“I brought you these,” the father says then, stepping around his wife. He reaches across the bed and hands over two books. One a Bible—no surprise there; the other a collection of nature essays by Annie Dillard. The soldier used to love Dillard. But the idea of reading anything that precious and preachy right now makes her sick.
“Thanks.” She puts the books down on the bed and looks at her dad. He’s still as upright and trim as ever. Wide shoulders, silver hair cut military short. Clint Eastwood creases around his light-blue eyes. He looks exactly like what he is: a God-fearing, law-enforcing American bully.
He hands her a manila envelope. “I think you might want to look at this.” It’s from the Army and it’s been opened.
“You read this already? My mail?”
“Open it,” is all he answers.
The soldier obeys, hands trembling even more than usual. Inside are her discharge papers. Medical, along with “failure to adjust.” That means she’s been booted out for being a fuckup.
“You can fight it, you know, appeal,” the father says. “They tell you how right there.”
She looks him in the eyes, the exact same washed-out blue as hers. “Why would I want to do that?”
“It makes it sound like there’s something wrong with you.”
“There is something wrong with me.”
“Oh, Katie.” The father looks at her sadly. “You know what I mean. You don’t want that smear on your record all your life, do you? It’s not right after what you’ve done for this country.”
“I don’t give a shit. The last thing I ever fucking want to do is go back in the Army. They can smear me all they friggin’ want.”
“Katie, your language,” the mother says weakly.
The soldier sits on the bed, her back to them, and drops her face into her hands. They don’t understand that she’s got no patience anymore. Not for their bullshit, not for their hypocrisy, not for their total goddamn dangerous ignorance. So her parents can’t be proud of her now? Can’t boast about her being a hero, as brave as any son might have been? So fucking what.
Nobody moves. The soldier can hear her mother’s wheezing breath. The mom stopped smoking years ago, but she’s so fat and out of shape she breathes like a Pekingese.
“Where’s April?” the soldier says once she’s calm enough to speak. She stands and turns to look at them again.
Her mother glances at the father. “We thought it was still a little too soon.” She swallows. “Next time.”
“Well, shit! How am I going to make it up to her if you won’t let me see her?”
“Well, you know what happened. You know what you did.”
The soldier nods, mouth clenched. “Yeah, nobody’s hero, me. Scared my little sis. Embarrassed you all. I’ve got no right to act like that with my nice little family, do I? God forgive me and all that crap.”
“Sweetie, please,” the mother says, reaching out a hand so plump it looks like a little balloon with fingers. “You can’t hide from the Lord, you know that. If you would just pray with me a moment it would help. Just one little prayer?”
“Mom. Stop.”
“Sally, leave it,” the father says. “Let’s all get ahold of ourselves here and sit.”
He waves his wife to the one chair in the room and plunks himself down on the corner of the bed. The soldier backs up until she’s standing as far away from them as she can get.
“Tyler told us he came last week,” the father says then.
No answer.
“He said you weren’t doing so well. He said you acted like you didn’t know him.”
I didn’t.
“Looks like you’re doing better today, though.”
“Yeah. I know exactly who everybody is now.”
The father and mother look at each other again.
“Katie, are they treating you right in here?” the dad says next, trying to soften his voice. “Do they know what they’re doing? Are they giving you too many of those drugs? Maybe you’d be better off at home, huh?”
“No.”
“No what?”
“I’m not going home.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course you are. You need to be with your family.”
“No, that’s not what I need. But you can’t understand that, can you? ’Cause for all your tough sheriff shit, you’ve never seen anything. What do you deal with all day up there in small-town land? Drunk drivers? ‘Domestic incidents?’ Teenage pranks? So don’t try and tell a soldier what she fucking needs, okay?”
The father closes his eyes. “Maybe you should stay here a little longer. But Kate… ” He opens his eyes again and gives his daughter the severest sheriff glare he can muster. “The Lord helps those who help themselves. You’ve got to want to be better, you’ve got to try. Otherwise nobody can help you at all.”
Not only are her hands shaking, now her whole body is. “Just go!” the soldier shouts. “Get the fuck away from me!”
Sheriff Daniel Brady rises to his feet. “I know it’s been hard, I know you’ve been through a lot, but you need to stop behaving like this.”
“Leave!”
And the soldier picks up the father’s Bible and throws it as hard as she can at the vase, sending yellow petals and shards of glass flying all over the room.
[ KATE ]
A FEW DAYS after the jerk-off threw his shit at me, Yvette tells me she’s been relieved from night convoys for a while, so is back on the same schedule as me. I’m real glad to hear this, not only because I miss her when she’s away but cause I’m still not getting on so good with Third Eye. We talk when we have to because you can’t not talk to someone who sleeps two feet away from you. But ever since that Sand Queen graffiti, she’s been either ignoring me or letting fly with a mean remark. Third Eye, I’ve decided, is turning into one of those Army females who’d rather stab you in the back than watch it. Either that, or she’s swallowed Kormick’s crap about me being a skank.
“What’s the story with you two?” Yvette asks me one morning during our usual run to the berm and back. “You and Third Eye are skulking around each other like a couple of she-cats fighting over a tom. And I know that ain’t the problem.” She gives me a wink.
I concentrate on running a moment. Running is getting pretty difficult these days, what with the Bucca bug draining my guts, the lousy food and the heat killing my appetite. It annoys me. I want to be growing stronger, not weaker.
“It started over that fucking graffiti,” I say reluctantly.
We both hold our breath a second while we run through a particularly fragrant cloud of burning latrine fuel.
“Why, what happened?”
“She acted like I deserved it and she’s been treating me like shit ever since.”
Yvette looks over at me. “Well, fuck her! What’s her problem? I mean it’s one thing being a dyke, I can live with that, long as she don’t hit on me. But why’s she have to be twice as bad as the boys all the time, huh?”
I shrug. I’m out of breath and my legs are aching already. “She’s even worse now that she’s started working with my old team. She hasn’t said anything to you about them, has she?”
“Nah, she just said they suck. How’re your new guys?”
“Not too bad. Mosquito’s pretty funny. Creeley’s a kid. But they’re all right.”
“What about Teach?” Yvette grins at me, bouncing along the sand road with no effort at all.
“What about him?”
“I hear he visits you up in your princess tower every single day.”
I don’t answer that, just concentrate on breathing through the burning sewage and getting my aching legs along that road and back again without collapsing. To my relief, she doesn’t push it.
A couple nights later, I’m reading on my rack when Third Eye comes in looking even more pissed than usual. She throws her big body down on her cot and stares up at the roof a long time, her red face clenched so tight she’s turning white around the mouth. I try
to ignore her and keep reading, but she looks so miserable that I figure I better do the Christian thing and see if I can help, even if she is a hardassed bitch. Mom would be proud.
“Something wrong?” I ask.
No answer. She just lies there on her back, mouth clenched.
“Smoke?” I offer her my pack. She shakes her head.
“How about water?” I hold out an open bottle.
She nods at that and props herself up on an elbow to drink. And to my shock I see that her narrow black eyes are filled with tears. Third Eye—that tough dyke—crying?
I pin up my poncho curtain in case Macktruck comes back, sit down and lean toward her. “Wanna talk?” I whisper. “Did you get some bad news or something?”
“Leave me the fuck alone!” She rolls over to face away from me.
I gaze at her broad back a minute. Yvette would be much better at this ’cause she and Third Eye still get along fine. But Yvette’s out on a convoy, so I’m the only option.
“Look, don’t bite my head off,” I whisper, hoping the guys around us aren’t listening. “Is it Kormick? Did he do something to you?”
But even as I say that I think, come on, Kate, be real— this chick’s built like a wall. Even that fuckhead couldn’t pull anything on her.
But then, ever so slightly, she nods.
“He did? What…”
“Shut up.” She rolls onto her back again and wipes her eyes with her wrist. “I fucking hate men.”
“Shh!” I look around quickly. This is not a conversation that should be overheard. Luckily, far as I can tell, most of the guys are tuned out over their DVD players and earphones. Maybe one’s actually reading a book. Still, you never know who’s eavesdropping.
“If I tell you, you won’t say anything about it, right?” Third Eye whispers then. “Nothing to nobody, ever? You swear?”
“I swear.”
“If you do, I’ll kill you. I mean it.”
“I know you do.” I lean closer. “Did he hurt you? Are you all right?”
Third Eye swallows and looks away from me. Then she says in a hoarse whisper, “He raped me. Him and Boner together. Of course I’m not ‘all right.’”
“Oh God! They tried to do that to me, too!”
Third Eye stares at me angrily. “I’m not talking about your fucking problems, Sand Queen. I’m talking about mine.”
[ NAEMA ]
GRANNY MARYAM’S NEIGHBORS, old Abu Mustafa and his wife and sister, have invited us over again to watch television. We have only one or two hours of electricity a day now, if any at all, but Abu Mustafa says that as soon as it does deign to visit us, we are welcome. We have taken to talking about the electricity like this, as if it were a malicious trickster. After all, it switches us from modern to primitive life and back again at will. Some people try to outwit it by buying a private generator, but we cannot afford such a luxury because the few dinars we managed to bring with us from Baghdad have so lost their value that they buy almost nothing. So we are left with no more control over our light and communications, or whether we bake or freeze, than we have over the glow of the moon.
Mama goes to watch the neighbor’s television whenever she can, eager to hear news of the war and our poor battered Baghdad, and Granny goes with her on the increasingly rare days she is well enough, but I hardly ever go at all. There is too much to do while the electricity lasts to waste time on television and its lies: heat the water for washing; clean the stubborn dust from our clothes; cook some rice to last us through the next few days of blackouts; soak myself from the pump and stand by the fan to cool off, the day’s only respite from the suffocating desert heat. And most urgently of all, recharge my cellular telephone in the hope of reaching Khalil and the other friends from whom I am so cruelly cut off. That telephone is my lifeline here in Granny’s remote little house, for we have no computers or Internet, no landline and we receive no letters. This war has isolated us as effectively as if it had sent us to Mars.
Many of my friends fled Baghdad at the first whiff of the invasion, having had more foresight than my family did, and where they are now I do not know. But those with less money or no contacts stayed behind and it is from them I particularly hope to hear, even though I know they will bear terrible tales. But the person I most long to talk to, of course, is Khalil. He and I have managed to speak only once in the nearly three weeks since my family left, during a rare moment while my telephone was working, and it was then that he told me he had decided to stay in Baghdad, no matter what. “I’m going to wait for you, my love,” he said. “I want you to have somebody to come home to.”
“Khalil, you mustn’t! It’s too dangerous!” I was replying when the telephone cut off, and ever since we have missed each other again and again, foiled by power outages, bombs and the wanton destruction of war. Now I no longer know where Khalil is, or whether he is even alive.
So the minute my phone has charged enough to work (and it only works at all down here because we are so near Kuwait; the Iraqi power lines have been bombed), I try to reach him, as I have tried so often already, punching in his number while my pulse thrums in my ears. All the other times I’ve called him, I have met only silence. But this time, a ring! My heart jumps so violently I can hardly breathe.
But then the ringing stops.
I try again. One ring… two… then nothing. Again I dial—the same thing. Over and over I try, but the telephone either rings and cuts off, or will not ring at all. What does this mean? Is Khalil’s phone simply not working, or has something terrible happened to him? I keep punching in the numbers, faster and harder, my hand flying in a frenzy. But already I know it is futile. The telephone has become nothing but an inert object, no more communicative than a stone.
I pocket the useless thing and drag myself through the rest of my chores, my limbs weighted with disappointment. Then I walk over to Abu Mustafa’s house to join Mama and Granny. They are inside with his wife Huda, and his sister Thoraya, who are good friends to Granny, drinking tea in front of a fan and sitting around a little television set, watching it in grim silence. I settle down to watch with them, too discouraged even to speak. But the minute I sit, the trickster blinks and kills the electricity once again, instantly smothering us in blackness and heat.
I should be used to its capriciousness by now, but at this particular moment I cannot bear it. I sit in the sudden darkness, unable to stop my eyes from filling with tears. Everything about this war conspires to make us helpless. Why was I so naïve as to believe that girl Kate when she said she would look for Papa and Zaki? It is much more likely that she has forgotten us, no more interested in our fate than the electricity trickster is in our needs.
Khalil, I think as I wipe my eyes and rise to light a lamp, I will marry you after all. My dreams of traveling the world seem absurd now. They seem to come from a time and place as remote and innocent as when I was an infant. Yes, I will marry you, and yes, we can be doctors together, if that is what you still wish.
Just be alive, habib, be safe. That is the only dream that matters now.
[ KATE ]
THE MORNING AFTER Third Eye tells me what happened to her, I have a little talk with Marvin. “How you doing today?” I ask him from the top of my tower. Nobody can see me talking to a tree up here, except maybe a few of the prisoners, but since they’re crazy as me by now it doesn’t matter. “As for me, I’m not so good.”
When Jimmy comes by in the afternoon, I ask if he knows anybody who works at the boys’ compound. “Yeah, Ortiz. Why?” He’s chewing on a mouthful of potato chips, his helmet tilted back like a cowboy hat and his high-planed cheeks sunburned and sweaty. All of us sweat so much out here we crave salt all the time.
“Because I promised that Iraqi girl I’d look for her kid brother. But then I forgot all about it.”
“So why do it now?”
“Just something Third Eye said. Could you arrange for me to talk to Ortiz?”
“Sure.” Jimmy squints at me from be
hind his shades. He’s sitting on my tower floor, as usual, his long legs dangling over the edge, his rangy body managing to look relaxed even in his bulky battle-rattle vest and jacket. I’m on the chair, scanning the prisoners, dodging shit and snakes— doing my job.
“Speaking of Third Eye, how’s she managing out there with those fuckers?” he asks then.
I glance at him. “Why?” I say cautiously. “You heard something?”
He pauses. “’Fraid so.”
“What?”
He stares down at his scuffed-up desert boots. “You don’t want to know.”
“I know I don’t. But tell me.”
He sighs. “Well, that asswipe Boner was bragging in the tent last night that she’d blown him and Kormick. A cozy little threesome, he said.”
“And people believe that? Third Eye?”
“People’ll believe anything in the Army.”
“Fuck.” I don’t know which is worse, the guys thinking she did that voluntarily, in which case she’ll get harassed to death. Or them knowing she was raped, which will get her treated like a leper. Either way they’ll say she’s a tramp, just like they say about me.
“I should’ve reported them, like you said. They wouldn’t be spreading crap like that about her then. I’m such a friggin’ coward, Jimmy.”
“Don’t say that! It’s not your fault. Nothing you could do would stop those guys from being the shitheads they are, don’t go blaming yourself. But is this anything to do with you wanting to find that boy?”
“Yeah. I just want to do something right for a change. I’m such a fuckup.”
Jimmy moves over to crouch beside my chair and takes off his shades. “Look at me. Come on, take your eyes off of those pretty prisoners a second and look at me.”
I do. His bright blue eyes are staring right into mine. For-get-me-not eyes.
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