A Particular Darkness

by Robert E. Dunn

  My worst wound was below the shoulder blade. The knife had been thrust straight down while I was pinned by the weight of the man on top of me. At the time, there was no telling how bad the wound was—but it was bad. It was probably the reason I’d been left discarded so blithely. Either I was believed already dead, or ready to die.

  My uniform had been cut and stripped away. Leaving me naked was another way to demean me. It also left me separate from the real soldiers. The men who had raped me were Americans too. Hating women crosses all borders and faiths. I knew who they were, that was the worst thing. The devil you know—

  If Americans had found me dead, they would assume I was a casualty of the insurgents. If I was found alive by any insurgent, I would be raped some more and condemned to die for the sins of being female and American.

  Wind pushed rippling waves of dust over the mud wall I was behind, slowly making my grave. I don’t know how, but I refused the tomb. It took a long time of hope and tears. Eventually I rolled from under the accumulating soil rising to my hands and knees. Every part of me shook with the effort. My head throbbed and gold flashed in my eyes with each beat of the pain. I vomited.

  When my gut seemed ready, I opened my eyes again. The puddle of puke under my face, like my blood, was being devoured by the dead land, becoming simply, more of the brown.

  Careful not to put my hands in the mess, I backed away. That was when I felt the cuts in my backside. The captain had slapped and cut my behind with the knife as he sodomized me. When he bucked up against me, moaning with his release, he thrust the blade deep into my right buttock.

  I let my head sag so I could look down the length of my body. More blood. More wounds. The entirety of my ribcage was bruised—black finger marks on pale skin. A lot of attention had been paid to my breasts. A long gash, starting high on my chest, ran under the soft flesh causing one to hang lower and at an impossible angle. On the other, my nipple was sliced and twisted. There was another laceration in the pubic hair, a violent, jagged gash, and a bare strip where the darker red curls had been stripped away. The lieutenant had taken a souvenir.

  Blood flowed from me. A river, undammed by my movements, rushed over the crust between my legs. Fresh fluid trickled down dead-white thighs and spread into dark galaxies of bruising. The new blood was coming from my vagina. The lieutenant, before cutting his souvenir, had punching between my legs several times before shoving his fist inside.

  I cried. For a short time or a long one, I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was a short time that only seemed equal to all the time I had lived so far. I stayed there on my hands and knees because it hurt too much to move, and I cried. It poured from my frothy lungs, a quiet, keening wail that sounded almost like a meadowlark, but there was no answering call.

  Even the silence became too great a weight to bear. I started gathering clothes and doing what I could to cover myself. The only thing worse than being raped and left naked behind some mud wall and shack in Iraq, was being found naked in any condition by the local faithful. A naked woman in that part of the world was a whore. The men there neither resisted nor respected whores.

  I found tattered pants and a bloody T-shirt, no boots and no underwear. Still it took almost ten screaming minutes to get the clothing on.

  When I stood, my head lurched again and the guts followed. There was no fighting it. I draped my body over the low wall and puked in hard spasms. Gold starbursts patterned my vision. I smelled bile and copper.

  I never remember rising again. Nor do I recall walking away from the wall. The next thing I really remember was finding a road and hoping I’d turned the right direction to find a checkpoint. Before I made it a hundred yards down the road, a white dot appeared on the horizon. A vehicle.

  If it wasn’t green it wasn’t safe. I dropped into the shallow ditch. When I hit, something popped in my chest. It was physical and audible and started a cascade of wrenching pain. Later, a doctor told me that a nick in my lung must have torn through. Air was escaping into the chest cavity at the same time blood was running into the lung. Each breath was a loud, gasping rattle that brought in little air and almost as much dust.

  The white pickup truck slowed on shrieking brakes. It carried three men up front and six in the back. All were armed. They looked at me like a wolf looks at a wounded calf.

  I said good-bye, in quiet thoughts, to my mother and father. All thoughts had become prayers. Everyone who had ever done me harm, I forgave, except the men who had put me where I was. Then I waited for the real death.

  One man jumped down from the truck bed and the others stayed behind, shouting. The bolt on an AK-47 was pulled. Everything went silent for a few moments then the shouting started up again. The man with the AK ran back to the truck. He sprayed a wash of rounds at me without aiming as the truck left the road and took off across open ground.

  A moment later, I watched a column of Humvees stop on the broken road. A squad of men piled out and formed a perimeter. One man shouted, “We need a medic and a litter up here.”

  In the back of a Humvee, the medic’s eyes were wide with fear and embarrassment. He had never worked on a woman before and certainly never one so intimately harmed. He looked all of nineteen. Working as quickly as he could, he put in a line to drain the air and blood from my chest. Once I could breathe, he followed the lines of cuts on my body, filling them with hemostatic powder. When he cut my pants off and spread my naked legs to pack those wounds, his eyes rimmed with tears. While he touched me and bound the lacerations that could be bound, he talked. Mostly he said everything would be all right. He said it like a mantra more for himself than me.

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “Everything will be all right.”

  Outside, the thick, hard rubber of the Humvee’s tires roared loudly on cratered asphalt.

  “It’ll be all right,” Corporal Billy Blevins said again.

  Chapter 17

  Sunrise was a blue-orange gap between a newly greening nadir and a marching gray zenith. Thunder rumbled faintly. I had lost the night to violence, both fresh and aged. That wasn’t so terrifying, I’d lost more than my share of nights hiding from the brown haze in whiskey and tears. Drunks like me know about lost time. No, the terror came from two realizations that came one foot in front of the other. First shoe—People needed me, the girls, Billy, needed me, and I had fallen into the darkness again. Second shoe—there was a new bottle of whiskey, still in the brown bag clutched in my hands.

  I had not so much as taken a drop. I knew that, not because the bottle was still sealed, but because of the fact, I was not intoxicated. At that point I was not going to trust my eyes. I did trust my sense of myself as a drunk though. There was no chance I had started drinking without getting completely wasted away.

  I opened the truck door and unlimbered myself from the cab. It’s a scary thing to realize, you’re hoping the whiskey in your lap was placed there by a stalker hoping to intimidate you. It is even scarier to suddenly know that it was something you did in the turmoil of a flashback and dry drunk. The truck was parked in the gravel lot of an all-night liquor store. Worse yet, it was one I recognized as being in my own county.

  I wanted to cry again, I may have done it if the man leaning over my tailgate hadn’t spoken to me.

  “We need to get you out of here,” Captain Alastair Keene said.

  “You need to go fuck yourself,” I hit him right back. When I’m that tired and heartsick I’m not up to my usual level of banter.

  “I’m not kidding,” he informed me flatly, then continued in the same bland tone, “Shit’s happening.”

  “Then you should feel right at home.” I felt better about my repartee with that one. “Why are you here? And how?”

  The how part struck me like God’s whisper in a prophet’s ear—he was at the cabin. I dropped the bottle and reached to pull my weapon from the holster. It wasn’t there.

  “I have your pistol,” Keene said. “For my own safety.”

  “Why?�
�

  “Because I didn’t want you to shoot me.”

  “The other why,” I blurted out. “The big why.”

  Keene opened his mouth slowly like he was building the answer with his teeth before letting it out. I didn’t give him that much time.

  “And if you think I need a gun to put you on your ass, you’re fooling yourself.”

  His mouth stopped working the words over. A shadow of anger rolled over his face and his eyes narrowed to dark fissures. For an instant I thought he was going to take me up on the challenge and I regretted my inability to hold my tongue. Then he relaxed and grinned, showing me bright white teeth. It was an expression I honestly couldn’t read. Some of that may have been the scent of whiskey coming up from the broken bottle at my feet.

  I lifted my feet high, stepping over the liquid like it would drown me if I touched it. It might have. I didn’t know and I didn’t want to risk it.

  “So—Hurricane—” Keene stepped over the nickname as carefully as I had the spilled whiskey.

  “Why.” I punched with the word.

  “Why. The big why. I don’t have that. Just a lot of little ones and you’re going to have to help me out on the ones you want.”

  “Start with this.” I kicked gravel and dirt at the broken glass and blotted liquid. “Why have you been leaving it in front of me? It’s a real dick move.”

  “You did that.”

  I knew he wasn’t lying. I knew the truth before I asked the question. I needed it to be him without believing it was.

  “You bought it last night and came to this truck and sat in the parking lot. The clerk knew who you were and finally called the sheriff. That was how I found you.”

  “Sheriff Benson told you?” I made sure he could read the disbelief in my face and voice.

  “Things have changed.”

  “Things always change, but they never really do.”

  “This thing changed. Your uncle killed a man trying to break into his dock.”

  “What? When?”

  “Last night. While you were off the radar. Your phone’s been off.”

  I pulled the phone from my pocket and remembered turning it off before starting the walk through the woods to the cabin. There were over thirty waiting messages. I put it back in my pocket.

  “Tell me everything,” I said.

  “A shooting involving a sitting member of congress gets a lot of attention. A second shooting . . . well, let’s say that shakes the branches hard enough for all sorts of things to fall out.”

  “Is Whilomina okay? What about Uncle Orson?”

  “She’s fine and he’s about the toughest bastard I’ve ever met. I don’t think he can be hurt.”

  “He’s hurt,” I said, thinking of my father.

  “I guess your uncle took the congresswoman to the dock for defense. It wasn’t a bad idea. There’s only the one narrow ramp for someone to walk in on and, with all the lights on, no boat was sneaking up.”

  “But?”

  “No but. Two men tried to run up the gangway. Your uncle, dropped one and the other swam for it. Orson said he hit that one too.”

  “If he says he hit him, he did,” I said with admiration. “That doesn’t explain how you got into the mix and why you’re not here to make my life a little more miserable.”

  “Can we talk about it in the car?” He nodded at the dented rental parked way behind Gagarin’s truck. “If I found you, the mercs can too.”

  “They already found me,” I said. “Last night.”

  “What happened?”

  “I’m the one here, aren’t I?” I held out my hand and waggled my fingers at Keene demanding my weapon.

  “They said you were a hell on wheels and ten miles of dirt-road bitch.” He took the gun from his belt and handed it over.

  “Who said that?”

  He shrugged, “Everyone.”

  “How long have you been in the service?”

  “Full twenty, next year.”

  “So you’ve saluted women? Superior officers.”

  “Of course.”

  “Did you ever salute one you didn’t think was a bitch?”

  He stared at me without answering.

  “That’s what I thought.” I checked my weapon then returned it to the holster. After that I pulled my phone again and called the sheriff. I gave a quick rundown of what had happened and asked him to call the Stone County Sheriff. He repeated basically what Keene had told me about Uncle Orson and Whilomina. He added that the congresswoman was not doing as well as she pretended to be. I quietly admitted that I wasn’t either.

  “Come back in,” he said. “This is getting a lot bigger than us.”

  “I would . . .”

  “But Billy?” he asked and answered.

  “Yes. I’m going after him.”

  “How?”

  “I’m walking straight into that tent and kicking ass until I find him.”

  “If you do, I’ll have to arrest you myself,” the sheriff said quietly. “And I mean it.”

  “Yeah,” I answered. “We all pay prices.”

  “No one says we have to buy the pig in the poke.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means,” he said, “that you don’t know if he’s there or even if anyone there is involved. It means you’re holding a bag. It’s big. It’s alive inside. But you don’t know if you’re holding your pig or not.”

  “You’re right,” I deflated as I said it.

  “Be careful.”

  “It’s too late for that, Sheriff.” I disconnected before he could say anything else. Keene had been listening in as I talked. His face was stony. There was no way to tell what he was thinking.

  We left the truck in the liquor store parking lot.

  “Do you know where Billy is?” I asked as soon as Keene had the car moving. He looked at me. Every line of his face could have been set by a level. It pissed him off that I asked even though he understood. “So explain it to me,” I said.

  “I told you”—he heavy footed the accelerator and we hit the road—“things get a lot of attention when a member of congress gets involved. Especially one on the House Armed Services Committee.”

  “So Whilomina put pressure on your boss?”

  “She didn’t have to. Once it hit the news everyone wanted to get on the right side of things.”

  “You’re still not saying what things. What knots were you tying the Constitution in?”

  “This time, I can honestly say I was as much in the dark as anyone. The CID—I was just a screen for the domestic part of a CIA black-bag operation to provide Army weapons and munitions to El Camino Ardiente.”

  “Why?”

  “I wish I knew. For deniability? The weapons were listed as stolen from the Army. My job was investigation.”

  “By not investigating,” I said.

  He nodded. “That and making sure no one else did any investigating.”

  “You mean me.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you took a look at my file and thought . . .”

  “I thought you were a troublemaker with a grudge against the Army. To be fair though, you didn’t do much to change my mind.”

  “To be fair—kiss my ass.” After that we sat in silence for a few twists of the Ozarks roadway. After one sweeping turn that Keene took wide and almost into an oncoming truck, I asked. “What’s it all about? The big picture?”

  “The guns—”

  “Not enough,” I cut him off. “This whole thing is about as clear as the sky above us.”

  Keene craned his neck to look up at the darkened clouds. “Another storm,” he said. “The weather is weird here. It’s warm one day, cold the next.”

  “It’s spring,” I told him. “Storm season. The cold air is spilling from the north or rolling off the Rockies. Warm air is rising up from the Gulf. Everything between the mountains out west, and the Ozarks plateau is tornado alley.”

  “How do you know when a tornado�
�s coming?”

  “Watch for the sky to turn green.”

  He looked out the windows again, trying, I imagined, to find green in the lowering gray.

  “It’s not even a storm yet,” I reassured him. “You’ll know when to look.”

  Keene kept driving and, mostly resisted the urge to scan the skies. “What did you mean, ‘it’s not enough?’”

  “Think about it,” I said then took my own advice for a minute. “You can’t just steal weapons from the Army and cover it up without a lot of people being in on it. Congresswoman Tindall and my father knew some of it. Not enough to understand or stop it. The Army is involved, so is the CIA and a team of outside contractors.”

  He looked like he was doing what I’d asked—thinking about it. Or he was thinking about the impending storm. Either way, his face was fixed and his head nodded gravely.

  “You’d know better than me,” I went on. “But it seems that our government supplies weapons to regimes and revolutions all the time. What is it that makes this operation something worth shooting at a member of congress or killing other American citizens?”

  Keene stopped nodding. “It would have to be very big or very illegal.”

  “Does what you know, fit that description?”

  He was driving even faster at that point like he was running from the conversation or the impending storm. His hands were at ten and two on the wheel but his mind was working other roads. After we leaned into a squealing turn, Keene shook his head. If it was to say no or to clear it, I wasn’t sure until he said, “No. What I’ve seen has been basic stuff—that’s to say, basically illegal, but explainable. I’m pretty sure that the guns would not be sent to Peru and the rebels there without congressional approval.”

  “That means Whilomina knew about it, I’m betting. She and my father tried to warn me without giving too much away.”