Sand Queen

by Helen Benedict

  “I have no water, grandfather, I’m sorry,” I say, kicking our extra bottle under my seat with one foot. My callousness shames me, but I have to keep Granny alive.

  Groaning, the man moves on to the next car while I look in horror at the scenes around me. How have my people been driven to this? What has become of my country?

  “Naema, look! Something’s wrong!” Mama cries at that moment. “We must leave the car now!”

  I turn around quickly. Granny’s emaciated face is stretched in new pain, her toothless mouth gasping. Clearly, her vital signs are failing—she needs oxygen and rehydration, and she needs them both now. I jump out of the car and Mama and I lift her up. Making a chair with our arms, we rush into the crowd with her. The car we abandon to its fate.

  Granny moans as we move her, her breath rattling, her murky eyes rolling in fear and confusion. We press ever harder through the mass of people around us, ruthlessly pushing the small and old out of our way while we pass more and more wounded and sick. A baby with her leg dangling in oozing shreds. A man with a flayed face, flies buzzing hungrily over the wounds. And when we have finally struggled all the way to the hospital entrance, we force ourselves desperately through the door, surrounded by others equally forceful, equally desperate.

  But here it is no better. The hospital corridors are swarming with people! A few blood-splattered nurses are trying to restore order, but the place is more like an overcrowded refugee camp than a house of rest and healing. And it is filthy! Beside us stands a sink full of bloody test tubes waiting to be washed. A tiny child lies alone and screaming on a urine-stained gurney, its face and body so blistered with burns I cannot tell its sex. A boy is carried past with a metal shard impaled in his skull, his eyes rolling in agony. In one corner a cluster of people is drinking out of an oil drum, but when I draw near I see that the water is covered with slimy, gray scum.

  “What’s going on here?” I call to a woman beside me.

  “The hospital’s had no water for three days,” she replies, raising her voice above the din. “There is only one doctor! Thousands of people have come for help. But there isn’t any help!”

  “Where are the British doctors?”

  “What British doctors? There’s nobody here, I tell you!”

  “O Allah!” Mama wails when she hears this. “What’s to become of my mother?”

  I look about me, wondering if they have put together a triage team in this hellish place. It is hard to admit, but were I in charge, I would tend to these wounded children first, not to an old woman so near her time.

  “Granny,” I whisper in her ear, “forgive me, but I must do this.” To Mama I say, “Let’s carry her over to that corner. You wait with her there. I’m going to help. My medical training is too precious to waste here.”

  Mama agrees and I see in her eyes the same knowledge I have. We have gone to all this effort only to bring Granny Maryam to her death.

  For the rest of the day I do not see Mama or Granny once. As soon as I explain myself to the nearest aid worker, she commandeers me. “We have twelve beds, no electricity, and no water,” she tells me dully. “I have no gloves, no equipment to offer you. Stem what bleeding you can. A woman over there is giving birth—help her. Separate the dying; we can’t save them. Make everyone who can walk leave.”

  I work and work, using what few skills I have. Time becomes one long stream of agonized faces, heartbroken parents, of blood and burns and mutilations. I seal over my mind, clench my teeth and simply do what I must. The baby is born alive—I tie and cut the umbilical cord and force the mother to get up and go. The boy with the shrapnel in his head dies the minute I touch him. I send him home with his parents, who stagger away, their faces stricken. The burnt child on the urine-soaked gurney, who stopped screaming some time ago, turns out to be dead. Those who are merely sick or diseased I order to leave in cold command. I pull out shrapnel with no anesthetic, waving away swarms of bloodthirsty flies. Bind up legs with shreds of material torn from my own dusty skirt, legs that are little more than a mush of flesh and bone. And soon I, too, am drenched in blood, the deepening red of it seeping through my clothes and chilling my flesh.

  I work and work through the rest of the daylight and into the night, until I lose all awareness of my body, and all sense of time.

  [ KATE ]

  WE DON’T REACH Camp Warhorse until six that evening. Twelve fucking hours on the road just to go three hundred miles. The convoy parks in a huge circle and the civilian drivers stumble out, shocked and sweaty. I jump out too, the second Nielsen lets me, and run to the lead truck to find Yvette. Please please please.

  That’s when I see the stretchers. Medics are lifting the wounded from a truck and carrying them to a waiting ambulance. Blood and torn flesh everywhere. I run from stretcher to stretcher in a panic, looking for her, getting in people’s way. A civilian driver with his leg a mass of gore, a white knob of exposed bone where his knee should be. A boy soldier with his arm a ragged stump of blood and skin. A girl soldier with half her face seared off, oozing pink-blood-black.

  The bile rises to my mouth.

  But still no Yvette.

  “Either move your ass or help,” a medic shouts at me, and the next thing I know I’m holding one end of a stretcher and hurrying across the sand with it, trying not to puke. The soldier I’m carrying is the boy whose arm has been blown off and he’s shuddering with shock, his face a stretch of gray agony under the blood and soot. I feel his shock entering me till I’m shuddering too. God, don’t let me find Yvette like this.

  I help the medic load the poor kid onto the ambulance and turn around to run back for more. Then I hear behind me, “You still here?”

  I whirl around. And there she is, all five-foot-one of her standing in the sand looking at me. I throw my arms around her and break into sobs.

  “Hey, take it easy, babe. We’re both okay, thank the Lord, huh?” She pushes me away gently and stares at the stretchers. “Look at those poor boys and girls. God, what I’d give to be able to fix those kids.”

  “Move!” a medic yells and shoves us aside so he can jump into the back of the open ambulance as it drives off. We watch it go. Then, since there’s nothing left for us to do, we turn and trudge toward the tents.

  “Why didn’t medevac come?” I ask when I’ve pushed down the nausea enough to speak.

  “It was that piece-of-crap radio. It didn’t work! Fucking cheap-shit war.” And there’s nothing else to say.

  I follow Yvette through the base—she’s been here a bunch of times, so knows the way. Rows of dusty tan tents crammed up close together, a few limp sandbags piled around their entrances. Dirty gray sand blotched with pools of motor oil. The usual racket of choppers and trucks.

  After I take my long-awaited piss, she walks me over to the chow hall, a huge KBR tent she says is filled with row after row of canteen tables and chairs, just like the ones back at Fort Dix. We can’t go in right away, though, because a humungous line of sand-covered, worn-out soldiers is standing out front, waiting. So we have to stand there with them. It takes almost an hour.

  Still, we make it inside at last, load up on beef stew, salad, OJ and lime Jell-O, and look around for somewhere to sit. After six months of tasteless MREs and T-Rat mush, I should be pretty excited about getting real food at last. But I feel too sick after what I’ve seen to have any kind of an appetite.

  We weave our way through the hundreds of men around us, their eyes stripping and mind-fucking us, same as at Bucca, to some empty seats at the end of a table. I pick at my food and Yvette eats fast, both of us too uncomfortable with those thousands of eyes on us even to talk. Then we split for the MWR building. MWR stands for Morale, Welfare and Recreation, which is military bullcrap for a big metal barn full of Ping-Pong tables and treadmills. But it also has a whole bank of computers that Yvette says actually work at a decent speed, not like those slow-ass machines we have at Bucca.

  After another long wait in line, Yvette finally get
s a computer at the end of the row while I get one in the middle, and within a few minutes I’m connected. I open my mailbox, stomach fluttering. I need so bad to hear from my old friends right now, Robin or any of the other people I’ve lost track of since becoming a soldier. Anyone, really, so long as it isn’t Tyler. I need to forget what I saw on the road. The squashed bodies, the vulture eating a kid. That poor boy with his arm in shreds. I need to be reminded that there’s a world out there apart from this one, a world where people have normal, nonviolent lives.

  Thirty messages! I run my eyes down them eagerly.

  Five ads for Viagra. Three for porn. One offering to extend my penis. And a whole bunch for diets and dating services—pretty ironic under the circumstances. And there, tucked away right at the bottom, the only four real messages on the whole screen. Four.

  I open them, trying not to let the disappointment get to me. A sweet one from April full of misspellings. A couple friends from high school telling me they hope I stay safe. And yes, one from Robin. I lean forward to gulp it down.

  She’s found a modeling agency. She’s posing for clothes catalogs. She loves the city. She has a new boyfriend. All is happiness and light. But at the bottom she’s written: “Did you hear Bush lied about the WMDs? Why are you guys still there?”

  I’ve heard this kind of thing from her before. She was always against the war, and no matter how often I told her that soldiers can’t choose their wars and aren’t free to quit whenever they feel like it anyhow, she never believed I couldn’t just walk away. We fought about it a lot till Tyler persuaded her to lay off of me, since I was going whatever she said. “Don’t preach to me about my choices,” I remember telling her. “You want to be a model. What good is that going to do for the world?”

  “You’ve got no right to talk,” she snapped in return. “You just signed up to be a baby killer.”

  This is getting depressing. Fucking e-mail.

  I close my eyes a moment, the gray face and bloody stump of that soldier searing across my vision. The bile rises again.

  A shriek—a shriek so piercing my eardrums press into my skull and snap. I slap my hands over my ears and stare into the eyes of the guy next to me. “Get down!” he screams. There’s a blinding flash and the air sucks right out of my lungs. Then the whole building lifts and explodes.

  I fling myself to the ground face-first and grope for my helmet, but it’s pitch black now and I can’t see it. Dense, gritty smoke is clogging my throat, and pieces of window and machinery and wall are crashing down all around me. I pull myself to my feet and run bent over, coughing and gagging, trying to find my way out, stumbling over things I can’t see in the dark, hard things, soft things. “Where’s the way out?” I scream.

  “Here!” Somebody grabs my hand and drags me out of the exit. A second mortar explodes. “Down!” he yells and I hit the ground again.

  Flat on my stomach, arms over my head, I wait to feel it: Metal spearing my back. Leg ripping off. Head caving in, a weight pressing me down and down…

  Nothing.

  I sit up, hacking and spitting, amazed that I’m still alive. And that’s when I hear the cries from inside the building: “God help me!” “Jesus! Mommy! Jesus!”

  I jump up and run back in.

  Pulling off the miniature flashlight pinned to my lapel, I shine it around in the dark. Six bodies in the rubble on the ground, soaked in blood and soot. Three have people crouched over them already, so I run to one of the others—an Iraqi worker, a long piece of shrapnel jutting from his throat. Blood is pulsing out of his neck and his black eyes are staring at me, terrified and pleading. I crouch down to find a way to help him, but just as I touch him something makes me look over at the other two bodies to see if they’re soldiers. They are. And right away, even in the dark, even in the smoke, I know.

  “Yvette!” I abandon the Iraqi and stumble over to her. She’s lying twisted and broken, her head thrown back, neck arched, her limbs in all the wrong places—she looks like a giant hand has crumpled her up and tossed her to the ground. I sweep my flashlight over her to see what’s wrong. She’s covered in so much blood I can’t even tell where it’s coming from. “Yvette! Talk to me!”

  She doesn’t. I lean over to stare into her eyes. She looks right back at me. She even has a little smile.

  I grasp her wrist, slippery with blood, and feel for her pulse. It’s there—thank God! Running my hands all over her quickly, I try to wipe away the ooze to see where she’s wounded. She’s full of shrapnel—like a pincushion, there’s so much in her.

  “Moan, damn you!” I call to her in a sob. “Moan! Make a noise!”

  And then she does. Just a sigh, like you sigh when you lie down at the end of a long day.

  I pick her up—she’s such a little stick of a thing—heave her over my back and stagger outside. Through the smoke I can see other soldiers loading the wounded into the rear of a Humvee, so I head over to them. One lifts Yvette off of me and helps me lay her down with the others. I jump up there, too, sitting with her among the wounded, listening to them groan and cry, holding her wet, bony little hand and staring into the flames and smoke and screams.

  We drive fast as we can in the dark with no headlights. A third mortar comes shrieking in, falling fifty meters away from us with such a powerful explosion it rips open the ground like an earthquake, sending our Humvee careening out of control. I throw myself over the wounded and grab Yvette, my face pressed so tightly against her chest I can taste her blood seeping into my mouth. I hug her and hug her with all my strength, trying to keep the life inside of her.

  As soon as we reach the field hospital, medics come running out of the dark with stretchers. “Be careful, she’s hurt real bad!” I yell to one. He helps me slide Yvette onto a stretcher. I take one end and we run inside.

  A nurse rushes up to me. “You hurt?”

  “No it’s my friend! Do something!”

  The nurse keeps staring at me. “You sure?” Her eyes won’t stop running over me, so I glance down at myself. Every part of me—from my hands to my boots—is slick with blood.

  “It’s not mine, it’s hers!” I shout, pointing to Yvette, whose stretcher is lying on the ground. I look around… where the fuck is the medic? Why isn’t anyone helping her? “Do something!” I yell again.

  The nurse steps forward, takes me firmly by the arm and leads me away. Somehow I’m in a chair then and time has slowed down and everybody is moving in slow motion and doing everything they can not to help Yvette. I want to scream and scream till they move.

  “Soldier,” the nurse says, bending to look into my eyes. “You need to get some rest.”

  THE BUS RATTLES through the outskirts of Albany for forty minutes before it finally reaches the soldier’s stop. But now that she’s here, she’s not so sure she wants to be. She’d rather spend the rest of her life on this bus, cozy and enclosed, at neither one place nor another, all decisions and destinations suspended.

  That being impossible, though, she forces herself to stand up, heaves her backpack over her shoulders with a wince and makes her way carefully down the aisle, trying not to jar her back. The passengers eye her. She knows her walk looks weird—half a swagger like a man, half a hobble like an old lady. She forgot how to walk normally in the Army because if you look at all feminine when you walk, the guys won’t leave you alone. That, and the injuries.

  She clambers off the bus and watches it drive away, wishing she could call it back. Her hands are shaking more than ever and her stomach’s churning acid. But it’s too late to turn back now, as the song says. So she hitches up her backpack a little higher and forces herself down the hill, every swing of her leg sending a spasm through her messed-up spine.

  There’s no sidewalk here, just leaf-strewn grass, which she doesn’t like walking on because she knows each step is murdering something. A ladybug or an ant. An earthworm or a flower.

  She walks past rows of houses, snug and smug behind their fences, their lawns heaped w
ith autumn leaves: ocher and copper and bronze. But she passes no people. People don’t walk in this part of the world, they only drive. So even though she sees kids’ tricycles, pumpkin-colored garbage bags, swing sets, early Halloween decorations, it feels as if the world’s ended and everyone’s been vaporized but her.

  She tramps on, her sneakers rustling through the dying leaves. Bright red berries signal from bushes. The trees shimmer burnished gold. The air snaps. A bare ginkgo stands in a pool of tiny yellow fans, like a woman who’s just dropped her dress. A skeletal face pokes out of a window, leering at her, eyes bleeding. She falls to a crouch, back shooting pain, groping for her rifle…

  Stand up, stupid. It’s only a mask.

  Back on her feet, embarrassed. One foot in front of the other. Keep going, just keep going.

  Birds are carrying on all around her—cardinals, robins, jays—although she can’t hear their songs as well as she used to because her eardrums are fucked. A dog barks, making her jump—she can hear that just fine. A woodpecker hammers on a telephone pole beside her, rat-tat-tat. She clenches her teeth and keeps walking.

  The further down the hill she gets, the more the houses are spaced apart, a lot of them with yards as big as fields. Some are messy with junked cars and lawnmowers. Some are decorated with deer statues, bear cutouts, skiing witches plastered face-first against trees. Some are so manicured their lawns look like Velcro. She thinks of the yellow mud houses in Iraq, the lean-tos made of cardboard stuffed with rags. The little kids begging.

  A strange awareness seizes her, as if her body has shrunk inside her clothes and now they’re flapping around her like the sides of a tent. She’s a Halloween skeleton dangling off a porch, only wrapped in a sack. Separated from her skin. Bones and flesh but no soul.

  Stop this. Keep going.

  The walk feels a hundred miles long. She doesn’t care. She’s so scared of what might happen that she half never wants to get there at all. But she does get there, of course— long before she’s ready to—because what you don’t want is what always comes easiest.