The Sandbox

by David Zimmerman

  For some reason, when they carted off half the base, they left behind an artillery battery, but they didn’t leave anyone trained to use it. Rankin thinks they just forgot about them. And us, I told him.

  For the most part, we feel safe here. Or at least as safe as anybody can feel in a place where half the population wants to kill you and the other half hates you. Once the Army took over the Cob, they set up floodlights and guard towers and a minefield. Ribbons of concertina wire curl through the sand. We’ve got M60s and wire-guided missiles, .50-caliber Ma Deuces, Eagle Mount 240 Bravos, and plenty of M4s and M16s. Nevertheless, there’s one thing that’s never far from any of our minds, especially on those nights when the wind whips up from the desert and the stars disappear and mortar rounds start dropping into the compound. The Khalifa’s brother took the fortress in a single night, and in the morning he stuck Omar’s head on a pike.

  6

  The storm appears at the far edge of the plain as we reach the outskirts of Kurkbil, the village just below the base. A bulging wall of dark and dirty yellow that stretches from the floor of the plain to the upper edge of the sky. It moves as quickly as a tank at top speed and seems to obliterate everything in its path. This beast sweeps across the desert like the Hand of God. The way it looks, I can almost imagine it as a living creature, a huge and malign force bent on swallowing the world from horizon to horizon. Nothing escapes the storm. And once it engulfs something—a house, a tree, a boulder, a road, a man—it seems to have vanished forever. A sandstorm looks like the end of the world.

  7

  Even before we reach the base, Lieutenant Blankenship is shouting orders over the radio. He’s out of the Humvee before it comes to a full stop, swinging a green metal lockbox and yelling for stretchers. His teenager’s face looks pinched and serious and we work quickly to do what he asks. The insides of the Humvees are smeared with blood. Everyone looks pale and dirty. Faces blur. Boots beat the sand. Voices are raised. We hustle, for our wounded and for ourselves. Nobody wants to be outside when the storm hits. Already we can hear the winds. They shriek and rumble as though the storm is scraping the desert down to bare rock.

  Studdie and I carry Kellen to the clinic. Doc Greer gave him a shot of morphine on the drive back to the base and Kellen doesn’t open his eyes until we settle him into a cot. Even then his eyelids only flutter briefly, showing just a narrow arc of white before they close. Studdie wasn’t on this run to Inmar, and I can tell from the breathless way he questions us about it that he’s sorry he missed the fight. Doc Greer won’t answer him. In fact, he turns his face away from each question, so I end up laying it out for him. Studdie’s a tall guy with broad shoulders and thin, sandy hair. He grew up in a military family, went to an academy high school, and enlisted the day he turned eighteen. His grandfather woke him up that morning by telling him he could enlist today or leave the house. Until he’d done his service he couldn’t take part in the family business, a turpentine plantation just outside LaGrange, Georgia. But Studdie says he would have done it anyway, and I believe him.

  I run from there to help secure the motor pool and tell Ahmed to head home to the village. Ahmed is a local guy who works on base most days, filling sandbags, unfilling sandbags, burning trash, helping Cox in the machine shop, and cleaning vehicles. Basically, he does the shitwork. As scrawny as he is, Ahmed can heft a good bit of weight and always seems to be busy even when he’s not doing anything, a skill I’d like to learn. I think he’s in his twenties, despite the wrinkles on his forehead and the thinness of his hair, but he could just as easily be thirty-five or forty. When I find him, he’s listening to an old Walkman Cox gave him and messing about with a pile of screws. As soon as Ahmed sees me, he pulls back his yellow-and-white-checked headscarf and smiles, making his eyebrows meet above his nose, but he doesn’t waste time with his usual chat and gets the hell out of here after I tell him the news. Everyone respects a sandstorm.

  Just after I finish winding down one of the bay doors, I hear the crunch of sandy boots on concrete. It’s Lopez. He stands in the doorway beside supply room number two and watches me. The wind ruffles the collar of his uniform. Behind him I can see the storm swallowing the highway leading into Kurkbil. It looks like a moving wall of night. I briefly imagine standing alone before the full force of the storm, allowing it to sweep me away. Lopez steps through the doorway.

  “What were you saying to him?” He gestures behind him with his thumb.

  “What?” I ask, honestly having no idea what he’s referring to. I’m still thinking about the storm.

  “Ahmed. What were you talking to him about? The IED?”

  “No,” I say, “I told him to get home before the storm arrives.”

  “Right.” He spits the word out. “He couldn’t see it coming on his own.”

  I clench my jaws to keep from saying something smart.

  “Not inside the motor pool. No.”

  This seems to stop him for a moment. In the gathering darkness, his eyes seem very shiny, like wet black rocks. He steps forward, and for a second or two, I think he’s getting ready to punch me. His face looks so grim and determined. I glance around him to see if anybody else can see us. There’s no one on the parade ground, and Specialist Cox, the mechanic, has already left the motor pool. We’re alone. Lopez takes another step forward and screws up his face as though he’s about to shout.

  “What, Lopez?” The storm is close enough for me to have to raise my voice. “What do you want?” The look he’s giving me is starting to get on my nerves.

  “I know what you’re up to, Durrant.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?” This whole conversation is creeping me out. He seems to be on the verge of confessing some terrible secret I am certain I do not want to be privy to.

  “I know why you ran into the factory today.” He pauses and gives me a meaningful look. “Did you sabotage the tire, so we would have to stop there? I found a clean cut on the tire. Only a knife would make that.”

  “No, what the fuck is up with you, man? How the hell could I make a tire blow out just when I wanted?”

  He scrunches up his face into this exaggerated expression of disbelief. Now I really want to punch him. I realize I’m clenching my fists and force myself to jam them in my pockets, which are still slightly moist. I reek of piss. With the storm coming, I didn’t have time to change. This makes me even angrier. Remember what happened the last time, I tell myself. Don’t be an idiot.

  “I know what you’re up to,” he says again, and then he points to his eye, like a warden in a second-rate prison movie. “I’ll be watching you.”

  I want to say, that’s right, man, that’s exactly where my fist will land. Instead, I just stand there and stare at him like my head is empty. He takes two steps backward before turning to walk away. Asshole.

  8

  I make a mad dash to the Comm Trailer. I figure everyone else will be battening down the hatches and I’ll get a little extra time on the satellite phone. I’m not sure it’ll work when the storm hits, so I need to move fast. It’s nibbling at the edge of town as I duck in. The sun looks like a dirty penny.

  Sergeant Guzman is in the process of shutting everything down. He pulls the cigar out of his mouth and groans when he sees me. The sergeant is way too big for his uniform. In fact, it looks as though his uniform is stuffed with the bodies of two men and topped with a single, miniature head. There are a lot of big guys in the military, so this should tell you something.

  “I’ll be fast,” I say.

  “The hell you will, Joe.” Sergeant Guzman calls everyone Joe.

  “How about rock, paper, scissors? I lose, I’ll shine your boots, clean your rifle, and roll your smokes for two weeks.”

  Sergeant Guzman is a notorious gambler. I’ve heard guys say he’ll bet on the length of time it will take to grow a moustache or how many puppies a stray dog will have. I don’t know about that, but I did see him bet on how many times Lieutenant Blankenship would refer to the seven-das
h-eight handbook in a single morning briefing. He won with a spread of twelve to nine. I’ve heard him call in football bets to his bookie in the States. The man has never missed wagering on a scorpion fight. Today is no different. The sergeant doesn’t hesitate.

  “Make it three. And you only get five minutes. No more.”

  “Deal,” I say.

  We knock fists. One, two, three. I hold out paper. He holds out rock.

  “You better make it fast, fuckwit,” Sergeant Guzman says, “because I am not, I repeat, I am not riding out the storm in this shithole trailer.”

  “I’ll be quick,” I say and give him the number I want to call.

  “Goddamn right you will, Joe,” he says and shakes his head.

  The phone rings six times and just as I’m getting ready for the machine, someone picks up.

  “Hello?” I say, and then after a half-second, I hear what I just said in the earphone again. This stuttering seems to happen every other time I use the phone. It throws me off balance and makes it hard to concentrate on what I’m saying. Static hisses and swirls down the lines. I imagine the route my voice takes—beamed up into orbit and then down to some satellite tower on the East Coast, into the phone lines and out across a string of creosote-soaked pine poles to a little brick apartment building on the south side of Savannah.

  “Toby?” the small tentative voice says, and my heart turns into warm pudding. It’s my fiancée, Clarissa, soon to be the mother of my child.

  “Oh, baby, am I glad to hear your voice.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Ten minutes.”

  “Five fucking minutes. Tops,” the sergeant says, tapping his watch.

  “I better get to it then,” Clarissa says

  “Get to what? I was the one who called you.”

  “I’ve been thinking about what I wanted to say the next time you called. Last time we got cut off before we really said anything.”

  A million worlds away on the other side of the ocean, Clarissa’s lips brush up against the mouthpiece, but she doesn’t say a word. I take a deep breath and stretch my neck until it cracks. I don’t like the way this conversation is going and we’ve barely said a dozen words.

  “How’s our little Herman?” I ask, after a long moment of awkward silence.

  “Toby, I never agreed to name him after your grandfather.” She swallows and I can hear her throat make a dry click. “We don’t even know if it’s a boy.”

  “But that night you said—”

  “I was drunk. You can’t count that.”

  “Damn right I can. We were also drunk the night we made Herman, and that sure as hell counts.”

  “That’s what I’m calling about.”

  “No, I called y—wait, is something wrong?” My chest tightens. “Did something happen at the doctor’s?”

  “Nothing happened. It’s just that . . . well . . . I . . .”

  A horrible thought occurs to me, one every soldier with a girl back home has at least once a week. “Did you meet someone else? Is that what this is about?” I don’t really believe this. Can’t, in fact. I’m not sure why I said it.

  She breathes. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to picture her face. All I come up with is her left hand. The one with the small J-shaped scar below the thumb. I would polish Sergeant Guzman’s boots for a month if I could kiss it right now.

  “What is it?” I say after a long silence. “I’m sorry I said that— well—it was—it’s been a bad day.” I want to tell her about the IED attack, but I know she’ll never understand. I tried before. She got frightened. I got frustrated. There’s no way to explain something like this to people back home. There just isn’t.

  She breathes loudly into the mouthpiece.

  “We’re talking in circles here,” I say, although we’re not really talking at all. “I can hear it in your voice. Something’s bothering you. Is it your parents?”

  “Toby.” There’s an edge to her voice. I wish we could start the conversation over again. It always takes a little while for both of us to relax and really talk to each other when I call, but today is different. It’s much worse.

  “I just didn’t want—”

  “Stop, Toby. Just listen to me for a second. Listen.” She pauses again, even longer this time, and I think I hear traffic sounds in the background. A radio.

  “I’m listening.”

  The satellite phone’s receiver hisses like a leaky tire. The storm is blowing my voice away. Oh, shit, I think, please don’t cut off now.

  “Here it fucking comes,” Sergeant Guzman says, watching from a window in the office. He taps the glass with a finger. I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or to himself. “This looks like a mean one.”

  “What?” Clarissa says. Her voice suddenly sounds very far away and it’s not just the faulty connection. “I can’t hear you. Maybe you should call back. This is killing me. I don’t—”

  I force myself to modulate my voice with limited success. “Don’t what, honey, don’t what?”

  “Never mind. I’m sorry. I’m just having a bad day, too. Maybe we should try this another time when we’re both in a better mood. Why don’t you call me tomorrow? Oh, yeah, I forgot, you only get so many calls each—”

  “Look, I know it’s hard.” I don’t want to hang up yet, so I try a different tactic. “It’s about killing me, too. If I could leave right now and come home, I’d get on a plane tonight. But I can’t. Like you said, we’ve already talked about all this.” I hear the pleading tone in my voice and it sounds fucking pathetic. I stop to clear my throat. “I’ll be back in ten months. I know I promised eight, but I got extended, and there’s not a hell of a lot I can do. They’ve got you, body and soul, as soon as you sign the paper. You can wait ten months, can’t you? Come on. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. You. This baby.”

  “I miss you so much. But sometimes I’m not sure if I can do this any more. If it got any worse, I’d—” She stops suddenly.

  You’d what? I wonder. But I can’t ask that. I’m not sure I want the answer. But then again, I’ll never stop thinking about it if I don’t. I can’t seem to help myself.

  “What are we talking about here? Are you saying you’d—”

  I don’t even have to say it. She knows what I mean. And I’m not sure if this should reassure me or scare the hell out of me. Somehow it does both.

  “No, no, don’t be silly. You’re my fiancé,” Clarissa says, but she doesn’t sound so sure about it and this worries me worst of all. “It’s just . . . it’s harder than I thought. Being apart. Sometimes I have to look at a photo to get your face straight in my head. It’s weird. And I’m really scared about the other thing.” There’s a long pause. I want to bang the phone against the wall. “I’m worried about how I’ll—I don’t want to be like my mother.”

  “What are you talking about? You’ll be a great mother. The best. You can’t think this way. It’ll only bring you down. You—”

  “Toby. Wait. Let’s not talk about this now. I know you’ve got a lot of stress. You don’t need this too. The next time you call, I’ll be in a better mood. Today just isn’t . . . good.” Her voice becomes ragged with tears. I feel my eyes fill. Shit. I look around. Sergeant Guzman stares out the window with a vacant expression on his face. Probably wondering how to beat me next time we play rock, paper, scissors. I mash my eyeballs with the heel of my palm.

  “I love you, honey. We’ll get through this. It’s tough, I know, but just think how happy we’ll be. You and me and Herman. Or not Herman, but . . . the baby.” I keep on like this for a while before I realize the line has gone dead. It’s the storm, I tell myself. It’s the storm that did it. I stand holding the phone pressed to my forehead.

  The sergeant looks over at me. “You done, Lover Joe?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “the line went dead.”

  Sergeant Guzman gives me a sympathetic look and a slow shake of the head. I know he thinks I’m lying and it makes
my face get hot. He’s a career man, like most of the really good sergeants I’ve met. His round, almost girlish face fills with wrinkles and he runs a hand over his Marine-style high-and-tight haircut. He can’t be more than a couple years older than I am, but the way he acts you’d think it was ten. Sergeant Guzman’s got two kids back home in Atlanta, and you can tell being a daddy has somehow aged him on the inside.

  “Don’t take it too hard, Joe,” he says, giving me a gentle shove toward the door. “Whether I want to or not, I listen to these calls every day. Jody problems are always the same.”

  Jodies are men back home who steal soldiers’ girlfriends and wives. We sing songs about them when we march. We joke about them as we eat. But lying in our cots at night, we fear them. They will steal your future just as surely as a bullet or a bomb.

  “It’s not like that,” I tell him, hoping it’s true. “The storm knocked out the connection.”

  “Okay, Joe,” he says, and then flicks a switch and the lights go out.

  9

  It takes me thirty minutes to find my tent. Usually it’s a two-minute walk. The sand scours my hands and cheeks. It finds every bit of exposed flesh and tries to grind it away. I think about Clarissa. She said she had to look at a photo to remember my face. I know she can’t have forgotten the first time she saw it. I remember that day as clearly as anything that’s ever happened in my life, and I know she must still remember too. She has to. It was a few months after my grandpa died. I’d bought a new parachute for a trip with my jumping buddy, Frick. We drove all night to a famous bridge in West Virginia, one of the best base-jumping spots on the continent. The perfect bridge. This was my farewell trip. By then I’d already failed out of college and signed up for the Army. We took turns throwing ourselves off that huge bridge. It was beautiful. Early May. A sky as blue as the ocean looks when you’re a child. The new leaves still had that bright neon green color. We took drags from a one-hitter painted to look like a cigarette before each jump, but I would have felt high without it. My body burst into song each time I chucked myself into that gorge.