Spoils

by Brian Van Reet

  She finishes the pitcher of warm water sometime in the night. The guard won’t leave his post to bring more. Thirst makes her sleepless. After the heat subsided, the sand flies came, biting her on the back when she lay on her stomach, and her stomach when she lay on her back. The sand flies are invisible, their bites small, hard, and intolerably itchy. A pestilence. The night drags on like a chore. Later she’s brought out of her thirsty haze and given a start when she realizes there’s something circling the shed in the blackness. She can hear it breathing, its snout snuffling curiously along the bottom seam of the zinc wall. She rests against the mud bricks, listening to it smell her through the wall, and before long it’s joined by another, and then another like it. They pace and snuffle in the dirt. The sound is eerie, but she’s not very afraid. They’re dogs, probably; no way they could get to her in here. But the gap beneath the door is big enough to admit vermin, and sometime near dawn she observes a mouse darting under and into the shed to claim a single grain of rice that she dropped while eating dinner. There’s enough moonlight admitted through the holes in the roof that she can see the mouse as a blurry shape in grayscale, fur and bone. The creature sits back on its hind legs and feeds itself the rice. She kicks lazily at it. It scampers off. She isn’t afraid of it but doesn’t relish the thought of mice crawling over her while she sleeps—no telling what diseases they may carry, rabies and God knows what, a death sentence out here. Then there are the snakes that hunt mice. A half dozen vipers native to Iraq, all venomous, some deadly, like the saw-scaled viper—one bite and you’ll bleed from all your orifices like an Ebola victim; the old hands in Kuwait told tales of camel spiders and snakes. She can abide mice or spiders but not snakes and she resolves to be absolutely impeccable with her food from here on, not to let a single morsel fall.

  She gets her best sleep after dawn when the air is coolest. The sand-fly bites torment her dreams. In the morning she waits for the changing of the guard and to be fed and watered and in the meantime examines the sign left in the dirt by the mouse. Its tracks look just like a tiny bear’s.

  “Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld! Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld!”

  She watches ruefully under the door gap, observing Walid in the middle distance near the prison building. He’s disturbed her from rare sleep. He’s the one doing the shouting, calling out loudly and multiple times in several directions, calling these names she knows so well, calling them like he’s summoning the upper echelon of her chain of command and these men might actually be hiding somewhere within earshot. He does it a final time, “Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld!” and dumps a bucket of what look like chicken entrails on the ground; almost instantly, the mess is descended upon by black horseflies, and shortly thereafter, three large dogs come loping into view. Walid watches them feed but doesn’t deign to pet them. Cassandra supposes they must be the same three that visited her last night. The hounds Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. One mystery solved.

  By late morning the heat has once again grown intolerable. The men keep indoors, out of the open, where satellites may be watching. From overhead, unless someone were paying very close attention, the place would look abandoned, like a crumbling way station succumbing to nature in the middle of nowhere, Iraq.

  Not much happens until the afternoon when there’s a brief but intense excitement. The distant thumping of helicopter rotors, a pair of Chinooks by the sound of them, transport birds with a distinctively loud report. The guard moves under cover as a precaution but the helicopters pass somewhere out of sight, never actually coming into view, the beating of their rotors fading away to wind noise and despair.

  Her one triumph that day comes when she observes the guard praying. He’s still on shift, which must be edging past the twenty-four-hour mark. Confused by the heat, she wonders if this is how long the shifts have always lasted but she’s only now noticing it because only now does she have the sun, God damn the sun, by which to judge time, or whether, as she believes true, the shifts have typically lasted closer to twelve hours and this one is much longer than usual. Which means something is up. She puzzles over the possibilities, what’s the deal with McGinnis, watching absentmindedly through the door gap as the guard unfurls his prayer mat in the dirt and begins prostrating himself. It takes a minute for the significance of what she’s seeing to hit her. When it does, she has to stop herself from laughing with the pleasure of unexpected knowledge. He’s showing her the direction to Mecca. He might be strict but isn’t too bright. She now possesses a kernel of knowledge where before there was none. She knows which way to start running if she gets free.

  Near sundown the Eastern European guard is finally relieved. Even before the new man speaks to her, she knows it’s Annas by the sight of his ankles, hairy and knotty and at her eye level—she’s seen them twice before from about this same vantage and wouldn’t mistake them. Near the door he and the other guard talk a few minutes in Arabic before the one ambles off and Annas remains. He doesn’t waste any time, pounding on the corrugated door like he’s pestering an animal.

  “Ugly woman. Bad woman.”

  She doesn’t answer, unwilling to give him the benefit of reveling in any fear in her voice, and not trusting herself right now to master it.

  “You here?” He rattles the chain against the door. For a second she thinks he might be removing the padlock and coming in to finish what he started the other night, menstrual blood be damned, but he’s not. He’s only jerking her chain. Literally.

  “I know your friend,” he says, voice quieter, less openly vicious, but all the more disturbing for that. “Very bad for them. Talk with me. I tell you things you need.”

  That he’s cruel, she never had any doubt, but there’s a shrewdness to his cruelty that she underestimated. Of all the ploys he could’ve chosen to get her talking, this one probably affords the greatest chance of success. She could resist threats, the promise of special treatment, but from her isolation it’s hard to refuse knowledge, a tantalizing bait even if it’s bogus, something cooked up just to screw with her, as she tells herself it must be. Which is how she keeps from asking what he knows about Crump and McGinnis.

  “Okay,” he says vindictively, when after a while it becomes apparent that she’s not going to play his game. She’s taken aback as his mouth appears in one of the door holes, finger held over his lips in a vow of silence. “Shh. I am like this.” He smiles menacingly before moving off from the door like he’s lost interest. “Ugly woman, stupid woman. You are dead yesterday and tomorrow. ”

  She holds out a long time, considering. Another night without sleep, tormented by the temperature and the flies and the possibility that Annas could decide to enter the shed at any time. In the midnight hour, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld return to investigate the perimeter before growing bored with her scent and moving on to patrol elsewhere. There are no more mice, but a nighthawk alights on the thatched roof, on the edge of one of the weather-beaten holes where she can see its severe avian silhouette against the moon before it takes wing and is gone. A few hours pass. She runs out of water again. She refuses to ask Annas for more. She scratches new bites on top of the old. She’s filthy, lying in the dirt, the earth still hot from the day, the air humid, heavy. It’s too much to bear. She says, “Fuck it,” says this out loud while rising to cross the two and a half paces—exactly—to the shed door, pounding on it loud enough to startle him, she hopes, which is the least she can do if she’s going to cave, to do it aggressively, fearlessly, and in a manner calculated to surprise.

  “Hey, asshole. I want to know, okay? I’ll talk to you. Just tell me what you know that’s so fucking special.”

  It’s horrifying, what they do to Crump. She watches under the gap as a cadre of the guards frog-march him out of the prison into the adjacent plot of land across from the shed, near where their trucks are parked under cover. Crump blinks his eye rapidly and appears pale and disoriented at the brightness of the sun. The black banner with Arabic script hangs behind him on the prison wall. She watched them put
it there earlier that morning and still didn’t believe.

  But Annas wasn’t lying. Hafs faces Crump at a distance of a few meters, holding the video camera stiffly at his chest like a shield. Crump is bound and made to kneel in front of Walid who stands behind him and makes a short pronouncement in Arabic. He finishes speaking to the camera and unsheathes a large knife and palms Crump’s forehead, pressing head against his own thigh to give himself access to the throat. She cries out to see the blade go in, cries out once and then watches the rest of it silently.

  At a certain point Hafs stops filming. He looks shaken and doesn’t linger long near the body or laugh or boast over it as some of the other guards do. The dogs come nosing around, snuffling at the blood-soaked earth, but Walid shoos them away. Crump’s decapitated body is slung by two men between them like an animal carcass and hoisted into the bed of one of the pickup trucks and driven off. It would be bad enough to have seen that happen to any person, but for it to be someone she knew, a friend, someone she had argued with, had watched in innocent sleep, to see him butchered like that, the look on his face, his legs kicking against the bindings. To watch that. To know the exact same thing may be in store for her soon. Cassandra stumbles toward the rear of the shed but falls short of the pail, dizzy, in shock, her limbs suddenly heavy and cold. She retches bile, splattering the mud-brick wall.

  She’s seen people killed, Aguirre right on top of her, and until now has been able to keep her stomach, but there’s something especially horrific about a beheading. The ultimate mutilation. Only later does she recover enough to think about anything else. Like Hafs taping it. What that means. What will happen with that video, Crump existing everywhere and nowhere at once, memorialized at his worst and finest. They never broke him. He went as bravely as is possible, never cowering, maintaining his scowl until the last moment, the moment the knife went in. No matter; they still took something like his soul. To set the manner of remembrance is the highest form of ownership.

  She didn’t want to accept it. She didn’t want to believe Annas when he told her it would happen this way.

  “We kill him soon, inshallah. Soon, the morning. You watch. You see. The other you not see. Now, you see.”

  She thought he was bluffing to get a rise out of her, but now that it’s happened, and in front of her eyes, she’s also forced to believe what he told her about McGinnis.

  Both men are gone. Her whole crew, dead. She’s completely alone.

  13

  SLEED: THE LACK OF LIFE

  22 Days After

  IRAQ (CAMP MARLBORO; FALLUJAH)

  The cigarette factory’s official name was Camp Hope. That was too stupid to use so we all called it Camp Marlboro. It hadn’t made any cigarettes in a long time. Higher transferred us there from Palace Row, couple weeks after the traffic circle. We moved into a bay on the factory floor, dusty and littered with scrap metal, empty water bottles, old pallets, and picked-over care packages that no one’d bothered to toss into the burn pit. One of the first things we did was rig up the big-screen and satellite dish we’d packed in a conex and brought with us. We found some ratty old couches in the foreman’s office upstairs and dragged them down to the bay to complete our entertainment center, as we took to calling it. When we weren’t on mission or guard we spent our time flipping between CNN International, Al Jazeera, Sky News, Al Arabiya, hungry for any word of the POWs. Their story was pretty much the biggest thing going. It was strange to watch the reports and know we were wrapped up in the middle of it, and not exactly playing the part of heroes. The whole world watching, and no one but us knew the truth.

  Given everything that’d happened, you might think I wouldn’t have been able to watch the news. You might think I would’ve been sick with guilt on a minute-to-minute basis, but I don’t remember it being that way. When you’re in the thick of it, you don’t have enough time. Stress, anger, sorrow, sure, yeah, but guilt is mostly a luxury afforded by enough space and quiet to think. It’s like an itch that starts small but keeps getting worse until you’ve scratched it into a bloody hole. It’s also like water. Some guys are stones but others, we’re sponges who soak and soak, absorbing the bad until we’re full up. The difference between the hard man and the soft, the guilty and the guiltless, is not a steady thing like his blood type or eye color. It changes over time according to what a person believes in, the stories he tells himself about himself. There’s a certain way of doing it where the good guys become bad and the bad good, and there’s another way that I wish I could do where there are no categories.

  Things started to fall apart when that beheading tape came out. The one of Private Crump. With all the horrible things that have happened in the years since, it’s hard to remember the way it was before that tape. Back then, a lot of guys still thought of themselves less like dead-eyed killers and more like the Peace Corps with rifles, like we’d really been sent there to build up that country and help those people. After the tape, that fantasy was over. More of us were calling the Iraqis hajjis, hating them secretly or openly, and caring more about making it out of there alive than doing anything to improve the place. There was even talk about suicide pacts. Groups of twos and threes, whole squads of us who’d agreed that if we were about to get captured by jihadis, someone would pull the pin on a grenade and take everybody out, friend and foe alike. Anything seemed better than winding up on one of those tapes.

  Not even Al Jazeera would show the whole thing, but you could buy a copy in the bazaar. A dollar for a DVD in a plastic sleeve. Even little kids were selling them. A guy from First Platoon bought one and it got passed around the company until pretty much everyone had seen it, and even the hardest motherfucker couldn’t play it off like he was just as gung ho afterward. Shit gave me nightmares, which were already becoming a problem after Galvan shot up that truck near Triangletown. But the dreams weren’t about what I’d seen, the man and his wife, the two kids, the sick-looking girl and the little boy with the messed-up arm. I thought of them all the time but they never made it into my dreams. No blood and gore, no dead bodies snapping back to life, like the ones that bother guilty people in the movies. Instead, I started having this dream where I was onstage under bright lights. There was a huge audience out there, most of them dressed in tuxedos and fancy gowns, and everybody was waiting for me to say something, to deliver a final line they wanted to hear, so they could get up and go home, but I had no idea what I was supposed to say.

  The war had turned for the worse—everyone knew that—but we didn’t know just how bad it would get. Like going over a big hump on a roller coaster, the feeling of everything hanging in midair and about to fall—that’s how it was. No one, not even Higher, knew if our deployment would last a few more weeks or forever. Rumors spread like the flu, and possible redeployment dates for our unit were tossed around, but when those dates came and went, and nothing happened, we were like a cult that’d expected the world to end on a certain day, but it didn’t. The world is always still there in the morning, and you can only take so much disappointment. After a while most of us stopped obsessing about when we’d go home, fooling ourselves into believing home didn’t exist, the entire idea of it was a lie, or worse, this place was home.

  The weather got hotter until it was like a furnace baking any good feeling out of us. Made you listless and stupid till you couldn’t get a thought across. I found it tough most mornings to summon the small amount of willpower needed to stumble outside and smoke the day’s first cigarette. Those of us nicotine freaks in the platoon worked on Blornsbaum until he reversed his policy and allowed us to smoke inside the bay on our cots. We stripped down to our shorts, lay there sweating, and didn’t move unless someone with rank ordered us to. The nights were just as bad. We sweated through our dreams and woke with bloodshot eyes and headaches from dehydration, sneezing away the plaster-fine dust that was everywhere, no one really knew where it came from, but it hung in the air like spilled talcum powder and settled on us all night long.

  Yo
u went to bed dusty and woke up dusty. You went to bed hot and woke up hot. Morale was down the tubes, but on our crew, Galvan seemed to tolerate things better than most. There was something about him, I guess you could call it his coolness, a kind of steely ease he had, like a well-built machine with tight tolerances. He could work longer than the rest of us in the motor pool before he had to quit, which was no small thing. It wasn’t even full-on summer yet, but the sun was like a nuclear bomb bleaching our desert camo almost white, the cotton stiff with a crust of old dried sweat. You could practically take off your pants and stand them up on their own, they were that crusty, and we were too, hands and necks salty, sunburned, constantly flaking off pieces of dead skin. The heat was like nothing I’d ever felt before, and that’s coming from a kid raised in the Dirty Dirty. Hearing the guys in the platoon bitch about it, Blornsbaum would say something like, “You think this is bad, well, some folks have it a lot worse. You start feeling sorry for yourselves, just think about them.”