Sand Queen

by Helen Benedict

  Once Papa had recovered from the worst of his pain and shock, my stubbornness had other uses. I went back to school determined to catch up, and each day when I came home I made poor little Zaki sit and listen while I played teacher and repeated what I had learned. If he fiddled or whined or tried to run away, I rapped his knuckles with a stick. It was only when Papa caught me that Zaki was liberated. Papa was so angry! “How can you torment your own little brother?” he said. “This is not the way to be strong. The truly strong are gentle and merciful, they don’t exploit the weak.”

  If only.

  That was a calm time for our family, though. Papa was home at last and teaching again at the university, after paying who knows how much in bribes and joining the Ba’athists after all. (Not even he was able to be a hero in those dire times.) Zaki was popular with his little gang of boys at school. And I, now seventeen, was studying hard at school and had my friends Farah and Yasmina, with whom I giggled over film stars and boys.

  My favorite of these times were the evenings, when, after Zaki and I had finished our long hours of homework, we were allowed to curl up on the sofa with our parents to watch the latest soap opera on television. We liked to play at guessing and reinventing the plots, and Zaki, who so loves to clown, would introduce the silliest twists: the hero would turn out to have chicken legs, or the heroine to have two husbands and two heads, one for each; ideas I am sure he gleaned from Granny’s stories. He would jump up and stalk about the room, jerking his head and picking up his thin little legs with just the same comic delicacy as chickens do. I find myself smiling at the memory as I walk from the prison back to the house, poor Umm Ibrahim wheezing at my side. How beautiful the most ordinary of times seem when they are gone.

  These times will come again. They must.

  But with the little Kate soldier removed from the checkpoint, how am I to find out anything of Papa and Zaki? How am I to know whether the Americans are as brutal in their prison as Saddam was in his?

  [ KATE ]

  TWO WEEKS HAVE crawled by since I started guard duty and my days are so much the same now that I can’t tell one from the other. I take my morning runs with Yvette, if she isn’t out on a convoy. Third Eye sleeps in most days, which is fine with me—I’ve been keeping my distance ever since the unsympathetic bitch pulled that I-told-you-so crap at the Porta-John. The rest of the time I’m up in my tower staring at the prisoners while they wander around in their pathetic sand corral, or get down on all fours to pray.

  I’ve got to admit, it freaks me out when they do that. They line up in rows facing southwest, which I guess is the direction of Mecca from here, spread out their little rugs, if they have any, get down on their hands and knees and stick their foreheads right into the dirt. I don’t like watching them grovel like that, their butts in the air. I know they don’t see it like I do, cultural differences and all that, but I don’t think God wants us to act so undignified—aren’t we supposed to be formed in His image, after all? And it bugs the hell out of me that all that praying doesn’t stop those same guys from acting like assholes the minute they’re done.

  A whole bunch of them are throwing stuff at me now. Snakes and scorpions they find in the sand. Spiders, dead or alive. Beetles and bugs in all shapes and sizes. They love it if they can make me jump or squeal, so I have to use up all my energy trying to look unfazed when a scorpion lands on my shoulder or a snake falls wriggling at my feet.

  There are a lot more prisoners to deal with now, too, because Bucca’s growing so fast. Every day, more are brought in. The tents are so overcrowded that we’ve been ordered to go out after our shifts and put up more compounds, even if we’ve already worked fourteen bone-draining hours that day. Why the prisoners can’t build those compounds themselves I will never understand. In MP training we were taught to discipline inmates by making them work for rewards and privileges. Not at Camp Bucca. “It’s too hot for the detainees to work,” the command keeps telling us. “Now get out there and sweat.” That sucks enough, but it really bugs me that the prisoners get fine meals and free cigarettes, whether they’ve been trying to escape, jerking off at me or saying their prayers like good boys. Some days it feels like they’re hotel guests and we’re their goddamn maids.

  At least we have a few more amenities for ourselves now. DJ and three other guys in our tent stole some plywood from an engineering company and built us a floor to cut down on the rats and bugs. There are more latrines and even a shower trailer. And we also have e-mail, although there are so few computers and they’re so damn slow that I get too frustrated to bother with it. I don’t really care, though. I don’t much want to write or call home anymore, not after that last conversation. What’s there to say? I can’t tell Mom or Dad about guarding prisoners who jerk off and throw dead spiders at me; that’s not their idea of what a soldier does at war. I can’t tell them about Macktruck reading porn all the time, or what Kormick did, either. All they want to hear is how noble and heroic I’m being. The first thing Dad’s always said the few times I have called is, “Kate, I’m real proud of you.” And the last thing he’s always said for good-bye is, “That’s my girl, brave and strong.”

  Thing is, I do still want to make him proud. I do want to be brave and strong.

  Mom’s approach is different. “Have you been saying your prayers every night and going to chapel?” she likes to ask, after telling me she prays for my safety all the time. “Are you setting a good example to those poor brave soldiers over there?”

  It was Mom who made me bring the crucifix with me, the one I tacked to my tent post right above Fuzzy. That crucifix is incredibly important to her because she was wearing it when she had this terrible accident back in high school and she’s always believed it saved her life. “Make sure you keep it by you all the time, okay, sweetie?” she said when she took it off her neck and gave it to me the night before I left. “Trust in Our Lord Jesus to watch over you, like He did me.” I was touched. I’d never seen her let the thing out of her sight before.

  She told me about the accident when I was fifteen, same age as when it happened to her. “Katie?” she said in the kitchen one summer day, while I was rooting around in our freezer for a Popsicle. “You have a moment? I need to talk to you.”

  I pulled out a lemon pop and turned to look at her. It was hot, so I was in bare feet, cutoffs and a bikini top, and I remember itching all over from mosquito bites. Robin, who was already my best friend by then, and a couple of cute boys from school were out in the front yard, splashing in our above-ground pool and waiting for me.

  “Now?” I said itchily. “Can’t it wait?” But Mom looked so weird and sad that I shut up and sat down. “What’s wrong? Am I in trouble or something?”

  She pulled a chair right up to my knees, folded her pudgy little hands on the lap of her yellow skirt and fixed her watery blue eyes on me. “No, it’s not you, honey. But there’s something I’ve got to tell you. It’s about what happened to me when I was your age. It’s time for you to know.” And then she told me the whole horrible story in this strange, detached voice, like she was talking about somebody else. Didn’t spare any of the gruesome details, though. The five girls getting drunk on stolen whiskey. Piling in a car, giggling, even though every last one of them knew better. Careening into an oncoming pickup at sixty miles an hour. Dangling heads, twisted backs, smashed faces. “I lay in the hospital for six months, thinking about why the Lord let my friends die and not me,” Mom said, “and that’s when I realized He was giving me a second chance, calling me to spread His love. Be the doers of the word, and not the hearers only. That’s why I want you to trust in Jesus and Mary, Katie. They’ll look after you as long as you heed Christ’s teachings. And that’s why I don’t want you seeing those boys outside again. They’re not the kind of boys you should be with. I know their parents. They’re hard-drinking, ungodly people. Dangerous people. You understand?”

  I nodded, feeling all weird and knotted-up inside. Then something cold hit my knee. My p
op had melted clean off its stick.

  But even if my parents were willing to hear the truth about my life out here in the desert, what would be the point of telling them? It’d only make them scared for me, and I know they’re already living in dread of seeing that military car drive up, the two stiffs in dress uniform coming to the door—angels of death. Even April has some sense of the danger I’m in. “Katie?” she said one time on the phone. “I saw a program on TV about soldiers dying in the war. Are you gonna die? ’Cause I don’t want you to.”

  Tyler’s the only person who’s come close to guessing what’s really going on, though. When I called him the second day after I started up in my tower, he said, “Are the men treating you okay out there?” I thought he was asking if I was cheating on him, so I answered, “Don’t worry, they’re all dickheads.”

  “That’s what I meant. Are you safe?”

  I could hear the need in his voice, the need to know I was all right. But I wasn’t about to repeat the mistake I made with my parents and come across as whiny and pathetic. So all I said was, “Tyler, I’m fine.” That was the first time I ever lied to him, and somehow, since then, I haven’t felt like calling him any more than I’ve felt like calling Mom and Dad. The command’s banned us from using our phones now anyway, so if Tyler or my parents ask why I don’t call anymore, I’ve got an excuse.

  Tyler wrote to me for my birthday, June 6th. He must’ve planned real carefully when to mail the letter because it arrived today with a package, only ten days late. Normally, snail mail doesn’t get here for months.

  Happy Birthday, Katie-pie!

  Wow, 20 years old! One more year and we can go to bars and get hammered, and you can get into the clubs I’m playing without a fake ID. It’s crazy that you’re old enough to fight but not drink.

  I miss you so bad there are no words for it. I ache for you every day, all day, and every night too. I keep going to our places, like the drive-in and Myosotis Lake and The Orange Dog, thinking it’ll make me feel better. But without you I can’t stand them. It’s like you’re walking beside me, but you’re invisible.

  Keep safe, brave girl. I’m counting the days. Hope you like the present! Listen to track three. I wrote it for you. Love and more love, Tyler

  In the package is a portable radio and a home-recorded CD of his own songs, their titles written out in red marker. I push the CD to the bottom of my duffle bag. I appreciate how sweet and careful his letter his, and how much work he put into that CD, but I can’t face listening to it right now. The sound of Tyler singing, especially about us, would turn my whole self inside out.

  I’m glad to have the radio, though. Gives me something to listen to in my tower other than the frigging detainees. Two guys in particular are getting under my skin. The first is this dipstick in a mustache, about thirty-five or so, who comes up to me every damn day to beg for cigarettes in English. He has his own fucking cigarettes, but no, he wants mine. “Soldier girl, gimme smoke. Come on pretty baby,” he starts. Then, when I won’t give him any, it’s, “Come on, cunt,” and other such charming phrases he must have picked up from American porno movies. After he’s finally given up on begging and insulting me for the day, he stands in the same spot for hours staring at my face. I’ve tried yelling at him to go away, but that only makes him laugh and stare even more. I’ve tried ignoring him, but we both know I’m pretending, so that doesn’t work either. I’ve tried staring back at him, too, but then he acts like I’m flirting with him and strips me with his eyes. Maybe he was a torturer under Saddam or something because he’s scarily good at this game of his and I’m not on the winning side. It’s ridiculous: I’m the prison guard here, I have the weapon. But those burning eyes of his won’t leave me alone. They even get into my dreams.

  The other prisoner who drives me nuts is the jerk-off. I think he’s genuinely crazy. Every time I face his direction, he whips out his dick and starts beating it, leering at me with the most obscene expression I’ve ever laid eyes on. He shouts at me, too, but I don’t understand what he’s saying, thank God, although it isn’t too hard to guess his gist. He wears western clothes, gray pants and a white shirt, which are getting dirtier by the day, and he has a beaky face and graying black hair. I don’t think he can be a political prisoner; he’s too disgusting. He’s probably some nutcase sex offender who was locked up under Saddam, let go when we fired all the Iraqi police, and then locked up again by us.

  One day, though, he tries something new. He doesn’t just jerk off. He drops his pants, squats in the sand and does his business. Then he wipes his ass with his left hand and throws his turd at me.

  When he does that, I almost shoot him. He misses me but it hits the platform right by my boot, and the stink of it makes me gag. I raise my rifle and aim it at him but it doesn’t faze him at all. I think he doesn’t believe a girl would shoot him. I think he doesn’t believe a girl is worth any more than the shit he’s just thrown at me. I aim right at his chest while he jeers, my finger on the trigger, the whole of me yearning to shoot his fuckass head off. The only thing that stops me is remembering how much trouble I’d get into if I killed an unarmed prisoner cold.

  I lower my rifle and kick his turd off my platform, and when Jimmy comes for his usual visit he finds me down on the ground, rubbing my boot in the sand, my face screwed up in disgust and my hands shaking even worse than usual.

  “What happened?”

  “See that fucking hajji over there?” I point at the jerk-off with my rifle. He’s strolling around the compound, trying to look innocent.

  Jimmy looks. “What about him?”

  “He just threw his own shit at me.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Jimmy shakes his head. “It’s much worse for you females out here than for us, isn’t it?”

  It’s true. Those prisoners really hate having female guards. But that isn’t the only reason it’s better for Jimmy than for me. He doesn’t have to work directly with the detainees like I do, ’cause he’s posted at the compound entrance, not right by the wire. And he doesn’t have to spend all frigging day alone, either—he shares his post with those guys from Headquarters. He doesn’t know how lucky he is.

  Every time Jimmy comes to see me, he brings me some kind of treat: soda and a bag of Doritos or Skittles from the PX. I think he’s worried I’m getting too skinny. But we don’t normally talk about the crap-throwing prisoners or anything else that goes on in that toilet bowl. It’s too damn depressing. We both feel, without needing to say it, that the whole point of each other’s company is to forget. So we talk about other stuff. Books we’ve read, movies, his past girlfriends, Tyler, our families, our plans for when we get back to college. Jimmy wants to study physics so he can invent things. I’m not sure what I want to be—maybe a teacher, maybe a TV reporter, or maybe one of those scientists who spend most of their lives alone in the forest studying birdcalls. Anything, really, so long as it isn’t a soldier.

  I’m the one who does most of the talking, though. Jimmy likes to speak about his little brothers, who are living with their aunt while he’s deployed, but he never says much about the rest of his life at home. I think it makes him too sad, partly because of his mom—I gather she’s been in and out of loony bins most of her life—and partly because his dad skedaddled when Jimmy was a kid, leaving Jimmy to pretty much raise himself and his little brothers on his own. I think that’s why he worries about those brothers so much.

  So when we talk, it’s mostly me blabbing on about how Tyler’s studying music at SUNY New Paltz, about Robin moving to New York City to be a model, or about some cute thing April did once. Bullshit, really, since that’s not what I’m thinking about. What I’m thinking about is when I can next take a piss, when I’m going to run out of water, when can I sleep and when can I shower. It’s like my brain has shriveled to the size of one of Rickman’s zits.

  As for reporting Kormick and Boner, Jimmy doesn’t bring that up anymore. Once, he says, “Kate, no pressure, but if you ever want to talk about
what happened with those fuckers, or if you want to do anything about it, tell me. But if you don’t, it’s okay. I won’t bug you about it anymore.”

  “Thanks,” I answer, and I do appreciate how kind that is. But there’s no way I’m going to tell him about it, or anyone else either. That’s not what soldiers do.

  “HI, SWEETIE,” THE mother says timidly, standing in the door of the hospital room with a big yellow bouquet in her arms and a quavery smile. “Can we come in?” She’s small and puffy, like a pigeon, and so loud with colors she makes the soldier squint. Hair stiff with copper dye. Eyelids powder blue. Lips neon pink to match her dress.

  The mother has a right to be nervous after what happened, the soldier knows this. So she nods and tries to smile. “Sure,” she says. “There aren’t enough chairs. You can sit on the bed if you want.” She moves over to stand by the window, the bed between her and her parents like a berm.

  The mother comes around the bed for a hug, but the soldier steps out of the way. The mom stops, disconcerted. “How’s your back, honey? Still hurting?”

  Shrug.

  “Well, you look a lot better, thank the Lord. Where can I put these flowers?”

  The soldier points to a vase on the sink. The mother tiptoes back around the bed as if she’s in church, which annoys the soldier to no end, and fills the vase with water. Then she unwraps the plastic around the bouquet with a deafening crackle and shoves the yellow flowers in, fussily arranging them before she puts them on the bedside table. A rotting, musty smell fills the room.