Youngblood

by Matt Gallagher

It’d been many years since I’d been unnerved like this, even in pretend—composing wishes, anticipating and destroying those chewy seconds that awaited on the other side of the phone. It was a nice feeling. Even in pretend.

  “I think I’m falling in love with you,” I’d say. “I’m sorry if that’s too abrupt or too American or too whatever. But it’s how I feel. I want—I want you to know I did what I did because it was the right thing to do. But also because of how I feel about you and your children.” I’d stop, just for a second, to show how earnest and well-intentioned I was. “Thought you should know.”

  The rest of the conversation would pass like smoke. I’d tell her to wrap her mother’s jewelry in clothing. Then I’d remind her to bring potable water and snacks for the trip. I didn’t trust Yousef or his people for any of that. “And layer,” I’d say. “Make sure you layer.” She’d chide me for being a nag.

  “I’m the mother,” she’d say. “Not you.”

  Then we’d laugh, together, a laugh rich with both possibilities and implications.

  “What are you smiling at, LT?” It was Snoop, and we were on the smoking patio. It was raining lightly outside. “You okay?”

  I groaned and checked the corners of my mouth for drool. The terp carried news on his face.

  “Yousef just called. Change of plan. He say to be on the road at the reservoir bed at sunrise tomorrow, near Rana’s home. His driver will meet us there.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  He nodded.

  I asked if he was ready. He said as ready as he’d ever be. He was worried about what the platoon would think. I said I’d handle them. I asked about his family in Little Sudan. He said they’d understand. I asked what he knew about Beirut. He said he knew there was a beach and a mountain with snow on it. I said that was probably enough. He said thank you, he’d never know how to repay me, that a lot of Americans talked about helping terps, but I’d been the only one who actually did. I said no problem, that he could buy the beers when I came to visit.

  “Only thing left, then, is Rana and her boys,” I said.

  “Yousef already took care of it.” Snoop cleared his throat. “She already knows to be there.”

  “Oh.” Pangs of disappointment fell through me. I’d wanted to be the one to deliver the news. I turned and spat on the ground. “That’s great.”

  47

  * * *

  The next morning, we waited at the reservoir bed in the elastic pause before dawn. And through it. And after it.

  Eventually Snoop looked over at me from the other rear hatch of the Stryker. It’d been two hours. “I don’t think they’re coming, LT.”

  He braved a smile. I ignored it.

  “Call her again.” No one had picked up the previous ten calls, but maybe someone would this time.

  No one did.

  “Something must’ve gone wrong.” I shouted through the headset to wake the driver. “We’re heading back into town.”

  The patrol moved east, into a hard yellow sun, and I told the driver to go faster, faster, until he said he wasn’t sure a twenty-ton armored vehicle should be going so fast, especially with the glare in his eyes.

  I said to go goddamn faster.

  We sped under the stone arch of Ashuriyah and the eyes of its watcher. Yousef wasn’t at Yousef’s. The shop boys didn’t know where he was, they hadn’t seen him since the day before. He was usually at work by now. Did we want any breakfast falafels?

  We returned to the Stryker. “Where to now, sir?” Dominguez asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

  I sat with Snoop and Doc Cork on the benches inside the vehicle. I took off my helmet and loosened my body armor. I made the driver turn off both the iPod and the external radio so I could think in silence.

  “Sir?” Doc Cork asked gently. “What the hell’s going on?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Does it have to do with the Iraqi woman?”

  I nodded.

  “We got your back,” he said with a sincerity I found patronizing.

  I ordered the patrol west again, back through the stone arch, to the hamlet with five small mud huts.

  We dodged an IED on the way there. The driver saw a milk crate over what had been a pothole an hour earlier and swerved around it. The vehicles behind stopped short. We’d been half a second from potentially blowing into meat ornaments, and all I could think about was the delay this would cause.

  “We gonna call the bomb squad?” Dominguez asked.

  And sit here for three hours waiting for them? I thought. But I said, “No. Pull up parallel to that bitch, recon by fire, and we’ll keep going.”

  They didn’t like it, but did as ordered. They were good soldiers.

  Dominguez’s machine gun ripped into the milk crate. The heat of the red blast washed over me as I watched from the hatch, understanding that at this moment, for this person, I’d be willing to do anything.

  We kept driving west. The outpost radioed to ask if we’d heard an explosion in our area. I ignored it. They stopped trying to reach us after the third call. The song of passing desert replaced the crackle of their faraway voices, chapped earth always, chapped earth forever, a hymn of holy yellow poison.

  We turned onto the thin silt road. A blue Bongo truck sat in front of the nearest house with a drip pan underneath it. I’d never seen the Bongo truck before and looked at it as if it were a lumpy testicle. It didn’t belong. There was a stiff wind that smelled of oil and animal shit. A man was standing alone at the square garden. Doc Cork, Snoop, and I dismounted. Washington and some others joined from another vehicle. Everyone looked ready for a fight, up on the balls of their feet, shoulders cocked, rifles at the low-ready. I locked and loaded, too, the bolt chambering a round with an anvil’s grace.

  The man didn’t turn as we approached, keeping his head bowed at the garden. He wore a button-down stained with paint and harem pants that danced in the wind like flags.

  “Stay back, sir,” Washington said. “He could have a suicide vest.” We stopped ten feet short of the man, fanning out. Snoop shouted through the wind. The man turned around, keeping his hands deep in his pockets.

  Stupid tears streaked Malek’s face. His beard was patchy, with gaps along the jawbone. He put his hands in the air.

  Doc Cork patted him down while Washington kept his rifle casually situated on Malek’s gut.

  “He’s clear,” Washington said.

  Snoop waved the Iraqi man up to us. He moved slow and without care. He was no taller than Rana and had the short, trunky arms of someone who worked with his hands. He wiped his face and nose with his shirtsleeve and spoke to Snoop.

  “He asks why we interrupt him on his day of grieving,” Snoop translated. “His wife has taken his children and left him forever.”

  “Get him to explain, Snoop. Make it seem like we don’t know anything.”

  As Snoop and Malek spoke, I studied Rana’s husband. He had thin lips and a forehead much too long for his face. There was a moony quality to him that I couldn’t place, an uncertainty in his speech. In a different time and place, I’d have commiserated with him. I reminded myself that he’d hit her, and hit her because of me. No, I thought. This man is your enemy.

  Snoop’s voice bit with a cold neutrality. He said that Malek didn’t know much, just that he’d returned home this morning to find his wife and sons gone, and their belongings, too. She hadn’t even left a note.

  “He’s fucking lying.” I grabbed Malek by the collar, twisting my knuckles into the pressure points under his chin. “What did you do to them? The fuck did you do?”

  His black, stupid eyes were welling up again. I tossed him to the dirt and had the soldiers follow me into their hut. Malek remained on the ground.

  The home was abandoned. The structure still stood, but everything that made it Rana’s—the blankets, the wood baskets, the coloring books we’d brought the boys—had all been gutted from it, leaving a fish skeleton
of two rooms. Even the Persian carpets were gone. We checked the bedroom. The family’s mattress and the two plastic chairs sat undisturbed, as well as a basket filled with Malek’s clothes.

  As the soldiers searched the other huts, Snoop and I walked back to the garden, where Malek had found his feet. Snoop asked if I had any questions for him, and when I shook my head because everything seemed fuzzy and distant, he asked his own.

  After a minute of dark thoughts, I interrupted. “The hell are you guys talking about?”

  “Gardening,” Snoop said. “These are his plants. He made it for Rana to try to make her happy.”

  I laughed, loud and brittle, and started moving away. I heard more Arabic behind me, and then Snoop called out. Malek wanted to know my name. I turned around.

  “Me?” I smiled big, one of all-American-boy charm and fluoride shine. “My name is Elijah Rios.”

  Snoop didn’t need to translate. Malek’s face started trembling, not side to side like a person would from anger, but up and down, like a guillotined doll. Then he began barking, at first low and hoarse, then higher and shriller, removing a shoe and flinging it at me, missing widely. I kept my cocky smile plastered across my face and patted my rifle. Snoop took a few steps away from Malek, but the Iraqi made no move to follow. He just kept barking, and then threw his other shoe at the garden. We returned to the Strykers.

  The other huts were as empty as ever. We boomeranged back east to Ashuriyah. As I looked back from my hatch through the kicked-up brown dust, Malek was still standing there, woofing, a wounded animal bleeding to death in its garden.

  The stone arch hadn’t moved. Things moved through it and around it, but it remained firm. It was now the meridian hour, and Yousef was at Yousef’s. I didn’t wait for the shop boys to leave before I reached across the glass case and grabbed the old man and asked very calmly and very politely just where the fuck Rana and her boys were.

  Halitosis blew all across my face, but I held fast. One hazel eye and one cloudy brown eye avoided my stare.

  Snoop gasped. “LT? He say he has no idea. He pretends he doesn’t know Rana. He pretends he doesn’t know us.”

  The barrel of my Glock found the inside of the old man’s mouth. Tink, tink, tink, I probed like a fisherman with a tackle, counting one eel molar, two eel molar, three eel molar. I kept going in a symmetrical pattern and flipped the safety trigger to semiauto when Yousef raised his index finger. I removed the pistol from his mouth.

  He spoke in short, clipped sentences. Before he finished, Snoop leaned across the glass case to grab Yousef himself. He started choking him, and Yousef gagged. I pulled the two men apart.

  “He’s a lying coward!” Snoop was indignant. “He say that he has no idea about any sheika or any smuggling, he’s just an old blind man who sells falafels. He doesn’t care if you put a gun in his mouth again and pull the trigger, because death means nothing to him. I’m going to murder him, LT. I must. For honor.”

  I raised my pistol again and put it under Yousef’s nose. In my palm, the steel felt like jelly. “I got this.” One of the shop boys started whimpering. I thought it appropriate that Saif’s weapon would kill Yousef, considering this was their country and all. “Any last words, my man?”

  Yousef flashed his mouthful of small teeth. “The majnooni was wrong about you,” he said, his English smooth as sky.

  I concentrated on an ache in my feet until most of the anger waned.

  “You’re the Cleric,” I said. “Always have been. And you ordered the hit on the mukhtar.”

  “Maybe,” Yousef said, his good eye still watching my finger on the trigger of the pistol. “Or maybe there isn’t a Cleric. Maybe there never was. Tough to say.”

  That was as close to a confession as I’d get, I knew. I also knew that whatever chance she had left, whatever chance they had left, might depend on me still. If they weren’t already headless in a ditch somewhere.

  I lowered the Glock.

  “Dead,” Yousef said. He knew I wouldn’t shoot him now. “You both.”

  I smirked, thinking of the viking captain and the Rangers. I made the sign of the cross on Yousef with the pistol. “A fatwa for you as well.” Then I cleared the Glock and removed its clip, placing the pistol on the glass case, near the spot I’d dropped the backpack the day before. It was all I had left to offer. In stunted Arabic, I found my words carefully.

  “Hate us. Fine. But save them. Rana is good. Ahmed is good. Karim is good. Save them. I will still bring the second payment. Take them where you promised. For them.”

  He didn’t nod or agree, but he didn’t deny me, either. Slowly, he slid the pistol to his body. Then I walked out of the shop, pulling Snoop after me, who wanted to know if we could beat the old man senseless if we couldn’t kill him.

  I was no killer. I’d long suspected it, but now I knew it. There was shame in that, certainly, for a man in combat, for a leader at war. But there was also relief.

  My body was shaking. The Barbie Kid watched us from his cooler across the street. He sat under the sun in a thin gully; everyone else had already retreated indoors for the late-morning siesta. I moved his way, stopping a few feet short.

  “We took everything from you,” I said. His lazy eye stayed fixed to the ground, but his good one cut through me like black shale. “I can’t bring back your uncle, or your goat, or your job. I’m sorry.” He blinked and flexed his unibrow. “For what it’s worth.”

  He must’ve grasped enough of what I said, because his middle fingers rose like tiny brown towers. I bowed my head and said in Arabic that he deserved peace and prosperity, and walked to the Strykers.

  He remained sitting on his cooler, staring at my footprints in the dirt like they were a Martian’s.

  Numb—so very numb—and suddenly exhausted, I ordered the patrol back to the outpost. There I called Rana’s cell myself. It didn’t ring through this time. It went straight to the dial tone of a disconnected number.

  48

  * * *

  The next few hours ate away what remained of my soul. There was Rana’s disappearance to consider. And Ahmed’s and Karim’s. And the missing Sahwa money. And Captain Vrettos’ sad, broken eyes. And lying to the Rangers. And the death sentence placed on Snoop and me. And Chambers, dirty Machiavellian Chambers, the most dangerous threat of all, because even after everything we’d been through, even after he’d saved my life and I’d listened to him and embraced the beast within, he’d remained an enigma, a man beholden to laws and codes he alone understood.

  With Rana gone, the headaches returned. I spent much of the day with Augustine’s Confessions in a rancid Porta John, trying desperately to find a way out. The few sentences I was able to grasp suggested that looking for a way out was the wrong thing, but there weren’t too many practical alternatives offered. The half Presbyterian in me talked to God, but He wasn’t answering, so the half Catholic in me thought I needed to find a proxy. And there was only one priest of war in Ashuriyah. I decided to confess my sins, to ask forgiveness, to seek repentance.

  I found him in bed, a DVD player on his lap, alone in our room. He seemed to be sleeping, his chest rising and falling in slow breaths like hills. Our boxy, windowless confessional smelled of wet tobacco. I approached the bunk and knocked on the beam. He looked up with eyes pale as slate, black skulls on his forearm throbbing, and pressed pause.

  “I need help,” I said. The deep lines slitting his face tightened. “Your help.”

  That was when the world wobbled.

  “Earthquake?” Then came another crash, and then another, and I realized it wasn’t movement but sound, like drunken continents tossing around tectonic plates.

  “A Spectre dropping some pain on hajj,” Chambers said. He hopped up and threw on his uniform top. “Maybe a Spooky. You know they got howitzer cannons in those gunships?”

  I didn’t, but nodded anyhow. We jogged to the command post, where Captain Vrettos said to prep the vehicles. He was going to need our patrol to search wha
tever it was that the air force had bombed back to the stone age, as soon as higher gave the okay to do so.

  “The mukhtar’s funeral is tonight,” he said. “I’ll be there. But keep me updated.”

  Six more gunship defecations later, we sped into a blue autumn night. I had a lot of misgivings about leaving the wire—I’d become paranoid enough to wonder if it was all a trap set by Yousef—but I knew I couldn’t stay in the outpost anymore. The mere act of motion meant I didn’t have to think about the consequences of my decisions, and that superseded everything else.

  The coordinates we’d been given were in the Sunni southeast. The strike had been ordered by a spec ops unit—they believed the targeted house had been wired to blow up. Black plumes sucked at the horizon, darkening the night sky. Traces of ember turned into gulps of smoke as we pushed south.

  We stopped a hundred meters away. A small blaze had engulfed the house. I radioed the outpost and let them know that one of the gunship’s artillery rounds had enkindled its target, and asked them to contact . . . the fire department? Our Strykers formed a defensive position.

  Craters the size of bowling balls ringed what had been a front yard. Much of the adobe roof had collapsed, and what remained looked as if it were held together by toothpicks. The warm blast of the flames functioned as an outsized furnace as I waited for Snoop to finish talking to a group of men and women who’d come out of the neighboring houses. Most shouted angrily at us.

  “They say that house has been abandoned for years, ever since the Invasion,” Snoop said. “They say there’s no wires or bombs in there. Their kids use it to play hide-and-seek.”

  Maybe, I thought. Everyone made targeting mistakes, but spec ops were the best. The fire was moving south, into a field of poppies and purple hyacinths. I left Snoop to handle the crowd of a dozen and waded into the ruins myself, pulling up the top of my undershirt to cover my nose and mouth, putting on a pair of clear lenses to protect my eyes. Hellish heat came from every angle.