If he wasn’t dead already. There was that possibility too. But she switched that notion off like a light.
She made herself think of the reality of all of this. Amazing things were happening, all of them validating her notions of good and evil, and at the same time revealing the horrible truth about them. There was no denying it anymore: every decision in life was important, and everyone did have to face an afterlife. It wasn’t theory, nor did it require blind faith to believe. You had to do your best to live for the next life, and even then there were no guarantees in this one. Random evil roamed the earth. She knew this now. She only had to look around the cramped space of the trunk to confirm it.
The car took another sharp turn, this time to the right. The movement mercifully shifted the weight off her left hip, which had partially fallen asleep, and it screamed in relief as she rolled partly onto her back, her shoulder blades popping stiffly in the process.
A whiff of exhaust fumes crept into the trunk somehow. She coughed lightly, feeling her throat parched again. She’d have to find a way to convince him to leave her with bottled water next time. Because she decided once and for all that there would be a next time. As long as he was alive and had any chance at all of running off to hurt the kids? Suicide was off the table.
The car began to bounce in a rapid-fire sequence. Confused at first, she couldn’t equate the sound with what it reminded her of, and then it came to her: he was driving on the lane dividers. She feared he’d fallen asleep at the wheel, but the pattern was steady and long, not an intermittent or back-and-forth sound. After a long while, just when her head began to split from the noise and she began to grow nauseous, he suddenly turned down the death metal music on the radio and blurted out, “Hey? Did you like that? Thought you might need a little massage!” Then he cackled, pulled the car off the dividers and mercifully back onto the road.
The pain in her skull had spread to the back of her eyeballs. She took some deep breaths, over and over again, a good dozen times, and forced herself to relax. She needed an out. Someplace to go that wasn’t here.
Bolivia called again, so she answered…
Her mother used to like to wear flower print blouses, some blue and purple, others orange and yellow, that she would buy from the local markets on their days off, usually a weekend a month. In them, her mother looked small and pretty, her face and smile a blossom rising from the folds of colored cotton fastened one button shy of her neck. When she was younger, Tamara, like any girl, would mirror her mother and dress similarly. But as she got older, she’d changed. Wanting to be taken seriously, she’d dressed in serious colors: flat navy blue or bland tan. No flowers. No patterns. She didn’t want to be girlie, but worldly. She wanted out of Bolivia and to go back to the States, where the bands she could only listen to on fading AM radio actually played concerts in arenas and stadiums.
And she wanted to have a Big Mac, every day, not just once every three or four months when they left the village to go to Brazil or home to California during the holidays to see family. Her mother would tell her that such a diet would only make her horribly fat, and yes, Tamara knew that, of course, but fat and alive was better than skinny and alone.
In her teen years the village had grown too small and stifling. There was randomness to their work that was frustrating; people found God and were saved, then found the world again and fell away. The huts and tents, boxed in by dirt roads and left behind by the passing centuries, left no room for anyone to be anything.
“To become anything,” she whispered into the darkness of the trunk.
They were the exact words she’d said to her mother one day while they were grinding flour together, the muscles in her mother’s forearms flexing in the sunlight. It was a spring day in full flourish, the tree line of the forest behind her painted in shades of fresh green and cropped in a sea of yellow flowers that, in short order, would become dandelion seed heads waiting to explode into the wind of a future day.
“Oh, Tamara,” her mother replied in an impatient tone. “What is it with you and this longing to become ‘something’?”
“What’s wrong with that, Mom? Really.”
“Why can’t you just be happy with what you already are?”
“Oh, please.”
“What’s wrong with that? Seriously. What you are is already so beautiful, honey.”
She rolled her eyes. “Mom.”
“I mean it.”
“I’m nothing here. I’m the pastor’s daughter. I do laundry and homework and cook.”
“Do you really believe that’s all you do?”
“What else, then? Oh, yeah. I help with the food or fires. Big deal.”
“And just what do you think you’d be doing that’s so much better back in the States?”
Tamara shrugged in mock dismay. “You mean besides having fun, Meredith? Meeting new people? Doing exciting things?”
Meredith. Her mother’s name. Gone now. The breast cancer took it, along with her smile and her pretty brown hair, which had fallen smooth and straight to the center of her back until the chemo—when it fell off like the leaves of fall.
“Don’t start with the name calling,” her mother chastised. It was something they’d already spoken about—a bad habit Tamara had gotten into of trying to address her mother as an equal by calling her by her first name when they would argue.
“Mom! I’m serious.”
“And so am I, Tamara. You just don’t understand yet. You’re only fifteen.”
“A woman, according to everyone here.”
Now it was her mother’s turn to roll her eyes. “Ah. So I see. Then you don’t mind this place when its definitions serve your purpose.”
Bits of chaff wafted up from their grinding bowls, catching in the air and spinning in some invisible vortex. They were quiet for a while before Tamara’s mother spoke again. “Honey. Please listen to me, okay?”
“No.”
“Yes. Just listen. You being who you are? That’s far more important than chasing this someone that you want to be. Do you understand?”
“No.”
Tamara’s mother shook her head softly. “Yes you do. You’re smart enough to know exactly what I’m saying. You’re just being stubborn.”
“Oh, please, Mom. What am I then? Do tell.”
“You’re the girl that every little girl in this village looks up to. Don’t you see it in their eyes, especially at Sunday school? And not just the little ones, either. The big ones too. They want to braid your hair or come to you for advice about boys.”
“Mom…”
“No, Tamara. Just hear me out. If you left, even if you didn’t intend for them to take it that way, they’d feel like you were leaving them, as if they weren’t good enough somehow.”
Tamara stopped to rest her hands. Grinding wheat always made her fingers hurt. “How?”
Her mother slowed her pace and looked at Tamara. “Honey. When you say someplace is better than where you are, it’s the same as telling people that where they are isn’t good enough.”
She’d looked at her mother and—
His voice boomed through the car.
“Hey, sweet cheeks! How about a love song?!”
And with that she heard ‘Stand by Me’ playing on the radio, a song she’d always loved. If she survived this, she’d never be able to listen to it again. He’d ruined it.
Just like she’d ruined that simple, understated hope her mother had that Tamara could become a woman who was content in serving God; a woman who could find happiness in flower print blouses and the bright smiles they brought to people who started each day with very little reason to smile at all.
Because Tamara had left the village, shortly thereafter.
And she’d been leaving it every, single day ever since.
AFTER A FEW MOMENTS OF SILENCE, even though he felt ridiculous about it, Parker finally asked, “What did he tell you about the soldier?”
Seth hesitated, so again Janie answered for
him. “That he would protect us and help us.”
“Anything else?”
“And that we could trust you,” Seth added. “I told my sister right after, when we were hiding. And then later, when you came to our house and we heard one of your detective friends telling one of the other policemen that you fought in the war, we knew.”
The inside of the car felt suddenly stuffy. Trudy glanced over again at Parker, but he didn’t acknowledge her as he lowered his window halfway down, the warm late afternoon air flowing in and only making it feel worse somehow. Cool air. He needed cool air or cool water, because this was all getting a bit too weird.
Parker cleared his throat. “Did he say anything else?”
“That we should tell you that we still weren’t safe. He said you might not believe us. So we were supposed to tell you a name, that’s all.” There was a sweet innocence to Seth’s voice, as if a voice in your head saying such things was no great miracle at all. Just another day of childhood.
Some questions you know you should ask, but you don’t anyway, maybe for self-preservation reasons, maybe due to just plain instinct. Parker wanted to know the name, actually tried to move his lips to ask it, but something in him, perhaps the last bit of his rational mind going down with a fight, wouldn’t let him.
To his shock, it was Trudy who asked it. “What was the name, honey?”
“Wa-heeb?” Seth answered hesitantly, sounding a bit confused. “I think that’s how you say it, right?”
Moments have weight to them. Parker had known this all his life. There’s the moment just before your first kiss, and before countless others that follow; there’s the moment before the first live rounds of combat whiz by your head, when you can swear you “feel” the bullet coming. Moments upon moments, some sit still and others shift around, some are light and airy, others, like this one right now, were unbearably heavy. Parker could barely breathe, but Seth’s question was just hanging there in the car, fluttering around in the wind rushing in through the window, so Parker forced a reply. “Yes. Yes, that’s right.”
“What—” Trudy said, only the first word of the question able to escape her mouth before Parker shook his head.
Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. This isn’t happening. I’m not in this car. We’re not going down this road.
This road…
He blinked and the 2 Freeway melted before his eyes and became Madagan Pass, a single dirt road framed on each side by dry brush and desert bushes, pockets of cacti populating the right side of the road far more so than the left. It was the only road that connected Kamdesh with Arotchi, a small village to the south, and it had become more heavily trafficked after a larger road nearby had been subjected to heavy snipering.
They were on a supply run. Two Humvees and a cargo truck. A shipment of food, ammunition and—most importantly—mail was awaiting them in Arotchi, along with four new grunts for the platoon, who were guarding the shipment.
Waheeb wasn’t even supposed to be on the ride. As a local enlisted to be a translator, he was off duty that day, but bored. He’d waved off the translator who was supposed to be going and hopped into Parker’s Humvee to ask him more questions about American women. Over the past eight months, he and Parker had formed a close friendship. Waheeb, being barely eighteen, had a curiosity about Western society that centered mostly on pretty girls and short skirts.
Dark skinned with thick black hair, Waheeb was considered handsome by the local village girls, but was already committed to marrying the daughter of his father’s best friend, who was the head of a local tribe in the hills that had, up to now, managed to play things as close to neutral in the war as possible—which was to say they played both sides of the fence, depending on which side suited them best at the time. Waheeb’s father, being a lower ranking member of the Kamdesh council, did not approve of Waheeb helping the Americans, but being sickly, he understood the army pay his son brought home as being good enough to support the family.
That was mostly Afghanistan for you: no friends and shifting enemies, with nothing in between but discrimination of facts and needs.
The I.E.D. on Madagan Pass was incapable of discrimination though. It blew up what it blew up, and on that day it blew up the Humvee in front of theirs, detonating late for some reason and catching the rear end of the vehicle. Parker had no idea if this was due to a trigger man in the hills who’d gotten the yips or maybe a bad transmitter, but it didn’t matter, a piece of shrapnel ripped through the gas tank and the combined explosion of that and the I.E.D. blew with enough force to lift their vehicle, and with enough debris to shatter the front windows, killing Corporal Timmy Anderson, twenty, who was driving, and Corporal Billy Fenn, nineteen, who was riding shotgun.
That left Parker, Waheeb and Crp. Freddie Bastone, twenty, to flee out the side door and into a barrage of gunshots that rained down on them from what felt like all sides.
At twenty-five, Parker was the old man of the crew. He glanced quickly back at the supply truck and was pleased when he remembered that Perez was driving it. There was no way he would abandon them, and Parker was relieved to see the supply truck gun forwards, its engine revving loudly, as Bastone screamed into his radio back to base for help.
That help was three miles away. You could jog there in twenty minutes. Drive there in under five. But in this situation it might as well have been across the Atlantic.
A self-propelled rocket grenade hit the supply truck from a nearby hill, blowing the side door, Perez and his Holy Bible to smithereens.
Without hesitating, even as the blast force blew over and by him, Parker brought his M16 up and shot the Taliban soldier who’d fired the rocket in the head, just above his left eye, a pink plume of brain and blood misting out the back of his skull.
Waheeb was screaming, in Arabic, for them to stop, pleading for mercy, fantasies of girls in short skirts now giving way to the reality of death in short seconds.
Bastone had pulled his M30 from inside the Humvee and spun around with it on his hip, firing a string of spitting three-inch rounds into the hill on their side of the vehicle, cutting two more Taliban nearly in half and clipping a third in the thigh, his leg bone bending and then snapping beneath him as he screamed in pain.
“Parker?”
It was Trudy O’Hara, from someplace very far away.
“Yeah?” he replied in a daze, the fingers of the memory still clutching him.
“What exit did you say?”
“Verdugo Road. Turn right. Travel Lodge.”
“Are you okay?” she asked softly, worry in her voice.
“Are you okay?!” Bastone shouted at him. “Parker?”
“Yes! Everyone is down but us, you got that, Bastone?”
Bastone nodded as he swung the M30 to the front of the vehicle and laid down a line of fire, which momentarily stopped the firing from that direction. Parker meanwhile used the grenade launcher on his rifle to fire rounds off over the back of the car at random to try and quiet the enemy behind them. The grenades exploded and shouting echoed through the canyon.
He had a few precious seconds to assess their situation, determine their options and to make a decision. In the meantime, Bastone was back on his radio.
“Mr. Parker. Please don’t leave me,” Waheeb screamed, clutching at Parker’s chest and shoulder. “You know what they’ll do to me.”
Parker pushed him back but made the mistake of looking into Waheeb’s eyes; they were filled with horror.
“I won’t leave you, man,” Parker said.
“Please, sir. Please don’t!” Waheeb pleaded, his face melting in desperation.
“Don’t worry,” Parker said, “I swear. Bastone? What’s the word?”
“They’re on their way. We got lucky. They decided to send another Humvee shortly after we left to send Starett along. One of the greenhorns we were supposed to pick up has a fever or some shit.”
Parker nodded. Starett was the company medic. But if they didn’t get here quick, his services woul
dn’t be needed.
The fire from the position behind them had nearly ceased. That meant one of Parker’s grenades had randomly found their mark. Lucky.
Still. They were far too outnumbered to make a stand here.
“You got a plan?”
The sun was high, a melon ball burning too bright directly over their heads. “Yes! But we’re fucked if we don’t get to that ridge!” Parker shouted, pointing left with his hand while he used his eyes to indicate they would be going right. Immediately both he and Bastone laid down fire as they bolted to the right, hell bent on a dead run for a small hill about thirty yards away.
Tactics 101: visibly point left, then go right. The enemy will waste a second or so firing in the wrong direction. It was an old trick, but soldiers knew it well.
But Waheeb was not a soldier. Taking Parker literally, he bolted left like a scalded dog, his joints fueled by panic, and directly into the line of fire.
Parker glanced over his shoulder just in time to see Waheeb take five or six bullets to his lower extremities and one to the shoulder.
He fell in a heap, very much alive, screaming, his hand outstretched to Parker.
Bastone, moving ahead with ferocious determination, screamed at Parker to follow, but Parker stopped. He’d made a promise.
Then? Their luck ran out.
A hail of bullets so thick that it felt like a hot waterfall separated Parker from Waheeb. Parker hit the ground, rolled behind a large boulder to his left and tried twice more to advance to Waheeb to get him out. But it was no use.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, three Taliban appeared next to Waheeb and dragged him away as he screamed in terror. Parker emptied his clip trying to stop them but it was no use.
Often now, whenever Parker visited a nightmare in his sleep, what awaited him was the image of Waheeb’s face at that very moment they dragged him away. It was a face that still pleaded for the great and mighty American with all his manly stories of conquered women to rescue him.
Parker had sat in shock behind the boulder as Bastone hunkered down in relative safety on the ridge and laid down more suppression fire. He was still sitting in the same spot when the other Humvee arrived and two Black Hawk helicopters swooped in from the west, guns screaming.
One Plus One (The Millionth Trilogy Book 3) Page 12
