The walk to the latrines is pretty far because we’ve built them out near the berm, this big sand dune we’ve bulldozed up around the perimeter of the camp as a security wall. Doesn’t anybody in the Army remember what Jesus said about building a house on sand? And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it. Security wall, my ass.
“So what’s up, glum-face? God piss in your Cheerios again?” Third Eye says as we make our way through the dark. The only light is from the moon. We can’t use flashlights because that would make us a target for mortars.
“It’s Kormick. He was in a shitty mood today.”
“Oh come on. He’s not so bad.”
“Are you kidding? He picked on me all day.”
Third Eye grunts. “You must’ve pissed him off then. What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything!”
“Sure you did. Come on, Freckles, when’re you gonna learn to play along? That’s all he wants. Then he’ll lay off of you.”
I look up at her face, but I can’t see it in the dark, ‘specially under her helmet. “What do you mean, ‘play along?’”
“You know. Listen, you made your choice. You gotta be a bitch or a slut around here, everybody knows that, and since you won’t be a bitch with that sunny little Christian act of yours, you’ve only got one choice left. That’s why the men chase you so bad. They all want to get in your pants, Sergeant Movie Star included. But you won’t put out, so they’re pissed.”
“So you’re saying I have to sleep with him? Fuck you! Not that I think you’re right about that anyhow.”
“No. I’m saying you got to make your signals clear, kiddo. If you don’t wanna put out, then you need to get a whole lot meaner.”
“Like you?”
“Yeah, baby. Like me.”
We walk on in silence while I try not to say that the only reason the men don’t bother her is because she’s an obvious bull-dyke and looks like the back of a garbage truck. Specially with that fucking bump on her forehead. But I don’t. I’m a Christian, like she said. I’m supposed to turn the other friggin’ cheek. And anyway, maybe she’s right. Maybe my signals aren’t clear.
Thing is, I try. All day long I try to act like a hard-ass, but it just isn’t me. I can’t be convincing. I sound like a clueless little country girl trying to act street-tough. And I sound like that because, well, that’s what I am.
“You know what you gotta do?” Third Eye says then. “You gotta pick out a boyfriend. That’s the only way for somebody like you. One meathead to fend off all the others.”
“But I can’t stand a single one of them! Anyhow, I’m not going to cheat on Tyler, no way.”
“You know what they say about beggars, kiddo. Think about it.”
We’re at the latrines now, the four Porta-Johns I mentioned, which is all we’ve built so far for the hundred and seventy-five people in my unit. They smell like you’d expect, so we do our thing quickly and leave, trying not to gag. There aren’t any bathrooms to wash in, either. For showers, we dump bottles of water over ourselves—a whore’s bath, the guys call it—or once in a while hang up a poncho and get under a portable shower bag. But most of the time we’re crusted with desert mud: sand and dust and sweat all mixed up into a fine brown soup and dried by the sun on our skins. Our uniforms get so stiff from sweat-salt and sand that you can stand them up on their own, like an army of ghosts.
Why it has to be like this, I don’t know. Isn’t the U.S. the richest country in the world? So why the hell do we soldiers have to live like we’re in a pigsty? It’s worse than when I go camping with Tyler and April, and we’re into roughing it, too. No campsites or tents, just sleeping bags on the pine-needle floor and a roll of toilet paper in your pocket. But it’s never disgusting like it is here at Bucca.
Me and Tyler love camping so much that we go all year round, even in the snow. But our favorite season for it is the fall, when the leaves are doing their flame dance and the sky’s so clear it can’t even hide the moon in the middle of the day. We head over to the Catskill Mountains, which are near where we live, and hike long and hard up to the high ground, jays squawking their warnings in the trees. Then we find a patch of soft pine needles and moss, settle in, build a fire and cook dinner: roasted hot dogs and ash-baked potatoes, usually, and if April is with us, marshmallows burned on the outside, gooey in the middle, the way she likes them. After we eat, Tyler plays guitar and sings while I clean up, April curled in her sleeping bag close by, little and lucky, her mouth sticky with sugar.
We wait for her to fall asleep, then Tyler slides into my sleeping bag and we lie there together, cuddled up tight, looking at the stars flickering through the trees and talking softly about whatever comes into our heads. Breathing in each other’s words and scents. Silky skin, soft breath. Our cocoon.
By the time I get back to the tent with Third Eye, Mack-truck is there, sprawled in his boxers on top of his rack, his blubbery belly out for all to see and a clump of chew stuck in his cheek. Just the sight of him makes me want to puke. A couple weeks ago I asked Sergeant First Class Henley, our platoon leader, to make the slob move, but he refused. “You can handle that yourself, soldier, and if you can’t, you should,” is all he said. So even though Third Eye’s on my right and Yvette Sanchez is over beside her, on my left I’ve got to put up with this moron sleeping right next to me every single night—which, in our tent, means only two feet away.
“Here comes my wet dream,” he calls as I walk in. He’s nudged his rack over closer to mine. Again.
“Move. You’re in my space.” I stand over him with my rifle on my shoulder.
He ignores me. Mack’s about thirty-two, hairy as a gorilla’s balls and ringed with fat that not even the Bucca bug can shrink. His face is so heavily bearded that even when he’s newly shaved it looks blue. Worse, he spits tobacco all day. Nobody likes him, not even Rickman.
“I mean it, fuckface. Move.”
He hauls himself up, his gut sagging over his Skivvies, emitting a wave of stale sweat and tobacco. Then he bends over and pulls his rack closer to mine than ever. He puts me through this asinine routine every night while the other guys watch and snigger. His little comedy act.
“I’m gonna puke on you if you don’t move away, you stink so bad,” I tell him.
“Hey, Macktruck!” Rickman calls from the other side of the tent, laughing. “You gonna let Tits talk to you like that?”
Mack grunts. And then it happens. What I planned. He straightens up and finds himself face-to-face with his worst fear: Fuzzy.
“Fuck!” he yells and staggers back, this terrified look on his face. His rack catches him in the back of his knees and he falls over with a huge thump, his fat legs flying into the air.
Everybody roars. Round one, Kate.
He struggles to his feet, red and spluttering, yanks his rack over to where it belongs and climbs onto it, pretending to laugh. He doesn’t look at me.
I pick up my poncho lining and tie it to some strings I’ve sewn onto the tent ceiling. This is the only wall I’ve got between me and this creep. I’ve been putting it up ever since he started whispering obscene suggestions to me on our second night here. Then I lie down, say my usual goodnight prayer, pull the sheet I brought from home over me and change into my PTs, the gym shirt and shorts I sleep in because they’re easier and cooler than PJs. But how the hell I’m going to get through yet another fire and brimstone of a night I do not know. My head hurts. Stomach hurts. Bladder hurts. It’s stiflingly hot and I’m crazy with thirst again, but I can’t drink more than one sip of water because if you’re a female it’s too fucking dangerous to go outside for a piss.
Is Third Eye right? Is it my fault things are like this?
The minute I wake up the next morning, I snatch my water bottle and chug the whole damn thing down. I spent half the night awake, moving the dust around in my mouth, and when I did finally drift off, I dreamed I was
swimming in my local lake with my mouth open, drinking my way across. Only, every gulp I took turned to sand.
I shake Third Eye and Yvette awake too, so we can go for our usual run together before leaving for our separate shifts. This is our only chance to get away from all the douches we work with, and our only free moment to actually enjoy ourselves. I think it’s the best moment of the day. It is mine, anyhow.
We creep out of the tent still wearing the PTs we slept in, and stretch a little before we get going. The air’s cool from the night and the sky’s glowing slate blue. The only other people around are a few guys running like us and the poor suckers on shit-burning detail. Since we’ve got no sewage facilities, they have the delightful job of dragging the barrels out from under the latrines, dousing them with gas and diesel and setting them on fire, then stirring them with a long pole so they can send black clouds of toxic stink over the camp for all of us to breathe in our sleep.
We jog along the dirt road that runs down the middle of the camp, too sleepy to talk yet. I feel my legs stretching and my body turning loose and strong, like it always does when I run. Makes me miss my track days in high school—the days when I still felt sane.
“Did that spider keep Macktruck quiet last night?” Third Eye asks me after a while.
“Not really.”
“Y’know, we should teach that mofo a lesson,” Yvette says. Yvette’s even shorter than me, but she has this husky, loud voice that makes you sit up and pay attention. “You two got any dental floss?”
“Dental floss?” Third Eye says. “Why?”
“You’ll see.”
Yvette always comes up with the best schemes. She’s a weird mix of street-tough and gentle. All her life she’s bounced from one foster home to another because her mom’s a junkie and her dad’s out of the picture. A lot of people are like that in my unit, but Yvette’s the only one I know who doesn’t hate the war. “It got me outta the ghetto,” she likes to say. “God bless America.” If war’s better than where she came from, you know it had to be bad.
I like her, though. She’s a dark-skinned Puerto Rican, narrow as a broomstick, with this little old-before-her time face under super-short hair. She can curse the cock off a roach, worse than most of the guys in our unit. But if you treat her right, she’s truly generous. More than Third Eye, who I wonder about sometimes.
The dawn breaks while we’re running and for a moment the landscape is actually beautiful. Fiery orange streaking the sky. The dust in the air sparkling like powdered rubies. The sand glowing rose.
Sunrises and sunsets are something else out here in the desert. The rest of the time it’s hideous.
I scan the sky a moment for birds, an old habit. Me and Tyler were into birds back at home, nerdy as that sounds. In the spring and summer we’d sit on my parent’s back deck, right at that moment at dusk when the swallows are tumbling through the sky catching their insect dinners, and look out for birds over the long valley that stretched up to the mountains behind us. We liked to compete over who could identify the most. Every evening, a great blue heron would flop over the fields, like a commuter on his way home from the office, minus the briefcase, but he was too easy for either of us to claim, with his long ragged wings and tail like an arrow. But I was best at catching first sight of the rose-breasted grosbeak in spring, and Tyler was always the first to spot the nervous little nuthatch trying to get at our feeder before the jays and catbirds chased it away.
So I was excited about the birds I’d see in Iraq. I looked them up in a bird book before I came. One is the Eurasian hoopoe, this crazy-looking thing with a woodpecker’s back, a dove’s head and a sandpiper’s beak, topped off by a striped crest like a clown hat. And there are supposed to be larks and ibis, eagles and storks—the kinds of birds you only see in zoos back home, never in the wild. I want so badly to see them! But so far I haven’t seen a single one.
Where the hell do birds go in war, anyway? Do they fly away someplace else? Do they hide? Do they catch fire and fall, black and smoking, to the ground? Or do they breathe in the bomb smoke and depleted uranium and burning bodies and oil and shit, like we do, and crawl away somewhere to die?
“HERE, I BROUGHT something for you,” the long-haired man says once he’s stopped crying. He slides a hand into his jacket pocket.
The soldier starts and shrinks back again on the hospital bed.
“No, no, it’s okay.” Slowly, he pulls out a little pink box, as shimmery as an Easter egg. He holds it out. “It’s from April. She misses you real bad. She says to please get well and come home in time for her birthday. Eight years old, can you believe it? She’s growing up so fast.”
He puts the box on the bed.
The soldier picks it up carefully, cradling it in her underwater palms. April is good. April is safe.
“Are you going to open it?”
The soldier looks down at the box.
“Katie?” The man leans forward again, his elbows on his knees. “Look at me, please?”
She hesitates. But then she lifts her head and eyes him warily.
“You’re home now, remember? The war’s gone. You’re not with those people anymore. It’s over now, you’re safe.”
The man does have the same soft face as Tyler, the same pleading, cinnamon eyes. Same flop of brown hair over his brow, too. But he’s doing something Tyler never would have done.
He’s lying.
[ NAEMA ]
GRANNY MARYAM IS not well. The shock of the soldiers storming into her house and taking Papa and Zaki has affected her mind. She was already bent and shaky, her little head drooping, but at least she was sharp. Now she wanders from past to present and doesn’t seem to understand that it was not Saddam’s soldiers who seized her beloved grandson and son-in-law, but the Americans. All soldiers are the same to her, whatever their uniforms, whatever their justifications. All are murderers.
Mama and I try to lift her spirits by putting her to bed in the prettiest room in the house, the one she normally saves for guests, whichhassweet-smellingrushmatson the floor and blueandred tapestries on its walls. We arrange her favorite cushions under the windows so their bright colors and gold threads can catch the sunbeams filtering through the shutters and send cheering sparkles over the room. And when the heat of the day has baked the house to an inferno, we carry her to the roof, where we can all sleep in the relative cool of the night.
But Granny notices none of these efforts. I take her temperature and blood pressure and feel her pulse, the way I was taught at Medical College—there’s nothing wrong with her but old age and heartbreak. Yet she won’t eat anything but the thinnest of gruels. She refuses to get up except to visit the outhouse, leaning on Mama’s arm, or to sit at the table, bent over her soup bowl, clutching her unused spoon and sighing. She moans and frets and wrings her bony hands, her eyes clouded with hurt and confusion. And she calls again and again for Grandpa, even though he’s been dead these twenty years.
I hate to see Granny like this, so changed from the lively and mischievous woman she once was. How Zaki and I loved to visit her when we were small! This little house and her animals; her soft, round body, smelling of the jasmine with which she perfumed her long hair; her secret smile, promising all sorts of forbidden treats once our parents’ backs were turned.
Every year on Eid al-Fitr, Papa would bundle us into the car—its red paint bright and unscratched then—and drive the nearly five hundred kilometers from Baghdad to here for the holiday. Laden with the cakes and breads Mama had baked and the clumsy gifts Zaki and I had made at school— lopsided clay bowls, usually—we would arrive tired and dusty but salivating in anticipation of breaking the Ramadan fast. And Granny would always be waiting at her door, dressed in the black abaya she has worn since Grandpa was killed, her old face crinkling with joy at the sight of us.
Once we were inside, Zaki and I would wait by the window, counting the seconds until the sun dipped below the horizon. And the minute it did, Granny would bring out her sp
ecial buttery date balls, spiced with cardamom and anise, which we would gobble until we felt sick. Then she would send us outside to play so the adults could talk among themselves while they prepared the night’s feast: perhaps masgoof, fish split down the belly and roasted with herbs; or maybe kibbe, my favorite, spicy lamb dumplings encased in cracked wheat.
Zaki and I spent hours playing outside in those days. We chased Granny’s chickens and collected their eggs. We learned to milk her goats and feed their bony kids, their fur so silky, their tiny bodies wriggling. And we climbed the neighborhood fruit trees to pluck what oranges and dates we could before getting caught, or ran over to play with the grandchildren of kind Abu Mustafa al-Assawi and his wife, who lived next door.
But our favorite times were the warm nights when we slept on the roof with Granny, as Mama and I are doing now. Zaki and I would lie side by side, watching the stars dance above, and ask Granny question after question about her life. Her past was like a history book to us, for she had lived in the old ways, far from the modern life we knew, and she had progressed from misery to happiness just like the heroine of a folktale. She had been married at fourteen to a man old enough to be her father, and for years was terrorized by his blows and the pain and horror of the nights when he came to her bed. She became pregnant before she was fully grown and almost died giving birth to a stillborn baby. But then, after five years of this misery, she was released. Her husband died, poisoned perhaps by his own cruelty, and a year later she was married to my grandfather, a man also older than she but kind and loving. “I wish you had known him, my little pets,” she would tell us. “Your mama, how she adored him when she was small! On the days he did not have to work, she would make him sit all morning while she played barber, pretending to cut his hair and shave him, getting soapsuds all over his clothes, just to keep him close to her.” Granny would chuckle then and patiently answer more of our questions, or tell us village gossip about the fat tobacco seller and his bullying wife until she had lulled us to sleep. Granny had a salty tongue.
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