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THE CONCERNS
THE SMITH FAMILY
Antebellum Smith (Bellum, Bang Bang, Ant), Specialist, US Army, AWOL
Travis Harmon Wallace, her husband
Increase Smith (Crease), her father
THE EMPLOYEES OF IRJ, INC.
Evangelína Ixchel Carrillo Canek (Evy), company landman
F. Bismarck Rolling (Bizzy), chief operations officer
Marisol Soto-Garza, executive assistant to Mr. Rolling
Ray Tyro (Reverend, Early Bird), private contractor
Ellis Baum, real-estate lawyer
THE VETERANS OF THE STANDARD GRANDE
Milton Xavier Wright, owner, Sergeant, US Army, Vietnam vet
Paul Vessey (Vess), Sergeant, US Army, Vietnam vet
Dereemus Stotts-Dupree (STD), Specialist, US Army National Guard
Samuel Stone, Private First Class, US Army National Guard
Jeffrey Luce (Screw), Specialist, US Army
Jairo Merced, Private First Class, US Marine Corps
Jacko Botes, Lance Corporal, US Marine Corps
Abdul Alhazred (Luckson Merisme), Private First Class, US Army
Ferdinand Wisenbeker (Wiz), Petty Officer, US Navy
THE DEAD
Ada Wright (née Teplitsky), Milton’s wife
Nehemiah Teplitsky (Chema), Milton’s father-in-law
Santiago Nabor Fuentes Carrillo (Papí), Evangelína’s father
Maryam Tyro (née Jalal), Ray’s wife
Sammy Davis, Jr., entertainer
THE BEASTS
Foxtrot (Foxy-T), chocolate Labrador
Egon, Belgian Malinois
Fulan and Fulana, raccoons
Wile E. Prince and Sue, alpaca
Son of Gizbar, cougar
THE VETERANS OF THE BAGDAD GRAND
Asa Goodman (Goody), Airman, US Air Force
Ruffin Steed (Steady), Private First Class, US Army
Ike Dopp, Lance Corporal, US Marine Corps
THE REST
Ramona Aahal Canek Gómez (Mamí), Evangelína’s mother
Ira Lependorf, estate lawyer
Sharyn Tyro, Ray’s mother
Dean Tyro, Ray’s brother
Esperanza, Increase’s sixth wife
Carlos (Charles, Charlie, Victor), Increase’s step-son
Shoshanna Roshanda (Jinx), dancer
Caryn and Kip, residents, Rip Van Winkle Motor Inn
Joe Ginsu (TrapAvoid), hacker, former colleague of Ray’s
Meena Mohammadzai (Zamda), role player, National Training Center
Al Franken (Chairman), US senator
for the weak or fainthearted,
all of us ultimately;
for the strong or fierce-hearted,
the one and only Thisbe
Here they come, returning from the road,
Thirsty ghosts, skirts desert swept,
Their mirage breath smeared, burnt,
Bad-i-sad-o-bist-roz dry and dust-blasted,
Here they come, returning from the road
—NADIA ANJUMAN, “The Deserted Voice”
translated from Persian by Meena Mohammadzai
Because the keys to the Kingdom got locked inside the Kingdom
And the angels fly around in there but we can’t see them
I got a girl in the war, Paul, I know that they can hear me yell
If they can’t find a way to help her they can go to Hell
—JOSH RITTER, “Girl in the War”
SUMMER
2012
SPECIALIST SMITH GUNNED THE GAS and popped the clutch in the early Ozark morning. Her Dodge pickup yelped, slid to one side in the blue dark, then shot fishtailing forward. The rear tires burned a loud ten meters of smoking, skunky rubber out front of the stucco ranch house on Tidal Road.
She felt thankful for her bad marriage. It allowed her the privilege of living off base; she could go AWOL without having to bust the gates of Fort Leonard Wood. Her four-barrel pocket pepperbox, a COP .357—holstered, unloaded—rode on the passenger seat.
To be sure she was doing right, she drove by Big Papa’s Cabaret, a soda-pop strip club that entertained lonely soldiers and unruly locals. Half a dozen men loitered outside, swigging from bottle-shaped brown bags.
Sure enough, Travis’s rusted-out, rice-burner pickup still sat in the dirt lot, its Browning Buckmark decal, in Stars and Stripes, peeling from the rear windshield. A display of American pride on his Japanese truck.
Unemployed, entrepreneurial Travis, inside somewhere, waited for the final lap dance to grind to a halt. Then his business got busy: pillhead happy hour.
Smith could practically hear the last-hurrah clapping and thigh-slapping, the hands of the soldiers not always paired. The dented steel door swung open and out staggered the pokes. There was Travis, a townie, bringing up the rear. Travis Harmon Wallace, her civilian husband. Overweight Travis. Travis under the influence of lord knew what Travis. Shiftless, automatic transmission Travis. He got blown back a step by the sunrise, shielding his eyes. He regained himself and made way to the milling men.
She gave a long thought to killing him, Travis.
The powerful derringer on the passenger seat was a gift from him—he tried so miserably hard to be hard—a gun he thought sexy in her grip and gangsta in his. What he’d bought them for their last anniversary. His-and-hers concealed carries. Had them engraved I’m your huckle bearer. When she’d tried telling him it was huckleberry, he got in her face. Near pistol-whipped her with the present.
The idea of loading the gun raised a clot of bile into her tight chest.
On her way out of town, she drove back by the house—its sham mortgage they’d started falling behind on the day after their incomprehensible closing. She slowed, tried to hear Foxtrot pawing at the doorframe. Nothing. Likely asleep under the butcher block.
She admired the twin tire marks she’d made earlier. They would be her lasting goodbye to Devils Elbow, where every street name started with T. Steering clear of 66, she took Tidal to Teardrop.
Smith, keeping to country roads, channeled her daddy’s crass drawl. Antebellum, he said in her head, you ever find yourself on the lam, you shunpike it, hear me, grrl?
Shunpike, Daddy?
Shun the turnpike, dumbass. Bumpkin county sheriffs a hell of a lot easier to outrun than revved-up state troopers. I should know.
She sped east out of the hotdamn Ozarks through the Mark Twain National Forest. She threw her ringing phone—Travy—out the window and into the parched summer. It smithereened in the rearview. She used her teeth to pull off her wedding band and engagement ring. Spat them into her hand and shoved them into the trash-crammed ashtray, mall-bought diamond solitaire be damned.
* * *
The temperature was already near ninety and Evangelína Ixchel Carrillo Canek savored the sopping warmth of the morning air like a sauna. She strode
through it looking for a syrupy café con leche. Far as she could tell, she’d been assigned to the Mantenimiento Marino de Mexico project initiative because she was Mesoamerican. Possibly as punishment for botching Fort Worth. She had no training for the Tampico job. Oversee the replacement of two winches, a slew bearing, and the tugger hydraulic pressure unit on the LB Lacie Bourg, routine maintenance on a maintenance vessel. A week ago, she couldn’t’ve picked out a slew bearing in a pile of yoke hoists.
She found an open stall the size of a Texas outhouse, ordered in Spanish from an old Huastec woman missing a finger. Evangelína had little of her ancestors’ language. That didn’t stop her from offering a Maya greeting, “Bix a beel?”
The woman, shorter than even Evangelína, nodded but gave no indication of understanding. Ten minutes later, clutched in a scaly hand like the foot of ten-year-old hen, she held out the steaming coffee. Perfectly sweet and scalding hot, the split stalks of sugarcane brought to boil with beans pulverized in a guayacán mortar and pestle.
The domestic retrofitting crew was still not at work aboard the liftboat moored in the diesel-slicked Puerto de Tampico. A teenage infante de marina with a wispy moustache stood guard, a submachine gun slung over the shoulder of his baggy fatigues. The negotiations with the local union, backed by the Cártel del Golfo, called for a ten-to-four workday. Labor agreement or no, she was on Tampico time.
Evangelína spent twelve days seeing the sights, fending off the advances of the locals, known as Jaibas, Crabs. In the evenings that lasted for ages, she shrugged on her jogging vest, loaded with twenty pounds of steel weights, and ran. Masochistic with her runs, she needed to make the most of her time.
Later, in four-inch heels, she wandered Calle Aduana, bemused by the aspirational Old World buildings, their balconies accented with English cast iron.
After her strolls, every night for an hour or more, she talked to her mamí back in Houston, who worried about Cártel del Golfo or Los Zetas beheading her only daughter.
Between girlfriends for too great a stretch, Evangelína considered going home with the butch owner of La Gula—a waterfront restaurant that served one of the slowest, best meals she’d ever eaten. The excessive after-flan course, served with a glass of sparkling rosé, was a plate of percebes flash boiled in squid ink for as long as it took the chef to say the Lord’s Prayer. Evangelína chased the briny, elastic goose barnacles with puffs on a habano Bolívar Inmensas.
Drunk but not desperate, not yet, she entertained the older woman’s advances but, confident Tampico was tranquillo, she walked alone through the dark back to her hotel, pulling heartily on the Cuban cigar to fend off the bugs, a pack of feral dogs in tow. The tremendous teats of the yipping bitches brought her to tears. Maybe she was desperate. For the last six months, despite costly assistance from a Houston fertility specialist, Evangelína had been failing to get pregnant.
* * *
With each mile it got harder to turn back. Smith had done it, quick and simple. Absent without leave. She’d miss the dog most, was already wondering why she didn’t drag him along. Foxy-T would make for good company and decent protection—not as good or as responsive as her M4 carbine but for damn sure warmer.
This was simpler—alone—this was necessary. She had no girlfriends to talk her out of taking off. A tomboy raised by a hooligan single father, a dog person drawn to the doggy company of men—this disposition lent her advantage over the catty Army women.
Done two tours driving mostly men. Two tours more than most Americans. On her first, reassigned to Charlie Company, 321st Engineer Battalion, she made fuel runs. Al Asad to Camp Ramadi right after Op Murfreesboro. Then, K-Crossing up to Mosul. More than once during that first tour, she’d been on MSR Tampa behind the wheel of a HET hauling sand imported to the desert. Local sand was too fine for concrete. Sand everywhere and not a single grain to mix. Had to transport sand from UAE to make a blast wall for fucksake. As if sand was a form of government, and what the Iraqis had at home just would not do.
In Afghanistan, tour number two, assigned at the support battalion level moving cargo to P1 units, it was a lot of Ghazni to Bagram Airfield and back. Got so she sometimes forgot where in BFE she was, Iraq or Afghanistan, engaging urban ex-Ba’athists or rural Taliban with terrible teeth, hearing Arabic or Pashto. The Hindu Kush mountains in the distance helped get her bearings; most of Iraq was flat as Florida. On both tours she saw a good bit of checkpoint detail. As a woman she got to pat down women and kids.
She’d been reassigned and set to deploy once more; third time’s a charm. Two turns playing grab-ass with circumcised women in burqas. Driving disposable half-million-dollar trucks on those clusterfuck roads. Getting two kilometers per gallon of diesel. Having had her unfair share of wrecks. She couldn’t stomach risking her life yet again. She didn’t want to drive, the one thing she was good at.
Didn’t even realize it was the driving till she got back stateside over a year ago and a quick giddy-up to the grocery store sent her into a longwinded panic. Spent a panting lifetime picking out a prewrapped head of iceberg lettuce from the pyramid of identical heads only to leave it in a magazine rack before bolting the checkout line with what felt like a heart attack. Didn’t even like iceberg lettuce.
Diagnosed her with PTSD—big surprise, who wasn’t—prescribed her Ativan for her anxiety, Risperdal to calm her, plus an antidepressant. Mix her a prescription cocktail and send her on her hazy, libidoless way. That was their idea of maintaining troop morale. US military become a pharmacological force. Soon soldiers would be wearing Pfizer patches on their uniforms. It made sense. It’d been grass and junk in the jungle, allowed if not approved, and a generation later designer pharmaceuticals had been sanctioned for the sandbox, where the recreational drugs of choice were domestic hash in cubes like beef bouillon easing you down off all the imported caffeine and methamphetamine, cans of Red Bull more important to the Surge than mortar rounds.
Once her scripts kicked in, she’d lost a year and a half, little idea where it went. Here she was readied to redeploy, just like that. Medicated, she felt as though her life had been pirated and broadcast over the internet, without her permission, at a crappy connection rate on an ancient computer, audio muffled, video pixilated and herky-jerky. Her old life—high-definition, painfully vivid, sexually driven—was available if she wanted to pay admission. The price was her posttraumatic stress.
As she sped along, doing 75 in a 55, half wanting to get busted and turned back, the degrading voice of her crackerass daddy was replaced by the calm monotone of her shrink, Major Olmstead: You internalized the war, Smith. Attuned yourself to the tensions and stresses of grave danger. Doesn’t make you dysfunctional. Makes you a good soldier.
But Olmstead’s aim had been to ready her for a return to a drawdown war forever flaring up. In addition to his scripts, he kept giving her reading assignments, self-help books with embarrassing titles. An advocate for the power of positive thinking, he said the simple act of reading was an exercise in creative visualization.
She instead engaged in destructive visualization. Daydreaming ways to kill Travis. Then there was a scene—one she thought unrelated to her husband—she evoked over and over. She’s in the heart of the Islamic world, infidelling. When she confessed the fantasy to Major Olmstead, he suggested she imagine doing something constructive there, something helpful. She said it was helpful cussing Muḥammad in Mecca, helped put her to sleep. Her honesty earned her another ridiculous reading assignment.
That’s when she started plopping her daily dose in the toilet, birth control and all. Sure enough, back came her bad case of the war jitters, where the sudden sound of Travis yelling her name about bounced her out of her boots. But her desire also came roaring round the bend, and she felt a bit like her daddy’s reconditioned ’70 American Motors Rebel Machine, the V8 engine with its four-barrel Motorcraft carburetor.
Smith gave a thought to visiting the old bastard of a biker—all his Warlock buddies called him
Crease—wasting away with wife number five along a rural length of the I-4 corridor, bitching about spics this, wetbacks that. She hadn’t seen him since she shipped out for boot camp—she’d rather hang herself with a rusty length of concertina wire.
Instead of turning south, she could head north, toward Canada. Seek asylum. She’d have to steal across the border. All she brought was her driver’s license and military ID.
* * *
Ray Tyro opens his compact. His camouflage cream is spent. He tosses the tin into the dying fire. Barehanded, he picks out a couple of warm coals. Cups the embers and blows till they glow. They catch. For a moment, he holds a flame wavering in his palm.
The burn, its seared-skin smell, flashes him back—fighting toward the torched Opel SUV on the low-slung bridge. Green I-beams angled over the muddy Euphrates. He stuck his hand through the shattered driver-side window, like reaching into a preheated oven. Two colleagues. One on the board of the International Peace Operations Association, a trade union for private military contractors. The other a former SEAL and personal trainer to movie stars, had his own line of workout videos. Both men, dead. Strapped into the front seats, charred and smoldering, smelling like pigs forgotten on a spit. Their throats slit after they’d been burned to bubbling black. Ray forced to leave behind their bodies. An atrocity, a violation of the Ranger Creed. To be dragged through the streets. Strung up from the riveted spans. But before Ray abandoned the remains of his teammates, with AK rounds ripping all around him, he drew his curved trench knife and gouged open one of the smoldering cardboard crates. There, he found package after melting, shrink-wrapped package. Stamped-steel forks, spoons, knives. The mission: make a delivery for subcontracted food caterers from Baghdad to a recently established forward operating base west of Fallujah. They were ferrying flatware—Ray resists the memory, refusing his murderous fury. He strives to stay present. Pain helps.
He drizzles canteen water on the cinders in his burning hand. Fizzle and smoke. With his thumb, he crushes wet coals into a warm mash he smears over his face. He’s vanishing. He must be careful—anonymity permits everything.
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