by Joe Hill
Glen went on. “My wife spent the morning crying about it. I heard her in the bedroom, but when I tried to go in and talk to her, the door was locked. She wouldn’t let me in. She tried to play it off like she was all right, talking to me through the door. She told me to go to work, don’t worry. It was her father’s wedding ring, you know. He died three months before we got married. I guess that sounds a little—what do you call it? Oedipal. Like in marrying me she was marrying Daddy. Oedipal isn’t right, but you know what I’m saying. She loved that old man.”
Mal nodded.
“If they only took the money, I’m not sure I even would’ve told Helen. Not after I got so drunk. I drink too much. Helen wrote me a note a few months ago, about how much I’ve been drinking. She wanted to know if it was because I was unhappy with her. It would be easier if she was the kind of woman who’d just scream at me. But I got drunk like that, and the wedding ring she gave me that used to belong to her daddy is gone, and all she did was hug me and say thank God they didn’t hurt me.”
Mal said, “I’m sorry.” She was about to say she would give it all back, ring and money both, and go with him to the police if he wanted—then caught herself. He had said “they”: “If they only took the money” and “they didn’t hurt me.” Not “you.”
Glen reached inside his coat and took out a white business envelope, stuffed fat. “I been sick to my stomach all day at work, thinking about it. Then I thought I could put up a note here in the bar. You know, like one of these flyers you see for a lost dog. Only for my lost ring. The guys who robbed me must be customers here. What else would they have been doing down in that lot, that hour of the night? So next time they’re in, they’ll see my note.”
She stared. It took a few moments for what he’d said to register. When it did—when she understood he had no idea she was guilty of anything—she was surprised to feel an odd twinge of something like disappointment.
“Electra,” she said.
“Huh?”
“A love thing between father and daughter,” Mal said. “Is an Electra complex. What’s in the envelope?”
He blinked. Now he was the one who needed some processing time. Hardly anyone knew or remembered that Mal had been to college, on Uncle Sam’s dime. She had learned Arabic there and psychology too, although in the end she had wound up back here behind the bar of the Milky Way without a degree. The plan had been to collect her last few credits after she got back from Iraq, but sometime during her tour she had ceased to give a fuck about the plan.
At last Glen came mentally unstuck and replied, “Money. Five hundred dollars. I want you to hold on to it for me.”
“Explain.”
“I was thinking what to say in my note. I figure I should offer a cash reward for the ring. But whoever stole the ring isn’t ever going to come up to me and admit it. Even if I promise not to prosecute, they wouldn’t believe me. So I figured out what I need is a middleman. This is where you come in. So the note would say to bring Mallory Grennan the ring and she’ll give you the reward money, no questions asked. It’ll say they can trust you not to tell me or the police who they are. People know you. I think most folks around here will believe that.” He pushed the envelope at her.
“Forget it, Glen. No one is bringing that ring back.”
“Let’s see. Maybe they were drunk, too, when they took it. Maybe they feel remorse.”
She laughed.
He grinned, awkwardly. His ears were pink. “It’s possible.”
She looked at him a moment longer, then put the envelope under the counter. “Okay. Let’s write your note. I can copy it on the fax machine. We’ll stick it up around the bar, and after a week, when no one brings you your ring, I’ll give you your money back and a beer on the house.”
“Maybe just a ginger ale,” Glen said.
GLEN HAD TO GO, BUT MAL promised she’d hang a few flyers in the parking lot. She had just finished taping them up to the streetlamps when she spotted a sheet of paper, folded into thirds and stuck under the windshield wiper of her father’s car.
The thumbprint on this one was delicate and slender, an almost perfect oval, feminine in some way, while the first two had been squarish and blunt. Three thumbs, each of them different from the others.
She pitched it at a wire garbage can attached to a telephone pole, hit the three-pointer, got out of there.
THE EIGHTY-SECOND HAD FINALLY ARRIVED AT ABU Ghraib, to provide force protection and try to nail the fuckers who were mortaring the prison every night. Early in the fall, they began conducting raids in the town around the prison. The first week of operations, they had so many patrols out and so many raids going that they needed backup, so General Karpinski assigned squads of MPs to accompany them. Corporal Plough put in for the job and, when he was accepted, told Mal and Anshaw they were coming with him.
Mal was glad. She wanted away from the prison, the dark corridors of 1A and 1B, with their smell of old wet rock, urine, flop sweat. She wanted away from the tent cities that held the general prison population, the crowds pressed against the chain-links who pleaded with her as she walked along the perimeter, black flies crawling on their faces. She wanted to be in a Hummer with open sides, night air rushing in over her. Destination: any-fucking-where else on the planet.
In the hour before dawn, the platoon they had been tacked onto hit a private home, set within a grove of palms, a white stucco wall around the yard and a wrought-iron gate across the drive. The house was stucco, too, and had a swimming pool out back, a patio and grill, wouldn’t have looked out of place in SoCal. Delta Team drove their Hummer right through the gate, which went down with a hard metallic bang, hinges shearing out of the wall with a spray of plaster.
That was all Mal saw of the raid. She was behind the wheel of a two-and-a-half-ton troop transport for carrying prisoners. No Hummer for her, and no action either. Anshaw had another truck. She listened for gunfire, but there was none, the residents giving up without a struggle.
When the house was secure, Corporal Plough left them, said he wanted to size up the situation. What he wanted to do was get his picture taken chewing on a stogie and holding his gun, with his boot on the neck of a hog-tied insurgent. She heard over the walkie-talkie that they had grabbed one of the Fedayeen Saddam, a Ba’athist lieutenant, and had found weapons, files, personnel information. There was a lot of cornpone whoop-ass on the radio. Everyone in the Eighty-second looked like Eminem—blue eyes, pale blond hair in a crew cut—and talked like one of the Duke boys.
Just after sunup, when the shadows were leaning long away from the buildings on the east side of the street, they brought the Fedayeen out and left him on the narrow sidewalk with Plough. The insurgent’s wife was still inside the building, soldiers watching her while she packed a bag.
The Fedayeen was a big Arab with hooded eyes and a three-day shadow on his chin, and he wasn’t saying anything except “Fuck you” in American. In the basement, Delta Team had found racked AK-47s and a table covered in maps, marked all over with symbols, numbers, Arabic letters. They discovered a folder of photographs, featuring U.S. soldiers in the act of establishing checkpoints, rolling barbed wire across different roads. There was also a picture in the folder of George Bush Sr., smiling a little foggily, posing with Steven Seagal.
Plough was worried that the pictures showed places and people the insurgents planned to strike. He had already been on the radio a couple times, back to base, talking with CI about it in a strained, excited voice. He was especially upset about Steven Seagal. Everyone in Plough’s unit had been made to watch Above the Law at least once, and Plough claimed to have seen it more than a hundred times. After they brought the prisoner out, Plough stood over the Fedayeen, yelling at him and sometimes swatting him upside the head with Seagal’s rolled-up picture. The Fedayeen said, “More fuck you.”
Mal leaned against the driver’s-side door of her truck for a while, wondering when Plough would quit hollering and swatting the prisoner. She had a Vivari
n hangover, and her head hurt. Eventually she decided he wouldn’t be done yelling until it was time to load up and go, and that might not be for another hour.
She left Plough yelling, walked over the flattened gate and up to the house. She let herself into the cool of the kitchen. Red tile floor, high ceilings, lots of windows so the place was filled with sunlight. Fresh bananas in a glass bowl. Where did they get fresh bananas? She helped herself to one and ate it on the toilet, the cleanest toilet she had sat on in a year.
She came back out of the house and started down to the road again. On the way there, she put her fingers in her mouth and sucked on them. She hadn’t brushed her teeth in a week, and her breath had a human stink on it.
When she returned to the street, Plough had stopped swatting the prisoner long enough to catch his breath. The Ba’athist looked up at him from under his heavy-lidded eyes. He snorted and said, “Is talk. Is boring. You are no one. I say fuck you still no one.”
Mal sank to one knee in front of him, put her fingers under his nose, and said in Arabic, “Smell that? That is the cunt of your wife. I fucked her myself like a lesbian, and she said it was better than your cock.”
The Ba’athist tried to lunge at her from his knees, making a sound down in his chest, a strangled growl of rage, but Plough caught him across the chin with the stock of his M4. The sound of the Ba’athist’s jaw snapping was as loud as a gunshot.
He lay on his side, twisted into a fetal ball. Mal remained crouched beside him.
“Your jaw is broken,” Mal said. “Tell me about the photographs of the U.S. soldiers and I will bring a no-more-hurt pill.”
It was half an hour before she went to get him the painkillers, and by then he’d told her when the pictures had been taken, coughed up the name of the photographer.
Mal was leaning into the back of her truck, digging in the first-aid kit, when Anshaw’s shadow joined hers at the rear bumper.
“Did you really do it?” Anshaw asked her. The sweat on him glowed with an ill sheen in the noonday light. “The wife?”
“What? Fuck no. Obviously.”
“Oh,” Anshaw said, and swallowed convulsively. “Someone said . . .” he began, and then his voice trailed off.
“What did someone say?”
He glanced across the road, at two soldiers from the Eighty-second, standing by their Hummer. “One of the guys who was in the building said you marched right in and bent her over. Facedown on the bed.”
She looked over at Vaughan and Henrichon, holding their M16s and struggling to contain their laughter. She flipped them the bird.
“Jesus, Anshaw. Don’t you know when you’re being fucked with?”
His head was down. He stared at his own scarecrow shadow, tilting into the back of the truck.
“No,” he said.
Two weeks later Anshaw and Mal were in the back of a different truck, with that same Arab, the Ba’athist, who was being transferred from Abu Ghraib to a smaller prison facility in Baghdad. The prisoner had his head in a steel contraption, to clamp his jaw in place, but he was still able to open his mouth wide enough to hawk a mouthful of spit into Mal’s face.
Mal was wiping it away when Anshaw got up and grabbed the Fedayeen by the front of his shirt and heaved him out 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. Anshaw said he leaped out on his own, trying to escape, but no one believed him, and three weeks later Anshaw 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 from 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 to 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 it.
“That the money Glen gave you, to swap for his wedding ring?” Petty turned away from 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. If I plop down five hundred bucks will you 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.
“Ohfuckgoddamnyouuglydyke,” he said.
“Hey,” said Bill Rodier, coming toward the bar carrying a trash barrel. “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 in her direction. “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 kept on holding it, 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 during that time, 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 weren’t 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 the fact that her own life was valued so cheap. Mal would not have expected more.
But it didn’t 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’d 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 into 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 ba
ck 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 third 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, toweling 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 center. 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 gray-and-black fatigues.
