by David Abrams
“Wait! Wait!” Drew screamed.
The saw stopped and the woman looked up. But now she wasn’t somebody’s grandmother. She was younger and Middle Eastern—beautiful as a supermodel. And she no longer spoke English. She unleashed a tide of angry words that crashed around the room. The only word Drew recognized was “Allah.”
The woman bent over Drew’s legs and prepared to go to work. The saw had disappeared from her hands, replaced by a rusty butter knife with tiny serrations at the tip.
This was going to take a long time.
The woman smiled at Drew, this time without sympathy. She had bright white teeth. They were sharp as razor blades.
He screamed himself awake as the butter knife bit into his skin.
That dream had come to Drew three nights ago—a premonition for today’s unexpected march across Baghdad.
God, his legs hurt so fucking much.
21
Legs
Thigh, knee, calf, ankle, heel.
Hamstring, gluteus, quadriceps, dorsal flexors, and sartorius—the longest muscle in the entire human body.
It’s a factory down there.
Our legs are levers.
Our legs are wheels and pistons and pulleys and cogs.
Our legs are shock absorbers.
Our legs are gazelle springs.
Our legs are giraffe stalks, taking long skittery strides.
Our legs are meat and muscle, shanks of ham and lamb and beef.
Our legs are tree trunks and blades of grass.
Our legs are made of water and wind.
Our legs are two fingers walking across a table.
Our legs, our legs, our legs are the only thing we believe in anymore. Our legs will deliver us from all evil. Our legs, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
22
One Foot in Front of the Other
Once upon a time, Cheever almost got himself blown up.
This was years ago, in a different place, a different unit—long before we were “we.”
Back then, Cheever wasn’t a Signal soldier attached to our infantry unit. He was the lowest of the lowly fobbits: a Public Affairs pogue who spent the majority of his time inside airless headquarters buildings lit by flickering overhead fluorescent lights. His job was to write stories—fluffy and sweet as a bowl full of marshmallows—about Officers’ Spouses’ Club scholarships, new books at the post library, and the occasional movie review for the post newspaper. Hardly anything about quote unquote real soldiering. The only times he got out of the office were to interview people like the corporal in Finance who had won some award for his stamp collection or to ride along with animal control MPs who cruised the post picking up stray cats, dogs, and—once—a purportedly rabid raccoon. The rest of the time, Cheever sat in his small, dimly lit office rewriting the police blotter so it came out kind of funny and surfing lingerie websites—the closest thing to porn allowable on his government computer. He lived on bags of Cheetos and Costco-size boxes of Twinkies he kept in his lower right-hand desk drawer. You think he’s fat now, you should have seen him back in the day. Every six months at the conclusion of the Army Physical Fitness Test, he’d find himself standing in stocking feet in the company commander’s office as an NCO ran a tape measure over his doughy flesh, calculating his body mass index and jotting numbers on a form pinned to a clipboard. How Cheever passed those APFTs and survived long enough to make it into our platoon is beyond us. Dumb luck, we figure.
Speaking of “dumb,” this brings us to our story.
So there he was—Cheever—three years ago on a training exercise in Thailand. To his horror, he’d been yanked out of his soft, safe garrison routine and attached to an infantry company that was going to the jungles on the border of Laos for a month to share training tactics, techniques, and procedures with members of the Royal Thai Army. Cheever’s job was to take large numbers of photos—battery-draining quantities—and e-mail them (along with five-hundred-word stories) back to the post newspaper, where some other Twinkie-stuffed private would edit the story and lay it out in that week’s edition.
All well and good—and, in fact, Cheever was kind of getting into it, despite the heat, the khao phat that gave him the watery shits for a week, and rumors of a tiger prowling the hills above the city. He was digging the excitement of this adventure, losing himself in the photos he artfully arranged in his viewfinder. Eventually, he’d return to the comfort of garrison air-conditioning and junk food, but for now, he went along with this mission like he really cared about the Army.
One afternoon, when the grunts were busy in the barracks cleaning their rifles, Cheever wandered into the city, camera in hand.
He passed auto repair shops opening onto the street, the whir of pneumatic drills coming like sexual moans from deep inside the garages. The heavy air carried the sizzling smell of frying chicken. He passed stacks of dried fish (fins and eyeballs and scales included). His throat was lined with the harsh aftertaste of motor exhaust, a bitterness that burned his esophagus. He was already sweating and his skin was throbbing and every time he passed one of the street-side food vendors another wave of smoky heat beat against him. The vendors cooked on portable propane ovens right there on the curb, glass cases on either side of them filled with skinned chickens, spits of marinated meats, and beds of dirty ice on top of which sat fresh vegetables (white, root-like, gnarled like deformed knuckles) and giant prawns and mussels. Cheever raised his camera and clicked and clicked and clicked. He walked along the sidewalk and threaded his way among the tables and chairs set up in the middle of the throughway, trying not to bump into them with his oafish American body. Old men sipping their soup and slurping their fried noodles stared at him muttering “farang,” and the young Thai girls covered shy giggles with their hands when he glanced in their direction. He walked on past another engine shop where a young Thai man, stripped to the waist, was peeling a tire off its rim. At his side was a urine-colored dog, half its fur eaten away by disease, its head so listless and lazy that it could not lift it from the sidewalk as Cheever passed. He walked on past a shop selling fans and stereos and compact disc players, all shrink-wrapped in plastic and overpriced. He walked on past another vendor smelling of grease and ginger and the musk of seafood, past a coffee shop called Al Pacino Cappuccino and a place called Giant Big Man Club. He walked on past a building where water from an upper-story air-conditioning unit dripped on his head and shoulders.
Eventually, he arrived at a zoo full of skinny, flea-bitten animals. He paid his admission and walked slowly through the exhibits, raising his camera and trying to get some decent shots between the bars. He saw white-handed gibbons (one of whom reached a long hand through the cage and slapped Cheever’s head as he tried to take a picture), flamingoes, a large black squirrel, and a herd of Eld’s deer, which resembled the small whitetails back home in Pennsylvania. They had glistening purple-brown noses and magnificent racks chandeliered over their heads. There was a newborn fawn that couldn’t have been more than a few hours old; the mother was still licking it. Its hooves were the size of licorice bites, legs shaped like dowels and thighs still pressed together in memory of the birth canal. He’s not sure why, but standing there in front of that cage, staring at this fresh, still-slick deer, Cheever began to cry. Then he got mad at himself for the tears and leaned forward and banged his forehead several times against the rusted bars until the mother deer got nervous and began to bleat like a wounded lamb. That night, Cheever sat on his cot in the barracks and deleted every photo of the city he’d taken that day. He wanted to be out of this country, out of the Army, out of this life altogether.
Wait—this isn’t the story we want to tell. Sorry, we got a little distracted by the sight of Cheever, the stupid tub of lard, getting slapped on the head by a monkey. Here’s the story:
On the third week of the training exercise, before his visit to the zoo, Cheever and his company of infantry soldiers were visiting a Thai military camp; it was the host nation’s
turn to show the Americans what Thai training was like. Most of it involved walking through the jungle, bending to examine broken branches and boot-crushed leaves, a long, involved ceremony that ended with everyone bowing and chanting “ommmm,” and catching three-foot snakes by hand, snapping their heads with a two-handed twist, then gutting, roasting, and eating the flesh.
Before that dinner theater, however, everyone gathered around a large plot of freshly turned soil—about the size of a Hollywood swimming pool—as three Royal Thai Army soldiers gave a demonstration in “route-clearing procedures.” The company’s first sergeant, kindness in his heart, ordered the American soldiers to take off their uniform tops and strip down to their sweat-soaked brown T-shirts, but to keep their helmets on, chin-straps tightened. He didn’t want to embarrass the United States with heat casualties. Everyone sat cross-legged around this pool of plowed earth, drinking cool bottles of water and watching the Thai soldiers move across the dirt, sweeping metal detectors in front of them and listening to the clicks that came through the headphones clamped tight against their ears.
A Thai colonel stood off to one side narrating their actions in broken English: “Now he step one foot, one foot … Now he listen for click-click … Now he go three step left, two step forward.”
Cheever was frustrated. He was at the back of the crowd, at a bad angle to get a decent photo. He tried holding his camera over his head and clicking off a few frames, but when he scrolled through them on the digital display, they all looked like shit.
He’d gotten the backs of the Americans’ heads, but the paper back home needed faces. The only way to get that was to go on the other side of the Thais and shoot back toward the US soldiers.
He made his way around the edge of the formation and stepped into the cleared field. The soil beneath his boots was soft as pillows. He was halfway across and about to raise the camera to his eye when everyone erupted in a jumble of yells: “Hey! Hey! Hey!” and “Stop! Stop!” and something in Thai he couldn’t understand. Cheever shrugged, thinking it was part of the demonstration. He fired off a few shots—all the soldiers were waving at the camera—but realized he needed to get a little closer to be able to see faces in the photo. Everyone was still yelling and now there was clapping. The Thai minesweepers had stopped and turned to look at Cheever. He’d taken another three steps when he heard the deep bellow of the first sergeant: “PAO—freeze!”
Cheever wasn’t a regular part of this unit, so no one really knew his name. To them, he was just the job title, Public Affairs. So when he heard “PAO!” fired across the field, Cheever suddenly realized the crowd had been yelling at him.
Across the field, everyone—including the Thai colonel—was waving their arms like semaphores. Now he heard the words: “Get off! Get off!” “Mines! Mines! Mines!”
Cheever froze. His balls tingled, rotating through his sac. His mouth filled with cotton.
He looked around him at the black clods of earth. He saw red flags sunk in the soft dirt at irregular intervals and suddenly he knew what they were for, what they marked.
Sweet Jesus God, have mercy on me, your humble, idiotic servant.
Legs trembling, he stepped backward, trying to place his feet in his own boot tracks as he made his way off the minefield.
When he reached the rest of the soldiers, they were on their feet and looking at him like he was the stupidest piece of shit on earth. More than a few were shaking their heads and cursing him for making the rest of them look bad.
“Sorry,” Cheever said with a weak grin.
“Sorry?” the Thai colonel said, frowning. “You sorry?” He picked up a fist-size rock at his feet. “Here your ‘sorry.’”
Cheever flinched, expected the colonel to bean him over the head. Instead, he turned and flung the rock in an arc over the field. It landed in a spot near where Cheever had been standing, blithely taking photographs.
Ka-whoom!
An earth geyser shot twenty feet into the air, raining bits of soil on Cheever standing, openmouthed, fifty yards away.
23
Park
Park is our quiet one.
Park holds it inside. He is a balloon: the air escapes by small, slow degrees. So much pressure behind that knot.
In this, he is much like his grandfather. He fought in the old war. On the Korean side. Against Americans like Sergeant Morgan, Arrow, Cheever, O, Drew, and now Park himself. Grandfather didn’t talk much about his time in combat. He died before Park’s war, so what he’d think of us over here, pushing our way into these desert cities, will stay a mystery. Grandfather built a retaining wall inside himself and stayed behind it. He was a quiet one.
As a boy growing up in Los Angeles, Park was close to his grandfather, trailing behind him on nights and weekends—grade-school footsteps inside the old man’s larger ones—walking along the pier, flying kites, or watching Grandfather carve his animals, the blade growing out of his thumb, his thumb peeling the wood, the wood revealing the four-legged bodies. The two of them seldom discussed the grandfather’s past, his cold months in the mountains taking aim at bundled, huffing Americans climbing upslope. But when they did, the old man would say things like: “War is nothing but the dead fighting the dead” or “I once found a hand—just a hand—in a snowbank. White and beautiful as marble. A piece of statue. It was the worst thing I saw during that war.” Beyond that, his grandfather remained clammed and dammed. Nothing out, only in.
Park practices his ways. Stoic as statuary.
So, that night onstage with the Country Bumpkins at Taji two months ago? It nearly killed him.
We were drunk on enthusiasm and near beer. These MWR Fun Nights were our release. Our morale and welfare needed some recreation, all right. At concerts, we packed the PX courtyard with our beige bodies, filled the night air with our cheers. The bands were never big names—only rising stars and falling has-beens—but they were good enough for us, the entertainment-starved.
None of us had ever heard of the Country Bumpkins, but that didn’t matter. For the space of two hours, we loved those three girls with their straw hats, their breasts, their smiles.
We were carried away by the night, the near beer, our need for something other than this war.
Sergeant Morgan was the one who pushed Park forward, goaded him to go up there, ordered the rest of us to lift him above our heads like he was some tribal sacrifice we were about to throw in a volcano.
Park protested. He struggled against our grip. He wasn’t into this shit.
He pictured his grandfather shaking his head, casting his eyes down to the floor. Such noise, such loss of dignity.
Then Park was onstage, lifted up and over the front barriers, wrists yanked by the band’s security team. He was surrounded by the trio of big-haired girls in denim cutoffs, their shirts—holy mother of God!—little more than checkered handkerchiefs wrapped around their chests and knotted behind their necks, barely holding back breasts swollen with silicone. Park pulled his gaze away quick as he could, but it was too late. The crowd had seen him ogling the boobs and now everyone had their O’Doul’s-oiled throats wide open: roaring, leering, chanting.
Park glanced over at the bass player—a beefy dude in a straw hat, shirtless beneath a pair of overalls—and got a thumbs-up and a wink.
Park wanted to die. He prayed his grandfather’s ghost would send a mortar whistling through the sky to land bull’s-eye here on this stage.
“We’re gonna need a little help with this next song,” one of the Bumpkins said, looking out into the crowd. “What do y’all think? Think we can persuade—uh, what’s your name?” She put the microphone against his mouth.
“Park.”
“Park,” she said. “Don’t tell me. Lemme guess: they call you Private Parking, right?”
Our laughter nearly toppled the walls of the courtyard.
Park’s face was marble. Hard, impenetrable.
“Sorry, I couldn’t resist.” The Bumpkin bitch wrapped her arm around hi
s shoulder. “What’s your first name, darlin’?”
She held the microphone to his lips like it was a lollipop she was offering him. Park looked at it like it was a dick she wanted him to suck.
“The strong, silent type, huh?” She giggled.
Then Park did the incredible, the unexpected: he told her his name.
“Lee—that’s a nice name,” the girl said. “I had me a boyfriend once named Lee. Wadn’t as cute as you, though. Besides, I think he loved his coonhound more’n me. Gladys—that’s the dog—used to drink Coors straight out of the can. One day, I up and told Lee he had to choose: me or the dog. And so that’s what he done. Last I heard, he ’n’ Gladys were living happily ever after in a double-wide in Tulsa.” Behind them, the drummer snapped off a rim shot followed by a bass-drum kick.
Park begged the stage to collapse and bury him.
“All right now!” the girl called to the crowd. “Y’all think we can persuade Lee—this Lee, our all-American hero Lee—to join in on the chorus?”
“Hell, yeah!” came the response. Park heard Sergeant Morgan’s voice the loudest among them: “Go, Park!”
We stood at the front, cheering him on. Those of us who had lighters flicked them on, waved them above our heads.
The three girls led Park center stage. Their breasts squeaked when they walked. Even through the roar of the crowd, Park could hear the silicone.
They put that lollipop-dick microphone in his hand and slapped a Styrofoam cowboy hat on his head.
Americans. He hated every last goddamn one of them.
The tallest of the Bumpkins nodded over her shoulder to the band and they started in on “God Bless the USA.”
A groan rose from the courtyard. Not that song. We were all so sick of “God Bless the USA” by that point, a little puke came up in the back of our mouths every time we heard the first words of the swampy, patriotic treacle. If we ever saw Lee Greenwood walking down the street, we’d kick the ever-lovin’ red-white-and-blue shit out of him.