Brave Deeds

by David Abrams

  That morning during the four-mile run, Drew’s heart beat a double-time pace. That night—again staying up late with a lame-ass excuse—he’d written back. She’d written back and he’d answered her again.

  One thing led to another and eventually there was this: a plane ticket to Seattle, a lie to Jacy about a training exercise he couldn’t get out of, a temporary stash of his packed rucksack in the company storage room, a change into civilian clothes, a drive to Sea-Tac airport, a nervous shuffling from foot to foot at the bottom of the escalators, and a quick hug between reuniting high school friends.

  Drew’s cell phone started ringing while they were at baggage claim. He ignored it. And then came subsequent rings followed by the vibration of multiple voice mails from Jacy telling him it was here and the baby was coming now and where was he goddammit, why didn’t he answer. Drew put the phone back in his pocket, smiling at Tessa through his worry.

  A few minutes later, he got a tearful voice mail from Jacy saying she was sorry for sounding like a bitch in her last message and she realized he was probably in a place out in the field without cell coverage and she’d have her mom get a message to him through his unit.

  Drew excused himself for a moment, leaving Tessa at baggage claim while he went to a place away from the speakers announcing flights boarding at various gates. He made a frantic call to his mother-in-law, convincing her not to call his company (she hadn’t yet, thank Christ). He told her he was doing everything to get back out of the field and he’d be there as soon as he could, just hold on. When he asked to speak to Jacy, his mother-in-law said it was too late: she was already in Labor and Delivery.

  Then Drew sank to his lowest point as a husband: he returned to baggage claim, and when Tessa asked “Who was that?” he gave a dismissive wave of the hand and said “Work,” followed by “It can wait,” followed by an equally lousy “This weekend belongs to us.”

  He rolled her suitcase out to his car, and they escaped from the city and drove along the interstate into Oregon with both of them chattering about their lives since leaving good old Hartington High (Drew’s half of the conversation almost entirely woven with fabrications).

  There came another buzz of a voice mail on his phone. He ignored it.

  Then they turned westward off the interstate south of Roseburg and, ninety minutes later, Tessa’s eyes widened as the ocean came into view.

  They stood on the cliffs at Bandon watching sea lions dive into waves crashing against Face Rock. There was another angry voice mail buzz. Tessa asked: “Aren’t you going to answer that?” Drew shook his head, said “Later,” and finally, mercifully, he shut off his phone.

  Drew and Tessa descended the wooden steps to the beach, walked along the edge of the tide, found a cave hidden from public view, and had a quick, glorious, sandy fuck.

  The rest of the platoon thinks Drew’s old lady is a smoking-hot babe and that by all outward appearances they’re happy. They don’t see the times Drew finds a solitary place away from the rest of them so he can reach into his helmet and pull out a photo of a wind-whipped girl not his wife.

  If he ever makes it back home, he thinks maybe he’ll give her a call and they can talk about oceans.

  27

  Walking Through the Garden of Eden

  “Hey. Hey, Arrow.”

  “What?”

  “Hold up a sec.”

  “Why?”

  “I need to ask you something.”

  “So ask while we walk. Then fall back in line.”

  “Okay, but can you just hold up a sec?”

  “Keep walking, Fish.”

  “Fine. Jesus.”

  We keep walking.

  “What’d you want?”

  “Huh?”

  “What did you want to ask me?”

  “Oh. You got a cigarette I could borrow?”

  “No, I don’t got a cigarette you can borrow.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “If I had a cigarette, I’d give it to you, but I wouldn’t loan it to you. No way I’d want it back after it’s been in your nasty cock-sucking mouth.”

  “Okay, then, can I have a cigarette?”

  “No.”

  “What the fuck? You just said—”

  “I said if I had one. I’m fresh out. You should pay more attention to words, Fish.”

  “Fuck you, Arrow.”

  “Sticks and stones.”

  We walk.

  “Helluva country, isn’t it?”

  “Whatever you say, Fish.”

  “You think you’d ever want to live here?”

  “Fuck no. Are you out of your mind?”

  “I hear this is the land of opportunity. A guy could get rich here. All that oil.”

  “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “Lots of people.”

  “Like who?”

  “Hoover, for one.”

  “The chaplain’s assistant?”

  “Hoover says the Garden of Eden used to be around here somewhere.”

  “Yeah, well God kicked Adam and Eve out for a reason.”

  “Hoover says he might move back here after everything’s over.”

  “To look for the Garden of Eden?”

  “No, to get rich. Lots of oil, he says. Lots of opportunity.”

  “Let me ask you something, Fish.”

  “What?”

  “When you were on God’s assembly line, did he open up your skull and take a shit in there?”

  “Fuck you, Arrow! Fuck you and your mother’s nasty twat where you came from!”

  “Sticks and stones, Fish. Sticks and stones.”

  We walk in silence until the wind brings us something bad.

  “Jesus, you smell that?”

  “Just you and your nasty-ass breath, Fish.”

  “Smells like something died.”

  “This whole country is nothing but death. I don’t know where you and Hoover get off calling it the land of opportunity.”

  “I’m just repeating what I heard.”

  “It was death before we came, it’s death now, and it’ll keep on dying after we leave. That’s the kind of stink you never get rid of.”

  “Okay, Arrow, okay. Jesus. But I meant more like right now. You can’t smell that nasty stank right now?”

  Arrow sniffed.

  “Smells like more of the same to me.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Look around you, Fish. Look at that field over there.”

  “What about it?”

  “You know how many bodies are buried in shallow graves over there?”

  “No, and neither do you.”

  “Not for certain, but if I had to guess, I’d say it was somewhere between a family of five and enough to fill Shea Stadium.”

  “Funny.”

  “You see me laughing, Fish?”

  “No, but somebody’s gonna have the last laugh here.”

  “The Sunnis.”

  “Yeah, the fucking Sunnis.”

  We walk.

  “Hey, Arrow.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t mean that about your mother.”

  “I know, Fish.”

  “I don’t even know her.”

  “Neither do I. Not really.”

  “Parents. Fuck ’em.”

  “Yeah … You need to fall back, Fish. Keep your distance. We don’t want to give Joe Sunni an easy target.”

  “Yeah, he needs all the help he can get these days.”

  “Fall back, Fish. That’s an order.”

  “Okay, okay. But—”

  “But what?”

  “You sure you don’t got a cigarette? You aren’t holding out on me, are you?”

  “Fall back, Fish.”

  28

  The Secret Life of Men

  Arrow is a recovering porn addict. Correction: not recovering, because you never fully leave it behind, do you? All those tits and clits and airbrushed asses remain in your head in some gigantic filing system waiting for
you to open a drawer and pluck out the memory of a tilted-back head, a tinny moan coming through the computer, a nipple puckering, a cock being introduced to a glistening bush. It’s all still there, right there, beneath the soft pad of your fingertip and a mouse click, and you can have it anytime you want. Those unreal, surreal, hyper-real women, their bodies shaved smooth and gleaming like wet seals …

  So recovering, no. Still wrestling, more like it.

  Has he weakened lately? Has he surrendered to the temptation to watch, for the thirty-second time, old favorites like Star Whores or Nightsticks (that classic 1983 XXX comedy set in a police academy) or even Every Tom’s Hairy Dick?

  Fuck, yes! Yes to the fuck! Bring on the tits and clits! he screams quietly inside his sweaty, wrestle-weary soul.

  Back in the States, he had his routines. They involved a neatly-folded towel, a dab of petroleum jelly, and a locked barracks-room door. Start to finish, he could get the job done in ten minutes. He had it down to a science. The chemistry of pleasure.

  Surprisingly, even on this deployment strictly forbidding anything that would upset host-nation sensitivities—where even a Victoria’s Secret catalog is contraband confiscated out of a soldier’s duffel bag—Arrow has managed to find a little dick-massage time with an Asian Yoga Massage DVD he bought from a street vendor. Just mention “downward dog” to him these days and he gets this weird look on his face.

  Tits and clits are not the only things he browses on the web. Lately, Arrow’s also been into cock. Abnormally long, hard missiles and swords that wave at the camera, urging him to come closer, take a look, maybe take a bite. He can’t understand why, but he can’t stop looking at cocks. If Arrow were ever to weaken, let his guard down one drunk night, and let slip a contraband-vodka confession to others in the platoon about this, they’d be shocked but probably not scornful. Different strokes for different folks. So to speak. But if the others were to find out about it on their own—a computer left unattended, a RocketTube visit left undeleted from the web history—and if they confronted him with it, and if Arrow were to protest with a quick self-defense of “I’m straight as the rest of you fuckwads goddammit” and superfluously remind them he was a legend for banging the entire cheerleading squad at his high school in alphabetical order starting with Amber and ending with Willow’s pillowy tits in his mouth, well then he’d be in for it. The platoon would show him no mercy.

  In his darkest moments of shame—and, as any addict will tell you, the pleasure is always counterbalanced with shame—Arrow has tried everything to discourage himself. He wrapped a rubber band around his penis (not too tight, lest it backfire and lend itself to pleasure) and reached inside his boxers to snap it—hard!—when the tits and clits (and cocks) grew too vividly tempting in his mind. He chewed tinfoil, he ate whole bags of Cheetos in one sitting, he went for long purging runs that climaxed with hands on knees and a gagging puke—anything, anything to clear his head of t&c (&c).

  Arrow has compartmentalized his secret life here in the desert. No one seems to notice he takes his showers alone. No one knows about the rubber band in his pants. And his grief for Sergeant Morgan? It appears to be just like the rest of ours, nothing more and nothing less.

  29

  The Part Where Things Start to Blur

  Looking back, it’s hard to sort the pieces in the proper order.

  There’s the pregnant woman—whose pear-shaped face we’ll never forget—and the van full of flowers. But before that, there’s the house and the bomb makers and the goat tied to a stake. We always get confused.

  When telling the story these days, we always put the pregnant woman before the terrorists.

  But we’re wrong. The bomb makers came first.

  30

  Who Are You?

  We look at Iraqis and think: Who are you?

  We have come here to this hot hell of a land, leaving our wives and our girlfriends and our parents and our cars and our weight benches, and for what? To protect and bolster a people we don’t know, who remain unknowable, who we couldn’t give two flying fucks for? And don’t even get us started on all that Muslim crap, the medieval bullshit that demands you keep your hot chicks hidden behind black curtains and makes you go all ape shit if one of us happens to sit down in your house, crosses his leg, and points the sole of his shoe in your direction. That shit baffles us.

  Some of us—like Sergeant Morgan—have made attempts, have reached across the deep brown chasm to probe and explore and empathize. But look what it got him, Rafe, the ambassador of peace, love, and understanding. It got him blown up. Fucking hajjis bit the hand that only wanted to shake theirs.

  We’ve tried, but we don’t know “the people.” When we get back to the States—if we get back to the States—you figure we’ll think about these Ali Babas anymore? Hell no! They’ll be even more distant and fuzzy, inscrutable as eroded Sphinx faces, as bland as newsprint.

  The only Local National we’ve come close to knowing in our time over here is Hamid, and even he wasn’t 100 percent hajji with his Old Navy T-shirts and obsession with Big Macs and Dancing with the Stars.

  And so, in the middle of our cross-city hike, when we’re stopped by the dude we later call Rat Face, we’re curious and a little scared. Okay, a lot scared.

  We’re on the dark side of the street, the sidewalk lanced with shadows. We thread our way through too many people, trying to act like we belong here. We step carefully, hearts banging against our armored vests. Somewhere to the north, another dog barks. Then it takes up a howl that sounds like either a laugh or a sob.

  We’re in bounding overwatch—a classic infantry maneuver—leapfrogging our way down the street: last man rushing ahead, scanning 180 through the sights of his rifle, then when all’s clear, the last man jogging up and doing the same. And on and on like that for nearly six blocks.

  We imagine we look pretty stupid to everyone else on the street, but this is how we’ve been trained to move. We are professionals, cogs in the machine, coolly executing the mission. Yeah, right. Most of us, our balls have long since climbed out of our shriveled nut sacks.

  All is going fine, we’re in rhythm, until Cheever decides now might be the best time for a piss.

  For him, it’s no longer a question, it’s a no-alternative demand made by his bladder, which is doing its muscular best to hold back the flood. Soon, the urethral dam will weaken, break, and flood the terrified residents living downstream in his pants.

  He must stop, the rest of us be damned. The piss-urge is so strong it’s even overridden the blister pain.

  We’re moving on, but Cheever pulls up short in an alley striped with shadow and sunlight. The sidewalk crowds have thinned, so he thinks it’s okay to take a pit stop. A piss stop. He leans up close to the brick wall, unbuttons, and releases. A dark delta forms a new shadow on the wall and soon there’s a puddle growing between his boots. He adjusts, spreads his legs.

  The rest of us have moved on without realizing he’s lagged behind—until it’s his turn to be last man up. O turns, irritated, to say something to him, but he’s not there. That’s when we hear him cry out. It comes from the mouth of a dark alley a block behind us.

  Fish goes, “What the fuck?”

  At the same time O says, “That’s Cheever.”

  Drew rushes up and taps Arrow on the shoulder. “Hold up, something’s wrong.”

  Arrow snaps around. “What?!”

  “We’ve lost Cheever.”

  “Shit.” Without another word, Arrow about-faces us and we hustle back.

  A man stands at the mouth of the alley, blocking Cheever’s exit. He’s thin as a blade, but somehow he fills the entire space. Cheever, face white and floating in the darkness of the alley, is still standing there with his cock in his hand, exposed to God, and to the world.

  As one, we snap our rifles to our shoulders. We won’t fire, for fear of hitting Cheever, but this hajji fuckwad doesn’t have to know that.

  Arrow shouts something in Arabic, w
hich we assume means something like: “Put your hands in the air and turn around slowly, asshole.”

  The thin man turns, but doesn’t raise his arms. His face comes together in a pinch, like a rat’s. All nose and teeth and beady eyes. He’s just missing the whiskers.

  The man smiles.

  There is a black object in his hands. It glints in the sun.

  The fact that this guy is not lying in a ditch perforated with M4 holes right now is only because:

  a) we’re so surprised we’re paralyzed,

  b) we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves with gunfire,

  c) if we shoot, we might hit the detonator and it’d be all over for all of us, and

  d) one or two of us might have accidentally left their selector switch on SAFE (but we’re not saying who).

  We scuttle back, trying to distance ourselves from the blast zone. There comes a blizzard of curses. Then we get ourselves squared away and we’re all business.

  “Down! Down!”

  “Set it down, sir, and step away.”

  “Hands up! Hands up where we can see them!”

  The man steps forward into the sunlight and says, “Okay, okay, America. Be cool, be cool.” His English is crisp and startling, even better than Hamid’s. “I’m putting it on the ground, see? There. There it is.” He steps back.

  Everyone else who was on the street a minute ago has disappeared. These hajjis are getting smarter by the day. They know when bad shit is about to go down. They know how to ghost-melt themselves right out of a scene.