by Andrew Ervin
It was said that after Attila the Hun conquered all of Central and Eastern Europe he rounded up the most beautiful women in his empire and set up his personal harem in what would later become Hungary. That was why Hungarian girls were so hot and why they differed so much in appearance. On the cleaning crews alone, Brutus saw girls with olive, Latin features, girls with Viking-blonde hair and blue eyes, and even girls with round faces and Asian-looking eyes. Magda had black curly hair and ruby lips. She was also five times smarter than anyone he had ever met.
He closed the door tight by jamming a wooden chair under the handle. She spilled all over him. Magda took off her clothes and underneath she had on her usual G-string panties, which he didn’t bother to remove. She obviously worked out, because she was strong for a woman and not at all averse to fighting back here and there. She had a nasty streak in her. They played rough. Brutus wondered if she had ever zapped an Arab with a cattle prod. She wore this expensive perfume she had had specially made in Dubai and as she rubbed against him, it rose from her skin. It smelled like fresh leather that had been treated with rose water and licorice. It drove him crazy.
After, as they got dressed, someone rapped at the door. “Halló?” a voice called out. It belonged to the head of the cleaning crew, a round old troll who, much to the amusement of the girls in her command, barked at Brutus in Hungarian whenever she saw him.
“Egy pillanat!” Magda told her.
Brutus gave the troll ten bucks to keep her quiet. That was a ton of money to some old lady making maybe two hundred dollars a month, and he didn’t have anything to spend it on anyway, except fast food and those bullshit Tom Clancy novels. Magda kissed him and went back to work. Before he left, he waited a few minutes to catch his breath and to allow any passersby to disappear.
He decided to put off rattrap duty and return to his room, Magda’s perfume still clinging to his body. Sparky was out. The image Sullivan had showed him remained burned onto his brain, like spots after staring at the sun. Brutus felt like he had been fucked up the ass. It was the fifth of March. Ten days until whatever Sullivan had planned. That didn’t give Brutus a ton of time to get his shit together.
Brutus put on some Public Enemy and yanked open his closet door. He threw all his clothes onto the bed, then pulled open the drawers of his dresser and dumped the contents onto the pile. Taking a pair of nail scissors from his desk, he poked it through the heart of a brand-new shirt that the Mambo had sent him for Christmas. Cutting a crude circle through the breast, he ripped the Polo insignia out and dropped the rough swatch of cloth onto the floor. Picking up the next shirt, he did the same thing. He repeated the process with every article of clothing he owned, tearing out all the corporate symbols, insignias, and logos. They were the trademarks of the white devil, of Satan himself. One after another, he stripped the tags off the pockets of his Levi’s and cut the swooshes out of his socks, until a stack of capitalist-propaganda cotton lay at his feet like broken shackles. He would have loved nothing more than to rip the U.S. ARMY patches off his uniforms, but he couldn’t go there. Not yet.
Next, he carefully refolded his T-shirts and socks, and replaced his dress shirts and pants in the closet. He picked up the discarded patches and put them in a manila envelope, like the one on Sullivan’s desk. He addressed it to his sister and included a note on a three-by-five card: “Please use these to make me a quilt.”
He put the card in the envelope, but before sealing it pulled it out again. He erased “quilt” and wrote “flag” instead. It would take ten days to get to her.
4.
Sparky was listening to a Hungarian pop station that played terrible American eighties music interspersed with heavily orchestrated Hungarian headbanger ballads while surfing the net for porn on a signed-out laptop. He lifted his chin in hello and turned the screen to face Brutus, who leaned over his roommate’s shoulder to see an image of two heavily tattooed men dressed up like pizza delivery boys penetrating different ends of the same surgically augmented woman. The elaborate set looked like the living room of a mansion, with a roaring fireplace and a bearskin rug. She was lying on her stomach on a glass coffee table and still had on her high heels. Two thick art books had been kicked to the floor. Brutus couldn’t make out the titles. Sparky, who had a way with words, said, “Looks like fun, doesn’t it?”
The image reminded Brutus of the photo on Sullivan’s desk. “What do you bother with that shit for? Big pretty man like you, I bet you get more tang than Buzz Aldrin.”
“Everyone says you’re the one tagging that Magda bitch. Every guy in camp’s been trying to get in her pants.”
Brutus shrugged. “I can neither confirm nor deny those charges. Besides, what’s a punk like you care about a hottie like Magda anyway?”
“Fuck you.”
“Good comeback.”
“O.K., fuck you, Shakespeare.”
Even Brutus had to laugh—but he didn’t care for the allusion. What if Sparky was in on the blackmail? Unlikely, but not impossible. Sullivan was not the kind of man to leave a roommate assignment to chance. Brutus couldn’t trust anybody.
He removed his hat, coat, and boots, then he turned the heater down a notch and finally sat. His feet were killing him. Commotion filled the hallway outside. Someone was barking like a dog. He flipped on his desk lamp, which provided a nasty, halogen glow. He opened his journal, a hardbound art-school sketchbook Joan had given him as a going-away gift. The edges were painted a shiny biblical gold, and Brutus had titled it “The Myth of Syphilis” in neat block letters on the flyleaf. He filled one page every day even when he had nothing new to say. He kept the book in his underwear drawer. Sparky knew of its existence, which meant that everyone knew of its existence, but there was nothing Brutus could do about that. As a general rule, he tried to limit his worries to those things he could control. There weren’t many in the army.
He stood again and pulled a half-liter bottle of Dreher from the little dorm fridge they shared. The P.X. sold American beer, but Brutus would have his whole life left to drink that shit when he got home, and at least the Hungarian stuff had some flavor to it. The cold, uncarpeted floor stung his feet. Back at his desk, he tried to clear his head, think things through. The beer brought a flush to his cheeks.
One week—that was how much time he had. Sullivan was probably running smack or something up from the Croatian coast. Brutus knew from personal experience about the Croats’ well-earned reputation for producing high-quality pharmaceuticals. It must have been something about the weather down there. Magda had gotten her hands on some serious, not-to-be-fucked-with shit. The Adriatic kind bud was as good as the best bubonic chronic that ever crossed through Philly. Brutus grew up smoking weed the way redneck kids grew up slurping Mountain Dew. His old man knew every reggae band that came through town, and they would come around to see him. He used to jam with some of those guys back in Kingston, but sold his bass when he got married and moved to the States. Brutus would get up on Sunday morning and Bunny or Toots or someone would be sitting on the front porch rolling a fatty. The Mambo would be irate about it all day. Every Sunday she would make a huge pot of curried goat to last the week, and most of the time the old man and his friends would kill it before it got dark. She wasn’t crazy about having all that weed around either, and that may have been part of the reason she kicked the old man out. Brutus currently had half an ounce stashed in a sock, but there was no way he could light up with Sparky in the room. Maybe he was getting paranoid, like Joan always said, but he was already in enough trouble.
Carrying drugs for Sullivan would be no joke. He had singled Brutus out to make an example of him, to cure the Uppity Negro Syndrome before it could spread and contaminate the rest of the base. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Turn the other cheek in the army and you ended up with a dick in your ass. Taszár had its share of drug addicts and every variety of alcoholic. Whoring. Hookers would show up by the carload, each carrying a bottle of home-brewed pálinka and a toothbrush. The M
.P.s sometimes accepted kickbacks to look the other way, or got a piece for themselves.
Independent thought, on the other hand—that was the biggest sin of them all. The only sin in the army. And independent thought from a black man was even worse. So Sullivan decided to use him as a scapegoat. He ran the base like an old Southern cracker running his plantation. He had his field niggers, like Brutus, who did the hard work—digging holes and lugging bags of concrete and shit. Then there were the house niggers, like that marine punk Doornail and the M.P.s, the adopted love children of the gay union of Uncle Sam and Uncle Tom.
Before that meeting with Sullivan, the only time Brutus had ever been officially reprimanded was the time he wrote a letter home to the Philadelphia Inquirer about some Supreme Court opinion by Clarence Thomas that he had read about online. Brutus had referred to the current administration as “Uncle Tom’s Cabinet,” and made a comment about how Ruth Bader Ginsburg and “all those other white Washington bitches” had better look out. He concluded with something about Amiri being right about 9/11. They didn’t print the word “bitches” in the paper, but the message came across all the same. The recruiter back on Broad Street, the old bastard who had suckered Brutus in the first place, saw the letter and sent a copy to Sullivan. As punishment, Brutus was confined to the base for twelve months.
He tapped his pen on the cover of his journal until Sparky got annoyed, then kept doing it. If it wasn’t running drugs, what else? Weapons were a possibility, but everyone already owned guns in Eastern Europe. They had more guns than they could use. Wasn’t a soul left who needed to buy guns from the army—with the possible exception of Brutus himself, who was still without a working firearm. Maybe someone over in the restricted camp was picking up some supplies on the down-low, cattle prods and waterboards and shit—and providing Sullivan with a taste of the action.
The whole thing could go down like this: Sullivan will send Brutus off the base, placing him at an even greater disadvantage because suddenly he would no longer be just a sodomite but also AWOL. While he’s away, Sullivan will drop a couple keys of coke in Brutus’s top dresser drawer, call in the pigs, and have his ass thrown in the pen. Hungary had fucked-up drug laws, the harshest of any non-Muslim country, all intended as a suck up to NATO and the E.U. If Brutus got nabbed with as much as a pinprick of resin in the bottom of a pipe, it would mean a minimum of a year in jail.
Sparky switched off the radio and headed out, so Brutus turned it on again and put in Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit.
More likely than not, though, Sullivan probably planned to simply send him on some goose chase intended to frighten him into becoming a model soldier. Scare him straight. Instill in him the fear of God and of his earthly incarnation, Uncle Sam. Brutus would get his delinquent ass kicked, caught with drugs or something, and be given the ultimatum: toe the line, quit the political bullshit, and Sullivan will make all his problems disappear, including the photograph. What a guy.
Brutus wrote the date at the top of the page. Under it, he made a to-do list:
1. Reread Julius Caesar
They might have a copy at the P.X.
2. Write letter to Mom
Later. He couldn’t even think about that yet. What was he going to say? “Dear Mambo, My commanding officer has a picture of me getting fucked up the ass so I have to go buy some drugs for him. Love, B.” Doubtful.
3. Write letter to Joan
He wanted to tell his sister the whole story, start to finish. And then he would get Magda to mail it for him, in case Sullivan was going through the mail. Couldn’t be too careful. The army could open a letter without anyone knowing the envelope had been touched by human hands, read the contents, and rewrite it on the same type of stationery in the same handwriting. Signature and everything. Brutus wrote it all down for Joan, including the conversation with Sullivan, and hid it in an envelope from one of her letters.
4. Write letter to J. J. Another tough one—later.
5. Fix pistol or find new
6. Kill whitey
He had about three grand in cash, which would go with him. The weapon wouldn’t be a problem. He could steal Sparky’s and leave him the piece-of-shit piece that didn’t shoot. Punk deserved it anyway.
Number six was a joke.
5.
When he got up the next morning, snow covered the ground and was blowing in every direction. He didn’t need to be on duty until the afternoon and he wasn’t hungry, so he skipped breakfast to run some errands. He could grab something later if he got desperate, but he hated to eat the hardened fecal matter that passed for meat at those fast-food places. Burger King was terrible enough back home; he didn’t even want to think about what went into the Hungarian equivalent of the Whopper. Maybe that’s what his rattraps were for. But sometimes there was no avoiding it. A man’s got to eat.
He pulled his jacket tighter, huffing it over to the office pool. When he was sure no one was looking, he whipped his dick out of his fatigues. Standing on tiptoe, he put it on the glass of the machine, set the enlarger to 150 percent and hit COPY. Zipping up, he folded the image and, laughing, stuffed it into another envelope. Back in his room, there was no safe place to hide anything, so he put the photocopy and the letter to Joan in Sparky’s closet between a few old boxes. There was a good chance his own stuff was being searched, maybe even by his own roommate. In Sparky’s possession, though, at least no one would find them in the next few days.
His next stop was Taszár’s small bookstore of government-approved texts, which operated under the auspices of a university in Budapest that served as the personal propaganda ministry of a well-known Hungarian billionaire war profiteer. They didn’t have a copy of Julius Caesar. He would have liked to bring Magda some poetry, but she had already read everything, and all they had for sale was that old Emily Dickinson shit. “Stop for death, my ass,” Brutus told the clerk, a lanky, bucktoothed Hungarian girl of fifteen or sixteen. She didn’t respond. The shop had nothing worth buying, so Brutus left without spending any money, a noble accomplishment. He didn’t like the idea of giving any more of his money to the army than he had to. Didn’t want to sell his soul to no Bravo Company store.
The base was unusually busy. Transports rolled out one after the other for either bridge-building duty in Novi Sad or to oversee still more landmine sweeping in Kosovo. All the trucks had SFOR stenciled on them in bright blue letters. A couple of them carried soldiers up to Budapest for R and R. The army reserved countless hotel suites along the Danube for years at a time. One of the hotels supposedly had thermal baths in the basement where all the women bathed together naked. That sounded like a damn good way to relax.
He was anxious to see Magda. It had been a few days. He wanted to question her about Sullivan, see if she had overheard anything. He went in through the back door and poked around, but couldn’t find her. A few officers looked at him funny, but he saluted and pretended he was supposed to be there. He wasn’t supposed to be anywhere in the whole goddamned country so the executive suite was just as good as anyplace else. Magda wasn’t around. The fifteenth was still a few days away, so he had some time before giving her the letter to mail home.
He returned the next day, let himself in again, and finally caught up with her. She looked great, her hair down at her shoulders instead of all tied up in knots and loops, like it usually was. She didn’t have any makeup on and it was the first time Brutus had ever gotten a look at her full, natural splendor. She had bright eyes that floated like lily pads when they looked at him. No perfume this time either, which he found strange.
The bosses must have been up her ass because she couldn’t get away.” Not a good time,” she said. “Let’s catch up later.” She didn’t want to be seen talking with him. She worked for a private civilian contractor, though, so it wasn’t like they could throw her in the stockade.
“That’s cool, but here,” he said, and handed Magda an envelope with her name on it. Inside was another envelope addressed to his sister. She
slipped it into her pocket without opening it and kissed him on the lips.
“See you tomorrow?” she wanted to know.
“Yeah, tomorrow’s good.”
She kissed him again, a half second longer, and headed off in the direction of Sullivan’s office. Brutus returned to his room to prepare for afternoon rattrap duty, which meant cracking open a Dreher and rolling up a blunt.
Work was more tedious than difficult, and he had trouble concentrating. Still too much to do before the fifteenth. Afterwards, he took a shower and tried to empty his thoughts of his responsibilities and duties. He wrote a letter to the Mambo about nothing in particular. She could get the details from Joan. He told her that he loved her and would be home soon. Then he lay down to read from the Fanon book, and to get some rest. By the time sleep came, he had agreed to let events take him wherever they wanted to. He would follow whatever path presented itself. This was his life; he could feel it.
He awoke refreshed and ate a large, flavorless breakfast. It was the fourteenth. He didn’t need to be on duty until 16:00, so he went to check on Magda. As fate would have it—or luck, for that matter, which to Brutus looked like fate in a cheap wig and bad shoes—she was thrilled to see him. She was heavily made-up again, much to his disappointment, but that didn’t detract from her beauty. She kissed him hard, and he tasted the oily surface of her tongue in his mouth, got the first whiff of her perfume. She agreed to sneak off with him.
In the best-case scenario, he would only be off the base for a day. Two at the most. Magda never needed to know he was gone. He didn’t want to get her mixed up in whatever Sullivan was playing at.
The worst-case scenario was something Brutus tried to put out of his mind.
He followed Magda to a conference room just a few doors down from Sullivan’s office. She clearly knew her way around. A meeting had recently broken up probably, or the generals were taking a break from planning how to kill more people: their files and half-empty coffee cups were strewn everywhere. Overflowing manila folders covered the long conference table with briefings, some of which must have been highly classified. They could come back any second, and the possibility of getting busted either didn’t occur to Magda or it excited her even more. What would they do if they caught him? It didn’t matter anymore. White dry-erase boards covered two whole walls with crudely illustrated maps of the Balkans. The national boundaries had been drawn and redrawn in several places on both maps, each time with a different colored marker. On the table, a laptop remained on. The screensaver read I’D RATHER BE FUCKING YOUR MOTHER in scrolling text.
