Youngblood

by Matt Gallagher

  Just kidding. I’ll bring you both.

  Have you calmed down? You dream of America, but staying here is best. We can have the life you see in the movies, here in Iraq, in Ashuriyah. The America you imagine no longer exists, if it ever did. You need to know that your father lives in more luxury than anyone from my hometown. Until I came to Iraq, until I met your father, I had never been in a house as large as yours. Or known a man who owned five Mercedes. Or seen a marble fountain, like the eagle in your driveway. Be careful what you ask for, Night Flower, that’s all I’m saying.

  We will visit, of course. I will show you the monuments in New York and Washington, and take you to the California beaches. But Ashuriyah will be home. Our children will know the meaning of family, and be part of the new Iraq.

  I know you’re laughing now. Yes, a new Iraq. They call me the “money man” for a reason. I can—and will—make your father the most important sheik in the province, much more important than just being in charge of Sahwa. We will build roads. We will build schools. We will build power stations and plants. We’re already planning the largest hospital in the country, bigger than anything in Baghdad, something that will make Ashuriyah one of the most important places in the Middle East.

  If you still don’t understand, talk to your father. He knows. He believes.

  Forty soldiers sleep around me now in the outpost, their minds far away, on everything that is typical. They are here to survive and endure, not to change. All they care about is getting home alive. I used to blame them for this, but that was unfair. I will get them home alive. But I won’t be going with them. I’m staying here. For you. For us.

  I met your brother yesterday. I’ll tell you about it next time I visit.

  Give your father my best. Good night, Night Flower, tomorrow awaits. Allah is One, the heart is one, and the heart only belongs to the One,

  E.

  BOOK III

  * * *

  34

  * * *

  None of the locals could remember a Ramadan like it, not even the elders. The summer heat was supposed to blow away in the wind, they said, not wash away in rain. If they thought it meant anything, though, they kept it to themselves.

  I fasted through the holy month, alone among the occupiers. I didn’t quite feel cleansed by it, but it gave me something to talk about with Rana. She was a source now. Our source. We came on the days she said to, when her husband was away in Baghdad managing his concrete business. Her information wasn’t great, but it wasn’t bad, either. She knew of some cache spots along the canal.

  She didn’t speak much of the ghost who haunted her, though during our third meeting she let me read one of his love letters. When I handed it back, I searched her face for signs of sadness or reminiscence. I found neither. Instead, she was studying me behind her arrow nose, probing, considering. I swallowed away a blush. She folded up the letter, placing it in a hidden pocket of the gray cotton dress she always seemed to wear.

  Snoop came to the hut with me at first, but eventually he stayed with the men in the vehicles outside. “To play cards,” he said. We were short-timers now. For the soldiers, home wasn’t just a thing we’d left anymore. It was a thing that awaited.

  Out there, the war endured. A land of bullets and fatwas, out there assured only death. I understood that now. The desert had always meant death for strange infidels far from home, from Alexander the Great to Elijah Rios. There were no dust storms in the sheika’s hut, though, no scorpions or holy wars. It smelled of lush wildflowers, not hot trash. With her, I felt no headaches. We listened to the playful shouts of her boys, not the shrieks of mortar shells. The war existed beyond the hamlet. In the hut—in the hut was something else.

  She spoke of the past with small, soft hands flitting toward the sky. I spoke of the present with anxious proclamations. I told her to smile more. She told me to find her reasons to.

  One dreary afternoon, she asked how we’d come to find Shaba’s remains. I didn’t want to say, but she insisted.

  I talked about the wake, about Haitham’s call, about the fatwa that relegated Ibrahim to Camp Independence, about all the tribal leaders who knew the bones were there but had pled ignorance. “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get them. We’ll get them all.”

  She stayed silent for many seconds.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Ashuriyah is hell,” she said, her face setting like flint. “How do you defeat the devil in his own home?”

  35

  * * *

  The summer before I joined ROTC was California bright and filled with crystal skies. Will came home for a few weeks and kept talking about the time he’d called in an airstrike on the Taliban. Marissa and I decided to give it another try, at least until we went back to our respective campuses in the fall, spending our mornings at the lake and our evenings in friends’ basements.

  Her sister Julie was to be married in August. Will, Mom, and I received invitations. Our dad didn’t live in our subdivision anymore, so he didn’t get one. There were rules in Granite Bay.

  Julie and Will had never really gotten along, even though they’d gone to school together. Marissa and I liked to joke that the reason for the mutual distaste was their red-blooded lust for each other. “Our kids could be double cousins!” we said. Neither sibling ever laughed with us, but we didn’t care. We had each other.

  Despite their history of antipathy, neither Will nor Julie considered themselves unreasonable, something that proved helpful when the groom, Richie Gomez, asked my brother to be a replacement groomsman—something about a Venezuelan cousin having visa issues. Richie and Will had played high school baseball together, so it made some sense, though I harbored cynical thoughts about the groom’s need to prove to the bride’s family that he wasn’t a Chavez-loving socialist, which meant trotting out Will’s dress uniform and shiny medals.

  “You’re a fool,” my mom said when I brought that up.

  “You’re an idiot,” Marissa said when I brought that up.

  The week of the wedding, I stumbled into our kitchen, seeking out the pantry. Will was pacing the linoleum tile floor.

  “Scumbag,” he said. “Creep. Coward.”

  I asked who he was ranting about.

  “Tomas Butkus,” he said. “He’s coming to the wedding.”

  It was well-known in Millennial Granite Bay that Julie and Tomas had hooked up on a camping trip, months after she began dating Richie Gomez. Well-known to everyone but Richie. Gossip peddling being gossip peddling, and gossip peddlers being gossip peddlers, the story had swirled around Richie without reaching his ears.

  “That was, like, a couple years ago,” I said. “And Julie and Tomas are friends. That’s who weddings are for.”

  “No, Jack. You’re wrong.” My potato chip munching rose with his voice, and I took a seat behind the counter. “Weddings are for people who will love and support your marriage. Not just a collection of friends.”

  “Then why are you going?”

  “That’s not the point. The point—this Lithuanian prick has no honor. He should have respect for her and for Richie, and stay the fuck away.”

  “Hmm.” He was speaking so fast that I had a hard time keeping up. I was hungry. And stoned.

  He went on to wax eloquent about HONOR. And INTEGRITY. And that lesser-known army value of NOT BEING BALTIC EUROTRASH. It all sounded quite significant and convincing, even to my pond-water mind, but one question lingered. When he finally stopped, it came off my tongue in a deluge of potato chip crumbs.

  “Will. Like, why do you care so much?”

  He looked at me, wild-eyed. “I don’t. I’m just saying.”

  After the weed wore off, I figured out why he cared. The night after he’d graduated West Point, he had proposed to the daughter of a Connecticut senator he met at a Boston bar. She said yes. Some months later my family received a terse, slightly fanatical e-mail saying the engagement was off, the wedding was off, it was all off, that Will had sworn to him
self that he’d never compromise and this was proof. He was going to be a man of principle, even if it meant sacrificing his own temporary happiness, because what was happiness in the long run but a silly, stupid emotion that was just a particular pattern of synaptic connections?

  We never talked about the e-mail or mentioned it to Will. There wasn’t much to say, other than we were there for him when he needed us.

  The wedding ceremony went well. Will was sharp and polished in his dress blues, and though the old, rich white relatives picked at him like vultures, he didn’t seem to mind. My mom patted my arm and told me perhaps I’d had a point earlier.

  “Those are the type of men who will keep your brother at war,” she said, her voice both proud and furious. “Not a grunt among them.”

  “How do you know that word?” I asked.

  “Army moms know lots of words,” she said. Then, after a pause, she smiled. “Navy daughters do, too.”

  The minister pronounced them man and wife. Bells clanged and spirits flowed. The world had never seen such joy, we all thought, and we all meant it. The stars were out, the night was calm, and the lakeside breeze blew with peace and joy and all sorts of particular patterns of synaptic connections.

  Near the end of the reception, I slow-danced with Marissa. She wasn’t a girl who got done up often, which made her loveliness all the more palpable. In her uniform of a floral, ruffled bridesmaid dress, half drunk on wine, she clung to me, describing our future house, naming our future babies, planning a life together as idyllic as it was ordinary. I beamed, belly full of beer, knowing that sloppy, irresponsible sex awaited. Shouts and screeching chairs suddenly came from behind us, near the bar. We turned that way, same as everyone else. Will was standing over a dazed Tomas, fist clenched.

  “Who am I? Who the fuck am I?” Will said. In that moment, his words almost sounded natural. “I’m an infantry officer. I’m a man with purpose. I’m a man who knows what’s right, what’s wrong, and what you are.”

  Tomas had trouble finding his feet, but his friends surrounded my brother and started crowing, chests out, drunken mania gliding through their eyes. I told Marissa that I’d be right back. Then I grabbed a metal chair, pushed into the circle, and told them if they wanted a fair fight, the Brothers Porter could certainly oblige.

  Mom polished off her glass of Irish cream and told us to get in the car—she was driving us home just as soon as she thanked Julie and Marissa’s parents for the evening.

  We didn’t say anything to one another on the drive home. As I stared out the car window at the streetlights and cul-de-sacs, I decided I wasn’t going to be a man of nothing. I wasn’t going to be a man of the idyll and ordinary. I was going to be the type of man who punched out Baltic Eurotrash at weddings for principle’s sake.

  I was going to be a soldier. I was going to be an officer. I was going to be a leader of men.

  Then I smiled at Will and patted him on the back. He needed that.

  36

  * * *

  We waited out the afternoon fall storm, the insistent pat-pat-pat of water meeting packed slabs of earth. I stood at a window watching my men teach Rana’s boys poker. They’d gathered in a Stryker to keep dry, but had lowered the ramp to let in air.

  “You brought this,” she said from across the hut. “We haven’t had so much rain for years.”

  She was teasing. At least I thought she was. I smiled shyly.

  Her home was neat and tidy, everything from winter blankets to tableware organized into wood baskets stacked like bricks in corners. I’d thought the baskets a sign of a transient lifestyle, but Rana explained she fashioned herself a “minimalist,” preferring an open space.

  “How’d you learn that word?” I asked.

  “There is a show—The Real Housewives of Cairo. My cousin in Karrada has a television. We watched it for hours when we visited last year. It was very . . .” She knocked on her forehead as she searched for the English word. “Educational.”

  I ran a hand through my sweaty hair. I’d been growing it out some, pushing the regulation length. My helmet and rifle lay near the front door. A pair of Persian carpets covered much of the main room with red diamonds and purple snowflakes. I returned to my plastic chair on the carpets, facing her. Every Iraqi man I’d met with had insisted on sitting on the ground for tradition. Rana said they just enjoyed messing with foreigners. She rose, gliding like a specter to the window, her dress concealing her feet and long black hair falling behind her.

  “It’s kind of your soldiers to play with Ahmed and Karim,” she said. Her English was no longer clipped by breaks between syllables, improving with every conversation. “They get lonely.”

  The other homes in the hamlet were abandoned and had been since the sectarian wars of 2006. Rana’s husband, an older cousin so infatuated with her that he hadn’t minded marrying the disgraced ex-lover of an American, maintained the other buildings in case any displaced al-Badris returned to the area. His name was Malek. I hadn’t met him, nor did I wish to.

  Rana moved to the kitchen counter, a thin piece of granite on the other side of the room. My eyes followed, and my nostrils filled with her perfume, a curiously muggy scent that reminded me of swamp blossoms.

  “Still no chai?” she asked. “Or food? Most Arabs don’t follow the rules of Ramadan, you know. Just the crazy ones.”

  My stomach growled from days of inattention, but I shook my head. Another meal of cold leftovers awaited after sundown.

  She brewed her tea differently from Saif, with more familiarity and less care. She scoffed when I’d said not to use distilled water, and had been more interested in the cost of his electric kettle than dismissive of it. She began boiling water and looked up, catching my eyes before they could dart away.

  “Tell me again,” she said. “About finding him.”

  “Nothing more to tell.” I’d grown weary of the topic. “Haitham told us where to dig. We dug. We found the skeleton and sent it home.”

  “To Texas,” she corrected.

  “To Texas.”

  “But how do you know it was him?” I marveled at the control in her voice, as if we were still discussing the weather. “Because of tests in a lab?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Then I tapped at a bottom tooth. “And this was missing.”

  A whimper escaped her throat, and she bent against the countertop like a broken vane. I stood, ready to do something, anything, but clueless as to what. Then the kettle whistled. I blinked and Rana was upright, pouring water into a pot. She let the green mint leaves soak and resumed her seat. At her gesturing, I did the same.

  Had I imagined her moment of anguish? I wasn’t sure.

  “I remember the day he did that,” she said. It took me a moment to realize she was talking about Shaba’s tooth. “Some of our guards were playing tetherball and asked Elijah to join. He was so bad, but tried so hard. There was a lot of blood. It took many towels to clean his face.”

  “You must miss him a lot,” I said.

  She shook her head. “It was a long time ago.”

  Rana went to swirl the teapot. When she returned, she asked about California. I told her I hadn’t appreciated it growing up, but missed it now: the sand, the ocean. Impressing her mattered more than the truth. Her eyes seemed to light up at the mention of the beach. I started to tell her I’d take her someday, if she wanted, but coughed instead. That wasn’t possible. I turned toward the window, where the rain was being replaced by drips of sunlight. There were shouts and the sound of a soccer ball being kicked around. I didn’t need to look out to know that Washington and the jundis were playing with the kids.

  “You sure they won’t say anything?” I asked. “We don’t want to get anyone in trouble. I know you’re taking a huge risk talking to us. To me.”

  “Who is there to tell?” A caustic sound slipped out of her, something between a groan and a laugh. She had a point. We hadn’t come across anyone else living in the area. “And they have fun playing with the soldi
ers,” she continued. “They understand for that to continue, their father doesn’t need to know.”

  “At least let me pay for information,” I said. “It’s been good. Found ten rockets at the canal yesterday.”

  She waved away my offer. “Just talk I hear. Glad it helps.”

  She moved to the kitchen counter again to pour herself a glass of chai. Impulsively, she started running in place, bouncing on her toes and lightly punching at the air, her sandals slapping against the floor. She stopped midstride and laughed at herself. “I can’t believe I did that with you here,” she said. “You must think I’m strange.”

  “Not at all,” I said, though I did, a bit. “A workout?”

  “Tae Bo? My cousin had videos of a black man who did this.” It took everything in the world right then for me not to laugh; apparently the nineties weren’t yet dead. “When you’re alone too much, these things happen. And exercise is important, I want to stay—petit?”

  “Pe-tite.”

  “Pe-tite.” She returned to her chair and smiled, her blocky, stained teeth reminding me of where we were.

  Her chai was lighter than Saif’s, more beige than wheat gold, and watered down. While the drink cooled, she nibbled on a plate of goat cheese and crackers. I asked about her family.

  “My family,” she said.

  I nodded. “I’ve told you about mine.”

  “It’s boring,” she said. “But all right.” Before I could tell her that I knew that wasn’t true, she began talking, her raspy voice leaving little space for interjection.

  “My parents married when my mother was fourteen. He was much older. They were cousins. Most women would’ve been happy to marry the future sheik of the al-Badri tribe. He promised a good life. But she wanted more than that. She wanted someone to make her laugh, someone to recite poetry to make her cry. My father was a good sheik. But good sheiks don’t do things like that.