Baby Brother's Blues (9 page)

15

B
aby Brother was feeling no pain. He had drained three Heinekens, smoked two joints, and was watching Jason roll another. The wide-screen television blasted the latest rap videos from BET, at Baby Brother’s request, and his friend knew a twenty-four-hour place around the corner that would deliver what he described as top-quality Thai food whenever they wanted dinner. All they needed now was some women. Baby Brother hadn’t had sex since he’d gone to Iraq eight months ago. The locals were off-limits unless you had a death wish, and while there were always a lot of female soldiers around, most were too busy concentrating on staying alive to consider having sex. There was a lot of masturbating going on, and, in a pinch, there was always some guy who was open to oral sex if you knew how to keep quiet about it afterward.

Those guys always told themselves it wasn’t about being gay. It was just about finding a way to relieve the almost unbearable tension they were under twenty-four hours a day,
every
day. Nobody needed to explain. For Baby Brother, one mouth was as good as another. When he closed his eyes, he could imagine it was a beautiful woman on her knees with her head in his lap, instead of a frightened young soldier, a long way from home.

That was how it had been with him and Jason, although as he looked around at his friend’s nicely furnished apartment with its leather couches and glittering electronic gadgets, it was hard to believe those moments had ever passed between them. Tonight, Jason was eager to catch up on the news of the guys in their outfit, good and bad, and prepared to give a friend a place to crash, but nothing in his manner suggested anything more. That was fine with Baby Brother. The war was the war, but back on the mainland, that
fag shit
wasn’t part of the program.

On the big screen, a dancer was shaking her behind and smiling over her shoulder like she shared the viewer’s presumed pleasure in her ability to jiggle first one cheek and then the other in perfect time to the song’s thumping bass line. On either side of her, young black men in baggy jeans and oversize white T-shirts, flashing diamond-encrusted gold teeth, pulled off crisp new bills from a roll of hundreds and tossed them in her direction while leering into the camera.

Baby Brother missed the life he’d had before the army. He missed the clubs and the women,
the fellas
and the drugs. Sometimes he even missed his old hardheaded sister. He’d had a good life and had thrown it all away for nothing. All those people who kept telling him he had a great future ahead of him might have been right after all. He wondered if it was too late for him to go back and mend some of those bridges he’d been so quick to burn. It hadn’t gotten him very far, he had to admit. The truth was, he might not live to see twenty, fighting a war he didn’t understand against some people he wasn’t even mad at.

He drained his beer as Jason twisted up the ends of the joint and flipped it to Baby Brother.

“Fire that shit up and I’ll get us another couple of beers.”

“Cool.” Baby Brother did as he was told and inhaled deeply, letting the acrid smoke fill his lungs. Vietnam vets were always talking about the amazing dope they had smoked over there. No such luck in this war. He had heard there was lots of heroin in Afghanistan, but in Iraq, there were no drugs on the base or on the street. Where that Marine had scored LSD was a mystery.

Jason handed him another cold beer, took a long swallow of his own, and picked up the remote. “I have to cut away to the news, brother. Part of my job is to brief the boss in the morning on who said what about who else. In this town, all that shit changes so fast, you better pay attention if you’re going to keep up.”

“No problem,” said Baby Brother, passing the joint and listening to his stomach rumbling. “Where’s the menu for that Thai place?”

“Next to the refrigerator.”

Jason was an associate with a big D.C. lobbying firm and he was eager to make up the time he’d lost in the army, when his reserve unit was called up for active duty, by being the best junior executive they’d ever had. At twenty-eight, Jason was ambitious, attractive, and hardworking. He was on his way up the ladder, but he knew it would take a lot of work. That’s why his love life was, as he put it,
shot to shit.

“Women don’t want to come second to a brother’s job,” he explained. “But they want that bling bling lifestyle, so what are you supposed to do?”

“Lie to them,” Baby Brother said. “Tell them you are whoever and whatever they want you to be to get that pussy.”

“That ain’t me, man,” Jason said, laughing at his friend’s directness. “I’m not trying to trick anybody out of anything. I’m looking for a voluntary exchange.”

Before Baby Brother could respond, their attention was drawn to the story that led the news. An Arabic-language website had broadcast a video of a suicide bomber packing his trunk with explosives, driving down the busy highway to his destination outside the American green zone, and detonating a blast that killed a dozen people and sent a huge fireball leaping into the air. The size of it and the absolute premeditation of the act rendered them both speechless.

Baby Brother set down his beer and leaned back against the soft leather of the couch. Jason quickly changed the channel back to BET, regretting the intrusion of the grim reality to which his buddy was returning in just a few days. On BET, there was no war news, only one more voluptuous, half-naked dancer and another gaggle of wannabe thugs flashing their gold teeth at the camera, oblivious to the world falling down around them.

“Sorry, man,” Jason said, tossing the remote down on the table then reaching to relight the joint. “I know that’s the last shit you need to see tonight.”

Opening his eyes, Baby Brother took the joint, inhaled deeply, and held the smoke as long as he could before blowing it out in one long stream. “Fuck it, man. It ain’t nothin’ I don’t see over there every damn day of every damn week.” He sat up and took a swallow of beer, enjoying the cool of it going down his dry throat. “How long you been gone? Four months?”

Jason nodded. “Give or take.”

“Well, it’s a lot worse than it was when you left. They got us doing shit now we ain’t even trained to do. They’re sending reserves over who ain’t been in shape in twenty years. Big, fat motherfuckers, been working behind a desk or some shit. They sent a damn fifty-five-year-old woman over as infantry. She was so scared, all she could do was look at pictures of her grandkids and cry.”

Baby Brother ran a hand over his face and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t meant to start talking about all this stuff, but watching that explosion had opened the floodgates. He took a deep breath and tried to calm down, but he couldn’t.

“You know what they had us doing last week?”

Jason shook his head.

“Searching for roadside bombs and defusing them.”

“When did they train you for that?”

“They didn’t! That’s what I’m trying to tell you. They just called us in one day and told us that was our new job. They had some sergeant show us the kinds of explosives these guys usually use and talk about how it could be in a car, in a truck, all by itself, just waiting for one of us to drive by or step on it. They even wirin’ animals and dead babies and shit, but they didn’t talk about that, so we weren’t ready for it.”

“That’s some wrong shit.”

“Tell me about it. The next day we rolled up on this old guy layin’ across the road like somebody shot him and just left him layin’ there. We didn’t want to drive around him because that’s where they put the shit, by the side of the road, remember?”

“I remember.”

“So, the lieutenant told one of the new guys to go and drag the body out of our way. This brother was one of the reserves, hadn’t been there two weeks. He didn’t know no better than to jump down, run over there, and grab the dead guy’s feet so he could move him.”

Baby Brother shook his head as if to clear it of the pictures his own words had conjured up. “Motherfuckin’ body blew up in his face, man. Literally. Took his head right off and we’re sitting there watching it. The bitch with the grandkids really freaked out, but it didn’t even surprise me. Nothing surprises me anymore.”

His own voice was so sad and empty it frightened him to hear it.
What if he didn’t survive this shit?
And if he did, what was he supposed to do with all the stuff he’d seen and heard and felt and done? Where was he supposed to put all that once he got home?

“You okay?” Jason’s voice almost got lost in the intricacies of the latest Missy Elliott video. He reached for the remote, hit the mute button, and repeated his question.
“You okay?”

In light of what he had just described, the question was ludicrous, and Baby Brother’s attempt at a rueful laugh came across more as a choking gurgle. He cleared his throat, looked at his friend, and stole a line from
Pulp Fiction.

“Naw, man. I’m pretty fuckin’ far from okay.”

“I heard that,” Jason said. “But you ain’t there now, so leave it alone.”

“How the hell am I supposed to do that?”

Baby Brother’s voice suddenly had an edge of aggression that was not lost on Jason. Since there was no real answer to the question, any response would be the wrong one.

“What the fuck, man? How am I supposed to know?”

Glancing at his friend, Baby Brother stood up and walked over to the window. The quiet street was empty and Iraq seemed like a bad dream. Maybe that’s all it was, a bad dream, from which he had finally awakened.

“Well, I know one thing,” he said softly.

“What’s that?” Jason was pleased to hear the calm return to his buddy’s voice.

Baby Brother turned and looked at Jason. “I’m not going back.”

“Now you just talkin’ crazy.”

“I’d be crazy to go back there.” The idea was growing on him, taking hold, gaining credibility. “Maybe this is my mama’s parting gift to her long-lost son, a chance to get my black ass out of there before I get my head blown off, too.”

“You’re not serious, so squash it.”

“Do I look like I’m playin’?” Baby Brother spread his arms wide as if to issue a challenge.

“You can’t just quit the army in the middle of a war.” Jason frowned. “That’s desertion. They get to shoot you for that, remember?”

“They can’t shoot me if they can’t find me.” Baby Brother began to pace in front of the window, suddenly filled with the possibilities of this new idea. “I’ll go to Canada or some shit like that. They still got people over there from the sixties. They don’t even mess wit’ ’em.”

“You’re not kidding, are you?” Still not believing what he was hearing, Jason was repeating himself.

“Damn, man, what I gotta do? Open a vein? I’m serious, okay? I’m done with all this shit
as of now
!”

Jason looked at Baby Brother like he had lost his mind. “What are you going to do, man? Just run away from the shit? Let everybody in your outfit down? Leave those guys even more shorthanded than they already are because you’re too scared to be where you promised to be?”

“I didn’t promise shit.”

Jason stood up. “Yeah, you did. You volunteered. There ain’t no draft. You stepped forward of your own free will and said ‘I do.’ It’s too late to back out now. That’s why they’re calling up the reserves in the first place.”

He was getting more worked up by the minute. “If I had to do my service for eighteen months, you have to do yours, too.
End of story.
”

Both men were aware that this was a dangerous moment. The positions they were staking out had no middle ground, and if they were going to spend the night under the same roof, they needed to find a compromise fast. Baby Brother blinked first. That wasn’t surprising since he had the most to lose in the exchange. An argumentative houseguest is as unwelcome as a summer cold and it was too late to make other plans.

Looking at Jason’s angry face, Baby Brother hoped he hadn’t already gone too far. “Listen, man, I’m trying to tell you this shit is all wrong. It ain’t about nothin’ and it don’t mean nothin’. I didn’t promise to give my life for some bullshit.”

Jason snorted contemptuously. “Don’t try to make this something it’s not. This is no political protest and you’re no conscientious objector with a righteous cause. You’re a
punk.
I got buddies over there that are never coming home, but at least they died like men. If you do this, you’re a disgrace to everything they stood for.”

Baby Brother saw no need for further discussion. Nobody could make this decision with him or for him. It was his choice and his alone, but right now it was time to go. He’d worry about where later. He reached for his jacket, knowing how little protection it would provide from the wind outside.

“Thanks for the beer.”

“Fuck you.”

He let himself out and heard Jason slam the door behind him.
Fuck you, too,
he thought.
Because your buddies didn’t make it, I gotta shed my blood? It don’t work that way.

It was after midnight and the temperature had dropped significantly. He didn’t have enough change for the metro, so he started walking back toward Dupont Circle in the hope that his uniform might generate a contribution from a patriotic citizen encountering an unlucky soldier on leave to bury his mama. It was a good plan, except that it was late and cold and there was no pedestrian traffic. Even the prostitutes had given up for the night.

Out of options, he turned up his collar, pulled that ugly GI hat down as far as he could, jammed his hands into his pockets, and headed toward Union Station. It was going to be a long, cold walk, but the train station was open all night, and if the uniform had any chance of generating a hot meal or a cold beer, that would be the place. All he had to do now was keep putting one frozen foot in front of the other.

He hadn’t gone six blocks when a chocolate-brown BMW pulled up beside him and the driver, a well-dressed black man in his late forties, opened the passenger-side window and leaned over to make eye contact. Baby Brother knew that look.

“Need a ride, young brother?” the man said smoothly.

Soft jazz was playing on the car stereo and the blast of warm air from the heater warmed Baby Brother’s cheeks as he stepped to the curb and leaned down to check the man out. He was expensively dressed and the interior and exterior of the car were spotless. The man was about his size and had closely cropped, salt-and-pepper hair and a neatly trimmed mustache.