Sand Queen

by Helen Benedict

  “Tits?” Mack says again. Ignoring him, I read over my letter, a weight collecting in my chest.

  “Hey, I’m talking to you!” Mack shakes my cot. “Turn around and listen to me for once!”

  I fold the letter carefully, slide it inside an envelope, seal it, and then write the address slow and clear.

  Mack reaches over and grabs my arm. “Hey!”

  “Get off!” I jab my elbow backward into something soft and crunchy.

  “Ow!”

  “Leave her alone, Macktruck,” Third Eye says dully from under her pillow. “We all gotta live together in this toilet. No need to make it worse.”

  “I didn’t join the Army to live with a bunch of crazy whores!” he sputters, clutching his nose. And he buries his head back in his porn.

  The next morning I wake up at the usual time and go outside to wait for Jimmy to join me for our run. I don’t know whether he’ll show up or even speak to me again, but what else can I do but hope? I can’t make it out here without him, can’t get through the days and hours and minutes that stretch ahead of me like a prison sentence. He’s the only reason I can get out of bed anymore and face what I have to face.

  I don’t need to wait long. He does show up, and only a couple minutes after I’ve stepped out of the tent. I’m so relieved I’m tempted to fly into his arms after all—make it easy on myself and pretend I really am the person he thinks and let him love me. But I don’t deserve that. And I don’t think I ever will.

  “Hi.” He smiles warily. I try to smile back but my mouth goes limp. I can’t find anything to say. So we do our stretches without talking and take off down the sand road.

  We run for a long time stuck in silence. And it isn’t the comfortable silence we used to have, the no-pressure, companionable kind. It’s a thick silence, full of words that can’t be said, full of hurt and longing and shame. A silence that makes me feel suffocated.

  At last, though, Jimmy does speak up. “Looks like fuckin’ Jupiter out here.” His voice is flat, neutral. I look around, and it’s like I’ve never seen the desert before. He’s right. Everything’s dark gray this morning: the sand, the sky, the tents, our clothes. The twilight, or maybe our moods, has sucked all the color out of the world.

  “Aren’t you sick of this place?” he says then.

  “Oh yeah.” But again I can’t think of another word.

  “You know the first thing I’m gonna do when I get home?” he goes on, panting slightly from running in this heat. “I’m going to grab my little bros, find a field and lie down in the thick green grass and just breathe. Then I’m gonna get us some brick-oven pizza and drink me a whole pitcher of beer.” When I don’t answer, he adds, “You still miss tree roots?”

  He’s trying so hard. Oh Jimmy. “Yeah,” I say quietly. “Yeah, I do.”

  We fall back into the silence after that. Run all the way to the berm and back again, like rats in a maze, without speaking once. I just can’t talk. All I can think about is how the ease and trust between us has suddenly gone; how if Jimmy knew what kind of person I really am, he’d hate me. And those thoughts hurt so bad they stop up my words like a plug.

  When we’re nearly back at my tent, I remember one thing I do have to say, though. So I force it out. “Did Ortiz have any news for me last night?”

  Jimmy shrugs. “Tell you later.” And without even looking at me, he runs off to his tent.

  But he doesn’t tell me later. He doesn’t say anything to me in the Humvee, and he doesn’t show up for his regular afternoon visit, either. For all fourteen hours of my shift, I sit trapped in my tower alone, hoping and hoping he’ll come. But he never does. And at the end of the day, when he and Creeley pick me up in the Humvee, he spends the whole ride kidding around with the guys and acting like I’m not even there.

  THE HOSPITAl PHONE is ringing and ringing, but all the soldier does is watch it suspiciously. She’s standing pressed against the far wall, doing the careful leg lifts the rehab doctor insists will strengthen her back. That phone brings a lot of unwelcome shit these days. Parents. Tyler. Clueless civilian friends. Please don’t be any of them, she prays. Please be Jimmy instead so I can get out of here. But she knows it won’t be.

  It rings five times before she can finally force herself to cross the room and pick it up. “What?” she snaps.

  “Katie, is that you?”

  It’s April! The sound of her sister’s breathy little voice makes the soldier’s throat swell. She has to swallow hard and sit down on the bed before she can speak. “Hi there, sweet bug, how are you?”

  “I fell off my bike,” April says.

  “Oh no! Are you hurt?”

  “I got a big yellow bruise on my knee and I scraped up my elbow. It stings a lot when I take a shower, like a bee bite.”

  “Ouch. No broken bones though, huh?”

  “Nope.” April goes quiet in that natural way little kids have on the phone. If there’s nothing to say, there’s nothing to say.

  “You out of school yet?” the soldier asks then.

  “Of course not! It isn’t even Halloween.”

  “Oh.” For some reason the soldier thought it was spring. Maybe those yellow flowers she spattered all over the room. “So, have you decided what’s your costume going to be?” she says, trying to cover up her mistake.

  “Guess.”

  “Hmm, let’s see. A princess?”

  “That’s stupid. That’s for little kids.”

  “Oh, sorry. A marshmallow?”

  April giggles. “No, silly. I’m gonna be a soldier like you. Mom found the costume in CVS.”

  The soldier can’t talk for a moment. She swallows again.

  “Did you like my present?” April says then.

  Oh God, she forgot. She never opened it. She has a hard time keeping track of things these days. Time. Objects. People.

  “Yeah, hold on a sec.” Tucking the phone under her chin, the soldier opens her bedside drawer, takes out the little pink box and pries off its lid. Inside is a mood ring and one of those woven friendship bracelets that kids make all the time at school.

  “I love them!” the soldier says, cramming the ring on her swollen finger. Luckily the ring is adjustable. “The ring fits real well and it’s so pretty. Did you make the bracelet all by yourself?”

  “Yeah, but Lizzy helped me. She made the middle and I made the ends.”

  That’s when the soldier remembers what happened the last time she saw April. How she came home from war broken and hurting, unable to stop the faces and the blood. How she took her dad’s gun from its sacred place in the sideboard and shot out the dining room windows because those faces were staring in. Kormick’s face, the jerk-off’s face, Mr. al-Jubur’s face. How April huddled in the corner, screaming, because she didn’t understand that her sister was only trying to protect her. How the dad threw the soldier into the car to take her here.

  “Hey, April?” she says quietly. “I’m sorry I scared you like that when I came home. You know I wasn’t well, right? You know I love you and will never hurt you? You know that, don’t you?”

  “Poo, you didn’t scare me. I’m not a little kid anymore. I’m eight years old now!”

  Shit. The soldier forgot her sister’s birthday, too.

  “What color’s your mood ring right now?” April says then. “Mine’s red. I think that means I’m happy.”

  The soldier closes her eyes. She can’t talk because she’s crying. Crying and crying, and she can’t stop.

  [ KATE ]

  SO, THEY ARE killing our men in that prison! I knew it! As soon as the interpreter began to talk, I knew that soldier girl had lied to me. Why have I allowed myself to believe her? Now I am sure she fabricated the message from Zaki. How could anybody be so heartless?

  All the way home with my companions, after the McDougall woman has chased us away as if we are no better than stray dogs, I mull over what I have learned. The prisoners are rioting, no doubt because they are being starved and beat
en. The Americans are shooting them, murdering them, yet they do not even know the names of all the dead. How can little Zaki survive this? And poor Papa with his heart? If they have survived at all.

  What fools we have been, my companions and I, coming to this prison day after day with nothing but photographs and prayers. We should have been coming with guns.

  But as soon as I enter the house, bracing myself to tell Mama this dreadful news, she rushes at me in a panic. “Quick!” she cries before I can speak. “Come!”

  I run after her into the bedroom. Granny is lying there rigid, her eyes rolled back in her head and her mouth stretched and gaping. I seize her hand, as bony as the corpse of a bird. Her pulse is nothing but a faint fluttering.

  “What’s wrong, Naema, what’s happened to her?” Mama asks, her eyes pleading.

  “I think she’s had a stroke,” I say, touched by her faith in my meager knowledge of medicine. “She needs a doctor right now!”

  “Go to the neighbors—go quickly and get help!”

  I place Granny’s frail hand on her chest and run next door, where I find Abu Mustafa working his vegetable garden, trying to cajole some sign of green out of the baked blond earth. He looks up in alarm as I fly toward him, straightening his old body with a wince. “What’s the matter, child?”

  “We need a doctor! My grandmother’s dying!”

  He gazes at me pityingly. “Don’t you know, daughter, that our doctors and teachers fled months ago?”

  “Where can I go then? Isn’t there anyone here who can help?”

  He shakes his white head. “You must take her to the hospital in Umm Qasr, if it hasn’t been bombed. You have your father’s car, I believe. Do you know how to drive?”

  “Yes, but we have no petrol.”

  “Come.” He leads me around to the back of his small, yellow-mud house and points to a five-gallon tin. “Take this. I hope it’ll be enough.”

  “But surely you need it? And I can’t pay you for it, at least not yet.”

  He lifts his hands in resignation. “Your grandmother’s been our neighbor and friend for fifty years or more. Huda and I have no need of this petrol. Where are we going to go at our age? No, take it, and don’t argue.”

  So now I find myself clutching the wheel of our battered old family car, just as Papa did only a few weeks ago, making my way toward Umm Qasr. Mama is in the back, holding Granny in her arms and trying to keep her comfortable, but my poor grandmother has no idea where she is. Her eyes roll and her breath comes out in rattling gasps. Mama can barely contain her panic as she murmurs prayers and verses from the Qur’an—I even hear her urge Granny to pray for forgiveness from Allah, as the dying must do, although Granny is much too far gone to pray for anything. As for me, I cannot help but wonder if there is any point at all to what we are doing, if we will ever reach this hospital or even find it operating if we do.

  Umm Qasr is only five kilometers from Granny’s house, but the drive takes hours. The road is clogged with American tanks and trucks, sometimes blocking both lanes, sometimes roaring so fast down the wrong side I have to swerve the car wildly to escape with our lives. No traffic lights are working because of the lack of electricity, and everybody is so frightened that their cars careen in all directions with no order at all. And then a chain of convoys drives by, forcing us to the side of the road to wait. We have to sit immobilized under the ferocious sun, our fear for Granny’s life mounting while one enormous American truck after another rumbles past, belching fumes into our faces.

  Mama keeps trying to force water down Granny’s throat, but we can both see her life ebbing away with every minute we are delayed. Yet each time I try to pull back onto the road, the soldiers in those convoys wave their guns at us and shout until the veins stand out in their sunburned necks.

  Those soldiers. They look so inhuman standing up in their gun turrets, leaning out of their windows, weapons bristling, their bodies hidden behind sunglasses and helmets and those ugly camouflage uniforms that match nothing. What do they want with us that they look like this? What do they think we have done to them?

  Finally, after nearly two hours, a break appears between convoys and I am able to pull back onto the road and continue our drive. The air is thick with dust and fumes, yet I can see women working the fields on either side of us, bent double in their black abayas as they dig and pluck at the dusty ground. What do they find to grow in all this desiccation? Children stand by the side of the road, their bellies distended with malnutrition and hunger, their legs scabbed and spindly, their clothes ragged, begging the soldiers for food. Some even run right up to the American trucks, so close I fear for their lives. Are these the people the Americans have come to help? If so, how does it help to drop bombs on their houses and imprison their sons and fathers? To destroy their villages, already so poor, and slaughter their babies? To murder them and not even know their names? Is this the way to liberate a people from a dictator? Or has the world gone mad for the taste of oil and blood?

  When, at last, we reach the outskirts of Umm Qasr, I am shocked yet again, for here, too, is pandemonium. Cars stuffed with impossible numbers of people clog the road, blasting their horns. Camels lumber through the traffic, their thin legs in danger of being crushed. Pedestrians fling themselves between vehicles. Donkeys and carts become entangled in fenders and car wheels. I have to weave through all these people and animals, trucks and carts as best I can, praying I hit nobody. And all around me the crowd presses inward with a frenzy I do not understand.

  Peering through the dusty windshield, my shoulders tense, my neck craned and aching, I steer the car painstakingly toward the hospital. But as I approach, the crowd only grows thicker and the confusion worse. We are forced to a stop in a jam of vehicles, all pointing in different directions, with no lights or policemen to tell us how to untangle ourselves. I lean out of the window and call to my neighboring driver, “Excuse me, sir, but what’s going on here?”

  “A team of British doctors has arrived at the hospital to help,” he calls back. “My baby has shrapnel in her chest. She’s dying!”

  And then I understand who it is that surrounds me. A father carrying a blood-smeared infant, tears rolling down his careworn face. A boy, limp and emaciated, pus oozing from the gashes on his leg. A dust-covered pickup with an unconscious teenaged girl in the back, her chest and neck charred and blistered. All about me are the wounded and dying, the victims of cluster bombs and machine guns, of mines and explosives, of poisoned air and filthy water. And, like Mama and me, every one of them is frantic to reach the hospital and those British doctors before it is too late.

  [ NAEMA ]

  WHEN I GET back to the tent after my long day of pointless waiting for Jimmy, I find Yvette home from her latest convoy, pacing the aisle, wired, hungry and pissed. “I can’t eat this crap,” she says soon as I walk in, kicking her MRE across the plywood floor. “I’m going to the PX to get some other kind of junk food. Wanna come?”

  “But it’s almost dark.” I’m glad to see her back in one piece, but I don’t feel like being with anyone right now, not even her. All I want to do is lie down and block out what happened with Jimmy.

  “Don’t be such a pussy! Almost dark. Shit.” She glares at me with her big eyes. “Come on, Freckles. I’m starving.”

  “All right. Jesus.” Sighing, I turn to follow her.

  The PX is a good twenty minutes from here across the base, and since the walk is dangerous for females, we hold up our rifles and keep our eyes peeled. The tents look like animals crouching in the darkening shadows, their sides heaving in the wind like they’re breathing. The blades on the concertina wire glint in the twilight, sharp and jagged. The air’s filled with its desert whistling and the creepy cries of the prisoners. It’s like walking through the land of the fucking dead.

  For most of the way Yvette grumbles and swears about one thing or another while I tramp beside her in silence, only half listening. “You know we got the shittiest damn base in this whol
e sandpit?” she’s saying. “Those other FOBs I go to, like Mortaritaville and Scania? They got chow halls, computers, Ping-Pong tables. Damn. Just half an hour away from here there’s a base with all that good stuff, while we… you listenin’?”

  I grunt.

  She looks over at me, her skinny little face blending into shadow. “You’re mighty quiet. What’s up? More shit with Third Eye? Or is Teach giving you love trouble?” Like everybody else, Yvette thinks me and Jimmy are an item now. She’s always ribbing me about it.

  “I told you, we’re just friends,” I answer. Although it looks like even that isn’t true anymore.

  “Well, girl, all I can say is, if a friend of mine looked at me like Teach looks at you, I’d be wetting my panties.”

  “It’s not like that! He’s a nice guy, that’s all.”

  “And for that matter, the way you look at him.”

  “Give it a rest, will you?”

  “Oh. Excuuuse me.”

  “Look, I’m sorry. I’m just tired.”

  Yvette glances at me. “I’m your buddy, Freckles. If you can’t talk to me, who you gonna talk to, huh? You can trust me not to blab, you know that. But don’t treat me like I’m Third Eye, and don’t treat me like I’m some bitch out to get you, okay?”

  That touches me, and for a moment I’m tempted to tell her everything. What I did to Naema’s dad, how I feel too filthy ever to accept Jimmy’s love. But then I throw that thought away. If I told Yvette what I did, I’d lose her, too. She wants to be a medic and put wounded people back together, not grind their faces into the sand and love every minute of it.

  “You’re right,” I say quietly. “I’m sorry. But I swear it’s true. Me and Jimmy aren’t involved like that. Never have been.”

  She doesn’t answer. But I know she still doesn’t believe me.

  We’re in sight of the PX by now, which is nothing but the open back of a truck and a couple of civilians selling junk food, pirated DVDs and knockoff watches made in China. (They’ll sell you porn and pills and their sisters too, from what I hear.) A few guys are there already, and when we walk closer I see who they are: Kormick and his usual sidekicks, Boner and Rickman. I stop in my tracks.