Mal was wiping it away when Carmody got up and grabbed the Fedayeen by the front of his shirt and heaved him out of the back of the truck, into the dirt road. The truck was doing thirty miles an hour at the time, and was part of a convoy that included two reporters from MSNBC.
The prisoner survived, although most of his face was flayed off on the gravel, his jaw rebroken, his hands smashed. Carmody said he leaped out on his own, trying to escape, but no one believed him, and three weeks later Carmody was sent home.
The funny thing was that the insurgent really did escape, a week after that, during another transfer. He was in handcuffs, but with his thumbs broken he was able to slip his hands right out of them. When the MPs stepped out of their Hummer at a checkpoint, to talk porno with some friends, the prisoner dropped out of the back of the transport. It was night. He simply walked into the desert, and, as the stories go, was never seen again.
The band took the stage Friday evening, and didn’t come offstage until Saturday morning. Twenty minutes after one, Mal bolted the door behind the last customer. She started helping Candice wipe down tables, but she had been on since before lunch, and Bill Rodier said go home already.
Mal had her jacket on and was headed out when John Petty poked her in the shoulder with something.
“Mal,” he said. “This is yours, right? Your name on it.”
She turned. Petty was at the cash register, holding a fat envelope toward her. She took.
“That the money Glen gave you, to swap for his wedding ring?” Petty turned his shoulder to her, shifting his attention back to the register. He pulled out stacks of bills, rubber-banded them, and lined them up on the bar. “That’s something. Taking his money and fucking him all over again. You think I plop down five hundred bucks, you’d fuck me just as nice?”
As he spoke he put his hand back in the register. Mal reached under his elbow and slammed the drawer on his fingers. He squealed. The drawer began to slide open again on its own, but before he could get his mashed fingers out, Mal slammed it once more. He lifted one foot off the floor and did a comic little jig.
“Ohfuckgoddamyouuglydyke,” he said.
“Hey,” said Bill Rodier, coming toward the bar. He carried a trash barrel in one hand. “Hey.”
She let Petty get his hand out of the drawer. He stumbled clumsily away from her, struck the bar with his hip, and wheeled to face her, clutching the mauled hand to his chest.
“You crazy bitch. I think you broke my fingers.”
“Jesus, Mal,” Bill said, looking over the bar at Petty’s hand. His fat fingers had a purple line of bruise across them. Bill turned his questioning gaze back her way. “I don’t know what the hell John said, but you can’t do that to people.”
“You’d be surprised what you can do to people,” she told him.
Outside it was drizzling and cold. She was all the way to her car before she felt a weight in one hand, and realized she was still clutching the envelope full of cash.
Mal held it in her hand, against the inside of her thigh, the whole drive back. She didn’t put on the radio, just drove, and listened to the rain tapping on the glass. She had been in the desert for two years and she had seen it rain just twice, although there was often a moist fog in the morning, a mist that smelled of eggs, of brimstone.
When she enlisted, she had hoped for war. She did not see the point of joining if you were not going to get to fight. The risk to her life did not trouble her. It was an incentive. You received a two-hundred-dollar-a-month bonus for every month you spent in the combat zone, and a part of her had relished that her own life was valued so cheap. Mal would not have expected more.
But it did not occur to her, when she first learned she was going to Iraq, that they paid you that money for more than just the risk to your own life. It wasn’t just a question of what could happen to you, but also a matter of what you might be asked to do to others. For her two hundred dollar bonus, she had left naked and bound men in stress positions for hours, and told a nineteen-year-old girl that she would be gang-raped if she did not supply information about her boyfriend. Two hundred dollars a month was what it cost to make a torturer out of her. She felt now that she had been crazy there, that the Vivarin, the ephedra, the lack of sleep, the constant scream-and-thump of the mortars, had made her into someone who was mentally ill, a bad dream version of herself. Then Mal felt the weight of the envelope against her thigh, Glen Kardon’s payoff, and remembered taking his ring, and it came to her that she was having herself on, pretending she had been someone different in Iraq. Who she had been then and who she was now were the same person. She had taken the prison home with her. She lived in it still.
Mal let herself in the house, soaked and cold, holding the envelope. She found herself standing in front of the kitchen counter with Glen’s money. She could sell him back his own ring for five hundred dollars, if she wanted, and it was more than she would get from any pawnshop. She had done worse, for less cash. She stuck her hand down the drain, felt along the wet smoothness of the trap, until her fingertips found the ring.
Mal hooked her ring finger through it, pulled her hand back out. She turned her wrist this way and that, considering how the ring looked on her crooked, blunt finger. With this I do thee wed. She didn’t know what she’d do with Glen Kardon’s five hundred dollars if she swapped it for his ring. It wasn’t money she needed. She didn’t need his ring either. She couldn’t say what it was she needed, but the idea of it was close, a word on the tip of her tongue, maddeningly out of reach.
She made her way to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and let the steam gather while she undressed. Slipping off her black blouse, she noticed she still had the envelope in one hand, Glen’s ring on the finger of the other. She tossed the money next to the bathroom sink, left the ring on.
She glanced at the ring sometimes while she was in the shower. She tried to imagine being married to Glen Kardon, pictured him stretched out on her father’s bed in boxers and a T-shirt, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom, his stomach aflutter with the anticipation of some late night, connubial action. She snorted at the thought. It was as absurd as trying to imagine what her life would’ve been like if she had become an astronaut.
The washer and dryer were in the bathroom with her. She dug through the Maytag until she found her Curt Schilling T-Shirt and a fresh pair of Hanes. She slipped back into the darkened bedroom, towelling her hair, and glanced at herself in the dresser mirror, only she couldn’t see her face, because a white sheet of paper had been stuck into the top of the frame, and it covered the place where her face belonged. A black thumbprint had been inked in the centre. Around the edges of the sheet of paper, she could see reflected in the mirror a man stretched out on the bed, just as she had pictured Glen Kardon stretched out and waiting for her, only in her head Glen hadn’t been wearing grey-and-black fatigues.
She lunged to her side, going for the kitchen door. But Carmody was already moving, launching himself at her, driving his boot into her right knee. The leg twisted in a way it wasn’t meant to go, and she felt her ACL pop behind her knee. Carmody was right behind her by then and he got a handful of her hair. As she went down, he drove her forward and smashed her head into the side of the dresser.
A black spoke of pain lanced down into her skull, a nail-gun fired straight into the brain. She was down and flailing and he kicked her in the head. That lick didn’t hurt so much, but took the life out of her, as if she were no more than an appliance, and he had jerked the power cord out of the wall.
When he rolled her onto her stomach and twisted her arms behind her back, she had no strength in her to resist. He had the heavy-duty plastic ties, the flexicuffs they used on the prisoners in Iraq sometimes. He sat on her ass and squeezed her ankles together and put the flexicuffs on them too, tightening until it hurt, and then some. Black flashes were still firing behind her eyes, but the fireworks were smaller, and exploding less frequently now. She was coming back to herself, slowly. Breath
e. Wait.
When her vision cleared she found Carmody sitting above her, on the edge of her father’s bed. He had lost weight and he hadn’t any to lose. His eyes peeked out, too bright at the bottom of deep hollows, moonlight reflected in the water at the bottom of a long well. In his lap was a bag, like an old-fashioned doctor’s case, the leather pebbled and handsome.
“I observed you while you were running this morning,” he began, without preamble. Using the word observed, like he would in a report on enemy troop movements. “Who were you signalling when you were up on the hill?”
“Carmody,” Mal said. “What are you talking about, Carmody? What is this?”
“You’re staying in shape. You’re still a soldier. I tried to follow you, but you outran me on the hill this morning. When you were on the crest, I saw you flashing a light. Two long flashes, one short, two long. You signalled someone. Tell me who.”
At first she didn’t know what he was talking about; then she did. Her canteen. Her canteen had flashed in the sunlight when she tipped it up to drink. She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, he lowered himself to one knee beside her. Carmody unbuckled his bag and dumped the contents onto the floor. He had a collection of tools: a pair of heavy-duty shears, a taser, a hammer, a hacksaw, a portable vice. Mixed in with the tools were five or six human thumbs.
Some of the thumbs were thick and blunt and male, and some were white and slender and female, and some were too shrivelled and darkened with rot to provide much of any clues about the person they had belonged to. Each thumb ended in a lump of bone and sinew. The inside of the bag had a smell, a sickly-sweet, almost floral stink of corruption.
Carmody selected the heavy-duty shears.
“You went up the hill and signalled someone this morning. And tonight you came back with a lot of money. I looked in the envelope while you were in the shower. So you signalled for a meeting and at the meeting you were paid for intel. Who did you meet? CIA?”
“I went to work. At the bar. You know where I work. You followed me there.”
“Five hundred dollars. Is that supposed to be tips?”
She didn’t have a reply. She couldn’t think. She was looking at the thumbs mixed in with his mess of tools.
He followed her gaze, prodded a blackened and shrivelled thumb with the blade of the shears. The only identifiable feature remaining on the thumb was a twisted, silvery, fishhook scar.
“Plough,” Carmody said. “He had helicopters doing flyovers of my house. They’d fly over once or twice a day. They used different kinds of helicopters on different days to try and keep me from putting two and two together. But I knew what they were up to. I started watching them from the kitchen with my field glasses, and one day I saw Plough at the controls of a radio station traffic ‘copter. I didn’t even know he knew how to pilot a bird until then. He was wearing a black helmet and sunglasses, but I still recognized him.”
As Carmody spoke, Mal remembered Corporal Plough trying to open a bottle of Red Stripe with the blade of his bayonet, and the knife slipping, catching him across the thumb, Plough sucking on it and saying around his thumb, motherfuck, someone open this for me.
“No, Carmody. It wasn’t him. It was just someone who looked like him. If he could fly a helicopter, they would’ve had him piloting Apaches over there.”
“Plough admitted it. Not at first. At first he lied. But eventually he told me everything, that he was in the helicopter, that they had been keeping me under surveillance ever since I came home.” Carmody moved the tip of the shears to point at another thumb, shrivelled and brown, with the texture and appearance of a dried mushroom. “This was his wife. She admitted it too. They were putting dope in my water to make me sluggish and stupid. Sometimes I’d be driving home, and I’d forget what my own house looked like. I’d spend twenty minutes cruising around my development, before I realized I had gone by my place twice.”
He paused, moved the tip of the shears to a fresher thumb, a woman’s, the nail painted red. “She followed me into a supermarket in Poughkeepsie. This was while I was on my way north, to see you. To see if you had been compromised. This woman in the supermarket, she followed me aisle to aisle, always whispering on her cell phone. Pretending not to look at me. Then, later, I went into a Chinese place, and noticed her parked across the street, still on the phone. She was the toughest to get solid information out of. I almost thought I was wrong about her.
“She told me she was a first-grade teacher. She told me she didn’t even know my name and that she wasn’t following me. I almost believed her. She had a photo in her purse, of her sitting on the grass with a bunch of little kids. But it was tricked up. They used Photoshop to stick her in that picture. I even got her to admit it in the end.”
“Plough told you he could fly helicopters so you wouldn’t hurt him anymore. The first-grade teacher told you the photo was faked to make you stop. People will tell you anything if you hurt them badly enough. You’re having some kind of break with reality, Carmody. You don’t know what’s true anymore.”
“You would say that. You’re part of it. Part of the plan to make me crazy, make me kill myself. I thought the thumbprints would startle you into making contact with your handler and they did. You went straight to the hills, to send him a signal. To let him know I was close. But where’s your back-up now?”
“I don’t have back-up. I don’t have a handler.”
“We were friends, Mal. You got me through the worst parts of being over there, when I thought I was going crazy. I hate that I have to do this to you. But I need to know who you were signalling. And you’re going to tell. Who did you signal, Mal?”
“No one,” she said, trying to squirm away from him on her belly.
He grabbed her hair, and wrapped it around his fist, to keep her from going anywhere. She felt a tearing along her scalp. He pinned her with a knee in her back. She went still, head turned, right cheek mashed against the knubbly rug on the floor.
“I didn’t know you were married. I didn’t notice the ring until just tonight. Is he coming home? Is he part of it? Tell me.” Tapping the ring on her finger with the blade of the shears.
Mal’s face was turned so she was staring under the bed at the case with her M4 and bayonet in it. She had left the clasps undone.
Carmody clubbed her in the back of the head, at the base of the skull, with the handles of the shears. The world snapped out of focus, went to a soft blur, and then slowly her vision cleared and details regained their sharpness, until at last she was seeing the case under the bed again, not a foot away from her, the silver clasps hanging loose.
“Tell me, Mal. Tell me the truth now.”
In Iraq, the Fedayeen had escaped the handcuffs after his thumbs were broken. Cuffs wouldn’t hold a person whose thumb could move in any direction . . . or someone who didn’t have a thumb at all.
Mal felt herself growing calm. Her panic was like static on a radio, and she had just found the volume, was slowly dialling it down. He would not begin with the shears, of course, but would work his way up to them. He meant to beat her first. At least. She drew a long, surprisingly steady breath. Mal felt almost as if she were back on Hatchet Hill, climbing with all the will and strength she had in her, for the cold, open blue of the sky.
“I’m not married,” she said. “I stole this wedding ring off a drunk. I was just wearing it because I like it.”
He laughed: a bitter, ugly sound. “That isn’t even a good lie.”
And another breath, filling her chest with air, expanding her lungs to their limit. He was about to start hurting her. He would force her to talk, to give him information, to tell him what he wanted to hear. She was ready. She was not afraid of being pushed to the edge of what could be endured. She had a high tolerance for pain, and her bayonet was in arm’s reach, if only she had an arm to reach.
“It’s the truth,” she said, and with that, PFC Mallory Grennan began her confession.
NICHOLAS ROYLE
&n
bsp; Lancashire
NICHOLAS ROYLE IS THE AUTHOR of five novels (Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart, The Director’s Cut and Antwerp) and two novellas (The Appetite and The Enigma of Departure).
He has published around 120 short stories, and to date has one collection to his name, Mortality. Widely published as a journalist, with regular appearances in Time Out and the Independent, he has also edited thirteen original anthologies, including two volumes of Darklands, The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams and ’68: New Stories From Children of the Revolution.
Since 2006, Royle has been teaching creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has won three British Fantasy Awards and the Bad Sex Prize once.
“This was one of those stories that came to me in the space of less than a minute,” he recalls, “pretty much in its entirety. It deviated a little from the plan that I started with, but much less so than usual.
“I wrote it for Phobic, an anthology published by Comma Press, an independent publisher based in the north-west of England that deserve special credit for their commitment to the short story. They also have a film production arm, via which a young short film-maker is hoping to shoot an adaptation of the story. The setting is based on the house of my very good friends Christine and Paul and their son Jack.”
“NELSON, COLNE, DARWEN,” said Cassie, reading the names off the road signs. “I remember all these Lancashire towns from Bournemouth,” she said.
“Your mam’s talking nonsense again,” said her husband Paul into the rear-view mirror.
“What are you talking about, Mummy?” asked James, who at ten was the elder of the two. His two front teeth still hadn’t closed the gap, freckles scattered across his nose.
“From when I worked in the sorting office in Bournemouth one Christmas,” Cassie explained.
“For Christmas. . . yeah . . .” began Ellie, James’s younger sister, “I want an iPod Nano. A black one.”
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