Spoils

by Brian Van Reet

  Worthy had made it out of the truck. We moved him to check for a pulse but didn’t bother anymore when we turned him over enough to see his face. Splintered teeth and pieces of skull scattered in the mud like tiny broken pieces of a smashed plate. There was no fear or pain or emotion of any kind that you could read into that face. Hard to believe it was the man I knew. A deep pain beat at the center of me, and I thought I was going to faint again, but all I did was retch up water.

  Blornsbaum called in a status report. “Three more KIA, grid to follow. I say again, three more KIA. Three still unaccounted for.”

  We moved the tanks to defend the position from any attackers who might still be out there. When help arrived, some of us dismounted to consolidate the bodies. After that was done, Blornsbaum went to the lowest point in the ditch and squatted down to clean his hands in the tacky mud. He coated his palms with the stuff and rubbed them together until the friction dried the mud and rolled it off his skin, blood with it. We followed his example and cleaned our hands. Rubbing them with the mud brought out the smell of iron and salt even worse. I felt myself getting light-headed again. Couple seconds later, I was out.

  PART III

  Money is ammunition.

  —UNITED STATES COUNTERINSURGENCY DOCTRINE

  9

  CASSANDRA: THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA

  1 Day After

  IRAQ (FALLUJAH)

  She comes to at the worst possible time, in the middle of the procedure. It’s thirst that does it, thirst that drags her out of anesthetized black, somewhere past sleep but not far enough. Her tongue is practically glued to the roof of her mouth, a sweet chemical taste as she pulls it away, rolls it around, a dried-out worm roasting on pavement.

  That she’s alive at all surprises her. That she’s been rescued and evac’ed to a field hospital is her first wrong assumption. Her vision skews like she’s looking through a lens smeared with petroleum jelly, eyes focusing at cross-purposes but she can see enough to perceive a bright white light and masculine, vaguely military silhouettes working together toward some purpose in a procedure that centers on her. Everything feels ambiguous and faraway, disassociated monstrously like a bad trip on cough syrup. She strains to raise her head but the force on her shoulders, slim bony fingers, thwarts her too easily. Is that all the fight she can summon? Must be in real bad shape.

  The last thing she remembers is the canal, the way the clouds looked like green slate, and sinking into the mud of the bank, Aguirre dead on top of her. She tries to speak McGinnis’s name, to ask him for water, she’s so parched, but renders nothing intelligible, just a little bubble of spit to wet her lips, a draft of cool air passing over her legs. They’re bare. Her feet are as well. Toes work. Good, not paralyzed. Again she makes a go at sitting up.

  You don’t quit until you’re dead, Wigheard. You don’t lose until you’re dead, so don’t quit.

  “Relax. You’ll only make it worse.” It’s a man’s voice, rich and almost sultry, pitched in a British accent, which is absurd. She must be hallucinating, because whoever he is, he can’t be a Brit. They’re all the way down south near Basra. No way she would’ve been transported to one of their field hospitals.

  “Nahnuf e-haj jahwore hydurt upthere adhokethen.”

  Now the voice, by its timbre and direction of origin the same man’s, gibbers not in the queen’s English but a nonsense language that feels immensely more comforting to hear, the one incongruity confirming the unreal totality of these other sensations: She’s out of her mind on drugs. Painkillers. That’s it. A red blinking dot like the LED on a video camera, tracers of light circling, bobbing, pupil dilated to the edge of the iris, something cold and wet pressing against her arm, the smell of rubbing alcohol, a needle prick going almost unnoticed in the bright cacophony of pain. The cords of her neck slacken, eyes rolling back; the drug does its work, burying her once more beneath cave-dark silence, blackness light as air.

  Next time Cassandra awakes the room is still and quiet. Into her forearm an IV bag drips a solution of saline and whatever substance is capable of obscuring agony. The line runs down her forearm into the crook of her elbow, the catheter sunk like a clear plastic vein extruded from her body. That is what she fixates on, the line, the catheter, the coolness of the drip into her arm marking time. She manages to tilt her head enough to look down her torso and what she sees there startles her, though even incipient terror is substantially dulled by opiates.

  She’s not laid out in a hospital gurney. Not even a proper bed. No longer wearing her uniform but some kind of plain long dress like a nightgown, lying on wool blankets arranged into a pallet on a dingy tile floor. A thickness of gauze is wrapped around her right bicep and the blood spotting through the bandage looks black in the low cold light. The wound. She was shot. No, it was the mortars that did it: but she may have been shot, too. She passed out. There’s time unaccounted for.

  Somewhere nearby a muezzin sings the call to prayer through a loudspeaker. It’s so close it could be coming from another part of this building, the walls of cinder block transmitting sound well. In time, dawn diffuses through the one visible window, barred but not paned, enough light for her to distinguish the different-colored threads in the dress she’s wearing. First she can tell blue from white, then blue from green, the colors forming a childish pattern, triangles stitched down the front. The dress perplexes her. She has to muster an immense concentration to focus on it or anything else but does manage to conclude that it’s an entirely inappropriate garment for someone in her situation to be wearing. The next inference does not follow, one logical extrapolation too far for this amount of morphine. Nor do words like captured or prisoner yet enter her mind. And dozing off again she never does spot the quiet boy in the shadowed corner sitting guard in the room, a vigilance over her.

  Whatever this is comes in waves. She allows one to take her under, to roll and drub her on the bottom like a surfer bashed in slow motion over a reef. Fantastic pixelations form and shift behind her eyes, rods and cones uninhibited in the darkness and by the drug and so free to resolve themselves into whatever the brain chooses, patterns plucked from white noise, a biochemical Rorschach test. Black smoke, or is it clouds? or is it the night-black water of the canal? and McGinnis like an anchor pulling her in deeper. Crump’s wounded eye like a misshapen pearl, the reflection of fire on broken glass, the mucky feel of the water, the smell of shit, fear, what is beneath fear, disease, infection, and water snakes and snapping turtles—wait, that’s it. The weird-looking slate-green clouds—she’s hit on the association: they were the precise color and texture of the mat of algae grown onto the shell of an alligator snapper her cousin once hooked accidentally while fishing in the marshy end of the stock tank on her grandparents’ land. Her cousin using chicken necks for bait. Beaching the strange saurian creature and pestering it with a tree branch until it extended its neck with alarming rapidity and cleaved the offending object in two.

  From somewhere far away she feels pressure on her arms, legs; they’re bound together, slung, her body being moved. She strains to open her eyes but there’s trouble there, a tight blindfold. Men speak. Talking among themselves and taunting her, she supposes, by the venom in their laughter. She’d know what they were up to even in this inscrutable language, the way soldiers mock the vanquished.

  It’s Arabic, not gibberish. A point of rare clarity for her at this moment of embarkation. She’s alive, not dead. Alive and entombed, alive and buried alive and drugged and shut inside a dark airless prism rushing through space, diesel exhaust and burning-trash smells, honking car horns like random shouting in a crowd, shitty Arabic pop music broadcast from radios overheard from the next lane over of gridlocked traffic. Mutedly, through insulation. The rattling idle of a truck engine; soon they’re moving again. Whatever she’s trapped in feels like slick plastic on the bottommost corner where her palms are bound behind her, slowly suffocating, drugs wearing off as the journey drags on, her wound throbbing aguishly with each ret
urning beat of her heart.

  The fever breaks on the evening of the third day, although she might’ve guessed a week or only hours. Given the other menacing unknowns she’s facing, Cassandra finds it surprisingly concerning, her complete inability to reckon the passage of time. If she’s going to maintain her wits, she’ll have to devise some way to divide the day from the night. The call to prayer would be the perfect thing but she hasn’t heard it in how long?—which points to one of several possibilities. Could be they’re holding her somewhere in the countryside far from any mosque, or else this place is deep enough underground, she wouldn’t hear it. Or both scenarios could be true. There are no windows, it’s pitch-black, and her limbs are free now, unbound. Condensation wets the concrete walls dank as a cave’s but warmer. Definitely feels subterranean. Her cell, as she first thinks of it. The red fog of infection having cleared enough for her to realize very well that she’s a prisoner and in serious trouble.

  Every time the door opens, she’s jolted with fear. The obvious, that they will rape or kill her, rape and kill her. This is something that she thought about plenty before the invasion: what might happen if she were captured. Arabs do have their reputation. This time it’s the man with the British accent, the one from her fever dreams, who enters her cell. He has a workmanlike manner and carries a satchel in one hand and a kerosene lantern in the other. He sets the lantern on the floor, the tubular cotton wick burning a lively orange. Even that much light is painfully, blindingly bright as her eyes acclimate. Behind him is another, taller Arab who leans against the door and never speaks. He carries a rifle slung on his shoulder and sniffles from time to time as if he has a cold. He looks at her with aristocratic curiosity, the hint of disdain.

  “Feeling better?” the British one asks.

  She nods, grunts, and it’s the truth.

  “I can see. Excellent.” He kneels beside her and searches through his satchel, producing a small glass bottle and a syringe. “Penicillin. You got quite a nasty infection, I assume from that filth you and your comrades were cowering in.” He inserts the needle into the membranous lid of the bottle and pulls back the plunger to draw liquid into the syringe. Taps it. Gestures at her arm, the bandage soppy, smelling like ripe cheese. “Will you permit me?”

  She could refuse to cooperate, resist every little encroachment, but to do that right now would be in total contradiction to her will to live, which is as stark and unvarying and immense as a prairie. And she believes him. Doesn’t feel like a dirty trick. Probably is penicillin in there. Whoever this man is, whatever he has in that syringe, under his care her fever has broken.

  “It’s perfectly safe. I know what you must think, but be careful not to confuse what you see for what is.”

  That’s indisputable. She allows him to give her the shot with only a passing worry about the cleanliness of the needle.

  He tends to her wound, swabbing her arm with alcohol, replacing the dressing with a fresh roll of gauze. No fumbling with anything, assured, like he’s done this many times; he examines her pupils with a penlight and seems satisfied by what he’s seen, packing his instruments back into the bag. He’s close, squatting on the concrete floor. He wears a pair of sturdy brown shoes, slacks, a collared shirt, his beard a bit scraggly but not too long, a face that could pass for Spanish. She can smell all three of their bodies. She’s never been more aware of a man’s in relation to hers, never more completely beholden. He snaps his satchel closed and, taking up the lantern, rises, his tall and silent, sniffling companion holding open the door to a glimpse of a bare passage beyond.

  Before they leave she manages to croak out a few words, her first coherent statement since the traffic circle.

  “Please. Can I have a light? It’s so dark.”

  “We’ll see. Anything else?”

  “Who are you?”

  There are fifty other questions she’s burning to ask, and Cassandra doesn’t really expect he’ll answer her at all, but then he does, pausing in the doorway like a harried mogul who’s stopped for a moment to deal with a minor problem before moving on to more pressing business elsewhere.

  “I’m Doctor Walid.”

  Crump is screaming through the floor. Crazy, but that’s how it sounds, like his angry, stupid, irreverent voice is rising from the floor somewhere toward the back corner of her cell, projected there as if through a tin-can radio.

  “Hey you fuck! You stay away from me with that thing! Fuck! Fuck! Motherfucker I’ll fucking stomp your hajji ass! Ah, man. Fuck. Ahhhh…”

  Amazed to learn he survived his injuries and is here, at the same time she’s terror-stricken by his cries, by whatever awful torment has befallen him. She calls his name instinctively and drags herself to the corner of the cell from which his voice came, feeling her way in the dark, leaning on her left side to keep the pressure off her wounded arm.

  Her fingers find the seam of the wall and, searching farther, a small circular grate sunk into the floor in the corner. The grate must be covering a drain, Crump’s voice literally piped into her cell. She can no longer hear him, even when pressing her ear to the grate, only the steady roar of resonant hollow places, the sound of the ocean in a seashell. She thinks of cupping her mouth and speaking into the grate but is afraid of who might overhear. She listens with her ear to the floor an indeterminate time, until her throbbing arm forces her to shift position, to sit with her back against the wall. Whatever just happened to him is over and might happen to her next. She isn’t sure whether to explore the possibilities there or to have no thoughts at all, no guesses about the immediate future, to keep her mind empty, at least that way to gain some kind of Zen mastery over helplessness. She finds it impossible. Can’t stop ranging from one scenario to the next. Eventually she gets around to a thought that all prisoners, sooner or later, trouble themselves with.

  How on earth did I get here?

  It was a mercy killing, although she didn’t know at the time those exact words for what she did. In the black, she abandons the unknowable future for the past, one of her strongest early memories, a story there in the past to be followed, her mind trying to discern what her unconscious is telling her in moral, symbolic terms with this memory bubbling up.

  How old was she that day—seven? Her cousin Jessie about four years older. The day of the alligator snapping turtle. After catching it and tormenting it with a variety of sticks, he went and got his Christmas present that he’d set nearby, a .22 rifle, which he’d used to entice her out into the fields to play. He was odd and lacked for friends, and even back then, as a small girl, she was fascinated by the gun, by its precision, the weight of it, the cold mechanical potential, the adultness. Jessie had promised to let her shoot but had reneged and gone fishing instead.

  That day by the stock pond she told him to leave the turtle alone. It stood its ground dumbly. Long tail like a rat’s, hooked beak gaping, a defensive posture that might’ve succeeded over an evolutionary timescale but did nothing to deter the assault of a creature such as her cousin. “What’d that thing ever do to you, Jessie Statler?” she said. Using his full name, aping the way adults, her father, scolded her. Growing up with hogs and cattle she was no stranger to slaughter and the kinder way to do it. Quickness was paramount; minimize the struggle. Misdirect the animal’s attention. The unexpected blow of the sledge. Stealthy slip of the knife across the carotid.

  Her cousin’s underpowered rifle was anything but kind, the pop of it no louder than a firecracker. It made clean holes the size of pencil erasers in the ridged leather of the turtle’s carapace, with clawed feet swiping methodically to escape the torment, its defensive posture abandoned but the hook and line preventing it from reaching water.

  She let him shoot it maybe five times before stomping off to a rock wall around the nearest pasture and fetching a big enough one to bash its head in. The first creature besides bugs she can recall killing. And not for food or to defend herself or for any other halfway decent reason, but for mercy.

  �
�Hey, no fair,” Jessie said. “That was my turtle.”

  “I told you not to.”

  “I don’t have to listen to no girl.”

  “I’ll tell Daddy,” she said, but they both knew the threat was empty. Jessie dragged the carcass into the woods and covered it with a mound of rotting leaves in the gaps between the washed-out roots of a maple where the bones may remain to this day. This is the end of her memory. A forgotten burial site.

  The door opens, startling her out of sleep. She shrinks against the wall, tangled in her blankets, rubbing eyes in the lantern light.

  “You want sandwich?”

  It’s a boy this time, can’t be more than a teenager. Not even the hint of a beard on his face, which is handsome, as far as boys’ go—a few more years before he’s fully a man, his good looks and youth especially alarming her; young men are the worst. But there’s meekness, too. He seems almost embarrassed to be in the cell with her.

  “Yes. Please,” she says, famished in the way of those emerging on the far shore of a serious illness. Her stomach, in knots, has been growling so loudly she heard it earlier like a stranger grumbling in the cell.

  “You want tea?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I bring.”

  When he returns there’s a man with him. Older and heavyset with coarse skin, he has none of the Kid’s shyness, looking her right in the face, appraising her body like a pickup artist at a bar. He murmurs something in Arabic to the Kid, and given that voice and his face, she silently names him with an epithet, Pig. You can’t always judge someone by looks and mannerisms, but sometimes you fairly can. Later, she’ll know this man as Annas.

  The Kid sets a plastic sack on the floor. “Bread. Cheese. Olive.” He takes an old metal thermos and displays it generously. “Tea.”