Youngblood

by Matt Gallagher

  On the patrol to Rana’s, I considered what Chambers had meant. I wasn’t sure. Then I considered the rumors about Rana and me. Today wouldn’t help, I knew. But she’d earned it.

  She’s a good source, I told myself. She saved us. I’m not overvaluing her info because I like her. Though I do. As a person, I like her. She’s interesting. The ramp dropped just then, and I saw Rana and her boys in the daylight.

  They’d dressed for the occasion. Ahmed and Karim wore matching white collar shirts tucked into navy trousers. The eldest wore a brown belt and his ubiquitous scowl, while Karim stared at the declining Stryker ramp with mouth agape, his bug eyes wider than usual. Both boys had slicked down their hair with water so it clung to their scalps like hay. Their mother wore a black burqa made of silk with a translucent veil that didn’t entirely conceal the greenness of her eyes.

  I took off my headset and smiled.

  “You’re the best, Jack,” she said. “This means so much.”

  “No problem,” I said with a too-casual shrug. “Rana.”

  She asked if we would take a picture of them dressed up. Snoop hopped out and played photographer, using her cell phone. None of the Iraqis smiled for it. Then they took a seat on the cushioned bench in the rear of the vehicle, Rana in the middle, holding her boys’ hands. Karim nuzzled into his mother while Ahmed whispered into her ear. Across from them, Snoop laughed.

  “They think they’re in a robot,” he said. He leaned forward and spoke to the boys, offering them sunflower seeds. Ahmed didn’t respond, but Karim gave the terp a shy smile and accepted a handful. The ramp closed slowly, like a drawbridge, the ochre glow of electronics filling the space between. It is kind of like a robot, I thought.

  The crunching of tires on silt turned to the quiet of smooth pavement. As we pushed east back to Ashuriyah, Ahmed asked Snoop where his mask was. Snoop groaned and said something about losing it. Since the Big Man’s edict, he’d also given up carrying around his plastic rifle, becoming more remote and moody in the process. I needed to talk to him again about his plans for after the withdrawal. As soon as I had the chance, I would.

  I switched the Stryker’s internal screen from the digital map to the camera of the driver’s view, so the boys could watch the passing landscape. Even Ahmed’s face brightened with interest, and he tugged at his mother’s sleeve to make sure she was watching, too.

  “How long?” I asked Rana. “Since you’ve been to the cemetery.”

  “We came for my father’s burial.” She patted Karim on the head, ruffling his hair. “This one had just been born.”

  Compared to Snoop, the Iraqis looked like baby birds on their bench. Rana’s legs barely reached the floorboard. As we swung south into Ashuriyah and under the Cleric’s arch, Ahmed fell back into the legs of the joe standing out of the rear hatch. If the soldier even noticed, he didn’t show it, remaining upright and rigid. In the meantime, Snoop helped the boy back to his seat, and I put on my headset to yell at the drivers to slow down.

  “Are you eating?” Rana asked as I removed the headset again. She tilted her head toward me. “Your face looks thin.”

  “Back to three meals a day,” I said. My appetite hadn’t returned with the end of Ramadan, though I ate enough to keep functional. I flexed a bicep. “Can’t you tell?”

  “I don’t like being lied to,” she said, her dimple flashing in amusement. “I already have two boys. I don’t need a third.”

  I smiled back, though it felt like the corners of my mouth were glowing warm from embarrassment. I changed the subject.

  The four Strykers halted at the graveyard’s entrance. Over the radio, I told Washington to join us on the ground as security and everyone else to remain with the vehicles. Valium addict or no, the two children loved him.

  I stepped into the late morning. The graveyard lay at the end of a road of packed dirt on the outskirts of town. There was nothing south of it, only dusty badlands cleaved by the occasional ravine, but a convenience store sat across the road in a cement bunker. A wrought-iron fence the color of milk enclosed the graveyard itself, a swing gate the entrance. A small bronze plaque hung from the gate, pink and green graffiti covering the engraved Arabic script.

  “Message from Jaish al-Mahdi,” Snoop said. “It say, ‘Home for Sunni donkeys.’ ”

  “What up, Scowls!” Washington joined us at the entrance, greeting Ahmed with an exaggerated hand slap. A learned smirk and jutted chin I recognized as my soldier’s own crossed Ahmed’s face. Karim, still holding his mother’s hand, tugged her down and said something in a soft voice, pointing at Washington and Snoop, and then at me. The terp laughed heartily.

  “He wishes to know,” Rana said, “why some Americans are painted and some are not. I’ve tried before.” She turned my way. “Perhaps you have an answer?”

  I racked my brain for a simple way of explaining to a child the racial history of humanity. I pointed to the gray sky and then to the skin on my arm. “The sun,” I said. “My ancestors lived far to the north, where there’s less sun. Your ancestors lived here, where there’s more sun. Their ancestors lived in the south, where there’s even more sun. We’re all the same underneath. It’s just the skin that changed, depending on where people lived.” I turned to Snoop. “Think you can translate that?”

  “Nice work, LT,” Washington said. “Not even that racist.”

  Karim nodded, rubbing the back of his head, which produced a spiky cowlick. His mother thanked me. I blushed again.

  Rana opened a black umbrella to keep the sun off, and we followed her through the entrance, one at a time, Washington conducting a radio check with the Strykers in a brittle cotton drawl. We walked in pairs: Rana; Karim at her heels, holding on to her dress; me and Snoop; and then Ahmed and Washington in the rear.

  The dirt path soon turned to disordered mounds of earth and sandstone markers, graves upon graves jumbled together. There was no grid, no discernible system whatsoever, just sun-blasted rocks and calcified yellow dirt. As we eased down a knoll, the graves became more spread out and distinctive: some had stucco tombstones; others were marked by small religious flags hung over them. A group of tabbies with fur like sunbursts had gathered between two tombs for shade. Most watched us pass indolently, though a tomcat draped in dead flowers hissed.

  Umbrella in front of her like a pike, Rana pointed to a crypt made of sun-dried brick with a porcelain-green dome, but my eyes drifted left, down the hill. In a depression lay lines and lines of markers, uniform and ordered. Plastic flowers rested next to the markers, the nearest adorned with portraits of young men holding rifles and wearing bandoliers of ammo across their chests.

  “For Sunni insurgents,” Snoop said. “The sign calls it the ‘Garden of Martyrs.’ ”

  A pair of gravediggers were planting shovels into the ground on the far end of the depression. I waved at them. One waved back. I squinted my eyes hard until the markers fell out of focus and I tried to see the soft green hills and marble heads of the garden of martyrs back home.

  It didn’t work.

  As we neared the al-Badri crypt, the mounds thinned into a pathway. A square of brown grass surrounded the crypt. Rana leaned down and pulled a few blades from the ground, shaking her head in frustration. A splintered wood door about my height led into the crypt itself. Rana produced a key and pushed it open. I instructed Snoop and Washington to stay back, pushing Ahmed forward to join his mother and brother, but Rana waved us to the fore.

  “My father thought well of Americans.”

  The crypt smelled of sour earth and incense. Removing my helmet and gloves, I ducked down into it, finding a wide, circular room that could’ve fit twice our number. A shuttered window at the top of the circle allowed for gashes of air. The floor of mosaic tiles fell into a pit in the center of the room, round cinder tombstones marking the graves. I looked up at the underside of the dome. It’d been painted with the golden-black eagle of Iraq, wings tucked, talons clutching a scroll.

  Rana asked S
noop something in Arabic.

  “Gene-a-ration,” he said to her, sounding out the syllables. “Gene-a-ration.”

  “No,” I corrected. It’s gen-a-ration.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I say.”

  Rana’s voice slipped back into rutted English. “My father’s grandfather is buried here, too. Three gen-a-rations of al-Badri sheiks rest beneath us. Or gene-a-rations.”

  Walking along the pit’s edge, she indicated which marker belonged to each dead sheik. Then, grabbing both her boys’ shoulders, she leaned down and told them of the powerful, wise men whose blood flowed in their veins. Karim looked into the pit with the clean smile of a child, feeling the gaps between his teeth with his fingers, but his older brother nodded darkly, as if he’d felt the ghosts guiding him through the world all along. Now he knew their names.

  Leaving Snoop and Washington in the back of the crypt, I walked to the far right of the pit, where Rana had indicated her father had been buried. I did my best to make the moment feel surreal. Here lay Sheik Ahmed. I fought off a seditious yawn and asked about the marker next to Sheik Ahmed’s.

  “For my brother,” Rana said. “He wanted to be buried in the garden outside, with the others, but our father wouldn’t allow it.”

  “Oh.” I stared at the small rise in the ground and wondered how it fit a prince of al-Qaeda. “I shouldn’t have asked in front of your children.”

  She moved to my side like wind wrapped in black, touching my arm. I turned to look at her through the veil. “They will have his mind. They will have his kindness, his caring for other people. They will not have his anger.” She folded her arms and looked down at the remains of her family. “So they must learn about him.”

  Rana let go of my arm and moved to the floor, tucking her legs under her and facing the pit, telling Ahmed and Karim to do the same. Snoop followed suit. I turned around and shrugged at Washington, who shrugged back. We joined the others in Muslim prayer, something Karim found humorous, as he kept sneaking furtive smiles at Snoop. His brother ended that with a quick smack of the head.

  Rana muttered in impenetrable Arabic for a full minute, Snoop and Ahmed joining her for bits and pieces. She bowed quickly, producing a small bottle of rosewater from an unseen pocket and sprinkling it down upon the ground beneath us. Once the bottle was empty, she returned to her knees.

  “How do the Irish bury their dead?” she asked me.

  “It’s similar,” I said. Closing my eyes, I probed my mind until I found something suitably nondenominational. “May the road rise to meet you. May the wind be always at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face. And rains fall soft upon your fields. And until we meet again, may God, may Allah, hold you in the hollow of His hand.”

  When I opened my eyes, they again fell upon the graves of the legendary sheik and his defiant son, two smeared moons of cinder in the dirt. I thought of Shaba’s burned carcass and grinning skull. I’ve found you all, I thought. Now what?

  I joined the others on my feet.

  A solemn quiet filled the crypt, a draft of wind whistling through the room from the window. Karim started puckering his lips. Ahmed told his brother to stop, which only made him do it more. Ahmed then put him in a headlock and punched him in the ribs. Rana was still staring into the pit. She asked her boys to go play outside. Washington and Snoop followed of their own volition.

  “Elijah was supposed to come here,” she said, once we were alone. “But al-Qaeda would not give us his body.”

  “Why not?” I asked, even though I knew why.

  She sighed, the swamp blossom scent of her perfume coming with it. “Life was impossible back then. First came the Collapse. Then the Shi’a death squads and the civil war. It didn’t matter to them that Elijah had become Muslim. It didn’t matter that this was his home. It didn’t matter that we were to be married.” Her voice turned to chrome. “Only the war mattered.”

  I waited for tears that didn’t come. She patted my hand with her left one, sending quivers like light up my arm. “Wish I’d met him,” I said. “Like his tattoo about liberating the oppressed.”

  She let go of my hand. “He only had one tattoo. It didn’t say that.”

  “De Oppresso Liber?” I said, sounding out the syllables. “Latin. On his chest.”

  Even through the veil, I could see her eyes turning to splinters. “He had a tattoo on his chest. It said”—she knocked her forehead as she searched for the pronunciation—“ ‘In-fi-del.’ He said it was a joke for Americans.”

  “Oh.” Fucking Chambers, I thought. What a goddamn fraud. “I see.”

  “He was a man, like any other.” She sighed again. “And I loved him very much.”

  We looked into the pit for another minute or so. Then we left.

  The noon sky had grayed out, hinting at rain. Snoop and Washington sat nearby, leaning against a pile of rocks they had to know was a grave. Rana asked where her children were.

  “That way,” Washington said, pointing over a ridge that led deeper into the graveyard. “Was playing tag.”

  I wanted to chew them out for letting the boys wander, but Rana didn’t seem bothered. She walked up the ridgeline, calling their names. After a few moments, Karim’s head poked up from the other side of the ridge.

  “What?” Rana’s voice flexed in worry. “Where’s your brother?”

  She began running before the words were even out of her youngest’s mouth.

  We followed, moving up and through rolling knolls, dodging headstones and crevices of dirt, unable to catch her. By the time I got to the knoll she’d stopped at, gasping for breath, she had sat Ahmed up against a dark boulder shaped like a dinosaur egg. The young boy’s face was as faint as the land, and he seemed disoriented.

  Rana grabbed his arms, running her hands down them like a tailor. “No,” she said. “No.”

  A pair of matching bite marks glowed like juice stains on Ahmed’s wrist. His mother began slapping his cheeks, which caused him to smile vaguely.

  The others ran up, Karim pointing to a small batch of camelthorn and shouting. Snoop pulled out a long Bowie knife I’d never seen before and started hacking into the brush. The brush rasped in anger, causing Snoop to push Karim back and stomp into it between hacks. Washington directed his rifle at the camelthorn, but Snoop shook him off, reaching into the bush and pulling out a thick beige rope two feet long with a bloody anvil for a head.

  “Viper,” Snoop said, throwing it down, then following it to the ground. He began to saw off the snake’s mashed-in head with his knife. “These have powerful poison.”

  Rana lifted her son’s hand to her mouth and began trying to suck the poison out, then spitting, then sucking from the bite again. “I don’t think that actually helps,” Washington offered, but his words were ignored.

  I walked over to the camelthorn and watched Snoop work. The viper had two horns that crested a broad, flat head, and a set of scales that alternated among yellow, brown, and gray rectangles. Snoop held up the snake head when he was done.

  “Doctors will want this,” he said.

  “Washington, radio the vehicles and tell them we’re en route,” I said. “They need to be ready to move.”

  Rana had tipped Ahmed’s head back against the boulder, slowly pouring the contents of another rosewater bottle into his throat. Karim stood nearby, tugging at his black bangs, his eyes filling with long tears. Still conscious, Ahmed kept spitting up the water and saying something about bad smells. He started running his fingers over the pink scar on his neck until his mother said to stop.

  I looked down at the now shaking boy. His wrist was beginning to swell. Too scared to scowl now, he suddenly looked like his father had in the mukhtar’s photo, plain-faced and grim. He’s Shaba’s blood, I thought. He’s Shaba’s son. And it’s up to us to save him.

  I put my hand on Rana’s shoulder as she forced water down her son. “We’re taking him to the hospital,” I said. “Now.”

  I tried to scoop Ahmed into my
arms. Rana wouldn’t let me. “I’m carrying him,” she said. “I’m his mother.” Washington and Snoop jogged ahead to let the patrol know we were following. Her face veil removed, with her son draped across her arms and the hem of her dress bunched together in one hand, Rana moved through the hills like a hero of old. She shook off my attempts to share the burden and told Karim he needed to keep up. I didn’t know what else to do, so I had the younger boy hop onto my back. He was heavier than expected. The air tasted hot and angry, and sweat ran all over my face and into my eyes.

  Doc Cork met us at the entrance with a fleece blanket and medical kit. He stuck an IV in Ahmed’s arm and checked his vitals, telling the boy to keep his arm below his heart. Ahmed nodded feebly, raising his hand to touch the scar on his neck again before remembering not to. The boy’s wrist had continued to swell like a balloon, and the skin around the bite marks had morphed to a dark yellow.

  I looked around at the coolers and folding tables spread between the vehicles. The men had been playing cards.

  Snoop pulled out the viper’s head and showed it to Doc Cork, jiggling it like it was a voodoo skull. Doc Cork stared at it, transfixed.

  “I don’t know what the fuck that is,” the medic said. “This is way beyond my training. We need to get him to a hospital that has antivenoms. I don’t . . .” he trailed off, but I pressed him. “We’d have to go to Baghdad to get what he needs. That’s too far, though. His heartbeat is through the roof.”

  “What about Independence?” I asked.

  Doc Cork’s shoulders slumped. “We’re not allowed to bring locals to base for medical treatment, not anymore. Not even for emergencies.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “I know—but remember the car accident? On Route Madison? First platoon wanted to do the same thing. Battalion told them it’s a no-go. They’re supposed to use their own hospitals.”

  “Please.” Rana grabbed my shoulders and pulled me close. Swamp blossoms and hard breath filled my nostrils. “We must go to your base. It’s the only way.”