by Stephen Dau
“Come on,” says Rose. “I’ll drive you.”
They make nearly a hundred dollars a week from the paper route, which they split among themselves and spend on toy action figures and slushies and model rockets.
“They should save some of it,” says Roy.
“They’ll have time to save plenty of money later,” says Rose.
They roll the dripping wagon into the garage, load the damp newspapers into the trunk of the car. Matthew and Sam climb into the backseat, and Rose closes the door before whispering something to Christopher, who stands quietly next to the car.
“What were you thinking?” she asks, annoyed despite herself at having to drive them around. She speaks to him as though gently rebuking a confidant. “You know Sam isn’t big enough to keep up with you two.”
Christopher fixes her with his striking blue eyes. “It was just an idea,” he whispers back, before he gets into the car. “I thought it would work, but I was wrong. I’m ready to move past it if you are.”
31
Jonas leaves Shakri in thought before he does so in action. He has suspected he would have to. Maybe from the beginning. He has known he must. It is for her own good.
He stops calling. He avoids places he knows she may be. At first he tells himself that it is only temporary, only until he can get himself sorted out.
He knows he owes her an explanation. He considers calling her, talking to her, giving her the chance to convince him otherwise. Partly he wants to tell her why; partly he also wants to be proved wrong. Partly he is afraid of being proved wrong.
He tells himself it’s only temporary. He has to work through some things. He tells himself they will get back together after he has had some time, after he gets rid of this thing inside that consumes him. He tells himself that it will be safe for her then, that they will be better than ever. But he fears that none of this is true.
In the end, he picks a time he knows she will not be at home, and he calls and leaves her a message. In the message, he explains to her the reasons he does not contact her: that he is protecting her, that it would not do for her to be with someone like him, that it is not safe, that she does not really know him, that she deserves much better, that he is capable of horrendous things.
32
“What happened to the gazelle?” asks Younis, the wind blowing more gently now, up the mountain behind him. “You know, with the lion, what happened?”
The silence of the night is broken only by the crackling of the fire, the scrape of steel on whetstone, the wind bearing up the slope, and, eventually, by a softly accented voice, almost reluctant to speak.
“Life’s cruel sometimes,” Christopher says. “It was fast, at least. That was the only good in it.”
33
“Here’s to Kurdistan,” says Hakma, lifting his glass.
“You need a new toast,” says Jonas.
It’s a Wednesday night, and he is back at Wilson’s.
“Never,” says Hakma. “I will toast the motherland until the day I die.”
Wilson’s is empty except for one old guy at the bar, and they sit alone in a booth near the front. The beer looks clear and full, the cold glass in his hand, and he can’t wait to taste it.
“Well, then, you need a follow-up.”
“Aha,” says Hakma. “Nothing wrong with toasting other things after the motherland.” He thinks for a moment, and then lifts his glass again. “Here’s to my enemies’ enemies, who are my friends.”
“Very original.”
“Got something better?”
Jonas thinks for a moment, raises up his glass, pauses as if in sudden meditation, opens his mouth as if to speak, and then drinks down the entire glass, lifting his hand to order another before it is even completely empty.
The evening settles into a familiar pattern. Condensation from the pint glasses wets rings on the tabletop, and Hakma periodically wipes at them with a soggy napkin. The old man who has been at the bar since before they came in yells something at the bartender, who tells him, in tones gentler than the words, to pipe down or go home. Wilson’s is known for nothing if not cheap beer, but when the bartender finally brings their bill, they are stunned by the tab.
“I don’t have it,” says Hakma.
“Don’t look at me,” says Jonas.
The room sways gently now that they have stopped talking. Jonas is content to sit there, comfortable in the booth, for the foreseeable future. Then he looks up to see that the bartender has disappeared into the back room, and he is suddenly all action.
“Let’s bolt,” he says.
Hakma looks at him for a moment, processing the options. “Yeah, okay.”
Without even being aware of having made the decision to do so, they’re up and out the door like they own it, like it’s obvious, and before they really know it they are out into the neon night, rushing down the street through the chill air. Jonas expects shouts or sirens to hit him in the back, but there’s nothing, just footfalls and traffic. He feels invincible.
They walk quickly down a side street and head up the hill toward the stadium. Close to the top they pass an apartment building, and Hakma says, “Hey, check this out.”
He walks over to the building’s side entrance, a glass door with a thin metal bar across the front serving as a handle.
“This is pretty cool. I discovered it a few weeks ago.”
The door swings open easily at his push, and they slip into a dim hallway and through a large metal security door, which is also unlocked. Their footsteps echo from the concrete and steel in the stairwell as they climb six floors to the top, where another steel security door opens to put them on the roof.
“I have no idea why they don’t lock it,” says Hakma.
They step onto the tar-paper roof, cross over to a low brick wall, and hoist themselves up onto the ledge, the street sixty feet below. The entire city is laid out before them, a mass of light divided into three pie pieces by the blackness of the rivers. Everything is lit from below by the streetlights, the buildings shown in stark relief on their sides and dark on their roofs, so that it looks as though someone is shining a dirty yellow flashlight up from below. Packs of students from the university roam up and down Forbes, but up on the roof they are removed from the shouts and laughter, the sounds of traffic and car horns barely touching them. They sit on the ledge awhile, hovering over the glow of yellowed light like gods.
34
The night before we went in, they gathered us in the planning tent around a steel table covered with maps and satellite images and lists of coordinates and frequencies.
They told us this was probably the most hostile village in the entire fucking region. They had found them, they said. They were ninety-nine percent certain. These were the guys who had killed Jacobs. Probably Marin, too. Finally, we had them. They were in this village.
“Light ‘em up,” they said. But they didn’t know what they were saying.
They estimated that, after we took the boats up the river, it would take us an hour to hike our way across the plain and over to the rise, two klicks west of the village.
They would be coming in hard, and they wanted to know whether anyone in the village suspected. Observe and report, they said. Radio in anything weird, anything out of the ordinary, they said. And now, in hindsight, I think it’s odd that no one questioned it. No one asked how we were supposed to know, after being there for only a few hours, what was weird and out of the ordinary and what wasn’t, what was totally normal.
They told us that when the time came, we would go in with the rest.
“What if we run into contacts?” asked Skeets.
“Assume hostility,” they said.
“If we’re spotted?” I’m not sure, but I think it was Dom who asked this.
“Light ‘em up,” they said.
It was a phrase we used a lot, and it was said easily, almost casually. But what I think now, what I did not realize at the time, is that for all the people gathered around that table, fo
r all of the planning, and the training, and the money spent on equipment, for all the time that we all spent out there, there wasn’t a soul involved who thought about it long enough to know exactly what that meant.
35
“What’s that noise?” asks Hakma, and then Jonas hears it, too, the static-click-static of sideband radios, and they rush over to the building’s adjacent side, and look over the edge in time to see two men in blue uniforms enter through the same door they did.
“Police,” says Jonas, his mind racing. “Just act like you live here.” Their plan set, Jonas is surprised to find himself relatively unconcerned as they stand on the roof, waiting, and pleased to find that if he concentrates in just the right way, he can keep the metal door through which the policemen will shortly emerge from drifting out of his field of vision.
“Hi, there, officers,” says Hakma, smiling as the policemen come out through the door and onto the roof.
“Hi,” says the one in front, a short, balding man who looks to be at least fifty. “What are you doing up here?”
“Oh, just looking at the city,” says Jonas.
“Do you live here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Which apartment?”
“Number six, sir.”
“Uh-huh. Can I see some identification?”
“Sure.”
“Uh-huh. Now, it says here that you live over on Calvert.”
“Right. I am actually just here visiting.”
“But you said you lived here.”
“Well, right, but when you said ‘you,’ I thought you meant the collective ‘you,’ not just me. See, you’re supposed to designate, if you’re talking to a group.”
“Uh-huh. And how about you,” says the officer, looking hard at Hakma. “And this time, just so there’s no confusion, I mean the singular ‘you,’ as opposed to the collective. Do you live here?”
“Well…” says Hakma.
Later, as he sits on the cold steel bench in the holding cell at the police station, Jonas will recall how some things seem so clear when you first see them, clouded though your mind may be by fear or alcohol, but when you see them again later, in hindsight, the foolishness of that initial clarity becomes obvious. But the foolishness of what he is about to do is not at all obvious to him at this point. The point at which Hakma is trying to explain his ID situation. The point at which Jonas decides to run.
Too late, he realizes that he has been paying so much attention to the policeman in front of him, the short, bald, out-of-shape-looking man doing all the talking, that he barely notices the policeman behind. In fact, he doesn’t really notice him at all until he is trying to run past him, and in one swift motion he kicks Jonas’s leg out from under him, and Jonas falls onto the tar-paper roof.
The policeman, who has until now not said a word, bends over Jonas where he has fallen, and finally speaks.
He says, “You’re under arrest.”
1
He hears the voice of his savior. It is gentle, and deep, and touched by the lilting music of the Pennsylvania hills.
It is also incoherent. Long strings of muttered words seem to float in the air between them, and Younis has trouble putting them into context.
“Maybe you knew her.”
“Knew who?”
“That kid. Was not supposed to go that way.”
“Which way?”
“Except that it was.”
“Was what?”
“It was designed to happen that way.”
The discussion has spun out over the course of an hour, circling and doubling back upon itself, and Younis can find no firm footing in the midst of it. So he sits back and allows the words to dance around him.
“Maybe the south. Maybe the east would have been better. Choppers. We should have used choppers. Skeets was saying that. Should have landed us right there. But the river. First mistake. The goddamned river! Whose Rambo idea was that? Stupid. Poor planning.”
The words swirl around him, and at some point, Younis becomes aware that Christopher is looking at him, waiting for a response.
“Do you know what I mean?” says Christopher.
“Sir, I honestly have no idea what you are talking about,” says Younis.
Christopher takes a breath. He focuses his attention, and then finally speaks in full and coherent sentences.
“When you do something like what we did, down there in the valley, once you make the decision to do it, it takes on a life of its own. They always tell you that the most important thing is to not make any mistakes. But sometimes, the decision to do it in the first place is the mistake.”
Younis doesn’t say anything, and turns away from Christopher’s stare and looks into the fire.
“Look,” says Christopher, pulling the leather journal out of his pack, untying the tie, opening it, and handing it to Younis. “Maybe you should read this.”
2
We called her Jezebel, and she was not supposed to be there.
She just appeared. One second there was nothing, just the open field. Then she was there, walking toward us. I hoped that maybe she was a mirage.
We picked that spot, just below the ridge, because it was perfect. It was two kilometers west of the village. It was on a little rise. We came up the river, arrived that morning, and dug our position just as the sky was getting lighter in the dawn. We had our firing sectors laid out, and had everything covered between us and the village.
Then we sat and waited.
Jezebel appeared late in the afternoon.
We had already been ambushed so many times. We had lost three guys. Jacobs had gone down two days before. Some of them wanted payback. We knew they had a house in the village; we knew they used that road. We knew everything we needed to know.
Skeets called her out first. She was about a hundred meters out and wandering in our general direction. How old could she have been? Eight? Younger? Her head was uncovered, and she wore a long white dress that billowed behind her as she walked. In the sun her dark arms and hair stood out against the whiteness. Every few steps, she would stop and look at the ground, and bend down and pick something up, a stone or something, and roll it around in the palm of her hand. Then she would either throw it off to the side, if it didn’t meet her mysterious criteria, or she would tuck it into a little cloth bag she wore over her shoulder.
“Vehicles on the road,” said Skeets. He was looking through the scope, moving his cheek against the gunstock. “Heading toward us.”
We had been briefed. We had been told these were the guys who killed Jacobs. We were reminded of the lack of hard intel, the preciousness of knowledge, the uniqueness of this opportunity. The weight of it pushed down on our shoulders. None of us had slept in thirty-six hours.
And then she was a hundred meters out, directly between us and the village. She bent down again to look at another stone, picked it up, this one meeting her requirements, and she filed it away into her bag. On the road behind her, two white Subarus kicked up the dust.
She was not supposed to be there.
Skeets said, “Gimme the word, sir.” His voice sounded strained.
Now she was less than fifty meters from us. She stood up in the field and looked around, off into the distance. I wished she would turn around and walk back to the village. I prayed that I would close my eyes and then open them, and that she would be gone. Instead, she stood for a long time in that no-man’s-land between us and the village, as though lost in thought. Then she turned and looked directly at us. She smiled, like she had just glimpsed the exact stone she had been out there looking for that whole time, the one she was looking for, the right size and shape and color, the stone she most wanted in her little canvas sack.
She walked straight toward us.
“Incoming,” Skeets said, looking at the road. “We need the order, Chris.”
I looked down at him and saw that his trigger hand was shaking, almost imperceptibly, and that he was breathing too fast.
> In my mind, I put her odds at about fifty-fifty.
3
Jail is not what Jonas expects. Metal bars do not confine him; food is not some sort of gray slop served on a steel tray. In fact, he’s there only for the night, so no food is served at all. He empties his pockets into a wire basket, which is carried nonchalantly away by an obese, uniformed man with a large mole on his cheek. He is allowed to make one phone call before being led into a white room with a heavy door and two long steel benches bolted to opposite walls. Actually, he gathers, it is called a holding cell, which makes it sound almost maternal. The walls are white with dark scuff marks, as though someone wearing black-soled shoes has stutter-stepped across them. Someone has etched the word “smoot” into one wall with a sharp object, the letters sliced thinly into the chipped paint, and a dark splotch stains one corner of the shiny concrete floor. He’s just in for the night, he is told again, for his own good, so he can sleep it off. But someone will have to come down and sign him out in the morning.
Other than the steel benches, the room is empty, spinning a little in his vision, filled with only the memory of former residents, the marked-up walls implying carelessness and violence.
“Slow night,” says the guard.
For a time he sits on the steel bench and stares at the back of the door. He notices that something is written there, roughly printed at an angle in small, pale letters, written using a blue marker evidently down to its last gasp of ink. Unable to read it from where he is seated, he crosses the room to get a better look. It says, “Jezus died for you’re sinz.”
Jonas goes back and sits down. The bench is just wide enough to lie down upon, which he does, his head against the hard steel and already starting to ache, and he falls asleep.
4
Rose gathers them together in ones and twos, writing letters and making phone calls, and even, occasionally, despite her unfamiliarity with technology, sending an e-mail. She will act as a facilitator. When they meet her, they will usually be impressed by how big she seems, her personality filling the room, this little woman with the shock of red hair and the booming voice, and the hugs she gives out like Halloween candy.
