The Sandbox

by David Zimmerman

  I make for the door, sprinting as fast as I can. As I’m rounding the factory gate, my foot catches on a piece of rebar sticking out of cement block and I go down. Hard. I land with my knee turned in and I hear it pop. The pain races from my knee to my head and back again. It fills me up entirely. I try to stand, but it’s no good. I fall before I can put any weight on my leg. Shit. I drag myself as best as I can across the highway and into the ditch across the way. The sound of the explosion is so loud I can’t hear it. The sky turns white and then orange and then black.

  94

  I wake to the sound of humming. The Sesame Street theme. My ears ring so loudly I can barely hear it. It sounds as though it’s coming from a klick away. Something pets my head. Fingers trace the top of my skull from forehead to neck. I try to move and find I can’t. My body’s numb, except my left arm, which is filled with pins and needles. My twisted leg doesn’t hurt, which is good. And then I realize it’s bad. The gentle hand strokes my cheek.

  Herman’s huge black eyes look down at me. His head fills the sky. He smiles. I try to smile back, but I’m not sure my lips are moving the way they’re supposed to move. Somewhere in the far distance I hear a faint popping sound, and I wonder if it’s coming from inside my own head. Herman stops humming for a moment and squints at something, puzzled. I want to ask him what he sees, but I don’t have the breath for it. He looks down at my face. It dawns on me then. He’s got my head in his lap.

  “Sunny day,” Herman sings, a little off-key, “chasing clouds away.”

  I don’t know how long we sit like this, but it feels like all day. I have absolutely no desire to move. I stare up at this child’s face and wonder again whether Herman is a boy or a girl. Something about the shape of his cheekbones strikes me as distinctly feminine from this angle. Who are you, Herman? As trivial as this may seem, my frustration amounts almost to a rage. They’ve stolen everything from you, Herman, haven’t they? Even your gender.

  The popping noises start up again. Herman frowns at whatever is making this sound. He notices me watching him and points. I try to push myself up with my left arm and fail. Herman puts his hands in my armpits and tugs until I’m slumped against his chest. Nothing hurts, and I know it should. This frightens me, but not as much as I would have expected. Rough cloth chafes the side of my neck, and I notice that the assault pack I found on the floorboard of the shit truck is still strapped to my back. At least I’ll have a bit of water to drink. Herman points again, still humming that song. I feel it vibrate on my cheek. It takes a while for me to get my bearings. I’m on the far side of the highway across from the factory. Something drips from my chin. My nose is bleeding.

  Herman points again. This time more emphatically. The factory is a smoldering ruin. Mounds of broken cinderblocks and huge twisted steel girders. Small dark wisps flutter across the burnt rock. But this is not what he wants me to see. He turns my head with his cold little fingers. The air above the Noses has filled with thick, black smoke. I follow it down to its source, and what I see knocks the breath out of me. The base is on fire. Worse: every few seconds, artillery shells burst, sending fountains of rock and sand hundreds of feet above the base. It seems louder now that I know what it is and can see where it’s coming from. The larger explosions vibrate the ground beneath us even here, and the smaller ones cause orange spurts of flame to bloom inside the torrents of smoke. The hills seem to be moving. That can’t be right. But it is. And then, suddenly, helplessly, I understand. Hundreds and hundreds of men pour down from the hills. There is a roar just above our heads. Three jets pass at very low altitude. Their cannons pepper the hillside. Several rockets burst at the edge of the base. I can’t imagine what it must be like inside. Has anyone survived? I think of Rankin and see his face so clearly he could be sitting next to me. I find it very hard to breathe.

  And then I notice motion in the smoke above the base. A Kiowa comes thudding up and away. It can’t be the captain’s helicopter. He’s already left. I should be riding along with him, wearing restraints. The helicopter flies low and fast, buzzing over the landscape like a dragonfly. It passes directly overhead. So close I feel the rotor wash in my hair. Then it continues on. If they saw us, then they’ve decided not to stop. I find I don’t mind too much. I just want to rest here for a while.

  Herman hums louder. He has something tucked behind his ear. Something pink. A tiny flower bud. All around us the desert floor is covered in miniature flowers desperate to take advantage of their brief moment of life after the sudden rain. Pale pink and cream, blue and lavender—that rosy lavender the sky sometimes turns just before the sun disappears. The jets circle back and shoot off several more rockets. The explosions blossom white and red and angry orange. Their sound rumbles through my chest. They are beautiful to watch—brief, unnatural, and bright, like flowers in the desert. The smoke drifts east, pulled along by the long, dry suck of the desert wind. Then I notice what I should have seen before. The rockets those jets fired weren’t aimed toward the hills outside the base. They’re exploding inside the base. American planes. American base. American dead. I can’t work it out for a moment. My head is a broken clock. And then I understand. They’ve decided to sweep the board clean. Maybe the captain called it in; or maybe when the lieutenant reported the insurgents’ surprise attack, someone higher up decided to use this as an excuse to end it all. They could easily blame the destruction of the base on the insurgents. Ultimately, we are all expendable. I want to feel something about this. Anything. But that part of me has stopped working. Herman takes the bud from behind his ear and strokes my nose with it. His face seems like one more blossom. I close my eyes. Somewhere in the distance I hear the soft thud of rotor blades. They’re coming closer. They’re coming back. Herman hums a little more, but the song has come unraveled in his mouth and these are only random notes.

  “Herman,” I say, when my battered brain finally works out what this means. I jerk my head toward the factory. “Go! You need to go. If they find you here with me, they’ll kill you too.”

  He only smiles. I tell him to leave again. Louder this time. I point with my left hand, make clumsy shooing gestures. Herman looks around, maybe thinking I see something he doesn’t, but he stays put. Finally, though it makes my heart sick to do it, I shout, “Get the fuck out of here, you dumbass! Go! Now! They’re going to fucking kill you!”

  Herman frowns at me, confused by this outburst.

  “Please,” I say, “go.” My eyes blur and I blink frantically to clear them. After all this, I can’t let Herman die too. I won’t. “Why the fuck can’t you understand?”

  He strokes my nose with his flower and murmurs something. Of course now, when he finally speaks to me, it’s useless.

  “I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Ahmed win,” I say, as much to myself as to Herman. At the mention of Ahmed’s name, he straightens up and scans the rubble around us, clutching the collar of my uniform so hard he crushes the flower.

  “Ahmed’s coming, kid,” I tell him. “You’ve got to go before he gets here.”

  The skin on his forehead bunches up. He wriggles out from under me and props my back against the cinderblocks. We are surrounded by a broken chunk of the factory’s outer wall on one side. On the other is a crumpled piece of steel from the gate. Herman crouches behind it and shades his eyes, scanning the area. God, what more do I need to do to get him moving and away, safe?

  “Ahmed, Ahmed, Ahmed!” I shout as loud as I can.

  Herman whispers something, his face now pale and pasty. The sounds mean nothing to me. When I don’t respond, he puts his hands under my armpits and tugs, but I’m much too heavy or he’s worn out from supporting me. We barely go an inch. His cheeks redden from the effort. A small vein above his temple pulses. Finally, he sits beside me, pats my shoulder, and shrugs.

  Somewhere in the valley behind us, the helicopter’s rotors throb. From the sound of it, they’re sweeping back and forth across the flat country, looking for stragglers. Or maybe me. The
crew must not have spotted us on the first pass, but it won’t be much longer before they’re back. Herman needs to run now before he’s in their sights. Door gunners love a moving target. I’ve seen it before. Stationary targets are boring. If they see him running, they’ll mow him down.

  I have no other choice. Please forgive me for this, Herman. I slap him as hard as my limp left hand can manage, which isn’t much. The expression on his face makes me feel ill. Tears stream down his cheeks. I make another shooing motion.

  “Go,” I tell him softly.

  And this time he does, scampering out between the warped metal gate and the chunks of broken concrete. After a few seconds, it’s as if he’d never been here at all. With all the strength I can muster, I push myself a little higher against the concrete blocks. Now I can see Herman again. He dashes from rock to rock like a squirrel, pausing behind the larger mounds and peeking out before moving on to the next. The relief doesn’t last long.

  They’re coming now, and that will be the end of it. And what will that mean? A bright jolt of pain and then nothing. That’s not so bad, is it? If the gunner’s a good shot, maybe there won’t even be any pain. Everything I’ve ever seen will seep right out the back of my head. Everything I’ve touched or loved or hated. The scaly calluses on the pads of Grandpa’s thumbs, my mom twisting her wedding band as she scolds me, the mirror reflection of Clarissa’s toes flexing as we make love, the white-hot flash of the IED vaporizing Lieutenant Saunders on the highway, the muscles bunching up in Rankin’s jaw as he cleans the blood from the Humvee’s seats, Herman singing about sunny days like a deaf-mute. Everything. And then a whole lot of nothing.

  None of this has turned out how I expected. Not a single minute of it. If you asked me two weeks ago, I couldn’t have told you this story. Hell, a year ago I couldn’t even have imagined it. I think that must be true of everybody who comes to find themselves in a spot like this, maybe even those who meet their end in a warm bed with clean sheets and a loving someone sitting beside them, patting their hand as they die. No one expects what they get, even if they expect it. But this much we all have in common: there’s nobody there but you when the dark comes to swallow you up.

  Maybe the story was simply meant to end this way. If I’d stayed in the cell, not much would be different. My corpse would simply be a mile away. And who knows, if I’d gone with Lopez, they might have tracked us down and hit us on the highway. This very thing might be happening now. You try and try, and still it turns out the way it’s going to turn out. It is what it is. And then you die in the desert. Try and put that in your stupid cigar box.

  It’s not so much the dying that scares me now. I just don’t want to leave yet. I’m not fucking finished. Twenty-four years? My grandfather got nearly three times that. And I wasted most of what I had. If I could have ten more years, that would be enough. Even five. Even one. Jesus, I’d be happy to see the sun rise tomorrow. What a Goddamn waste. I grit my teeth. Sand crunches. Is this what my life adds up to? There isn’t any point thinking like this. It’s almost over. Think of something sweet. A long jump from a tall cliff. The upward rush of air. The nerves in my belly jangling in happy terror. And then the pop of the silk chute and the fast, hard jerk of the harness catching my fall. After that, it’s all softness and gliding.

  More fire on the mountain. Across the highway, something in the factory grounds explodes with a dull thud. Gravel patters across the smoking rubble. Small dark bits of cloth or doll-stuffing flutter up into the air and drift across the rocks. Some of them twirl high into the hard blue sky. Dark green butterflies. Thousands of them. I know it can’t be true, but that’s exactly what it looks like—like someone dropped a butterfly bomb. And then I understand. The dirty green butterflies drifting across the crumbled concrete have numbers on their wings. Fifty-dollar butterflies. Hundred-dollar butterflies. A wind whips down from the Noses, filling the air with dust. It also sucks thousands of bills up into the air. An impossible amount of cash, a huge green cloud of money. The helicopter pilot must see the money cloud too and wonder what it means. The thudding of the rotors gets closer, but they continue sweeping back and forth behind me. They won’t spot me until they’re directly overhead.

  Herman chooses this moment to make a dash across the highway. I crane my neck and watch the Kiowa wheel around and come this way. The helicopter pilot has seen Herman as well. He flies straight ahead, no longer swinging back and forth above the valley. I have thrown everything away for this small child. If I do not succeed in this, I have not succeeded in anything. I cannot let them get him. No matter what that means.

  Once I decide what I’m going to do, it only takes a moment to set it all in place. I wrestle one of the flares out of my assault pack, pop off the cap and screw it onto the detonator. I rest the flare on my stomach and feel for a rock big enough to bang it on. Herman seems to realize what the sound in the air behind him means. He runs faster, jumping over the mounds of rubble, his skinny legs a blur. All the speed in the world won’t do him any good when that Kiowa swoops down behind him. But I don’t intend to let that happen. I twist around and try to get a read on how fast the helicopter is moving. With the rock lodged between my legs and the flare’s tube tilted at the correct angle, I should be able to hit it. Even if I don’t bring it down, it might just distract the pilot long enough for Herman to escape, because if the Kiowa does stay in the air, it’ll come hunting me instead. The Kiowa’s shadow races almost half a kilometer ahead of it. I need to pop the flare just as its shadow crosses the highway.

  The rotors pound the air. Each thud seems impossibly slow. The helicopter’s purple twin glides across my useless legs, blotting out the sun for a moment. I hold my breath. Sweat makes a puddle of my face. I wonder briefly about the possibility that they’re coming back to rescue me. What if I’m making a terrible mistake? And then it’s too late. Its shadow kisses the asphalt, and I pound that flare as hard as I can. It shoots off with a beautiful whoosh of sparks. When the flare bursts, the Kiowa wobbles. Black smoke mixes with the red. I’m not certain what the flare hit, if it hit anything, but the helicopter’s engine sounds unsteady. The door gunner fires wildly, unsure where his target is. The rounds ricochet off the twisted steel around me, making it gong and ping, but none of them hit me. Brass shell casings glitter as they drop to the ground.

  Twelve klicks away, a dust devil swirls across the valley floor. The world seems to have abandoned me some time ago, or me it, and now it’s flying past so quickly I can’t keep a grip on it, can’t even keep my feet on solid ground. From this vantage, upside down from the rest of my life, the world looks a different place altogether from the one I’ve always thought it to be. Using my left arm, I grab on to the cinderblocks and pull. This effort makes the blood from my nose drip faster. Behind the twisted metal of the gate, there is a small space that might provide some shelter from the door gunner’s bullets. They thump into the sand all around me, ricocheting off the steel and concrete. It’s a small chance, but so were all the rest. I doubt I’ll see the sun rise tomorrow, but I’m not dead yet.