“Yessir.” A long exhale.
“Med tent from here. Dismissed.”
Damarkus had the doorknob in his hand when the captain said, “Lockwood, one more thing.”
He wheeled around slowly.
“That piss of yours comes back positive, after this conversation? I’ll fucking bury you.”
Damarkus Lockwood had thrown himself to the ground in open fields while bullets streaked past him, he’d been flattened into a blackout by the concussive waves of an exploding RPG, he’d been hurled to the roof of a Humvee after it rolled onto an IED on Dead Girl Road in Baghdad and been one of just two soldiers to walk away unscathed. But in seven years in the Army he’d never been as scared as he was leaving that command center, because to die from a bullet was one thing but to die from shame another, because fearing an enemy was nothing compared to fearing yourself—so scared, in fact, that on his way to the medics’ tent he retched into a trash barrel, the strain so visible on his face that upon entering the tent he was immediately guided to a bed.
* * *
Two days later, on a dingy, yellow-skied afternoon, the soldiers manning watch at Hila’s Entry Control Point observed a lone figure climbing slowly toward the outpost, pausing at each turn in the switchbacks to peer backward before continuing upward. When he was eighty meters out they fired a warning shot and the man stopped and raised his hands and hollered up something in Pashto. A two-hour standoff ensued during which Lieutenant Cantwell, via Shpoon and a megaphone, ordered the man to disrobe to prove he wasn’t a suicide bomber. A team of ANAs finally made its way out to the man, the American troops lining up their weapons on the Hescos in case he was a decoy for snipers, and then the ANAs returned with the story: The man knew the location of a cache of weapons, mortars and RPGs and other heavy fire, hidden in the valley. An American medic had saved his son’s life during one of the autumn patrols and he’d hiked all this way because he didn’t want the medic to be killed.
The decision to believe him or not fell to Captain Lindholm. Lieutenant Cantwell lobbied hard against it, pointing out what a perfect way this’d be for the Taliban to launch the spring fighting season: luring a winter-fattened squad out of the wire and into an ambush. Yet the worse scenario, to the captain’s thinking, was the outpost coming under bombardment from a painstakingly accumulated trove of heavy weapons like the one the man was describing. And if the cache did exist, its location—as much as its contents—was high-value intel, because its existence would mean that one or more of the elders that Lindholm had been meeting for weekly shuras had been lying: not a surprise, not even really a disappointment, but an advantageous nugget of knowledge for the captain going forward. He brought out the medics to see if one could ID the man. Yeah, one of them said, peering through binoculars. I remember the guy’s eye patch. His little kid fell off the back of his motorcycle and punctured a lung. We tubed the kid’s chest.
Lindholm chose Cantwell to lead a squad out, the lieutenant drawing one concession out of the captain: If an ambush was in the works they’d be gearing for it tonight. Waiting twenty-four hours might throw them off. They sent food and water and a blanket out to the man with a warning that if he moved from that spot, even to pee or defecate, he’d be shot.
Due to patrol scheduling, the twenty-four-hour delay meant Cameron and Damarkus’s squad would be the one going out.
Cameron had not, as Damarkus feared, been questioned about the Bronya by Cantwell or by anyone else. Damarkus didn’t know much more than this because he’d kept as far away as possible from Cameron ever since leaving the med tent, at dinnertime joining a table of NCOs who didn’t seem entirely receptive to his presence: Whatever hashish rumors had reached the captain, Damarkus figured, had also reached them. Damarkus picked at his food, radioactive from nonexistent hash fumes, furtively glancing at Cameron who was sitting with Beano listening blank-faced to a rant about why the Federal Reserve needed auditing. Cameron confronted him later, to ask what was wrong, but Damarkus froze him out. He was tense right now, he said, needed some space to focus. He dressed down the squad as a whole after a surprise weapons inspection, too, startling everyone. “Something sure crawled up his butt,” Cameron overhead one soldier muttering afterward, another one saying, “Yeah, just not how he likes it,” Cameron waiting for them to look his way—but they didn’t, to Cameron’s relief, Cameron deciding it was nothing but trash talk. Fact was, though, the entire outpost was tensing. Rumors of ominous enemy chatter seemed confirmed by the officers’ renewed stiffness, and the local national lying in the dirt out front, whether a decoy or an informant, felt like a rebuke to the winter’s lull: a human alarm clock blaring eighty meters from the front gate. Everything was tightening. Even the dogs outside the wire acted skittish, barking at the snow for melting.
Damarkus knew what he had to do the very moment he left the command center, that knowledge, he’d later think, supplying half the cause for his retching. The situation was clear, which meant the solution was too. He recognized it as a lose-lose scenario but told himself these were common in wartime. Captain Lindholm’s newest predicament, for example: If he was wrongly trusting the guy out front, he was sending a squad into an ambush; if he decided not to trust him, and the guy was speaking truth, whatever was in that weapons cache was going to come raining down on them soon. Sometimes the choice was between loss and loss, and at times, when the losses were high enough, when the choice felt pitched between calamity and catastrophe, your mind could seize up, leave you feeling like you’re choosing between going blind and going deaf: flipping a coin and suffering heads or tails. This was how Damarkus Lockwood felt. And this was why, in the eighty-four hours that elapsed between him retching outside the command center and suiting up for the patrol, he slept no more than an hour at a time.
They left the wire at twenty-three hundred hours, under a clear and guardian half-moon. The man they were already calling Gollum didn’t know how to read a map and the route he intended to guide them sounded distressingly vague. This made it more difficult for the men back at Hila’s command center to get an infrared-vision drone in proper place for surveilling the terrain ahead, since only Gollum knew where that was. And he didn’t know too well, it seemed: The squad backtracked more than once, Gollum claiming the darkness was throwing off his sense of the landscape, Cantwell suspecting he’d found the ambush point vacant and now was either actively hunting the missing ambushers or just killing time, joyriding a U.S. Army squad. The soldiers hiked silent and nimble through a world rendered emerald in their night-vision goggles. Hours passed. Gollum grew more and more disoriented and Cantwell more and more wary. He decided to stagger the squad, assigning Cameron and Damarkus to take a more distant rear-watch position alongside two ANA soldiers.
Fifteen minutes later the ANAs just stopped and sat down, as though all these walking hours had been in search of an ideal picnic spot. Damarkus urged them forward but they shook their heads no and as one pulled something from his pocket the other raised a forefinger in that international code for break time. He radioed the news to the lieutenant. Cantwell cursed and told him to hold the position; the whole thing was a shit show and they’d circle back shortly.
Damarkus looked over at Cameron, propped against a boulder smoking a cigarette about thirty feet from the two Afghan soldiers who were likewise smoking and muttering languidly in Pashto. The timing, Damarkus decided, was unexpectedly perfect. The Afghans wouldn’t understand what they were saying but their presence was a cushion against any dramatics.
He leaned beside Cameron against the boulder. “Look,” he began. “This here’s gotta be the deal going forward.”
Cameron turned to him, nothing but curiosity on his face, a green ghost unaware that he was being vanquished into the past.
“None of it ever happened, okay?” Damarkus kept his voice to a clipped whisper. “Not the words, not the feelings, not one part of it. Everything that happened and every
thing got said in the Bronya—it’s gone and it wasn’t never there.”
Even through night-vision goggles the confusion was blatant in Cameron’s eyes. His chin came jutting forward, mock-bravely. “The hell you saying?”
“You heard me,” Damarkus hissed, from the part of him wanting Cameron to say just yessir, the part of him holding the microphone right now. “It’s gone outta my head and you’re getting it out of yours. Nothing ever happened and from here on out we go about our business that way.”
“Why you acting this way, D?” Cameron was facing him now, away from the boulder face. “What’d I do?”
“It ain’t nothing no one did because nothing ever happened, you understand?”
“No, I don’t.” Cameron shook his head, dragging on his cigarette like it was an asthma inhaler. “Not even close.”
“We ain’t gonna be this way anymore, you hear me?”
“Why you doing this now?” His hushed voice full of pleading. “What happened?”
“It ain’t about now,” Damarkus said, alarmed by the rise in his own voice, wanting and not wanting to dull its serrated edge. He swung his head toward the Afghan soldiers as a funky smell reached his nose—the rumor must’ve reached them too, because the pair was openly smoking hash, passing a joint back and forth in the darkness. “I mean to say—yeah, it is about now,” he said, as lost in his own incoherence as Gollum was lost in these lightless black mountains. “Because now’s different than before. Because the only way out of this is if before didn’t happen.”
Cameron fell back against the boulder, crumpling. “You ain’t making any sense, D,” he whispered. The two ANAs were laughing now—maybe from the hash, maybe about the hash, maybe about something totally unrelated—and Damarkus could see the laughter rasping Cameron, could see him flinching at every acid chuckle. Whatever it was, it felt and sounded like ridicule, and Damarkus couldn’t bear that for Cameron. He knew the Tommy Landry story—knew how laughter, real or perceived, was toxic to Cameron, was poisonously entangled in everything he knew about love. He glared at the ANAs but without goggles like his they didn’t catch the glare. One was laughing at the other one’s coughing. “Shit,” Damarkus said. “Head over this way with me.”
They didn’t walk far. On the other side of the boulder from the trail was a wide and flat ledge with a spur of rock overhanging the cliff side, providing a natural lookout over the valley. Closer in were some bedraggled juniper and rosebay bushes eking a stunted living from the gravelly soil, the men’s boots exacting further punishment on their forlorn branches. Down the valley in the east, a violet fuzz was outlining the lumpy horizon, dawn beginning to heave its way up.
Cameron was stumbling like a drunk, Damarkus suddenly fearing he might weave his way off the overhang. “Just stand still,” he told him, Cameron stopping with his head dropped.
Damarkus’s radio cracked, Cantwell saying, “Bloodhound Six, this is Echo One. You guys still parked? Over.”
“Roger, Echo One, that’s affirmative,” Damarkus replied. “We’re holding. Over.”
“Headed back your way. Recontact in five mikes. Over.”
Cameron had moved directly in front of him, not quite close enough to touch, pleading, “What are you saying, D?”
Damarkus inhaled, exhaled, trying to re-center himself with air. Lieutenant Cantwell and the rest of the squad were five minutes out and after that they’d need to fall back into the patrol line, thirty feet apart in forced silence. Walk it off, Chief used to tell Damarkus when he was hurt. You can walk off most anything, boy. Yet something in Cameron’s voice—the anguished warble, yes, but a heavier bass note of resistance—was telling Damarkus he’d made a mistake here, the dimensions of which felt to be telescoping by the second. He’d thought to avoid the danger of an animated conversation inside the wire, but he’d also thought his authority, especially out here, would mute any protest. One other mistake he was realizing: He hadn’t understood, or he’d refused to understand, the intensity of Cameron’s emotions.
“Look,” he said, softer now, struggling to think over the thudding of his heart, “the only thing that can come from me and you is—it ain’t nothing good, Cam. Don’t matter how it felt last month or how it felt yesterday. There ain’t nothing good at the end. We don’t get to walk off into that fucking sunrise over there. You feel me? This here ain’t life, man. Me and you got loose, I know we did—we got weak. But that weakness ain’t us. And best thing we can do is say that weakness never happened.”
“I didn’t get weak, D,” Cameron said, his entire voice now drawn into that bass note, solid, unbreakable, somehow dominant. “For the first time in my life I got strong.”
Damarkus reared back several steps, as from a sudden whoosh of flames. “Naw, listen—you ain’t getting me.”
“I’ll pretend whatever the fuck you want but you can’t tell me I didn’t feel what I felt.” Cameron banged a fist against his chest. “You ain’t making me a liar.”
Now it was Damarkus stumbling drunkenly, wheeling back in the direction of the horizon’s purple fringe. “Goddammit,” he heard himself say, his breathing heavy as a runner’s. Remember there’s no choice here, he tried reminding himself: just the incomplete line between what is and what has to be. Yet another voice inside him, one he recognized only dimly, maybe from the past and maybe from the future, was calling bullshit, spewing phrases that kept colliding and recolliding in the raceway of Damarkus’s mind: what has to be; what can’t be; what could be; what should be—
He was two separate men as he turned back toward Cameron. He was one man in love and the other man fleeing the very sound of the word, its lethal echoes. He was one man walking toward Cameron and the other walking away, conjoined twins being violently severed. He felt words filling his mouth but didn’t know which man they belonged to. Before he could say anything, though, Cameron spun away from him, his fist still pressed to the front of his flak vest as though to restrain his very heart, and Damarkus, confused by how much Cameron hurting hurt him, and recognizing that this pain constituted love, felt himself take a lunging step forward—
Only his eyes had time to move once he registered the click beneath his heel. Cameron was turning back toward him. That’s all he saw, in that final green landscape: a turn that could’ve meant nothing and could’ve meant everything. His lips cracked apart.
Boom.
twenty
Did it matter, as awareness of Cameron’s homosexuality spread slowly and then fast, especially after the attorney for Tommy Landry chose to leak it in a two-million-dollar civil lawsuit filed against Cameron, Scott T. Griffin, Ain’t No Picnic Productions, LLC (Griffin’s production company), Guidry’s Lava Lounge, and various other defendants? There’s an answer to this question, but, as with so many of those surrounding Cameron’s recovery, not one that’s easy to prove—not with unequivocal data, anyway, not with resonance imaging of the motley and fluid national temper. But to many people of faith, particularly those whose faith tilts more toward ideology than theology, both inside and outside the Christ-haunted state of Mississippi: Yes, of course it did. It mattered a great deal.
Plugging the words miracle and Mississippi into Google, in October 2014, yielded a raft of additional search term suggestions: real; paralyzed; amazing; veteran; true. By late February 2015, Google’s algorithm was coughing up these: gay; hoax; assault; debunked. Most if not all legitimate news outlets omitted Landry’s allegation—in capsule form, that Cameron had assaulted him to stop Landry from outing him—from their coverage of the lawsuit, filed January 12. The Sun Herald’s Jesse Castanedo, for example, was leery of broadcasting an accusation that felt to him like a venom-laced publicity gambit. (Plus, he says, “in half the fistfights I’ve ever seen, from schoolyards to barrooms, someone gets called a fag or some other gay slur. This just seemed like the same thing channeled through a lawyer.”) The gossip website Radar Online, howev
er, gave it a full-color splash (“Read the SHOCKING Police Report!”), and links to its coverage went scattering swiftly and widely, like roaches fleeing a light. That Cameron refused to publicly confirm or even acknowledge any part of Landry’s claims, and that Lifetime’s Nicola Ash maintained a brusque no-comment regimen, mattered little. Because the revelation, oozing through the channels of social media, wasn’t really about Cameron. His sexual orientation, cracked open for public examination, got appropriated into a much larger, older, and more bellicose dynamic—as a cudgel, not a complication.
This was particularly striking in the way hard-line atheist bloggers and webmasters took to trumpeting Cameron’s outing: gleefully. They reveled in putting conservative Christians—Cameron’s supposed fan base—into the pincers of an uneasy predicament: If God so abhorred homosexuality, why ever would he exert his miraculous grace on a homosexual? Their cackling was all but audible as they baited their trap: “Either God doesn’t have such a big problem with hot man-on-man action,” as one blogger, Chris Clairmont, writing as “The Fundy Unbeliever,” wrote in late January, “or God didn’t have anything to do with this man standing up and shouting hallelujah. Miracle or endorsement? Hmmm. Which one is it, all ye faithful? (Hint: It’s a trick question. God doesn’t exist.)”
A handful of Christian bloggers, including the thoughtful Catholic apologist Peter Heekin-Kaye, responded with the salient point that, scripturally speaking, God abhors the sin but loves the sinner, arguing that divine healing of a sinner—regardless of the sin—amounted to theological harmony, not dissonance. “These are political distinctions,” he wrote, “not spiritual ones.” Such political distinctions dominated, however, and began manifesting themselves in a curiously inverted way: Those who had initially promoted Cameron’s recovery as a miracle, aligned generally with the Christian right, now clamored for a scientific explanation, while those on the more secular left who’d balked at and even ridiculed the idea of a miracle, and had sought its disproval, started cozying up to the notion, or at least to the theater of its implications. One faction appeared willing to suspend its belief while the other seemed inclined to suspend its disbelief. One flipped while the other flopped.
Anatomy of a Miracle Page 37
