No Shelter (Holly Lin, No. 1)

by Robert Swartwood

  I don’t know for certain this will happen, but as we pull through the intersection, as we leave Marilyn behind, I hope it’s close enough to the truth.

  I hope she punches him as many times as she can.

  I hope she makes him pay.

  49

  It’s one of those silly ironies that on the worst day of my life the elevator in my apartment building is working.

  I take the stairs anyway. I let myself into my apartment and shut the door. I think about eating something—my stomach is growling—but I don’t really have an appetite. I take off my sandals, drop them to the floor, and enter the living room to find Nova sitting on the couch.

  He doesn’t say anything. He just stares back at me. His hands rest in his lap, both clutching stainless steel Berettas.

  I sit down in the recliner facing him.

  “Were you followed?” he asks.

  “No, but it doesn’t matter anyway. They know where I live and if they wanted to take me out by now, they would have.”

  Nova doesn’t respond. His thumbs slowly move back and forth over the plates of the Berettas.

  “How long have you known?”

  He keeps staring back at me.

  “Why the fuck did nobody ever tell me.” I shake my head, lean forward in my seat. “I watched them die.”

  “No”—Nova shakes his head almost imperceptibly—“you watched what they wanted you to watch.”

  “So you knew?”

  “I had my suspicions.”

  “But why ... why didn’t you ever tell me?”

  “I figured it wasn’t my place. Besides, I never knew for certain.”

  I lean back in the recliner, run my fingers through my hair. “So everybody figured it out except me.”

  “Ken was your father. Zane was your lover. After seeing what you did, there was no way you could ever step back and look at it rationally.”

  “And if I could have stepped back and looked at it rationally, what would I have seen?”

  “For starters, I was supposed to be the one who went on that yacht, not you. But Ken had switched up the rotation that morning. He’d said he wanted you there instead.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “No, but remember who gave you your guns.”

  “Zane did.”

  “That’s right.”

  “That still”—I shake my head again—“that still doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I know you, Holly. I know how particular you are about your weapons. Especially your ammunition. When you can, you like to load your own bullets. You like to make sure you touch each one before you put them in the magazine. But sometimes you’d allow Zane to load your magazines for you. Why? Because out of all of us, he was the one you trusted most.”

  I think of Zane again, turning around in Walter’s chair, Zane who I had watched die two years before.

  “Impossible,” I whisper.

  “They’d loaded blanks in the magazine.”

  “No they didn’t. I’d used the gun. I’d fired it.”

  “But had you hit anything?”

  I pause a moment, trying to remember. Everything had been happening so quickly.

  “Zane and my dad were doing most of the shooting. They went on the yacht first.”

  Nova nods, watching me closely. He doesn’t say anything.

  “But I ...”

  I don’t know why I’m doing this to myself. Trying to work it out in my head, how it could possibly have happened that the two men I trusted most in the world played me for a fool.

  But I’d seen Zane with my own eyes today. I’d heard his voice. I’d felt his hands on my arm. I’d felt his lips on my forehead.

  “Why?” I ask finally.

  “Who knows. There may not even be a reason.”

  “There has to be a reason. Zane, my father ... they were good men.”

  “Were they?”

  My teeth clenched, I get up and stalk into the kitchen. I open the fridge. The light comes on and I look at the little I have in here—the nearly empty container of milk, the V8, the aging cheese—and I wonder if I died who would be the one to clean out this fridge, what they would think, the story these few remaining items would tell.

  I close the fridge door, open the cabinet and pull out a glass. I use the tap to fill the glass and I take a long swallow, then another long swallow. I set the glass in the sink and start to turn back toward the living room when the cork board on the wall by the phone catches my eye.

  On the cork board, in the top right corner, is the Bazooka Joe comic Scooter had given me.

  Nova steps into the kitchen, leans against the open doorway.

  “You should get some sleep,” he says.

  Still staring at the comic, I say, “Do you know everything that happened today?”

  “I know two FBI agents were killed. I know Walter’s kids were taken and are being used for ransom for Delano’s flash drive.”

  “Those kids are already dead, aren’t they.”

  Nova doesn’t answer.

  I turn around so I can face him. “Answer me, Nova. Do you think Casey and David are dead already? Do you think Zane—do you think my father—is capable of killing them?”

  “People are capable of all different kinds of things.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question.”

  “You should go lie down, at least for a couple hours.”

  “I’m not tired,” I say, but it’s a lie. I’m exhausted. Whatever Zane gave me is still working its way through my system and I feel more than a little drowsy.

  “I’ll stay while you take a nap,” Nova says.

  “Walter’s not going to give them the flash drive, is he?”

  I don’t know why I ask the question. The answer is obvious. Even if Walter wants to, he cannot get to the flash drive. It is now in the safekeeping of the United States government, an organization that has always put the many before the few. The lives of two children don’t mean a thing to them.

  “They’re already dead,” I whisper. “They were dead the moment I stepped out of that car.”

  But I know that’s not true.

  For those two kids—for little Casey and David—they were dead the instant they met me.

  50

  I wake to darkness. I’m lying in my bed. The fan in the corner is blowing, set to low. I rub my eyes, start to sit up, but stop when I see that I’m not alone.

  Nova sits in a chair beside the door. He has it tipped back on two legs, leaning against the wall. My eyes are adjusted enough to the dark that I can see his eyes are closed.

  I sit up completely. I do it slow enough that the frame doesn’t squeak. I swing my feet out. I start to stand.

  “Who’s Karen?”

  Nova opens his eyes, stares straight back at me.

  I reach out, turn on the lamp beside the bed, sit back down. The frame squeaks loudly like it always does.

  “What?”

  “You talked in your sleep. You mentioned the name Karen a couple times.”

  “She’s my lesbian lover. There, I’m out of the closet. Happy now?”

  His face remains impassive. His eyes never leave my own.

  I glance at the alarm clock. Almost ten o’clock. I’ve been asleep for over four hours.

  “Do you really want to know who Karen is?”

  “Do you really want to tell me?”

  I don’t answer right away. I’d never planned on telling Nova about Karen. The only two people in the world who knew about her besides Walter were Zane and my father. Are Zane and my father, I have to remind myself.

  “It has to do with the first person I ever killed.”

  He leans forward, drops the chair back down on four legs.

  “You don’t have to tell me about it,” he says.

  “No, I want to.”

  “Why?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  But it does matter. It matters because right now Nova is the only person in the
world I trust. He is always there, no matter how much I treat him like shit. I never had an older brother, someone to look out for me, to stand up for me. Nova, despite his arrogance, despite his masochistic ways, makes the perfect substitute.

  So I tell him about Karen. A shy twenty-one-year-old girl out of Topeka, Kansas. A girl who had blond hair and blue eyes and an accent that grated on your nerves after five seconds. But she had a good heart. She was sweet. She entered the Army because she didn’t do well in school. She tried, but no matter how hard she studied she always received poor grades. The only places that would hire her were fast-food restaurants and the local mom-and-pop grocery stores. But Karen didn’t want that. She wanted to make a difference.

  We came to Iraq about the same time. We were assigned the same barracks.

  Within a minute of arriving Karen introduced herself to me and the rest of the girls. She told each of us her life story. She told us about her boyfriend back home who was an auto mechanic. She told us about how he had promised they would get married after her tour of duty. She told us about the house they would eventually buy, the small yard, the back porch, the children they would have (one boy and one girl) and how during the summers they would rent an RV and one year travel to the Atlantic, the next year to the Pacific.

  None of the other girls cared much for Karen. They especially hated her accent. She would even say things like “y’all” and “how do.” I seemed to be the only one who could stomach her, and because of this we became fast friends.

  The surprising thing about Karen is she wasn’t afraid of the danger. She knew how to handle her weapon. She knew how to fight. She could run a mile in under five minutes. She could do one hundred pushups without breaking a sweat. For a small, petite girl out of Topeka, Kansas, she was a true spitfire.

  Why I got along with Karen I still don’t know. Sometimes I thought it was because I was so exotic to her. I couldn’t imagine there being many Japanese Americans in Topeka. And if there were, I couldn’t imagine many of them wasting their time with a girl like Karen. But she had her surprises.

  At nights I would lie in my bunk and turn on my iPod and listen to music. Tool, Sublime, Radiohead, Linkin Park, Alice in Chains, Rage Against the Machine, Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots. Karen asked me one time if she could listen to my earphones. I gave them to her, thinking she wouldn’t care for any of the songs. But she closed her eyes and smiled and started bouncing her head to the music. When she took the earphones off, she asked me what my favorite band was.

  I told her it was a toss up between Tool and Alice in Chains.

  “They’re not bad,” she said. “I do love Maynard. He’s just so mysterious, you know?”

  And she smiled mischievously, something I hadn’t expected from this girl who I had thought only listened to Dolly Parton and Travis Tritt and Garth Brooks.

  I asked her what her favorite band was. She said she didn’t know, she had so many.

  “But do you wanna know what my favorite song is?”

  I asked what.

  “Here, let me see your iPod again.”

  She scrolled through the list until she came to the one she wanted. She selected it, then handed me the earphones.

  I put them on. There was a moment of silence and then I heard the pulsing bass and then the heavy guitars and then Zack De La Rocha started up about how the main attraction is distraction. The song was “No Shelter” by Rage Against the Machine.

  I asked Karen why she liked it so much. She said she loved that one line, the one about the front line being everywhere and there being no shelter anywhere. She said she thought it applied to the entire world. She said that was the main reason she joined the Army. She wanted to do something important with her life. She wanted to try to make shelter in any way possible. If not for herself, then for her family. For her boyfriend and their eventual children.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth about the song. How it was really about commercialism and the mass media doing everything it can to manipulate people’s minds. How it promoted the government or the Army in no way at all.

  Three months later she was beaten up and raped.

  I pause a moment, waiting to see Nova’s reaction to this. As usual, he doesn’t give one.

  He says, “Who was responsible?”

  “An American soldier.”

  51

  Because of our location we had no running water. We had to do our business in the porta potties stationed around the base. One night Karen had gone out to one of these porta potties. She had done her business. When she had finished and opened the door, someone was waiting for her. He punched her in the nose. He knocked her down. Then he hit her two more times until she was unconscious and raped her.

  “Apparently it happened a lot over there,” I say. The fan keeps blowing in the corner, making the drapes over the windows sway. “Some women were knocked out and raped and then left there to be raped by whoever else came along.”

  “What was done about it?”

  “At the time? Nothing.”

  I forced Karen to go to our CO. She hadn’t wanted to; she was embarrassed. She said she couldn’t even identify the man if she had to. I wasn’t there when she spoke to the CO. I only found out later what the CO said. He had apologized but asked her what else could she expect—we were at war.

  I told Karen we would contact someone else, but she told me just to forget it. Her face was pale, her eyes red. The air was so dry in the desert that it dried the sweat off our bodies. It did the same to tears.

  “Don’t make a big deal about it, okay?” She hugged her knees up to her chest. “I’m just going to forget it ever happened. You should too.”

  But I couldn’t forget. Now every male soldier I looked at was a suspect. It was strange; the enemy had suddenly become the ones inside our base.

  I started asking around. A few of the girls admitted that they had heard stories of other women being raped in the same way. None ever admitted it had been them. But sometimes I could see it in their eyes. A flicker, nothing more than that. It was the same thing I now saw in Karen’s eyes. Before there had been an energetic fire, a passion to try to give shelter to the world, undo all the front lines. But that fire had been extinguished. She became withdrawn. Detached. Distant. One time I found her behind our building, punching the wall. She’d held her broken and bloodied hand up to me and said it didn’t even hurt.

  I called my father. He was stationed somewhere halfway around the world; I never knew the exact location. I told him the situation. I told him what the CO’s answer had been. I told him I suspected it was happening to other girls. He was quiet a moment. I could hear the static on the line and pictured a giant black hole between me and him. Then he said, “You’re a smart girl, Holly. You know how to make it right.”

  There was only one way I knew how to make it right, but I refused to consider the option. It was just too extreme. It was just too ... unlike me.

  Then Karen became even more detached. One of the girls found her in our building banging her head against the tiles. She was sent to the infirmary. She was given medication. It was decided she should go back home.

  The day before she left, however, she overdosed.

  I thought about what my dad had told me. How I was a smart girl. How I knew how to make it right.

  I decided that night—just hours after Karen killed herself—how I was going to do that.

  I began making nightly trips to the porta potties. I would wait inside for five minutes. It was stifling hot. The combination of piss and shit was severe. I would spend the time counting how long I could hold my breath.

  When I opened the door I would be expecting someone on the other side, someone who would try to punch me in the nose, push me down, knock me unconscious. But there was never anybody there.

  A week passed. Then another week. I was beginning to lose hope. I was beginning to look at the rest of the male soldiers during the day with hate. They were all guilty. They were all hi
ding something.

  Finally one night during the third week someone was waiting for me. I could hear his boots crunching outside the porta potties. He was being too sloppy. He was getting away with too much and his ego had grown too big.

  When I opened the door he was there and threw a punch at my face but I ducked it and kicked him in the balls, grabbed his neck and twisted it so hard I thought I might tear his head from the rest of his body. His body went limp in my arms. I dropped him to the ground. There was nobody around. The night was momentarily silent. The sky was clear.

  And at once a series of impulses began to race through my mind like a line of dominoes: I wanted to kick him. I wanted to pull out my knife and stab him a hundred times. I wanted to cut off his dick and stuff it in his mouth and then leave him out for the rest of his brothers-in-rape to see (this last thought so gruesome and unlike me that for a moment I actually questioned my own sanity).

  In the end I took his body and buried it out by the generator. I kept his dog tags. His name was Michael Blair. I had seen him around. I remembered him as one of the few men who had tried talking to Karen when she first arrived. He had a baby face. He had large hands.

  Nobody saw me. I returned to my bunk with a great sense of disappointment. I’d wanted more. I’d wanted to keep him alive longer. At least until I’d tortured him. Until I’d gotten some names, other men who played the same game. Maybe he wouldn’t have known anybody else, but that wouldn’t have mattered. I would have tortured him until he made up a few.

  The next day he was reported missing. Three days later his body was found. The entire base was searched. I hadn’t had time to move his dog tags. I’d placed them in the corner of my locker. I don’t know why I kept them, or why I didn’t hide them better. I think by that point I just didn’t care anymore. Before I hadn’t minded fighting in this war. Now I didn’t see the point. We were fighting against one type of evil while another type hid behind their uniforms. It reminded me exactly of what Karen had said about the front line being everywhere. It was true: there was no shelter.