by Harry Mazer
Niko was mowing the Brights’ lawn when Ariela arrived. Only she didn’t much resemble Ariela but some pale zombie replacement. He cut the engine and ran over to greet her. “You okay?” he asked.
She held up a printout. It was wrinkled and then smoothed out again, like she had thrown it out and then recovered it. He read it carefully and felt his stomach jounce. “Oh, crap,” he said.
Ariela nodded. She opened her mouth to say something, thought better of it, and then just shook her head.
Niko reeled as he read it a second time. He’d had nightmares about this since Ben had left.
I’m not going to war. How many times had Ben said that? Of course he was going. They all went. They went and came back, and then they went again and again, until they were used up and scared and too shattered ever to return. And then they were sent back again.
He couldn’t believe the tone of it. Like the whole thing was a big party. And the misspellings and clumsy typing, as if he had regressed, as if they had taken the man and turned him back into a kid.
“Did he at least cc his mom and dad?” Niko asked.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Ariela whispered.
“What the heck was he thinking?” Niko rubbed his forehead. Ben couldn’t have been so stupid, so callous as to write only Ariela and expect her to be the messenger. Then again, he’d been doing a lot of stupid things lately. “We’ll go in and tell them together.”
Ariela looked away, then let out an enormous, shaky sigh. “Niko?” she said.
“Yeah?”
“What are we going to do?”
He opened his arms, and she sank into them, her own arms limp by her side. She began to sob—wracking, shaking moans that scared him. “We’re going to be here for him, that’s what.”
The words sounded hollow and trite as they came out of his mouth, so he just shut up and held her, both of them rocking, both of them sobbing in full view of the neighborhood as a distant lawn mower yaa-yaahed loudly, like a cruel laugh.
September 15
The explosion came at 07:13:00 a.m., when Charlie Company had been out of the wire maybe ten minutes.
At 07:12:23, Ben Bright was walking beside a Humvee, eight measures into “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story. If memory served his company leader right, it was the part that went “It may come cannonballin’ down from the sky,” ironically enough.
During boot camp, Ben hadn’t had the guts or the energy to sing. He’d only started at a Camp Idol karaoke night, and only after lots of encouragement. But once he’d started, there was no stopping, even after the deployment orders.
That was where he’d gotten the nickname Broadway. Not very imaginative, but then none of the names were, really. Bolcomb from Arkansas was Hayseed. Mendez from Fordham Road was Da Bronx. Reiner, who looked like Schwarzenegger before he got fat, was Governator. And Katrina Westhof was Catwoman.
Ben liked his name. It reminded him of who he was and what he was going back to. It reminded him of Ariela, of her yes on the platform of the Long Island Rail Road. Yes to a ring that wouldn’t be paid up for another few years.
Yes was what had been getting him through. Singing kept yes alive. And on a mission through the Iraqi desert, where heat and silence were like solid things, people wanted songs.
Especially people forced to walk beside the vehicle because troops on foot look “friendlier.”
The blast, which came out of nowhere, seemed to rip the voice out of his throat.
He dropped to the road like dead weight. Beside him, the Humvee jolted. In a nanosecond, an instantaneous flipbook of odd memories flashed through his brain: Ariela in her sea-green halter top, Dad yanking a bluefish from the Montauk riptide, Niko and Ben racing down Atlantic Avenue after stealing a comic book from Howie’s, Mom crying after West Side Story ...
Then, a dull metallic thump, and the images stopped.
Ben hacked on the sand, which had caked into his face and seeped between his teeth. His eyes hurt as they opened. The road stretched out, coated with sand and leading to a small collection of sand-colored buildings just ahead. He smelled sweat and garbage. Either they had survived, or heaven was just like Iraq.
Spectacles, testicles, wallet, watch. All accounted for.
The Humvee was intact, too. The thump had been courtesy of a very angry Private Wade “Hayseed” Bolcomb, who had hit his fist against its side door. “Where’d you get your license, Mendez?” he yelled. “Wal-Mart?”
From the Humvee’s passenger seat, Devon Johnson was howling. “Da Brrrronnnnnx!” he shouted. “Yo, Mendez, you ever heard of a Wal-Mart? They got Wal-marts in Da Brrrronnnnnx? Today only! Driver’s licenses, faw f’r-a dolla!”
“Yo, Broadway, you got any songs about loser New Yorkers who never learned to drive?” Hayseed asked.
So that was it: Raoul Mendez had backfired the engine, which sounded like a bomb blast, and now the guys were giddy. You had to be, when your life passed before your eyes and it was just a mistake.
“Shouldn’t have taken off the training wheels!” came a shout from the other side of the vehicle. It was either Hideki or Governator. They sounded the same, although one was skinny as a post and the other could have been a body double in Terminator.
In the gun mount, Catwoman held her head in her hands. She was from outside Keokuk, Iowa, and the best shot Ben had ever seen. “You want to switch places, Bronx?” she called out. “My daddy taught me to drive on a tractor. I can handle this.”
Ben couldn’t see Mendez in the driver’s seat. But he heard a whole bunch of words peppered with the phrase “your mother.”
“Dang, look at this crap,” Hayseed drawled. A cloud of sand billowed around him as he wiped himself off. He was the biggest of the unit, maybe six six, with a drawl so thick you first thought he was from some foreign country. Or planet. “And here I was, all ready to show off my pretty new uniform to the Hadji girls.”
“Maybe they have a Laundromat in town,” Ben said. “Then you could prance your junk around while you wait.”
“You’re the prancer, Broadway. Me, I’m the dasher. And I get the vixens! Yes! Yes! Am I a po-wet or what?” Hayseed tried to hide a self-satisfied smile but couldn’t. He spat. “Frickin’ sand. Makes me think of my mama.”
The Humvee was moving again, its treads digging into the cracked cement road. Ben shouldered his rifle and began walking. “Okay, I’ll bite. How is the sand like your mama?”
Hayseed nodded, falling in beside him. “I could blow up half of Iraq and eat the children for lunch, I could become a billionaire selling plutonium to Iran on the black market, I could steal the life savings and the clothes off the back of Muhammad in that house over there, and my mama would organize a damn pig roast for all of Jonesboro when I got home. But if I tracked this crap into the house, wham!—out on my butt. She’s the one that made me so OCD. Know what that is? Obsessive Compulsive Dickhead.” He spat out a line of sand onto the ground. “What’s this stuff made of anyway?”
“Soil. Rock. Dust.” Ben hocked a lungful off to one side. “Hey, know what dust is? Mostly dead skin. I read that somewhere.”
“And you think this hick is stupid enough to believe that.”
“Never said you were stupid, Jethro.”
Hayseed gave a sudden lurch to the side, nearly knocking Ben off his feet. “Sorry, must be the Tourette’s,” he said.
Ben was cracking up. “Tourette’s, OCD . . . what the hell else do you have?”
“I’ll tell you what I have, is a friggin’ driver’s license,” Hayseed said, glancing toward the Humvee. “He don’t, you know. Bronx.”
“Serious?” Ben said. “Does Nails know?”
“Mendez says they don’t teach you to drive in the Bronx. So Nails decides we’re his teachers. The Bronx Remedial Driving School, Hadji Division. Says they ain’t no better way to learn how to drive.”
“And get us all killed,” Ben said.
“I know, right? Don’t make no sense.”
>
Through Ben’s sunglasses, the village loomed larger. The heat swirled up from the sand and pavement in tight little eddies. Tiny figures, clad in loose-fitting white clothes, were stopping in their tracks, staring balefully.
Everyone talked about Embracing the Suck. The Suck began at basic training, which broke you so that only the strongest could come out the other side. Then you received your deployment, and Suck now equaled Fear plus Loathing. Then your first few weeks in Kuwait, waiting for orders, and a convoy into Iraq across the desert. Suck to the suckth. But this—meeting the people you were here to help, right in their homes, and knowing that they hated your guts—this was Suck Unembraceable.
They were scared and angry. They couldn’t see what you saw—schools for girls, power plants, crops, construction, new markets, real freedom. They had no electricity or running water, practically no medical care, and the Sunnis breathing down their backs. You were a pack of well-fed infidel kids, armed to the gills and looking for insurgents. If there was one hint of one Al Qaeda there—one poison apple—then everybody suffered.
You are after their hearts and minds . . .
That was what Lieutenant Leonard “Nails” Nelson had drummed into their brains. Nails was known for his ability to gain trust among the locals. Supposedly this is what had kept the troops alive for three months, not a single casualty. Publicly, everyone respected that.
Nails also called the current mission Operation BFF. Privately, they all thought he was a little nuts.
“Look at them,” Hayseed said under his breath as he glanced around. “They hate us.”
“We must be like outer space men,” Ben said.
“Operation BFF, Big Friggin’ Fools,” Hayseed drawled. “Where’s our fearless leader anyway? Back at FOB looking at Internet porn.”
“He’s entertaining some major,” Ben said.
Hayseed raised an eyebrow. “Like I said.”
The locals began slinking back into their houses. They moved like wisps of smoke. Ben fought to keep from shaking. He recited Nails’s words to himself: Face-to-face contact makes human connection. It’s their country. We have to act like guests—guests whose job is to protect and defend them. Which means men on the ground, gifts, playing with the kids.
It also, apparently, meant using a Humvee driver who grew up in the only place in the U. S. where people didn’t get a driver’s license at age seventeen.
He wondered what Nails would think if he actually saw Mendez’s driving. Ben glanced at the vehicle nervously. Bucking a bit, slowing and speeding, heading unsteadily into town. Into the thicket of diverted eyes, untreated illnesses, and hunched backs.
“Ready to be a hero?” Hayseed asked.
“With pickles and mayo,” Ben replied.
He remembered the last thing his pastor, Father Joachim of the Eastport United Church of Christ, had said on the day he left home. “May God be in your back pocket.”
The Humvee bucked. Mendez cursed. Johnson stuck his head out the window, pretending to be carsick.
Ben thought, May God be in the carburetor, too.
In a moment the Humvee roared into the village. Despite the migration indoors, the town center was still packed—men in groups talking animatedly, women hanging out with kids, older kids playing unrecognizable games in the sand. At the soldiers’ approach, their eyes seemed to glow through a scrim of sand, their expressions ranging from impassive to hostile.
“Wave to the Hadjis,” Hayseed said. He nodded amiably at an emaciated white-bearded man in front of a clay shack, who was so still you couldn’t be sure if he was alive. “Hey, Shep, how ’bout them Texas Rangers? Nice lawn you got there! Can I borrow your weed whacker? How ’bout borrowin’ your daughter? What’zat? Can’t tell ’em apart? Oh well, my loss. Catch you next time. Happy birthday!”
The man’s eyes glimmered slightly. He broke into a smile and waved back.
Whatever crap comes out of your mouths, keep it low, and eyes off the women, Nails had said. “Dude, maybe he knows English,” Ben whispered.
“Maybe he’s got a daughter,” Hayseed said, casting a deceptively respectful glance at three middle-aged women in hijabs, who were carrying small sacks over their shoulders. “Ooooh, dang, my knickers are in a twist over that one.”
“Which one?” Ben asked.
“The one with the beard. Well, the lightest beard.”
“Guess I got the one with the nose,” Ben said.
“You’ll never need a can opener, Abdul.”
“They got cans here?”
“Hey, she’s looking at you. Don’t look back, she is. Sing to her—go ahead, Broadway! No show tunes, though, please. Maybe some Eminem. You know who that is?”
Suddenly, Catwoman’s voice pierced the heat. “Eleven o’clock! Eleven o’clock!”
Hayseed fell silent. Ben felt the hairs rising inside his helmet, neck to crown. The road ahead curved to the left. Maybe fifty yards. Through the heat’s haze, Ben spotted something by the side of the road. A shapeless, sand-colored lump.
“Canvas sack! Canvas sack!” Hideki shouted.
Mendez braked. The Humvee lurched, then stopped. Johnson wasn’t laughing.
Ben dropped to his knees. Trash was the enemy in Iraq. Trash, bumps in the road, potholes, anything that could hide an IED.
Instinctively he raised his rifle. He scanned the area for suspicious movement, men with metal objects in their hands. Cell-phone signals activated IEDs. The guys would wait till the vehicle ran over the item. The bombs were homemade, stuffed with nails and metal scraps for maximum damage. The force of a well-timed blast could rip apart the heavy armored Humvee like a tuna can. It could shred a human body.
Ben’s heart seemed to slow. The world around him was suddenly clearer, sharper. He was vaguely aware of families all around him moving, oddly organized, like choreography. He saw the old man’s robe disappear into a doorway. An arm dragging a crying kid behind a house. In a moment the street was empty, as if the people had just dissolved into the sand.
“Wires, Big G?” Johnson.
“Negative.” Governator. With high-power binocs.
“I got the jammer activated.” Mendez. Nobody making fun of him now.
Then Ben stiffened. On the second floor of a long, stucco building to the left, he saw a man, bald and middle-aged, wearing a striped shirt and clutching a cell phone. “TEN O’CLOCK! TEN O’CLOCK!” Ben shouted, running toward the building.
Hideki was beside him, rifle pointed.
“WINDOW. SECOND FLOOR!” Hayseed.
They were moving toward the building, but also closer to the canvas sack. At some point, you would be too close. Ben thought about Mendez and the infrared jammer. It didn’t always work.
The bald guy was shouting something now, something with the word Allah in it. Everything they shouted seemed to have Allah in it. A bullet ricocheted off the wall, two inches from the window. Hideki was firing.
Ben saw the man’s silhouette passing through another window, followed by two other men.
Three more shots, maybe four. He crouched, shielded behind a post, and took aim.
“Move! Move! Move!”
Governator raced to the door of the building and kicked. It ripped off its hinges, and he burst in, rifle first. Hideki followed, taking position.
Catwoman called out, “Heads up!” She was in the Hummer, still in the gun mount.
Ben could hear a shot. A volley of shots came from behind them. Pieces of the building’s upper walls exploded in puffs of cement debris.
“Come on!” Hayseed shouted, racing to the door.
Ben felt his feet moving. He was in the building now, in the darkness and the stink. Hideki and Big G were racing upstairs, followed by Johnson. But the building was long, and the guy could come down into a section even closer to the sack. He could be luring them. This could be some kind of suicide mission.
No. If it was, they’d be wearing the explosives, he thought. But he didn’t believe it.
&
nbsp; “Moving below!” Ben shouted, hugging close to the first-floor walls, swinging the rifle left and right, with Hayseed and Mendez behind.
They surrounded the bottom of another stairwell. Boots clomped overhead, past their location. To their right, a closed door. Ben kicked it down and moved in. A woman shrieked, arms stretched toward him, pleading. On the floor was a tiny ancient man, his face like a skull.
No. It wasn’t an old man but a kid—a teenager, so sick and wrinkly he looked about seventy-five years old.
“We won’t hurt you!” Ben shouted, knowing they wouldn’t understand his words but might pick up his meaning. “We’re not here for you!”
There was a huge clatter in the next room. Hayseed was in first. Hideki, Big G, and Johnson were racing down the stairs and out a back door. The end of the building.
Somehow the guy and his pals had escaped.
Ben followed them out, into the sun’s glare. The three men were streaking across the desert in sandals, their white garments flowing like gull’s wings. Ben eyed the sack. It was thirty, forty yards away, but the men were out of range. “Let’s get ’em!” Hayseed shouted.
“No!” Johnson said. “In the Humvee! Everybody!”
Hayseed’s eyes were crazy-wide, his teeth clenched. Back home, he had some sort of state high-school record in kickoff returns and, fully armored, he could do the hundred meter in twelve five. “I could take them bastards,” he murmured, his voice choked with frustration.
With a grunt that seemed to come from his toes, he pulled a grenade from his belt, turned to the building, reached for the pin.
“Stop!” Ben shouted. He ran in front of him, hands in the air. “There’s a mother in there, dude, with a sick kid!”
“Hayseed! Broadway!” Johnson shouted. “In the Humvee. Now!”
Hayseed lowered his arm, turned from Ben, and spat into the dust. “Where’s my engraved invitation?” he growled as he strutted toward the vehicle.