“Over there, you know, sometimes being brave is the same as being stupid,” Damarkus said, a small laugh bubbling out of him. “And he was stupid sometimes. That’s why I named him Cambo.”
“Can you explain that?”
“Naming him Cambo? You seen them old Rambo movies, right?”
“I’m aware of them,” Euclide said.
“This was in Paktika Province again, little while later.” Euclide wasn’t expecting a story, just an explanation, but settled in contentedly. Damarkus’s fluent and energetic way with war stories was making him discount his earlier suspicions about PTSD, but there was Shyrece still, now with the baby in her arms, helicoptering close to her brother.
“We got hooked up with an engineer company that was building a holding pen for some detainees,” Damarkus said. “They’d found this little courtyard with a guard tower and was stringing up some razor wire, the standard shit. And then it blew up. We came under fire from about thirty or forty Talibs—small arms, mortars, RPGs, the whole menu. We had an MRAP but the moment the fuckers blew in they took it out with a mortar round. Broke the gunner’s arm, blinded the driver, just neutralized it with a single sixty. So now we’re kinda fucked, right? It’s like we’re trapped inside a blender. We got enemy up in that guard tower now, we don’t got shit for cover, and they’re fixing to overrun us—and that’s bad, you gotta understand, because if they’d taken that courtyard there wasn’t hardly nothing between them and a command center down the highway.
“So Cameron, he’s helping evacuate the wounded out of the MRAP. I’m right there with him when a bullet hits one of the wounded in the knee. And I remember him saying, ‘Goddammit,’ just like that, just put out, you know, like he’s playing poker and got his tenth crap hand in a row. And without orders, because nobody woulda ever ordered him up there, he climbs up into the gunner’s hatch and starts blasting that fifty cal. He’s totally exposed up there. I mean, you shoulda seen his helmet afterwards.”
Damarkus’s eyes were flickering with a distant glint, reminding Euclide of someone recounting an extravagant meal. “I ordered him out of there,” he said. “Cambo says he never heard me but I think he ignored me. He’s just swiveling and shooting that fifty: bam, bam, bambambam. By this time there’s Talibs coming over the wall. I realize he’s running black on ammo so I get on in there and start loading for him, shouting the whole time for him to get his stupid ass down. I mean, he didn’t have a chance up there. I load him a second box, he’s still firing. Load him a third. And by the time that third box is running black, man, that courtyard’s gone quiet. I don’t know how many enemy he took out—had to be more than a dozen.”
Euclide looked up from the notes he was taking. No, Cameron Harris wasn’t a coward. Janice had it wrong. Here was a young man who’d twice risked sacrificing himself to save others. For the first time since she’d uncorked that venomous theory, Euclide was sensing the warm radiance of a potential miracle, its divine rebuttal. And while he knew miracles didn’t work this way, Euclide was beginning to glimpse a framework of justice built into this one, as though walking had been Cameron’s reward for the lives he’d saved.
“That’s the second time we could’ve lost the whole squad if Cameron hadn’t pulled his Rambo shit,” Damarkus was saying. “I remember afterwards he’s standing there smoking—he’s so cheap, he always smoked this nasty Afghan brand called Pine, smelled like he was smoking kitty litter—and I come up to him like, ‘You’re a stupid motherfucker, you know that?’ And he’s like, ‘Sorry, Sarge, I just lost my temper.’ So sincere, you know, like a kid who just fouled out of a basketball game. Me, I just got to laughing my ass off. I mean, that was close to Medal of Honor shit right there, and he’s saying sorry. That’s the minute I…”
He pulled up short. Some kind of switch got pulled, erasing Damarkus’s lamplight grin and replacing it with a melting expression of sudden agony or grief. Shyrece moved in, patting the baby on her shoulder, her own expression mirroring her brother’s.
Euclide didn’t know how to read this. Criminal and canon law in Italy had endowed him with little experience fielding war stories, but maybe this is how it went, he thought: You focus on a single point of light, like a stargazer, until the enormity of the darkness surrounding it smothers the glow. His gaze bounced between Shyrece and her brother. “The minute you what?” he prodded.
Damarkus raised his head, something new and solid in his eyes. “The minute—the minute I knew what kind of soldier he was.”
Euclide cocked his head, studying him. “You sound like you admired Cameron very much,” he offered.
Damarkus said nothing, that new solidity Euclide noticed calcifying into stone-facedness. An aspect of his eyes, in that moment, was reflecting his lower legs: functional, but bloodlessly metallic.
Shyrece dropped a hand down onto her brother’s shoulder. “Pretty sure Cameron,” she said to Euclide, as softly as he’d yet to hear her speak, “admired D just as much.”
La sorella: Once again Euclide felt the urge to underline that word in his notes.
“Can you talk about when you were injured?” he asked, thinking maybe he was merely positioned too early in this story, that fast-forwarding might bring clarity.
Damarkus’s account of the story aligned with the one Cameron had furnished Father Ace, with one exception that Euclide failed to catch: In the version Damarkus told, it was Cameron, not him, who’d wanted to check something out on the ridge, when they’d left the Afghan National Army soldiers and strayed to the spot where Damarkus’s boot heel tamped the soil above a land mine that’d been lying dormant since the Soviet–Afghan war of the 1980s. Boom.
“It seems astonishing,” Euclide said afterward, “that you survived.”
Damarkus sketched how he’d done that: the forty-seven surgeries, the way the surgeons rebuilt his urethra using tissue from his cheek, the nine months he’d spent at Walter Reed Army Medical Center followed by the year he lived in a dorm on the hospital’s campus for physical and occupational therapy, the hundred-thousand-dollar robotic arm they’d fitted onto him that he almost never uses, not since the third time he punched a hole in the bathroom wall reaching for his toothbrush.
For the first time, Euclide saw a smile creep onto Shyrece’s face. Listening to her brother describe what had to be the most painful and difficult period in his life, the grueling aftermath of that land mine, appeared to relax her. She tickled the baby, rocking on her heels. It was pride, Euclide saw. It was warm, warranted pride.
“You didn’t stay in touch with Cameron Harris afterward?” Euclide asked, close to wrapping it up, Shyrece’s newfound ease dissolving some of the weird mystery of the way she’d been acting until then.
A low vibration suddenly thrummed the room, which Euclide immediately traced to Shyrece. Another mention of Cameron Harris, and her ease popped like a soap bubble. Why? She was staring at her brother’s face, with close and tender scrutiny, but she was also, Euclide felt, transmitting signals to him on a sibling frequency that Euclide could sense but not decode.
“Naw, we really didn’t…,” Damarkus said. “We had some serious healing to do, both of us, and after a while I guess it was like, keep looking that way,” twirling a finger toward the future. Something about this explanation must’ve struck him as insufficient, because Damarkus added, “Some guys stay in touch with everybody in their squad or platoon, you know. The band of brothers thing. Other guys, though,” twirling again toward that middle-distance future, “sometimes you just move on, you know?”
With this last statement Shyrece leaned down and kissed the top of her brother’s head. With this: not with his account of his injuries and hellish recovery, but with this.
Exactly why this gesture provoked something in Euclide, and what exactly it provoked, he cannot say. The kiss struck Euclide as a reluctant sanction—as if she didn’t agree with something her brother was
doing or saying but supported him anyway, the kiss of a father releasing his daughter to a bridegroom he abhors. If it hadn’t been for her, he’d later say, and the sheer volume of sub rosa communication his antennae kept discerning, he wouldn’t have posed the question that he did, would’ve driven out of those woods armed with an uncomplicated portrait of Cameron Harris. He feared repeating a common mistake of his as a prosecutor, bogging himself down trying to untie a peripheral knot that, tied or untied, would have little to no impact at trial, what Americans called missing the forest for the trees. But still. La sorella…Janice’s suspicions about Cameron stayed viable every time Shyrece flinched at his mention.
“Sergeant Lockwood,” he began, steeling himself with formality, “I hope you’ll understand why I must ask this question.”
The look on Damarkus’s face caused Euclide to stall a moment; it suggested he knew precisely what was coming.
“Given your knowledge of Cameron Harris, would you find it at all credible that some or all of his paralysis might not have been legitimate?”
The twist of Damarkus’s face made clear this was not at all the question he was anticipating. “Legitimate?”
“That some or all of it could have been faked.”
He sprayed the word as much as spoke it: “Faked?”
“Maybe some time later, after an earlier recovery of function…”
“The fuck for?”
“I don’t know,” Euclide said, unnerved by the way Damarkus’s nostrils were flaring and the sheen of rising fury Euclide could see in his eyes. “Possibly to avoid returning to combat? Possibly—”
Damarkus spat a puff of disgusted air. “You ain’t serious with that.”
“It’s just something that needs to be excl—”
“Naw, you can’t come in my house talking shit like that.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just—”
“You don’t know shit, you know that?” Shyrece was behind him now, spearing Euclide with her eyes and with one hand kneading her brother’s shoulder, the baby in her other arm beginning to mewl from the tensely raised voices. “You listen to me talk and then you come out with that. You lay that shit down. You don’t know fuck about nothing.”
Euclide lifted both hands to show surrender. He tried to speak, but Damarkus cut him off again—
“You don’t know the shit we went through. You don’t know what shit is.” His eyes were brimming. “You got no fucking idea. Cameron Harris was the bravest, toughest soldier I ever served with. Never saw him half step in my life.” His voice was catching, and he gulped for air. His quiet sergeant’s authority was gone now, replaced by something wilder, more elemental, more dangerous; the baby let out a cry that could’ve come from somewhere inside Damarkus. “Did you not fucking listen to what I was just telling you? You got something wrong with you?”
Shyrece’s voice entered: “You see, D? This is why I told you don’t do this.”
“I don’t care you got questions you supposed to ask,” Damarkus said, ignoring her, Euclide tensed for Damarkus to come leaping out of his chair. “They’re bullshit questions. You don’t get to come into my house talking shit like that. You can just get the fuck out of here. You not hearing me? Get the fuck out.”
“I told you, D,” Shyrece said.
Damarkus threw up his hand in another stop sign, but the effort broke him. He buried his face into the stump of his left arm and let out a low and grinding sob. Euclide sat drawing his lips into his mouth, jolted by a blast he hadn’t seen coming, and would’ve left the house right then, concussed with confusion and guilt, were it not, again, for Shyrece. She peered down at her weeping brother, her features softening so profoundly that it appeared her face was going out of focus, unraveling from pity or love, until, with a decisive nod, she hardened them back, aiming her eyes at Euclide.
“There’s something you should be knowing about my brother and Cameron,” she said to him.
“Shy, don’t—” Damarkus’s words muffling into his shirtsleeve.
“What for?” she snapped downward. “I’m listening to you tell a story that ain’t the real one.”
Euclide perked, though he was feeling something like the way Damarkus had described feeling inside that courtyard: trapped inside a blender. Shards of emotions were buzzing around him, too fast to identify.
“You ashamed, D? That why you sent Chief out?” The baby was wailing now, howling at the ceiling. “He don’t care and you know it. You ain’t got no cause for shame, D. Only thing shameful is acting like the truth ain’t true.”
“Shy…,” Damarkus moaned, lifting his face just long enough for Euclide to see the flood smearing his cheeks, then burying it again.
Her gaze froze Euclide. “My brother loved Cameron Harris.”
Euclide groped to make sense of this, his arms rising as though to capture her words from the air and turn them over in his hands. “Well, sure,” he said, elongating his own words less from caution than bafflement. “Combat duty creates…it must create incredible bonds, the shared trauma, and—”
“Naw, you ain’t feeling me. My brother, he was in love with Cameron.” She looked down at Damarkus’s racking shoulders. “Shit. Look at you, D. You still is.”
seventeen
Thirty-six hours after the panicked, shambolic retreat from Guidry’s Lava Lounge, on the afternoon of January 2, 2015, Scott T. Griffin was roaming his rented cottage in Ocean Springs, across Biloxi Bay, with his phone pressed to his ear. The rest of the crew—Kaitlyn, Honeybun, Casey, Kroth—were draped on sectional couches, a funereal pall dulling their faces, Kaitlyn nibbling her fingernails one after the other. Honeybun tried lightening the mood with a batch of Bloody Marys, but no one seemed lightened or, for that matter, thirsty; Honeybun had to keep reminding everyone about the sweating crimson glasses in front of them, like a mom pushing cough syrup. On the coffee table was that morning’s edition of the Sun Herald, read and reread, announcing a criminal inquiry into the fight by the Biloxi Police Department and the temporary suspension of filming.
“Look, Cameron didn’t get paralyzed washing windows,” they could hear Griffin saying. “He was a warrior. He got taken out in combat, okay? He was trained for violence, conditioned for violence, and then—no, Bree, please, just think about this for a minute—he had to sit for four years with all that violence running crazy through his veins.”
Griffin’s manic energy—he was flailing his pink arms, pounding walls and tables to punctuate what he was saying, grunting and gesticulating as though wicking the spirit of the James Brown T-shirt he was wearing—stood in total contrast to the zombies strewn on the couches. An hour before, Lifetime’s Nicola Ash had issued a terse statement saying that “in light of the recent incident in Biloxi, Mississippi, the March 15 premiere of the series Miracle Man has been indefinitely postponed,” sucking even more oxygen from the room. Griffin, however, wasn’t seeing that as the airless omen everyone else was. (“Saying indefinitely is like saying forever with an emoji,” went Casey’s mumbled reaction.) In fact, Griffin was strangely relieved. Postponement meant a reprieve from the deadlines that’d been shrieking after him every day, particularly in the last few weeks. It meant he had more editing time to hone narratives, to tweezer significance from the hundreds of hours of humdrum existence he’d filmed. Moreover, Griffin wasn’t willing to concede that Cameron’s assault doomed the show—complicated it, yes, but only in ways that the documentarian in him was relishing. As Griffin saw it, the show until that point had been based on a situation; what he had now, he thought, was a story.
“Did he respond poorly to a provocation?” he was saying to Bree Winterson, Lifetime’s head of programming, patched into a conference call along with Griffin’s agent and a phalanx of attorneys. “Okay, yes. Of course. But was that response really out of the blue? No. That’s what warriors do. Is it a short-term loss? Absolutely. But, long ter
m, for the show, listen—I think this just added this massive dose of texture and complexity. I really do. The fact that he responded physically, after all those years when he couldn’t? Cameron’s not a saint, but, come on, we knew that. He’s not some Christian Superman. He’s a bit of a meathead, okay, who took out some asshole in a bar fight. But I’m saying we should embrace that complexity. Let’s pivot the show toward it, not away from it…”
When he ended that call, the twentieth or thirtieth he’d made or fielded since waking with a multilayered hangover on New Year’s Day, he’d convinced, by his own reckoning, “somewhere between zero and zero-and-a-quarter people.” But Griffin wasn’t dissuaded. He wouldn’t let himself be. Miracle Man had become like a vital organ to him, one of the only things pumping blood through his veins. Not just because his twelve-year marriage had turned into a dumpster fire indirectly ignited by the show, and not just because documenting Cameron Harris’s story was the deepest project he’d ever undertaken, the thing he was counting on to prove he could do more than local color, that big themes weren’t out of his reach, that he wasn’t just an L.A. hustler peddling moonshiners and jukers and truck-stop hookers from the deep-fried margins. If he lost the show—and the way Winterson kept saying, “Scotty, this just isn’t the show we ordered,” certified that as a looming possibility—he’d lose everything: the money, his crew, his investors, his reputation, any and all basis for convincing future network execs he could deliver a show. To be a producer, he’s often said, your job is to produce. It’s an infinitive verb. To not produce is to not exist. And that’s what Scott T. Griffin, already homeless, already dazed and frayed, and currently listening to Casey and Kroth comparing the westward flights they were scouting on their phones, felt that he was up against: the end of his existence as he knew it. All because of a single one-thirty-a.m. punch in a gnarly little shit-kicker bar. Okay, more than one punch. But still…
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