by David Abrams
Now he’s bored, he’s tired, he’s impatient to reach Maryland, where, as he always does, he’ll use his downtime eating blue crabs at Buddy’s, looking up a brunette he met two trips ago, and, sitting on a Chesapeake beach, watching the sun rise over the dunes. That’s eleven hours from now. He yawns, scratches his anxious balls, then goes back to reading his Louis L’Amour novel.
We’re jealous. We wish we had this kind of duty. Shit, we could be loadmasters. Plane rides, brunettes, and crabs. We couldn’t fly out of here soon enough.
When the plane banks sharply to the left, Sergeant Morgan’s head separates from his neck, the mortician’s soft threads tearing without resistance—and rolls off his shoulder to thump-thump-thump against the coffin wall.
39
Trail of Blood
As we walk west across Baghdad, going from sunlight to shadow to sunlight to shadow, it becomes obvious to all of us—save one—something is wrong.
There’s a disturbance in the Force.
We falter, we slow.
For all our differences, we are the hive mind. We are us against them out here on this mission: us against the heat, us against the street, us against the city, us against whatever will keep us from reaching the service for Sergeant Morgan. We are one team, one body, one fight.
At least, five of us are.
Something is wrong. There’s a troubling buzz in the hive. A bad bee.
When we—save one—turn and look behind us, we come to a halt. No fist up, no sinking to one knee, no fingers moving to the trigger housing. We just stop, and stare.
The blood trails away from us in spatter drops, rosebuds on the sidewalk, thicker and heavier where we stand, then thinning to a wispy weave of cat’s-paw blots to the east.
We stare at that blood and realize we’ve miscalculated. A total fucking fuckup. A tire-squealing turn onto Uh-Oh Street. In our haste, we have been fools. All of us—all but one—know we’ll pay for our error, our lapse of caution.
O looks at us—his face already ghost white, his eyes already glazed, and says, “What?” He sways like a skyscraper in heavy wind, and says again: “What?!”
The trail of blood ends at his boots.
40
Blood Pours Out
Olijandro’s eyes dilate. The sidewalk swims in and out of focus. Pain—new and startling—blooms up through his chest. “What?!” He looks at us for an answer we don’t have.
“What—what’s happening?”
That’s all O gets out before he collapses. He goes down hard and quick, his rifle preceding him to the sidewalk in a clatter. He tries to push himself back up, but his arms give out and he slumps.
The sidewalk feels cool to Olijandro and he wants to hug it forever.
Down the street, a boy has been kicking a can back and forth with quick soccer footwork. Now the can clatter has stopped. The boy has seen us. He runs inside—to get help or to hide, we don’t know—abandoning the street, leaving us to our work.
We’re all over O. We tear at his vest with trembling, sloppy fingers. The Velcro sounds like a curtain torn in half. We loosen straps, pull away the heavy ballistic plates so he can breathe.
This is a big mistake.
Blood pours out like we’ve tipped a bottle of cranberry juice. It spreads fast, way too fast. We’ve inadvertently loosened the tourniquet-tight flak vest that’s been holding O together for the last hour.
The wound gapes, yawns, stretches for fresh air.
We part O’s flak vest, pull away his blouse, untuck his T-shirt. We can see it now, a hole no bigger than a goldfish’s mouth, at the base of his rib cage. That dark hole mocks us, throws up a single spurt of blood as if to say: Peek-a-boo!
We have no time for questions, no time to be confused, no time to stop and ask: Didn’t he say he was fine? That he just got the wind knocked out of him?
We rip open his first aid kit, pull out the field dressing, slap it over the wound, our fingers less sloppy now.
“Hold on, hold on, hold on,” we chant like it’s a hymn and we’re in church.
All our training—those cold wet afternoons at Fort Drum, the mannequins with painted wounds, the NCOs with their stopwatches and clipboards—it all surges back to us. We are precise, quick, efficient.
We think again about Savarola and curse him for not being with us right now. We will kick his ass when we see him again.
“Oh, Jesus God,” O says in a leak of breath. “O, por Dios …”
“Stay with us,” we say.
O goes, “Okay, okay, I’m fine. I’m fine.” His voice bubbles. “It’s just a flesh wound. I’ve had worse.”
Goddamn Olijandro. Monty Python to the end.
Wait. Hold up a goddamn second. The end? No way. Not on our watch. This is not the end. Not yet, not yet.
Of course we think about death. Who doesn’t? We’re soldiers out here in the zone of death, for chrissakes.
We think about the end all the time.
We eat it for breakfast and shit it out every afternoon.
But this—
We’re not going to let it come for us right now. Keep your distance, motherfucking Reaper.
We’re gonna hold on, hold on. O, buddy, can you hear us? You stay with us, okay?
We tie the bandage. We rip open our own first aid kits, get another bandage ready. Just in case. We gather fallen palm fronds from the street, we hold them over O to keep him cool, make him comfortable. One or two of us pray, though we’re not the praying kind.
O goes, “It’s just a scratch.” His voice trails off. A red bubble appears at the corner of his mouth, grows, pops.
41
In Delirium
His ex-wife leans over him. “Hey, you all right?” She touches his bandage, but it doesn’t hurt. In fact, it tickles. He laughs—a bubbly gurgle—and that hurts. Oh, por Dios, it hurts like nothing’s ever hurt before, like it was the first pain his body ever felt.
“Stop,” he whispers, and she takes her hand away from his ribs.
Melinda brushes her fingers across his forehead, as if to sweep back a lock of hair. “You used to have beautiful hair,” she says. “Black as the night. Where’d it go, mi corazón? I miss your hair.”
Black as night. Black night. The Black Knight. That movie they loved. Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He and Melinda saw that one over and over.
“Remember, Melinda? Remember how we laughed? And sometimes we didn’t even know why we were laughing?”
“I remember, O. We remember.” Fingers brush across his forehead. “Now, shhh-shhh-shhh.”
That scene where the Black Knight loses the sword fight with King Arthur and ends up dancing on one leg, tomato-juice blood gushing all around. He taunts Arthur, saying his wounds are merely scratches, but all the time there’s this blood spray. He goes, “I’ve had worse.” Blood jetting out of his amputated limb stumps. The Black Knight mocks King Arthur, saying if he didn’t stand in one place and fight, he’d bite his legs off. And that was some funny shit. O and Melinda bent over double, slapping their own legs.
Legs. Oh God, his legs are so cold. The chill is rising up his body. Like blue rising up in a thermometer measuring ice. A reverse thermometer.
He’s going in reverse. The camera pulls back. He’s slipping away.
Not yet, not yet.
“Swim against the tide, O.”
“Okay, Melinda.”
“Swim to me.”
“I’m trying.”
Melinda bobs in the waves. She’s nothing but a head and shoulders. Pero que bella es, so beautiful. The prettiest fish in the ocean. Mi corazón.
“Stay with us, O.”
“Okay.”
“Swim to me, O. Take my hand. Can you see my hand? Grab my hand.”
The waves are strong, but O is stronger. He pushes through; he pushes through as hard as he can. He swims to Melinda. He can’t see her hands, but he knows they’re there. It’s a matter of finding them.
“Take my hand, O.”
“Hold on, O.”
“Stay with us, O. Don’t you dare leave us. You hear us, O? Don’t you dare go out on us.”
42
Huddle
We stop O’s bleeding. It takes a succession of bandages and yards of tape and O’s side looks like a Christmas gift wrapped by a four-year-old, but he’s stable. He’s pale and weak, and barely with us—but at least he’s with us, right?
We move him to a shady spot, lay him against the side of an abandoned warehouse. High above our heads is a faded sign painted on the stucco in Arabic that none of us can read, not even Arrow, but there’s a cartoon drawing of a tire rolling along a road, flying through midair with horizontal lines streaming behind it. An illusion of speed and forward movement. But that tire’s not going anywhere.
We elevate O’s feet to prevent shock. He’s still with us enough to look up at the warehouse sign and make a joke: “God, I’m so tired.”
At least we think it’s a joke.
Cheever stays with O while the rest of us move away to talk.
The first thing Arrow says is: “I’ll carry him.”
“The whole way?” Fish says.
“I’ll do my best.”
Drew goes, “Not in this heat.”
Arrow shrugs. “So, we carry in shifts. It’s only, what, another couple of klicks to the ECP?”
“By whose count?” Fish says. “We don’t know a damn thing.”
“We’ve got to be getting closer,” Arrow insists.
None of us mapless fools know for certain, of course, but we doubt the Entry Control Point to FOB Saro is less than two kilometers from our current location. In our heads, that guard shack retreats from us like it’s on a conveyor belt. Unlike the tire, it is on the move.
“O needs help right now,” Arrow says. “Our quick-fix patch isn’t gonna hold for long.”
“One bad coughing fit,” Fish says. “Then he starts gushing all over the place.”
“Well, aren’t you Suzy Sunshine?” Drew scowls at Fish.
“What we need is a hospital,” Arrow says.
“Look around you, man. Not exactly one on every corner here.”
This neighborhood is a wasteland. We’ve been walking through a deserted zone of factories and empty fields ever since we left the bomb makers’ hidey-hole. Nothing moves—no cars, no people, no dogs, not even a piece of trash tumbling on the breath of the wind. Because there is no wind in this oven. We’re out here on our own. Men against the landscape. Men against the circumstances. Men against the clock.
“We’ll never make the memorial service now,” Drew says.
“Forget Morgan,” Fish says. “Unless we move out right now, we’re looking at a double-casket service.”
“Wow, that’s harsh, dude.”
“I calls it as I sees it. The longer we stand around with our dicks in our hands, the harder it gets for O.”
“You mean the harder your dick gets. Cuz it loves your hand.”
Fish gets all up in Drew’s face. “Only reason I’m not kicking your ass for that right now is because it’s too hot and you’re not worth it.”
“Fine. I’ll take a rain check.”
Arrow has had enough of this. “Shut up, both of you!” He looks over at Cheever. He’s fanning O’s face with a palm frond. “I still say we carry him. And I say we move out. Now.”
Fish sighs. “You’re the boss, boss.”
We break the huddle and move back to O and Cheever. That’s when Park, who’s been silent this whole time, stops us and says, “Wait. The van.”
43
Blow Job
This is all his fault. You trace the lines of everything that happened today, the many branches of paths and options and choices, and it always comes back to him. It’s Cheever’s fault.
This is what he thinks as he sits beside O, fanning him with a palm branch.
Leaving the map in the Humvee. Slowing them down with his blisters. Stopping to take a piss. All roads lead back to John Hubert Cheever.
Cheever’s spiraling down, getting darker by the minute. He’s reached his limit, physically and emotionally. He can’t do this anymore. He’s gotta stop fooling himself, and the others. He thinks, They’ll all be better off if I just go away, follow the whirlpool drain to the end.
He needs to find somewhere safe, somewhere we can’t see him and stop him. Somewhere it’ll be just him and the M4.
Cheever doesn’t think about us, how we’ll feel about his trigger pull. He does think, however, of his mother. Her face when she gets the news, how she will collapse into a sinkhole of grief.
He thinks about the muzzle. He thinks about how it will taste when he lays the tip against his tongue. He thinks about how the metal will click against his teeth. He thinks about his lips closing over the shaft of the barrel.
Cheever has never given a blow job in his life, nor has he ever received one. This will be his first and last fellation.
Actually, the M4 will be the one giving him the blow job. He grins. Yep, it’ll blow him, all right. Blow the back of his head clean off.
Good one, Cheeve.
At Cheever’s feet, O groans, moves his head side to side. He’s slipping in and out of consciousness now.
Cheever kneels beside him. “Hey,” he says. “Hold on, O. Hold on, dude.” He puts a hand on O’s shoulder. “You stay. I’ll go.”
44
Backtrack
“Hey. Hey, Park.”
Fish is a few paces behind Park, who’s really moving out now, double-timing back the way we came. It’s just the two of them, sent back for the van parked beside the bomb-making house.
“Hey, Park. Slow up a minute.” Fish is out of breath, but he jogs harder to catch up. “Hey, man, you got a cigarette?”
Park says nothing, keeps marching at quick time. Hup-hup-hup. It’s Sergeant Morgan saying that: Park hears Rafe calling the cadence in his head. This makes Park go even faster.
“Didjoo hear me, Park?”
Park heard Fish just fine. Fish knows Park doesn’t smoke, never owned a pack of cigarettes in his life. So why is he bugging him about it? Why is Fish wasting energy flapping his jaw when he should be stretching out his legs, conserving his breath? Park abhors waste. And Fish is nothing but a waste. He’s one of those windup chattering monkeys. His words are toy cymbals bang-bang-banging.
“I could use a smoke right now.”
They walk, jog, walk.
“The silent treatment, huh? Jesus, Park, you’re something else.” This whole mute, enigmatic facade is starting to bug the shit out of Fish. Who does Park think he is? The Buddha of the battalion?
“Must be a Japanese thing,” Fish says.
That stops Park.
“Korean.” His voice slides out thin as a knife.
That’s it. One word, then they’re back to hustling down the street.
“Whatever,” Fish mutters and jogs to stay with him.
They pass street after street, searching right and left for familiarity, trying to look as normal as any two heavily armed Americans running across Baghdad on a sunny afternoon would be. Just a couple of tourists on a scavenger race through the city.
“What if the keys aren’t in the ignition?” Fish says, just to say something. They’ve already discussed this. No keys, then they hot-wire the van. If that doesn’t work, they’ll look for another car, motorcycle, rickshaw, whatever they can find to transport O to FOB Saro.
But for now, the van is the thing. This is our new target of opportunity—ever since Park remembered seeing it parked beside the bomb-making house—the delivery van with a cracked windshield and a daisy on top.
“The van” was all he’d said back there. He hadn’t needed to say more. The rest of us remembered it then, too. That dusty, rusted vehicle slumped beside the house. It’s exactly what we need for O right now. Why hadn’t we thought of this sooner?
O.
Jesus. How could we not have seen this coming? How could we have been blind t
o his stagger, his wobble when we pulled him to his feet? How could we have thought everything was fine when O said not to worry—just a punch of wind. How could we not have heard the weakness in his voice? How could we not have known he was saying those things only to keep us going on the mission, even though he knew—he must have known—his life was draining away?
“Park’s right,” Arrow said. “We’ve got to go back and get the van.”
Were there weeds growing out of the grille? Were the tires flat? We couldn’t remember, but it didn’t matter. We’d drive on metal rims, if that’s what it took to get O to the aid station on FOB Saro.
Park and Fish drew the short straws for the mission. Lucky them.
They knew where they needed to end up, but weren’t exactly sure how to get there. Before we had to stop for O, we took so many turns, too many lefts and rights.
When Fish and Park started, they could follow O’s blood trail. That was fine for about two blocks, but then it wisped away to nothing.
They argued about directions—both had their hunches—until Park, hating himself for doing it, caved in to Fish and they went his way.
Until they came to the Tigris and to a stop so sudden it was like they were in a cartoon, dust boiling around their feet, and they knew they’d fucked up.
We hadn’t seen the river at all today.
“Well, shit,” Fish said. “Can I get a do-over?”
That’s when Park stopped listening to Fish and took point on this mission. They backtracked to a familiar spot and when Fish said he thought they should go right, Park went left, and got them back on course.
Now they hustle, push their way past uncertainty and misdirection.
“You think he’ll be okay, Park?”
“Dunno.”
“He was looking awfully pale when we left.”
“He’s bleeding out.”
“You don’t like him, do you?”
“I never said that.”
“Well, you’re acting all cold and shit right now, Park.”
“I’m focused.”