Warlord: Dervish

by Tony Monchinski

  Mook was bantering back and forth with the dirty boy, his M-4 hanging at his side, looking through the bootleg DVDs the kid proffered. Big Meech stood around looking bored, his lip curled up against the sun.

  Months in the heat had leaned Jason out. Between the incessant, sauna-like temperatures, their MREs, energy drinks and the stress, he had abs again. When he looked close enough, there was grey in his short-cropped, brown hair. And there was grey in his eyebrows and beard whiskers when he had beard whiskers.

  If she could see him, Aspen wouldn’t recognize him.

  Jason had noticed the grey in his eyebrows when he’d shaved lines through them. It wasn’t his idea, but Rudy’s. The kid had been shaving lines in his own eyebrows. Jason asked him what he was doing and Rudy told him and then the kid asked, “What you think about that old man?” Jason had dismissed him with a wave, but the kid said, “Know what, old man? Sometimes, you just gotta let go.” Jason thought about it and then he’d let Rudy have at it. Afterwards, he remembered staring at himself in the mirror, Rudy nodding approvingly, smiling, “See what I mean old man?” The kid had offered to shave lines in Big Meech’s next, but the terp had muttered something in Arabic and wandered away from Rudy and his clippers.

  Jason had thought of Rudy as the kid, but Rudy wasn’t a kid, not like this boy here, this kid talking with Mook. Rudy had been eighteen, maybe nineteen. He’d worn an Italian horn on a chain under his fatigues, said it was for luck. When his luck ran out they never found the charm.

  Jason remembered when he was a child in New York. The winters. Old people used to complain about the cold. Uncle Ritchie would complain, but he wasn’t all that old, though he seemed old to Jason as a boy. Uncle Ritchie in his v-neck t-shirt with the gold chains on his hairy chest. He wasn’t really Jason’s uncle and Jason wasn’t sure how or when they’d started calling him uncle. He was a neighbor and a friend of the family; a friend of Jason’s mother.

  This winter’s colder than, Uncle Ritchie would be standing there in his t-shirt and grey sweat pants, hands on hips, plumes of breath jetting out of him in the wintry air. Jason and his friends would be playing in the snow, building their forts and readying their snowballs. Let me tell ya, Jay, Uncle Ritchie would say this to Jason, singling him out among all his little friends, this winter’s colder than, and then the man would catch himself because whatever was coming after colder than wasn’t going to be appropriate for nine-year-old ears. This winter is friggin’ cold.

  Jason could never understand why Uncle Ritchie stood outside in the middle of the winter in a short-sleeved t-shirt.

  Tell ya somethin’, Jay, Uncle Ritchie would cross his hands in front of his body and rub his arms but make no move to go back in his house. I don’t know how much more of this I can take. The breath would be coming out of Uncle Ritchie in small clouds. One day I’m going to sell this house and move. Jason never needed to ask where Uncle Ritchie might move.

  Move to Arizona.

  It was always Arizona.

  Uncle Ritchie would say this to Jason when Jason was little. At nine, Jason had never been to Arizona. At that age, he’d never been outside of New York State and rarely beyond the borders of Rochester. But Jason knew Arizona was hot.

  Tell ya what, Jay, it’s hot in Arizona.

  He knew Arizona was hot because Uncle Ritchie was always telling him how hot Arizona was.

  Real hot

  And he knew that Phoenix was the capital of Arizona. He’d learned that in school.

  But it’s a dry heat. Uncle Ritchie invariably added this, almost as an aside, like a secret he was sharing with little Jason in the snow, little Jason’s nose running in the cold.

  When he blew his nose in Iraq, Jason found bloody mucous in the tissue. The snot had dried out from the arid air coming in off the desert. The dust had coated his sinuses. He’d gotten to the point where he was in no rush to blow his nose and see what came out. Jason lived with the slight discomfort hardening mucous left in his nasal passages. Maybe Arizona was the shit and maybe it wasn’t, but Jason thought he could tell Uncle Ritchie a thing or two about dry heat.

  Sometimes, the kid had said to Jason, you just gotta let go…

  Uncle Ritchie had never made it to Arizona. The paramedics found him stroked out next to the washing machine in his basement. He spent the last three months of his life in a nursing home. Jason’s mom went and visited him there a couple times.

  Jason reflected that, at least when he blew his nose, he used a tissue. The Gift would just press his thumb to one nostril and expel whatever was in his head, a hillbilly handkerchief. The Gift was up on the Hescos, behind the sandbags, on the machine gun. The Gift’s last name was Gifford but someone had shortened that to Giff. From the way he talked, Giff thought he was God’s gift to the ladies (Jason couldn’t imagine) so Giff had become The Gift and the nickname had just sort of stuck.

  “This one good one,” the disheveled kid was promising Mook. “Big American…” The boy held his hands up to his chest like he was cupping enormous breasts. He didn’t have the word for them.

  “Titties!” The Gift offered. Mook, Meech and the boy couldn’t have heard him, but Jason, from where he stood equidistant to all, did.

  “Bazookas,” said Mook.

  “Bazookas.” The boy laughed, nodding his head.

  “Funbags.” Tucker’s nasally voice rose from the barrier.

  “Yeah, yeah. Look…” Mook asked the boy “…can you get World War Z 2?”

  “I can get!”

  “You get World War Z 2 and you come back tomorrow, okay? Part two. Not the first one, right? None of that Brad Pitt bullshit. Then we’ll talk.”

  “Then we talk,” the boy repeated, a grin on his face, his teeth ivory, like the snow on the ground when Jason was nine years old.

  “Then we talk,” Mook agreed.

  “Boobies,” said the Gift.

  “Tig ‘ol bitties,” retorted Tucker.

  “Tomorrow America,” the boy promised Mook.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “You got chocolate America?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Breasticles.”

  “Chesticles.”

  “Tomorrow good,” the boy was smiling.

  “Tomorrow is good,” Mook agreed with him.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, bye.” The Sergeant turned and walked back towards the barrier, Meech trailing him.

  “Gazongas.” Tucker wiped sweat from his brow.

  “You said that one already.”

  “Nuh-uh I didn’t.”

  Mook nodded at Jason as he passed. Jason stood there and watched the kid rejoin his friends across the street.

  “Blinkers.”

  “Cans.”

  “Cans?” The Gift looked suspiciously at Tucker. “That’s some shit my grandfather would say.”

  “What are you two nitwits talking about?” Mook chided them.

  Jason couldn’t imagine the aerostat saw much of anything different on any given day. It was like standing around out here, guarding the road, or patrolling in a convoy, the way they’d been last week. Listening to Tucker and the Gift bullshit back and forth, ignoring the disdain on the faces of the locals, doing your best to cope with the incessant heat. Scorpions and spiders the size of your goddamn hand. The same old same old, day in and day out, until suddenly it wasn’t. Until some Muj stepped out of the crowd and took a knee, the wooden heat shield of an RPG-7 up on his shoulder, tracking. Until the Humvee in front of yours passed a pile of scrap on the side of the road and then that pile of scrap detonated.

  Jason blinked and watched the boy and his friends until they disappeared from sight. He took another sip from his water bladder and tapped the trigger guard on his M-4 with his gloved hand.

  When he returned to his position in front of a Hesco, the guys were busting their sergeant’s chops.

  “S’matter Mook?” Tucker spoke fast. “Kid didn’t have any camel-fucking movies?”

  “Nah,
he didn’t. There goes your Christmas present.”

  “Kid got an older sister, Mook?” The Gift looked bored up on the M240B. “Hey, Meech—kid come back tomorrow, ask him he got a sister.”

  “Mook, you should think about adopting that kid,” Espada offered. “Bring him back to Detroit with you. You know. Like The Blind Side. Kind of.”

  “Know what I think?” Mook asked without looking over his shoulder, his back to the Hescos, watching the people passing them on the opposite side of the street. “I think it’s too early in the morning for this bullshit. That’s what I think.”

  “Look at that one, Gift,” Espada gestured to a woman clad head to toe in black robes. “I seen ankles.”

  “Ankles?” The Gift called down. “Them cankles.”

  “Bitch got piano legs,” Tucker chimed in.

  “Yeah,” granted Espada, “but they’re hot cankles.”

  “What you think, Giff? She a MILF?”

  “MILF? She’s a cougar.”

  Jason wondered if Uncle Ritchie had ever slept with his mother. Uncle Ritchie seemed old to Jason when Jason was nine years old, but Uncle Ritchie had to have only been, what? In his forties? Maybe fifty? Jason’s father wasn’t in the picture, hadn’t been for as long as Jason could remember. Sometimes in the summer, Jason would come home from playing in the neighborhood with his friends and find his mom in the backyard having a beer with Uncle Ritchie. What was up with that?

  Yeah, Uncle Ritchie had probably been banging his mom.

  A lot of these guys—guys like Tucker and the Gift—their dads hadn’t been around either.

  Jason knew how much he was and wasn’t like these men. For one, at thirty-eight, he was way older than they were. Mook was twenty-two, though he looked thirty. Tucker was nineteen. War was a young man’s game. When Jason enlisted, because of his age, he’d needed a waiver. The Army needed bodies, so they gave him one.

  Unlike the other men, Jason was college educated. Mook was a few credits shy of an associate’s degree from a community college. The Gift talked about a semester or two at university, but all it sounded like he had done there was chase co-eds. Tucker hadn’t even graduated high school; they’d tutored him for his GED before they’d allowed him to enlist.

  Because Jason had his bachelors and Masters degrees, they’d bumped him up to E4, which would make it easier for him in case he wanted to become an officer. Like that would ever happen, he thought. I should have had my head examined enlisting. If they examined his head now he was worried about what they might find. Jason wasn’t feeling well and he knew his malaise was more mental than physical. He had one goal in mind for the remainder of this tour: survive.

  “Yeah, what you looking at…” The Gift was talking at a guy glaring at them from across the road.

  “Another friendly native,” remarked Espada.

  Live

  “Cheese him, Giff,” Tucker encouraged. “What chew think, Meech? That hajji want to be our friend?”

  The Gift waved at the man, giving him a wide, shit-eating grin.

  Make it out of here

  “Yeah, you cheesin’ him, Giff…” The man scowled back. “…you cheesin’ him.”

  “What?” There was no way the guy could hear The Gift’s challenge. “What?”

  Go home. That’s all Jason wanted to do. If he could survive and get back home he could sort all the other shit out; his problems, his job…Aspen. Thinking about home, thinking about Uncle Ritchie and his mom, Jason knew this wasn’t good. Remembering his childhood, when he was nine years old building snow forts with his friends…that didn’t help. There were some things you couldn’t go back to.

  Sometimes, it was like the kid had said, you just had to let go. Just survive. That was the thing. Concentrate on the here and now to stay in the here and now.

  Jason wondered what Rudy had been thinking when the IED detonated.

  Against his better judgment, against everything he’d just been silently chastising himself for, Jason thought about Aspen and the girls. He pulled back the sleeve of his fatigues and looked at the water-resistant watch peeking out under his glove. The watch had been a gift and it reminded him of home, of his country. He wore it upside down so he wouldn’t need to turn his hand over to look at it.

  It was a quarter after ten. That made it, what? After six in the afternoon in North Carolina? The girls were probably doing their homework. Jason pictured Aspen on the couch, her legs drawn up under her, reading one of her women’s magazines in the late afternoon sunlight.

  Best not to think of her.

  “Sun getting to you, Jay?”

  Jason looked at his sergeant. “Nah.”

  Mook’d had his eye on him for some time and Jason knew it. Mook had a way of picking up on things. Jason wasn’t acting overtly funny, not the way they’d seen other guys act. There’d been no outbursts on his part, no strange behaviors. He’d just withdrawn further, gotten quieter than he usually was. Especially since the kid got blown all over the road.

  “It is fucking hot out here, dough,” Tucker pronounced.

  “I thought you guys did good in the heat,” remarked the Gift.

  “What is it Sergeant?” Mook was still looking at Jason.

  “You mean black guys?”

  “Yeah. You know, Africa and all that shit.”

  “I don’t know, Jay…” Mook ignored Tucker and the Gift and their banter, ignored the people passing them across the road. “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “…my black ass is from Alaska. I don’t know about them other niggers, but I hate dis heat.”

  “Nothing,” Jason stared back at his sergeant. It was like everything and everyone else had receded into the background, like he and Mook were the only ones here. “It’s all good.”

  “All good, huh?”

  “It’s all good, Sarge.” Jason suspected Rudy had said something to Mook, something about Aspen. Jason figured the sergeant knew more than he was letting on.

  “You sure, Jay?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “You sure you sure?”

  “Look, Sarge, I’m half way around the world in God’s asshole.” Things started to come back into focus. The barrier. The people. “I’m hot as shit. My clothes fucking stink.” His olive drab t-shirt was pasted to his body. “My underwear…I got fucking batwings—”

  Tucker and the Gift both cracked grins.

  “—I got, I don’t know how many thousands of potential hostiles strolling past me, thinking of ways to kill my ass. And to top it all off, I’ve got my sergeant eyeballing me like he thinks I’m ready to go out on a section eight.” The aerostat hung in the sky. “But besides all that bullshit? I’m fucking marvelous. Thanks for asking.”

  Mook nodded. “That’s all I want to hear.”

  “Hey, Tucker.”

  “Whut chew want, Giff?”

  “I gotta stretch my legs. Cover this pig for me.”

  “Nuh-uh, youse crazy you think my black ass getting’ up there.”

  “Come on, Tuck.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Giff. Some camel jockey motherfucker send an RPG down here—who you think he gonna be aimin’ at? Not dis black man down here on the ground. Dat’s for sure.”

  “Sarge?” The Gift looked to Mook.

  “Can’t help you, Gift.” Mook was back to scrutinizing the people passing by. “I can’t make these stubborn Alaskan motherfuckers do nothing.”

  “Tuck, come on. You gonna make me beg? That it?”

  “You know what, Giff?” Tucker paused, like he was thinking it over. “Maybe if you ask me real nice—real pretty please and shit with sugar on top? And maybe if you ask me down on one knee and all sorts a’ shit? Maybe then I’mma still tell you go fuck yourself.”

  “I got you, Gift,” Jason volunteered.

  “Thanks, Jay. You alright. That ungrateful, nappy headed little…” The Gift was trying to get a rise out of Tucker, but the other man didn’t comply.

  As the Gift climbed down th
e Hescos, Jason clambered up. He settled in behind the sandbags, placing his M-4 aside. From habit he cracked open the feed tray cover on the M-240B and checked the ammo belt. He was comfortable with the machine gun. He’d trained on it and knew what it was capable of. Mounted on its tripod, it had a maximum effective range of eighteen hundred meters. It could spit out six hundred to a thousand rounds of 7.62mm a minute. Satisfied the chain-linked cartridges were fitted properly into the receiver, Jason lowered the tray cover, the latches catching.

  Rudy had been nineteen. Back home, Jason had taught kids almost as old as the kid.

  There were big differences between here and back home. There was no way to compare sitting behind a gas-operated machine gun to sitting in a faculty meeting. There was no common ground listening to the whistle of incoming mortar rounds versus listening to the pledge of allegiance over the PA, between patrolling hostile streets—waiting for a burst of AK fire or the white smoke trailing a rocket—and walking down a polished hallway, Squibs grade book under your arm.

  Rudy had been in the Humvee ahead of Jason’s when the IED went off. After the initial cloud of dust had roiled past, Jason had taken a look at what was left of the Humvee, and he started looking for the kid’s good luck charm.

  Other people were looking for arms and legs.

  Christ, what’s wrong with me? Jason shook his head and rubbed his temples with his gloved index fingers. Yeah, he wasn’t eating like he used to. And his bowel movements were infrequent and uncertain, solid one time, liquid the next. He knew all about the Iraqi ass piss. Nineteen months in this sandbox would do that to you.

  But it wasn’t anything physical getting to him.

  It had to be mental. The suck was enveloping him. This place was getting to him. These people…the hard looks on the young men’s faces. The way the women wouldn’t look at them. The Gift blowing snot out of his nose with his finger on his nostril. The kid all over the road like that last week…

  More and more, Jason found himself retreating inside himself. Thinking of things past, things sacred, things that didn’t deserve to be thought about out here in this godforsaken desert. Playing in the snow with his friends when he was nine years old. Uncle Ritchie and his mom. Aspen and the girls.