The Survivor

by Gregg Hurwitz

  Nate says, “Mah brothah,” and they bump fists.

  On the jostling ride, Nate is distracted by Janie’s words from last night, upset that he can’t be on the other end of his daughter’s pretend phone calls. Charles is still going on about his mom’s shitty cookies, so finally one of the guys says, “Give ’em to Abibas.” The ’terp receives them with a smile, they vanish into the threadbare rucksack, and Nate enjoys a few hours of relative silence.

  By the time they arrive at the town center, the sun has asserted its presence. They get out and scan the surroundings, their M16s aimed at the ground but tightly held. All around are cinder-block walls, street dogs, TV dishes nailed to corrugated roofs. And eyes everywhere. Windows. Rooftops. Doorways. People talking on cell phones, whispering, ducking from sight. A quartet of old women in burkas, all expanses of black cloth and jutting chins, stare from a front porch, as still and craggy as a rock garden, the skin under their eyes so dark it seems grafted on. Looking through the open door behind them, Nate sees a child-size coffin.

  Nate’s squad heads to a house with the front door busted off the hinges from the last raid. At least twenty people are jammed into the front room, which has a vague barnyard smell. A rug covers the cement floor, the walls are bare aside from piña-colada-size Iraqi and U.S. flags stuck in the cracks. Everyone inside is focused on a TV the size of a toaster. The men command the couch, holding hands. The women sit on the floor chewing flatbread. A little girl stands in the middle of the room, hitting a paddleball. Whack whack whack.

  The men rise and offer tea, but the mood changes when the sergeant pulls the women into the next room, as is SOP. Nate takes off his Wiley X sunglasses so he can make eye contact as he helps settle everyone down. He figures that ordering people around in their own house is disrespectful enough when you’re not sporting shades on top of it. The girl continues—whack whack whack—but this seems not to bother anyone except Nate, who sees his own daughter in her deep brown eyes. The soldiers show the photo of the man they’re after, but no one knows anything; the entire assemblage has gone as deaf, blind, and dumb as the proverbial three monkeys.

  Charles comes in from the back with a skinny little man who has plastic zip ties around his hands. Shaggy hair frames the guy’s drawn face, and he wears a white man-dress and black flip-flops.

  “Found him hiding behind the generator,” Charles says.

  They get Abibas over to the man, who denies being whoever he is supposed to be. The dispute continues in translation, Abibas jotting down parts of the exchange in his notebook, and finally the sergeant lowers his radio and says, “They want him in now. I’m calling up a helo. You six get him to the meet point. Overbay, you’re in charge.”

  The little girl trails the half squad out and follows at a distance, her face betraying no emotion or interest, the paddleball never ceasing its elastic dance. Whack whack whack.

  They trudge under the heat, the houses turning to shacks, the shacks eventually giving way to sand dunes. The captive makes not a noise. Abibas is perspiring through his clothes, and McGuire makes a crack that maybe the sweat stain’ll fix the spelling of his damn shirt. The little girl with Cielle’s eyes crests the rise with them—whack whack whack—and there below, the Black Hawk waits. They pile in, Charles waving good-bye at the girl who stands silhouetted against the sun, her paddle in perpetual motion. The helo vibrates and shudders, revving to life.

  Abibas shouts at Nate, “Damn eet to shit. I forget my notebook. Sarge tell me must always have notebook. At house. I go back.”

  He looks ill with concern, so Nate waves him off duty, figuring where they’re heading there’ll be professional interpreters, and the kid scrambles down and starts to jog away. The Black Hawk begins to lift.

  “Hey!” Charles shouts after him, pointing at the threadbare rucksack wedged between the seat and the cabin floor. “You forgot my mom’s cookies!”

  Abibas stops and looks back at them.

  Then he turns and runs.

  The seconds slow to a molasses crawl. The Black Hawk hovers four feet above the sand. All six soldiers have gone as stiff as statues in a half rise above their seats, oriented toward the rucksack. Nate is nearest. It is right there across from him. Above the panicked roar inside his head, Nate hears the pledge he made last night to Cielle. Promise? Promise you’ll come home? And he cannot unlock his muscles.

  From the seat beside him, Charles leaps. He lands atop the rucksack, smothering it, and a brilliant white light frames his body as the bomb detonates. The Black Hawk pitches to the right, the pilot overcorrects, and they lurch into a nose-down spin. Nate sees the fan of the beating rotors kiss the sand, and then there is a great violence of physics and an eardrum-rending screech. Images and sensations strobe, rapid-fire: The slid-back door. Weightlessness. Nate’s open mouth pressed to the sand.

  He rises, uneven on his feet. An explosion surges behind him, a wave of heat propelling him to his knees. Atop the dune the girl bears silent witness, the whack whack whack lost beneath the roar of flame. There are parts everywhere, parts of flesh and metal. Half faceless, McGuire is screaming and holding his severed leg, and then he stops screaming. It is suddenly silent. Sand swirls, settling like rain. Though a whoosh of white noise streams in Nate’s ears, he hears a ragged breathing coming from somewhere, and he spins in the cloud of grit and yells, “Charles! Where are you? Where the fuck are you?” and realizes he is stepping on his friend’s hand. Charles is alive, his gut a muddle of tattered fabric and dark, dark blood. His hands press into his stomach farther than they should, and his eyes are wild and rolling.

  Everyone else is dead. Nate’s radio shattered. Supplies on fire. The nearest medic with the squad back in town.

  Nate stands dumbly still for a moment, then crouches and hoists Charles over his shoulder. Charles gives off a sound that is not human. Nate staggers up the slope, past the girl silently watching with Cielle’s eyes—whack whack whack—and Charles is howling and sobbing, “—don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t you—”

  Nate runs. Pain screeches down his spine, ignites his muscles. The heat rising through his combat boots and Charles’s weight on his shoulder are oppressive; the burn spreads through his thighs, his calves, the taut muscles of his groin. He feels as though he is inside a pizza oven. Charles is sputtering and shrieking, the journey a jarring kind of hell—don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t you leave me—and Nate’s shirt is saturated with his friend’s insides. He runs harder as if to stop the blood draining into his eyes. His vision is a painted haze of brown and red, red and brown, smudged together as if by a child’s fingers.

  “Help me!” Nate shouts. “Somebody … ’elp … me.…”

  Charles is quieter now: “… don’t … leave … please.…”

  Nate’s lips are coated with dust, and his voice is gone; he can’t generate saliva. He blanks out on his feet, still running. Then suddenly the squad is all around, the sergeant trying to pull Charles off his back, saying, “Let go. Nate. You can let go now. Let go of him. Let go.”

  Nate topples over, Charles landing beside him, long dead, the blank stare inches from Nate’s face. And Nate is talking, but no one can hear him.

  “He’s okay,” Nate pants into the hot sand. “He’s okay. Just make him breathe again.”

  Chapter 7

  When the ramp of the C-17 lowers, bringing into sight the wavering black tarmac of the Los Alamitos Army Airfield, a chorus of cheers goes up from the plane’s cargo hold, and Nate spills out with a sea of camouflage into the temperate Southern California air. He spots Janie and Cielle on the runway, waiting behind the sawhorses. Cielle looks bigger, her face round and smiling. She and Janie are jumping up and down, beautiful. He runs to them, and they smash together in a three-way hug. “Welcome home, Husband,” Janie tells him, beaming, and he says, “I missed you, Wife.” But the jubilation quickly recedes, leaving behind a ponderous silence that lasts the car ride home.

  Nate walks through every room in
the house, the house he loves, trying to make it his own again. It does not feel like he belongs here, or anywhere else. A void has opened up between him and the rest of the world. He reminds himself it has been just seventy-two hours since his sprint across the dunes with Charles bleeding out on his back. How Nate feels here in Santa Monica—it’s just temporary.

  When his pacing carries him downstairs, Janie and Cielle are waiting in the family room, bursting with excitement. A large cardboard box sporting an oversize red bow sits on the carpet. Cielle says, “C’mon hurry hurry open it.”

  He lifts the lid and peers inside. A rustle of tan fur, and then a puppy head pokes into view. The pup scrambles up his arms into his face, slurping, and Nate holds him, running a hand down the strip of reversed fur on the spine.

  Cielle says, “He’s a Rhodesian ridgeback. They used to be lion hunters. He’ll grow up huge, to a hundred pounds. He’s yours, but Mom said I could name him. Wanna know his name? It’s Casper. Like the ghost.”

  Janie adds, “They say it helps, I guess. Adjust. A dog. Unconditional love, no conversation.”

  Nate squeezes him, smells him, lost in the warmth, the quiet magnificence. He hugs his wife and his daughter, Casper squirming from lap to lap, and for a single moment, he forgets the burden he still carries on his back.

  * * *

  He sleeps fitfully, knowing the task in store for him tomorrow. Back on the eve of his redeployment, a gnawing need drove him to ask his lieutenant if he could serve the death notifications to the families of the men killed on his watch. His request went up the chain and was quickly approved—it was hardly a sought-after job—and he was handed a pamphlet to read on the flight home providing guidelines for Casualty Notification Officers.

  It is not until he gets to the front door of the McGuires’ house that he realizes how woefully unprepared he is. Every detail embeds thunderously in his brain—the paint peeling on the door frame, the sudden laxness in Mrs. McGuire’s face at the sight of him, the rasp of the screen against his shoulder as he steps inside. McGuire’s father, a hulking rectangle of a man, creaks the floorboards of the hall and then sits across from Nate, his dry hands cracking at the knuckles when he grips the armrests of his chair. Nate doesn’t remember what he says, but then Mrs. McGuire’s eyes are leaking and Mr. McGuire is asking him something.

  Nate musters his voice. “Yes, sir, he died honorably.”

  “Was he in pain?” McGuire’s mother asks.

  Nate thinks of McGuire gripping his severed leg. The screams. He says, “No.”

  Mr. McGuire: “Did you kill the bastard who got him?”

  “No, sir.” Nate rises and, as instructed, delivers a small bag with McGuire’s effects. His stomach burns as McGuire’s mother sifts through the contents—a cross pendant, dog tags, a G-Shock watch with a smashed face—and feels the need to say, “I can’t imagine what it’s like to lose a son—”

  “Two,” the big man says sharply. “We lost both.” He looks up and away, a distant glint in his eyes. “How’s the war going, son?”

  “I hope we’ve turned a corner, sir,” Nate says lamely.

  “Yeah, what corner is that?” He snickers at the silence. “We had a name for that corner, too, when I was in the Corps. We called it Clusterfuck Bend.”

  Nate cannot think of a response, so he keeps his mouth closed.

  “His body?” Mr. McGuire asks.

  “It’s been well taken care of. It shipped from Ramstein, full honors rendered at each point of transfer—”

  “I don’t give a shit about that. What kind of shape?” A pause. “Well?”

  “We didn’t recover his whole body, sir.”

  “What’s missing?” Mr. McGuire wets his lips. “Go on, son. If I can take it, you sure as hell can.”

  “A leg. And … and … part of his head.”

  Mrs. McGuire’s eyes move abruptly to the ceiling.

  “Who went down with him?” Mr. McGuire asks.

  Nate lists the names, ending with Charles.

  Mrs. McGuire says, “You tell their mothers and fathers thank you for us.”

  It is a full minute before Nate dares to speak again. Though he has been forbidden to offer any details about the activities surrounding the death, he hears himself start to spill: “It was an IED hidden in a rucksack. Right in front of me. I should’ve gotten to it before it went off. I could have—”

  The deep voice cuts him off. “See, son. Now you’re making your problems our problem. Don’t ya think we got enough problems tonight?”

  Nate’s entire body is trembling. “Yes, sir.”

  “So act like you got some sense in you.” The man’s face has turned ruddy. “Don’t leave us with more to chew on. See, you’ll go on home, eat dinner with your wife, tuck your kids into bed. You’ll move on. We’ll be here. So you think of us from time to time.”

  Mrs. McGuire says, softly, “Jim,” and he silences.

  Nate looks down into his lap for a long time. “May I please use your restroom?”

  She points. “Powder room off the hall there.”

  Nate runs the water to cover the sound of his vomiting. He splashes water on his face, dries his eyes with a pink hand towel that smells of floral detergent. Studying his reflection, he vows to learn how to do this better. He squares himself, emerges, delivers the necessary information as best he can, and shows himself out. As he drives away, his sweat-drenched uniform clings to him like a bad dream.

  Johnson’s family, next up, is kind and appreciative, and that is all the worse. Then comes Miles’s stepmother, who says, “Well, then,” and closes the door. Bilton’s wife asks Nate to drive her to school to tell her son. The following day begins with a sad meeting in a church basement—stained coffeemaker, cinder-block walls, and unbroken wailing. Tommy K’s mother takes her son’s baseball cap from the bag of effects, presses it to her face, and inhales. By dusk the compounded effect of so much suffering has left Nate utterly void. He welcomes the numbness, because he fears that if he starts crying, he will crack wide open.

  Arriving at Charles’s childhood house, Nate realizes he has saved this, the worst, for last. Inside, he sees Grace Brightbill bustling at the sink, a plump, pleasant-looking woman with dyed blond hair cut in a bob. He recalls her pride at every one of Charles’s papers, no matter how bad. The report cards pinned to the fridge by photo magnets of Charles in T-ball. Nate sits in his car, replaying her son’s voice—don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t you leave me—and feeling the heat of the explosion, the sand raining down on him. How he himself couldn’t leap for the rucksack.

  And so Charles had.

  Nate struggles to keep breathing. Self-loathing swells and washes over him, and he realizes he is too craven to proceed. Driving away, he dials headquarters to request that someone else be sent to serve Charles’s death notice. He knows already that this will be a decision he will regret for the rest of his life, but he cannot stop himself from making it.

  * * *

  The next day, depleted and emotionally hungover, he takes Cielle to lunch as promised. She eats ten chicken nuggets and then five more. When she asks for a sundae, he says, “I think you’ve had enough, honey.”

  “But I can’t get full.”

  As they walk out, a teenage kid accidentally pops a ketchup packet in his hand, and red goo snakes down his wrist, his forearm. All of a sudden, Nate’s face goes hot and he is back in the Sandbox, spinning in the wake of the explosion, his ears ringing. McGuire is there holding his severed leg and—

  “Daddy? Daddy?”

  He has blanked out completely in the doorway of the fast-food joint. He swallows hard, turns his head from the guy, and says, “Let’s go.”

  There are other signs, too, in the weeks that follow. He cannot watch a plane in flight without bracing for it to explode. Despite the mounting bills, he cannot bring himself to go back to his job as a buyer of men’s suits. He and Janie make love with more urgency, as if they’re trying to hold on to something.
They talk less afterward, Janie rolling over into a paperback, Nate staring at the ceiling, watching the fan blades spin like the rotors of a helo and reliving those instants confronting the left-behind rucksack. Night after night, lying beside his wife, he changes the dance steps, rewrites history. A thousand times he watches Abibas pause on the dune and stare back at them, then turn and run. Nate looks over at the rucksack. But in this alternate history, he puts his promise to Cielle out of his mind; he unlocks his legs; he leaps.

  In the morning when Nate brushes his teeth, he hears Charles’s voice in his head, sees him sitting on the edge of the bathtub. Charles is in his green-and-khaki ACUs and wears his combat helmet, but one thing is different: There is a massive hole blown in his stomach, and he is dripping blood onto the ivory bathroom tiles.

  “What the fuck?” Charles says. “It’s indulgent, all this moping and shit. Get over it already. You’re home.”

  “I know,” Nate says through a mouthful of toothpaste. “I know that. But I can’t get it from my head into my gut.”

  Charles peers through the hole in his stomach wall. He flexes, making the intestines wiggle, then looks up with a pleased smile. Noting Nate’s expression, he assumes a serious face. “Don’t get boring.”

  Nate spits foam into the sink, rinses. “Sorry. I’m hung up on killing you.”

  “That crap again?” Charles waves a bloody hand. “What could you have done?”

  For the first time, Nate actually speaks out loud. “I could’ve jumped first.”

  * * *

  He goes in search of work but inevitably winds up sitting with Casper on the curb by the car wash, watching the vehicles go in filthy and come out spotless, that toxic film reel throwing images against the walls of his skull, corroding him from the inside out. No matter how many times he works and reworks the equation he is locked inside, it is destined to tally up the same—two dead legs, three frozen seconds, threadbare rucksack five feet away.