Cherry

by Nico Walker

  I didn’t want to look at him. I said, “I dunno, sir. It was fucked up of me. I apologize. I don’t know what happened. I just kind of went crazy for a minute, you know?”

  “You realize I could have you court-martialed for what you just did, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not going to do that, so don’t worry.”

  I said, “Thanks.”

  “I’m not going to say anything to anybody about this when we get back. Nobody’s going to say anything about it.”

  And he didn’t say anything.

  And no one else did.

  And nothing happened to me.

  * * *

  —

  I SENT a check to Roy with a note: more Percs, Oxys would be fine.

  And goddamn if he didn’t send me four 80s. Roy was paying $60 for 80s in those days. Not great.

  Still, I was only snorting 20s then. A 20 would take me there. I’d get four good days out of an 80. But goddamn if the mail wasn’t slow.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  When Arnold got killed we had to pack him out. Arnold was dead as shit. Packing up his stuff was no good. He didn’t need it. Who needed it?

  There’d been seven of us in the room.

  Now there were five.

  Shoo had been on the patrol that Arnold got killed on. He told me what it had looked like. Said it was bad, just a complete mess. Like somebody’d run him through a juicer.

  “That’s bad luck,” I said. “He hardly ever left the wire.”

  Shoo said yeah, “That was only the third time he’d gone out.”

  “Goddamn.”

  Then I had the day off. It was good. Burnes was hanging around as well, telling me some shit about something. He used to smoke weed when he worked at the airport in Boston and he hit an airplane with the fuel truck he was driving. I was high as shit. Burnes took a hit off his Miami and drank some of his coffee.

  Then Shoo walked in. “Bad news, guys. You’re going to have to stop smoking in here.”

  This was the worst news. Burnes and I each smoked about four packs of Miamis a day.

  Burnes said, “You’re kidding me. Why?”

  I said, “Sarr, this is unreasonable.”

  “You’ve got a new guy moving in here, coming over from HHC. He’s going to be one of Sergeant Drummond’s joes. His name’s Specialist Branson or some shit like that. He’s moving in here today.”

  Burnes said, “C’mon, you’re joking.”

  I said, “Sarr, we smoke. Lessing smokes. Cheetah smokes. We all smoke, except for Fuentes.”

  “And I don’t mind,” said Fuentes from over where he was in the corner. “It doesn’t smell any worse in here than it would if they didn’t smoke.”

  Shoo said, “Enough of this noise! I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. No more smoking.”

  Specialist Branson showed up an hour later. He came walking in the room like he owned the fucking place, the room we had lived in over eight months. He was a big motherfucker with a bald, pink head and a blond mustache. He didn’t say hello.

  Lessing had come back in the meantime. We’d told him what was being done to us. He said, “So this is the piece of shit?”

  I nodded.

  Burnes set his book down and looked at Branson. “What’s your fucking problem, man? I’m serious, man. Who the fuck do you think you are?”

  Branson looked around the room. He didn’t seem to be worried about the way things were going. You could tell right away that he didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about things.

  I said, “We smoke in here, and you can get fucked.”

  Branson went over and looked at the wall above Lessing’s bunk where Lessing had stapled fifty Maxim girls to the wall.

  Lessing said, “Hey. Cocksucker. Do you mind?”

  Branson left. He hadn’t said anything, not one word.

  Ten minutes later Sergeant Drummond walked in. “Lessing, you’re gonna have to take those girls off your wall.”

  “Excuse me, Sarr?”

  “You heard me, Lessing. Branson’s a Christian, and those girls on your wall are offensive to him.”

  “Then tell him to go fuck himself.”

  “Oh come on, son. It ain’t gonna hurt you none to take them old girls down off the wall. Just put em in a book so that way you can look at em whenever you want to. How’s that sound?”

  Lessing lit a Marlboro Red and looked at his boots. He was too upset to continue the conversation. Drummond was pleased. When he left he was laughing at us.

  “Here comes old Branson,” he said. “Make way for old Branson. Here he comes.”

  Shoo came back. “What’s the fucking problem now?”

  Lessing said, “Sarr Drummond said I have to take my pictures down because of the new guy, Sarr.”

  Shoo said, “You’re kidding me.”

  He said no he wasn’t kidding.

  Burnes said, “This guy is a piece of shit. Please don’t do this to us, Sergeant.”

  I said, “He’s telling you the truth, Sarr. This guy Branson comes in, doesn’t say shit to anybody, looks around, leaves, and then he’s got Sarr Drummond in here two seconds later telling Lessing he’s got to take all his pictures off his wall.”

  Shoo considered this; then he said, “No. No, that goes too far.”

  And he left and told Drummond to find somewhere else to put Branson.

  And we smoked cigarettes as we were wont to do.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  By the time it was fall you could tell we were all a little off. In that state none of us could have passed in polite society; those of us who’d been kicking in doors and tearing houses up and shooting people, we were psychotic. And we were ready for it to end. There was nothing interesting about it anymore. There was nothing. We had wasted our time. We had lost.

  People kept dying: in ones and twos, no heroes, no battles. Nothing. We were just the help, glorified scarecrows; just there to look busy, up the road and down the road, expensive as fuck, dumber than shit.

  There were rumors of death: the occasional murders, the horrifying endings. Someone from Bravo Company: the medic quit, said he couldn’t face going out anymore. One of EOD’s people: there was a second IED under the first one. Gone. Etc. Etc. We set up a patrol base. Haji knocked it down with a car bomb. More women got shot to death: a woman holding a baby, a pregnant woman. At least it was fall. We had arrived in fall, so there was that point of reference. We were getting close. Really a year is nothing. It takes that long to learn to be any good in the field, and then once you know what you’re doing, you’re on your way out.

  It’d been a while that I’d had the feeling that Staff Sergeant North hated my fucking guts. Maybe half the times I’d left the wire were with North. I think I was just about on every patrol North went on that year, over a hundred patrols probably with him. We’d been through some shit, got bored as hell together. Now the motherfucker didn’t like me at all. That was fine. There was no danger in it. Just he’d talk shit, like I’d light up a Miami when we were somewhere in the daytime and he’d come up and get shitty about it and say, “This isn’t fucking smoke break time.”

  And right in front of motherfuckers, like I was some fucking cherry.

  For his own part he was kind of fucked. He’d start letting loose with his two-oh-three, lob some grenades around just for the shits of it, wouldn’t even call in a test fire. That’s when you knew he was in one of his moods. On a day like that he might walk the whole patrol into the river and we’d be bathing in shit and parasites. Still, that wasn’t personal.

  What was personal was North got to coming at me wrong all the time. It really started after I said all that greasy shit to Lieutenant Evans and walked off from that patrol. Now if North had something to say to me he’d either have someone else say it
or he’d look off at something far away or he’d turn his back when he talked. It’d have made sense if North didn’t also think that Evans was an asshole. And it’d have made sense if North was always about his discipline, but what with his sending two-oh-three rounds downrange for no fucking reason and talking shit about Evans when Evans wasn’t around, it wasn’t like North was completely all the way alright. So who the fuck knows.

  Part of it was I wasn’t as fucking wild about America as North was. That and the shit wasn’t any fun for me. All it amounted to was some more people were dead and Emily was probably getting fucked by other guys. Probably every time I cleared a house some fucker was balls-deep in Emily. I was lovesick. And yeah it must have been nice to be North, to be tough, to believe in this, to be a killer. But I wasn’t ever tough and I wasn’t ever gonna be. If I was some kind of veteran now it was only on account of luck that I hadn’t got my soft ass killed. Sometimes that’s enough to have somebody fooled. But North knew I was a fake because he’d been there half the time and seen it. I’m sure there were some other people who knew, but no one hated me for it half as much as North did.

  * * *

  —

  CORPORAL LOCKHART and Specialist Jeffries lived in a room across the way. They had lived there all year. It was a little room; you’d hardly notice it if you didn’t know it was there. Specialist Haussmann also lived with them. None of them had left the wire much. Specialist Haussmann would have been alright, but he had a tendency to bitch all the time; he bitched more than he was worth, so he was set aside, and people had forgotten about him, and he was stuck.

  Corporal Lockhart and Specialist Jeffries didn’t bitch as much as Haussmann, but they were especially frail, and somebody had made them the company’s arms room clerks. They listened to My Chemical Romance a lot, and they talked about what a fucking cunt Corporal Lockhart’s wife was, and they had an idea to catch mice and make snuff films with the mice.

  I saw one of the snuff films they made. A mouse in an empty ammo can. A small white hand (Lockhart’s, I believe) descended into the frame. The hand held a can of Zippo fluid, and it squeezed the can. The mouse was soaked. The hand disappeared from the frame. The hand came back; it held a lighter now, ignited the mouse. The mouse ran back and forth, a little fireball; stopped dead in its tracks; tipped over like a ditched bicycle.

  There was always a fuckload of mice running around the building, so they had plenty to work with, and they made I don’t know how many of these mice snuff films. They thought they were clever, and they might tell you about how in one of them they drowned a mouse or how in another one they dismembered a mouse and cut the mouse’s head off with a cigar cutter or how in another one, their masterpiece, they crucified a mouse on Popsicle sticks and disemboweled the crucified mouse while it was on the cross. Haussmann didn’t know what to do. He kept trying to get moved to another room, but he couldn’t get moved. “It isn’t fair,” he said.

  Back in Killeen, Texas, Corporal Lockhart’s wife had grown emotionally distant. In the time since he had gone off to Iraq, she had started partying a lot and working as a dancer and fucking a guy named Dale and spending all of Corporal Lockhart’s money. She told him all about the shit in more detail than you’d have expected she would. It seemed a little overvindictive, but in her defense she was hot and Corporal Lockhart was the type of guy who went around crucifying mice.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  Haji hit Delta’s patrol base. The road along the west bank of the river was the only way to get there and it was night and we were obviously going to get hit. Haji’s thinking was he could throw a few clips and an RPG into the patrol base, and if he made some bodies there, great, and if not, he had left an IED on the only road in, and QRF was sure to hit it.

  The first track missed the pressure plate. Our Humvee missed it too. And this was good for us in the Humvee, that we had missed it, because it was big enough to have fucked us up something tough.

  The pressure plate was at a point in the road where the road was half-gone from old IEDs. The pressure plate spanned all that was left of the blacktop there. But at the same time the road was so torn up there that a driver might skip it altogether.

  The third vehicle, Evans’s track, set it off. The explosion was dull, like it had gone off underneath. Perez was up in the Humvee turret, yelling, “IED! IED!”

  Sullivan let off the gas and the truck slowed to a stop. I slipped my aid bag onto one shoulder and opened the back driver-side door. I was half out when Sullivan hit the gas again. The Humvee bucked forward and I ate shit. Hueso-Santiago ran past as I was unfucking myself. He was the vehicle commander of the lead track. He had taken it upon himself to go see about the one that had been hit. And I was running that way too. I caught up with Hueso-Santiago. He was crawling all over the front of the disabled track. Everybody was fine but the driver, Private Miller, and he wasn’t bad off. He had taken shrapnel on the inside of his left thigh. Hueso-Santiago pulled him out of the hatch.

  The hole in Miller’s thigh was big enough to put a thumb into it with room to spare. But he’d be alright. The shrapnel hadn’t found the artery or anything. I packed the hole with gauze and put an Ace wrap around the thigh so as to keep pressure on the wound. I started an IV and gave him morphine. I’d told Hueso-Santiago to call the medevac in as urgent surgical because Shoo had once told me to always call our guys in as urgent surgicals even if they weren’t.

  This was an easy casualty. The casualty had a face. He wasn’t burned up. He didn’t bleed out internally. He’d be alright. He’d get a Purple Heart and the Purple Heart would get him laid a few more times than he would have otherwise and he didn’t even have to get hurt that bad. The thing about Purple Hearts is you can’t get hurt too bad. You get hurt too bad and girls won’t fuck you no matter how many Purple Hearts you have.

  QRF2 took a long time getting out to us with EOD and a wrecker. There was some shit going on at the FOB. People were saying, “The FOB’s been overrun!”

  This turned out to be an exaggeration. What really happened was a few of the battalion snipers had gone up in the scaffolds of the power plant and a guy out in front of the Delta Company TOC saw the snipers and mistook them for Haji. So he shot at them. The shots missed the snipers and came down on the Echo Company TOC. Echo thought the shots were coming from the scaffolds, having also seen the snipers up there. Echo started shooting. The shots missed the snipers and came down on the Delta Company TOC. Delta was now certain that the snipers were the Haj, and a lot of Delta guys opened up on the snipers. A firefight ensued between two American rifle companies with the battalion’s snipers caught in the cross fire. In the midst of all the confusion an interpreter set up an IED in the battalion weight room. No one was seriously injured.

  * * *

  —

  EMILY HAD left the state of Washington. She was back in Elba. She was going to school. She wasn’t out in the fucking wilderness anymore and I could call her again. So I called her when I could call her, but there wasn’t much to talk about. All I could say was I’d be back soon. I didn’t recognize that this was something she maybe wasn’t looking forward to, even though I knew, and I’d known the whole time. Still you hold with the lie.

  I paid her tuition for fall semester.

  She’d asked me for the money so I thought we were good.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  The worst possible outcome was to get killed at the end, after all the bullshit. If you weren’t going to go home it was better to get killed early on. That was the logic. You didn’t want to get killed at the end.

  Two from our battalion were killed that morning. We were going out that night, a squad worth of guys from Third Platoon, led by Evans. It was supposed to be our last patrol of the tour, and the roster was a mix and match of shitbags and fat guys. I couldn’t imagine us being effective. But we were just going out in Humvees and making a short trip up and down Route Martha
. So it didn’t matter.

  We weren’t out long when the company net said a Raptor was sending back video of four armed men. The armed men were east of us. Coordinates were given. Could Lieutenant Evans get there?

  He looked at his map. “It’s a kilometer, roughly.”

  I said, “Sir, this is a bad idea.”

  “Why is it a bad idea?”

  “With all due respect, sir, they’ve got us out here with three of the most obese shitbags in the company, and those are your dismounts. Think about it. Do you think you can take those guys dismounted, off road, in the fucking dark, through all those shit canals for a klick? That’s gonna make a lot of noise. Those hajis will hear us coming all the way. We might as well drag a fucking piano with us. I’ve seen those guys on dismount patrols before, sir. They’re a fucking disaster. They fall all over themselves. Borges can shoot, but he can’t walk for shit, and the rest of them are an out-and-out fucking liability. No upside. You can’t expect to take those guys and one medic, not one NCO, and shoot it out with four armed men who will hear you coming from a mile away. I’m sorry, sir, but it’s a real bad idea.”

  “…I don’t know.”

  “Sir, with all due respect, it’d be different if we had any chance of succeeding. But look at what you’ve got to work with. It won’t end well. Best-case scenario it’ll be a waste of time. But do what you think is right and I’ll go along.”

  He keyed the radio. “Echo mike, this is echo tree six actual….It doesn’t look like we can get there from where we are.”

  * * *

  —

  OUR LAST night on the FOB, some of us got together and passed around some cans of duster. We huffed duster till Sergeant Bautista lost touch with his central nervous system. He swayed back and forth like a blind piano player. A stream of drool ran from Bautista’s lip and pooled in his lap.