Fives and Twenty-Fives (21 page)

“All right, then. I have the perfect name.”

“Wonderful, my friend.” Hani kissed my cheek. “Wonderful.”

I drew the English words in big, thick letters.

“What does it say?” Hani begged.

“Exactly what you wanted. The Americans will read it and feel safe. We will do a good business. Only make me a promise, Hani.”

“Yes. Anything.”

“This is temporary. One week. Two at the most.”

“I promise, my friend.”

I looked over Hani’s shoulder and watched Mundhir hanging fishnets out to dry with Abu Abdul. Mundhir smiled at the old man and they walked together down the beach holding hands. I saw Haji Fasil counting rice sacks in his storage hut. I looked back at Hani and marked the look on his face.

They were having fun, meaning we would be stuck here, by the lake, for too many days. We were uncomfortably close to Habbaniyah and risked a passing encounter with someone, some merchant or former soldier, who knew my father and brother.

I went to the road and hung the sign on a pole Hani had secured in a pile of rocks:

TOURIST TOWN. STOP AND SPEND MONEY ON BULLSHIT
.

Significant Incident Report: Criminal Act, murder and intimidation

While executing a road repair mission on Route Golden, an Engineer Support Company convoy, Hellbox Five-Six, was approached by three Iraqi nationals who claimed that soldiers of
the Iraqi Army wearing civilian clothes had murdered several local merchants. Assisted by a coalition-employed interpreter, the Iraqi nationals led coalition forces to the bodies of
five men in the vicinity of
the Dra Dijlia Market. The bodies were found bound and blindfolded and appeared to have died from gunshot wounds to the back of
the head. When asked by coalition forces how they knew the men had been murdered by members of
the Iraqi Army, the locals claimed it was common knowledge in the area that Iraqi soldiers were members of
a Shiite death squad. The bodies were turned over to the local Iraqi Highway Patrol, and coalition forces continued their mission.

Respectfully submitted,

P. E. Donovan

Big Boy Rules out Here

This might be the worst hangover I’ve ever had. It’s like a straw siphoning the moisture from behind my eyes, sucking it across my brain and down my spine. Why did I drink so much whiskey? And what did I say to Paige?

I grab my phone to check the time and see a text message from a new contact labeled Empathy.

“What time are we meeting at West End? I’m excited to see this boat. And, um, terrified for you. You have *no* idea what you’re getting into.”

Good God. I told her about
Sentimental Journey
.

Her crack about Bear Bryant and his three fingers of Maker’s Mark had got me talking. She knew just what to say. Just how to get me telling stories. This is a problem.

It’s not smart for me to tell stories. Makes people uncomfort­able. But with a few bourbons in me, everything takes on a gallows humor and I just want to share, share, share. It’s why I drink alone, mostly. I don’t have the discipline to drink around people and answer their simple questions without saying something awful. Even the memories that seem funny in my head come out sounding like the summer vacation of a psychopath.

It’s even worse, though, when I just sit there quietly and refuse to discuss the war at all. People get the impression that I’m the stereotypical brooding vet. That’s why I always keep two or three stories on deck, harmless and cute, to distract and move the conversation elsewhere. The million dollars burning on the side of the road is a real winner. Fred the Scorpion works well, too. That’s Cobb’s story, but I pretend it happened to me. I used to tell stories about Marceau, but had to stop; people asked too many questions about him.

Suddenly, I have a flash of recollection. A national championship ring. A pile of hay. Good Christ, did I tell Paige the story about the old man?

I remember pulling the Nomex hood away from my face and slowly working the fabric under my chin with a knuckle of my gloved hand. My fingers gripped a pen; the Humvee hit a bump and I double-clutched, barely catching it. I tried to wipe my face, but there was too much sweat. I was just pushing it around.

Up ahead of us, a goat herder in an ankle-length shirt flailed and slapped his thighs to urge his animals from the road. Zahn tapped the accelerator. Just a tap. Just enough to stoke the engine but not enough to spin the wheels. The sound of it reached the herder and he panicked. He jumped up and down, waved his staff, and beat his animals to move them from the road before the wild American ran them down.

Zahn spit into his dip bottle. “Real combat petting zoo out here, sir,” he said, laconic as ever.

I had radio handsets wedged under the rim of my helmet, pressed against each ear, and secured to my chin strap so that the microphones floated in front of my lips. The thick cords twisted up to hooks above the windshield. Like ceremonial braids.

Up ahead, in the dusty traffic circle where men sold produce and bales of hay from donkey carts, I spotted an old man with a thick, gray beard and a black-checkered kaffiyeh standing next to his cart of alfalfa hay, having a heated argument with a customer.

The old man turned away from his customer and slapped his forehead in distress.

The fat, middle-aged customer clenched his fists, stomped his feet, and scowled so violently the hairs of his mustache seemed to plug his nostrils.

The old man wiped his brow and pushed his hand into the fat man’s face. He pointed to his upturned palm and shouted.

I thought of my father and smiled. “Look at my sweat,” I said to myself. “Look at it, here. You see that sweat? Not one dollar less. I’d sooner salt my fields. Not one dollar less.”

Zahn perked up. “Say something over there, sir?”

“Yeah, just something my father used to say. Folks would roll by late in the afternoon, looking for bargain hay, and he’d go, ‘Sooner salt my fields in sweat. Don’t you try to muscle me. I played tight end for Coach Paul Bryant.’” I pointed to the old man. “This guy up here? The old guy in the head scarf? Reminds me of him, a little bit.”

The old man’s features grew more animated out the windshield. He screamed and pointed to his ring finger.

I turned back to Zahn. “You
see
this ring? National champions, 1961!”

Zahn smiled, but only to keep his lieutenant happy. It was hard enough, his job. Guiding an awkward, top-heavy vehicle through a poorly designed traffic circle without losing speed—hard enough without having to indulge the idiotic musings of his college-boy lieutenant, skipping down memory lane. I understood.

All at once the men doing business in the traffic circle heard our engines above the din. We had four Humvees and two trucks that day, all with heavy guns mounted up top. The gunners waved red flags and shot flares, and the merchants fled like birds. Most moved away from the curb in a tight knot. A few, the bold ones, ran into the street to save their little Daihatsu bongo trucks.

But the old man with alfalfa for sale didn’t move. A bongo truck careened through the booth next to his and bucked to a stop against a pile of sacks. The old man didn’t even flinch. He just slapped his face and protested to the universe at large. The injustice of alfalfa prices. The idiocy of these terrible drivers. The imperial arrogance of the Americans.

I craned my neck to watch him as we rolled through the traffic circle and back into the desert, until the town faded behind us, before turning back to the horizon and searching through the smog and the shrubs festooned with garbage. A brown smudge stood out in the distance from inside the green ribbon hugging the river. I glanced at my map to make sure it was the right place, the
right
smudge.

I smiled, wiped my nose, and said to Zahn. “Hey, how about on the way back we buy some hay from that guy? Just to do it, huh? What do you think?” I turned to the backseat to face Dodge. “Can you barter for hay?”

Dodge looked up from his book, the one he was always reading, the one from which he’d removed the paperback cover to hide the title and avoid questions. “I haven’t a clue,
Mulasim
. I’ve not once bought hay in my entire life.”

“Hell,
I’ll
do it,” Doc Pleasant chimed in. “Teach me three words, Dodge. Seems like that’s all you need. The rest is just yelling.”

Then we heard the bomb.

Behind us.

I was looking right at Doc. I saw him flinch and grip his seat. The shock wave kicked me in the ass and pulled through my chest. I dropped my pen, bending over out of instinct to get it. The radio cords grabbed me by the chin, like a rock in a slingshot, and sent my head bouncing back up. The pen skittered away over the floorboard.

Zahn squirmed in his seat and fixed his grip on the wheel. “
Fuck
. That fucker was big.” He reached for the can of Skoal in his grenade pouch.

All at once, the convoy net built to a fuzzy brawl in my right ear, excited transmissions and shouts coming in from all six vehicles. The vehicle commanders, keying their handsets at the same time, all stepped on each other and reduced the net to a dull bleat.

In my other ear, an unknown radio operator in the combat outpost up ahead, the brown smudge in the window, continued speaking casually until the sound reached him a few seconds later. A low rumble came through the concrete walls of his operations center, into his radio, and back into my ear. A time traveler.

I unclipped the handset and tossed it away before I had to hear about the bomb again. The handset bounced off its hook like the telephone in my parents’ kitchen when my father didn’t want calls during dinner.

“You see that,” I yelled up to Marceau in the turret, twisting in my seat to get a better angle. I waved at Zahn. “Speed up, speed up.”

No sharp crack of an artillery round. No steel frag hissing by the turret. I could tell by the sound, full and deep, that powerful as the bomb had clearly been, it was probably homemade. A hot-water heater, maybe, packed with ammonium nitrate fertilizer soaked in diesel fuel. That was becoming more popular around that time. Slow, powerful blast waves that might not be capable of piercing armor, but could throw a Humvee into the air like a child’s toy.

Dodge cursed loudly in Arabic and asked Doc in English, “Are you okay, man? Are you okay?”

Doc opened his eyes. “We’re fine. Way behind us. We’re fine.” He didn’t loosen his grip on the seat, though. And he kept on flinching.

The highway curved right and I saw the smoke in my side mirror. Inside the smoke, a cloud of gray debris rained down on the traffic circle. The attack had obviously been meant for us, and we’d been spared by a triggerman late on the switch or a bomb with a bad fuse.

After all six vehicles had reported up, I called out on the common net for the convoy to push through. The outpost up ahead had a quick-reaction force. Marines on twenty-four-hour standby with gunned-up security Humvees. They could take care of it. It wasn’t our job. Push through.

I turned back to the horizon and watched the smudge become a thumbnail, growing slowly into an earthen berm with empty Hesco baskets stretched out on top, waiting for a front-end loader to come by and fill them with rocks and dirt. The canvas lining of the Hescos flapped against the steel-mesh frames in places, rotting away like clothes on a skeleton.

Zahn turned off the highway, down a steep embankment, and onto a dirt track. Ahead of us, five Nissan trucks with Iraqi flags painted on white doors lurched through the gate, an American Humvee belonging to the military adviser team following them like a determined sheepdog. The white Iraqi Army trucks swerved and jockeyed for position on the narrow road, all of them nosing violently into the soft sand at times before finding their place in line. Iraqi soldiers stood in the truck beds and braced themselves. They wore ill-fitting helmets and flak jackets over old-style, green camouflage uniforms. Their tan boots looked brand-new.

The American Humvee slowed down like they might be expecting a report from us. Zahn slowed down in response. But the Humvee just rolled by with the turret gunner gesturing at the Iraqis, giving us a sarcastic shrug. “What more do you want?” he called out, hand over mouth. “We got them out the gate!” Then he settled back behind his gun.

“
That
was weird,” said Zahn, having apparently caught the musing bug from his lieutenant.

We reached the gate, where an Iraqi soldier on watch waved us through before returning to where two more soldiers squatted in the shade with their helmets off. He dragged his rifle behind him like a child’s blanket.

Zahn whistled, the musing bug having now taken a thorough hold. “They got a truck bomb in their future, they keep sitting around like that.”

A young Marine from the adviser team, wearing running shoes and shorts, a rifle slung across his back, met us in the vehicle assembly area immediately inside the outpost and gestured for us to follow. I slid my armored window to the side and called out, “Clearing barrels? You have any? A berm where we can unload the machine guns?”

The kid shrugged, gestured to his loaded rifle. “Big boy rules out here.”