I think that’s the reason . . .” She trailed off. “He never stopped thinking of himself that way.”

  “What else?” I said.

  “He cared too much. Like Elijah.”

  She continued about her childhood, about how her mother had been a religious woman but had kept her and Karim away from the mosque, because children of a sheik weren’t supposed to mingle with townspeople. Geography had been her favorite subject as a girl, because of the maps. And though it was embarrassing to admit now, she’d had a crush on one of Saddam’s sons for the longest time. It was all fine background, but not why I was there. I wanted her to get to the point. There’s the past we wish defined us, I thought, and there’s the past that actually does.

  She was talking about her mother insisting she learn the oud. “What about Rios?” I interrupted. “Elijah, I mean.”

  She looked up from the carpet and tilted her head. “Almost there, Lieutenant Porter. It was at those music lessons that we met.”

  “Oh.” I forced another cough. “My bad. Go ahead.”

  “I’d seen him from a window, coming to meet my father. He was already famous by then. And when the American trucks went through town, calling out a number for the people to call and tell them where al-Qaeda was, I thought, ‘I could call and speak to an American.’ That was exciting to me then. So I called the number and said I’d only speak to him.”

  “I thought you two met in your father’s sitting room.”

  She laughed curtly. “No Iraqi would allow that. Especially not my father. We talked on cell phones. First about information. Later about other things. Then he started coming to my music lessons, paying the instructor for his silence.”

  Goddamn Alia, I thought, and her bullshit story. She’d made me look stupid.

  “And Rios, I mean Elijah, he taught you English?”

  She nodded. “I’d studied some before. But it’s because of him that I’m good at it. He spoke Arabic, though his dialect was bad. So we learned from each other.”

  The air in the room felt humid, and I felt clumsy and jealous all at once. I pointed outside, changing the topic.

  “Your boy, how was he . . .” I pointed to my own earlobe and drew an imaginary line down my neck. “Hurt.”

  She bit into a cracker and shrugged. “Sky bomb,” she said. “We were lucky.”

  I stared at a carpet stain between my feet. The soldiers called her eldest Scowls, which only made him scowl more. Now I knew why. Ahmed also had sharper features and paler skin than his clever-faced younger brother, something I thought about a lot. Too much, probably.

  I’d spent a lot of time fantasizing about how Rana and Shaba had fallen in love, using Alia’s version of events as a template. I knew every scene, every line of that desert ballad by heart. Sometimes I was there, observing silently in a corner. Other times I became a participant, toasting to their eternal love with the dead sheik. Sometimes I even replaced Rios, and it was Jack Porter who held hands with a moony young woman in her father’s courtyard. Still other times, I didn’t replace Rios so much as I became him, speaking fluent Arabic and darkly brooding over the future of my new country. But it hadn’t happened that way. None of it had. It’d happened on the phone.

  “What’s your dream?” Rana asked suddenly, bringing me back to her hut.

  “Huh.” It wasn’t that I’d never chewed over the question. It was that where I came from, a person wasn’t supposed to have just one answer. “Seek greatness, I guess.” Then I smirked, hoping that got me out of the question.

  “What does that mean?” Her response wasn’t implicating, just confused. “I meant what do you want? From life?”

  “Depends on the day, really.” I didn’t want to talk about myself anymore, mostly because her question had caught me off guard. “What about you?”

  “It’s better if I show you,” she said. She moved to the bedroom, where the family shared a large cotton mattress. She returned a minute later, a faint reverence in her steps. She held something to her chest and pressed it into my hands. The smell of swamp blossoms filled my nostrils, and goose bumps shot up my arms, beneath my sleeves.

  It was a postcard. An old one, with worn edges and deep creases. A drawing of a city on the beach covered the front, a coral-blue sky and palm trees nestled up against a long row of Gothic buildings. Flipping it, I saw that the back was covered in faded Arabic script.

  “Naples?” I asked, looking back up. I’d no idea where the postcard was from. “Havana?”

  “Beirut,” she said, the last syllable a feather off her tongue. It was only then, listening to her talk about a trip her parents had taken to Lebanon years before, that I realized she was younger than I was. Despite everything she’d been through, despite everything she’d seen, she was still younger.

  In America, I thought, she’d be in college.

  A furious knocking filled the stillness. I looked at Rana in a panic. An army officer alone with an Arab woman, let alone a married one living in seclusion, couldn’t be explained away.

  I hadn’t even done anything wrong.

  “It’s for you,” she said.

  The walls of my throat closed up as I rose and took three steps to the front door. It wasn’t anyone important, though. Just Batule, in all his oafish, mouth-breathing charm.

  “Sir!” he said. “It’s Captain Vrettos. Just radioed and said we got to roll to the big mosque!” Loose words dribbled from him like saliva. “Dead Tooth, at the top. Firefight with the IAs. And we need to get over there. Like, now.”

  He ran back to the vehicles before I could respond. I grabbed my helmet and rifle and went to follow.

  A soft, determined hand stopped me as I stepped into gray mist. I turned around.

  “You remind me of him,” she said, squeezing my palm. “Be careful.”

  Rifle in one hand, helmet in the other, I ran on air to the waiting Stryker.

  37

  * * *

  The minaret seemed so far away. A little cream-colored dome crested the spiraling stone tower, a dark-age Ottoman relic. The afternoon had turned dim and chilly. I rubbed my arms. An oval of American soldiers and Iraqi jundis ringed the base of the tower, watching the black flag of al-Qaeda flap rowdily from the small walkway near the top.

  Dead Tooth was somewhere up there. The squad of jundis that’d chased him here said three other insurgents were with him, as well as the mosque’s mullah and a long black tube that maybe was a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell.

  Baritone Arabic blared from a megaphone on the other side of the oval. It was Saif, demanding the insurgents let the mullah go. He’d arrived before us, and shortly after Chambers and his half of the platoon. Captain Vrettos and a group of headquarters soldiers arrived last, bringing the sum of Coalition forces attempting to wait out a petulant, cornered teenager to fifty-five.

  I leaned against the front of our Stryker and sucked down warm water from my CamelBak, watching the sun fall. The adrenaline jolt I’d gotten from Rana’s words—and hand squeeze—had waned. I wondered if I could find a warm can of Rip It in the back of the vehicle. During the onslaught of puberty, I’d stay in my room for hours after a fight with my parents or Will. This was sort of t
he same thing, albeit with a kidnapped holy man and the potential for geopolitical disaster.

  “Sir!” Dominguez shouted from the gunner’s turret. “Commander wants you at his vehicle. Leaders’ powwow.”

  I flashed him a thumbs-up and then walked counterclockwise around the ring of armored vehicles, helmet cocked back, thumbs tucked under the chest plate, and rifle dangling from its sling, thinking about Rana and her kids. They seemed so alone. And sad.

  “Hey, gaucho, pick up the goddamn pace. Waiting on you.”

  “Sorry, sir.” Captain Vrettos sat on the edge of a lowered Stryker ramp. His eyes were red and cheeks wan. “Didn’t realize.”

  The commander sighed and shook his head, voice slurring past the tobacco nestled deep in his cheeks. He resembled a pufferfish whenever he chewed, the effect heightened because of his build, a Pez dispenser head on a pull-string body. I kept my head low and stood between Chambers and Saif.

  “Ideas?” Captain Vrettos began. “If we don’t solve this in the next thirty minutes, the division commander’s coming from Camp Independence to personally fire us all.”

  “Can’t blow up a mosque,” First Sergeant said.

  “Need to blow up the terrorists,” Chambers followed.

  “Blow up?” Saif asked, a lot of shock and a little awe in his question. “How?”

  “I’ve done this before,” Chambers said. “In oh-four, Sadr pulled the same shit in Najaf. He stayed in a shrine for three fucking weeks, surrounded, and still got away. Learned that lesson. We need to get them now, before the generals show. Then it’ll be too late.”

  “Too late?” Saif asked. “For what?”

  Chambers ignored him. “Sir,” he said to the commander, “this is what I recommend. I’ll take a small team of guys. Four-man stack, Room Clearing one-oh-one. The staircase spirals up like that. If we move quick, they won’t get an RPG out the window fast enough for a clean shot. The fuckers are iced, and the mosque stands. Win-win.”

  “Americans aren’t allowed to enter mosques,” Saif said, pushing his way back into the conversation. His voice was brittle. “My men and I must do this.”

  “No offense, big man, but this isn’t training. My soldiers are better. We go, the only blood spilled is terrorist blood.” Chambers didn’t look away from the commander as he spoke to Saif, his eyes pale as slate. “Trust me. I’ve been here before.”

  Captain Vrettos began plucking at his eyebrows, trying to think.

  I said, “I’m going, too.”

  “No way, sir,” First Sergeant said. “Can’t have both members of a platoon’s leadership getting wiped out in one move.”

  “I hear you, First Sergeant. But these are my men. I’m going.”

  Captain Vrettos groaned and let go of his eyebrow. “Okay, you three all go. Grab a jundi for point. Lieutenant Porter, take a radio, you’re my command and control up there. Molazim Saif, you’re the de facto terp, but with a rifle. Do not kill the mullah. Understood?”

  None of us were happy, but we all nodded.

  As Chambers stalked off grumbling about having to do this with “two fucking officers,” Saif pulled me behind the adjacent Stryker.

  “You must stop this,” he said. “This is a terrible decision. There must be another way.”

  I found his voice too authoritative. Dark Irish fury tore through me like cinder.

  “Fuck off,” I said. “Orders are orders. We could be dropping a drone bomb. Get your gear on.”

  “So that’s how it’s going to be?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mistook you, Loo-tenant Porter. I mistook you for someone different.”

  “Grab your jundi. We’ll meet at the base of the tower.”

  I went to walk away, but turned around to see Saif half grinning at my backside.

  “I’ll be there,” he said. The smile he was wearing hadn’t reached his eyes. “But only me. None of my men will go up there for this.”

  I rolled my eyes and played him the world’s smallest violin, rubbing my right thumb and forefinger together. Then I found Batule and said he was walking point up the minaret. He started prepping his gear. Hog was there, too, sitting on the back of a lowered ramp with a bored look on his face.

  “This is crazy, sir,” he said.

  “Sure is,” I said. I’d been avoiding him since the Haitham incident. He’d probably been avoiding me, too. “How you doing?”

  Hog looked down at his feet. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think about him a lot.”

  “Yeah.” I chewed my bottom lip.

  He looked back up, his eyes turning to gin. Before he could tear up, I tapped him on the helmet and said to keep doing a good job. Then I walked away.

  We gathered in strained silence. No one in our four-man stack wanted to speak; nor did anyone who was staying behind. The plan was far from tactically sound, but that’d never stopped a military operation. Saif unholstered his pistol, metal glinting in the dusk. Pushing away three or four bad jokes, I cracked my neck, tightened my bootlaces, and crossed myself with great papist flourish. Then I followed Batule, Saif, and Chambers up the yellow stones at a quick trot.

  To my ears, our boots on the path sounded like falling trees, each step a fatal alarm for the enemy above that possessed everything—high ground, larger weapons, the fervor of zealotry. As we rounded two, then three loops of the spiral ramp, the sand winds howled. We faced the dead of north on the third rotation, and it struck with an open palm; I had to stagger to my left to catch my balance. Only Chambers remained upright. Saif pushed past Batule, and we kept moving.

  With two more rungs of tower to go, the dirty sky burst into patriotic staples of red, white, and purple. A green star cluster followed. Illumination rounds, I realized, meant to distract the insurgents in the tower. It’s Independence Day in Babylon, I thought, turning back to the climb as the lead man tripped over a clear, ankle-high wire spread across the path, landing on his palms and knees.

  There was a long, yo-yoing pause during which no one moved. All I could do was bite my lip and tuck my chin before the world exploded into stone. I thought of all the little things that make up life and the ancient howl returned, pushing me into the tower wall. I saw and heard nothing until I did again.

  •  •  •

  It was the falling debris that brought me back, earth raining back down on earth. I felt my face like a blind man reading braille. One lip, two lips. A nose. The eyes were still there, and they opened and saw dirty sky again, though my lenses had been blown off. I blinked and blinked, pushing away the thousand hammers pounding in my head, and stood up.

  Everything was brown ash. As I leaned against the tower wall, trying to remember who and why, a shape came out of the cloud like a monster.

  “Sir!” It was talking to me loudly. “Sir!”

  “Batule!” I grabbed him by the chest plate and pulled him toward me. His face looked like meatloaf, and his hands were pressed against one of his eyes, his palms lapping up pools of dark blood. Pieces of his uniform on his arms and upper torso had been shredded, but he seemed able to walk. I said to keep his hands pressed against that socket and asked if he could make it down the tower path by himself. He said yes.

  “Go,” I said.

  “No way, they need help.”

  “That’s a fucking order!” I was yelling too loud but wasn’t sure he could hear me, either. “You’re combat ineffective. Go the fuck down!”

  He went one way and I went the other, using the curving tower wall as my guide, toward belt lashes of rifle fire.

  I floated through steps of exaggerated movement, uncertain where my feet would land, a spaceman sifting through the powder of the moon. Four, five, six steps in, I heard laughter, then the whistles of steady gunfire, then saw the hazy silhouette of a man on one knee firing a rifle up the path. I found my own still on me, dangling from its strap at my hip. I raised it to my shoulder pocket and flipped it to burst, firing into the fangs of the unknown, not bothering to aim, not ca
ring to. A bright lodestar of a tracer lit the way every fifth round. Breathing in the hot cordite of spent rounds, breathing out the cold sulfur of rounds spent, I kept squeezing until the magazine ran dry. When I dropped it and reached into my vest for a replacement, I found Chambers to my left, on one knee, searching the brown cloud, squeezing off rounds one or two at a time.

  “Welcome to the party,” he said. He laughed again, low and loud, breathing in the slag around us. “Get some, hajj,” he said. “Come get some. The infidels are at the fucking gate!”

  I asked where Saif was, and he nodded to his far side. A body lay there, leaning up, firing a pistol up the path.

  “He’s in a bad way,” Chambers said. “Gonna take both of us to get him down.”

  “Let’s do it.” I hadn’t heard any counterfire since I’d sent away Batule. “While we can.”

  We each grabbed one of Saif’s armpits and lifted, draping his arms around our shoulders. Saif’s head sagged to the side. He mumbled something with glazed eyes and splashes of runny, hot drool. I tried not to look down but realized as we started that there was space where Saif’s legs were supposed to be, two long holes filled with nothing. Something was dripping, like water from a broken tap. I clutched his body closer and kept moving.

  We spoke to one another through labored breaths and grunts, Chambers and I shifting Saif’s body to alter the weight placement, slow, waddling steps of minutes that felt like days. The fog of earth was thinning, but not quickly enough; we couldn’t see farther than a few steps. Only sharp whimpers of pain now came from Saif’s mouth. Just as my shoulder threatened to pop out and my chest and legs churned, Chambers leaned over to set his half of Saif down.

  “Quick break here. Should answer that. It’s been buzzing this whole fucking time.”

  “Huh?”

  He pointed to the forgotten radio on my back. I set Saif down and reached across my back for the hand receiver. I hadn’t heard anything.