Fives and Twenty-Fives (38 page)

When he’s not talking at me, he’s talking to this little, blonde bartender. This girl I’ve been hitting on. He tells her it’s okay. That he’ll take care of this. That he knows this guy, and he’ll get him out of here.

I don’t know which guy he’s talking about, but he has his hand on my shoulder and I don’t like that. Don’t like it one bit. I shrug him off, about to get pissed and swing. But before I can, he locks up my arm and carries me off into the street where all these assholes are singing about people they used to know.

“Let’s get you a cup of coffee.”

“I don’t need any fucking coffee, sir. Get fucked, sir,” I say, not sure why I’m calling him sir. My feet won’t push off the sidewalk the way they should, so I drag my toes and let this guy carry me, like Lieutenant Donovan pulling me around the day Zahn got beaned. “An asshole. Just like Lieutenant Donovan.”

“Who?”

“You. You. The asshole.”

“I guess that’s fair.” He puts me down on a bench while the singing reaches a high note. This guy takes a seat next to me, and I start to understand where I am. It’s that little square with the fountain, right next to the French Market, where all the tourists buy their feather boas and shit.

“One more time, Doc. It’s Lieutenant Donovan. It’s Pete, I mean. It’s me.”

“Yeah . . . Zahn told me about you.” I hear for the first time how bad I’m slurring these words. “Zahn told me the lieutenant was around here somewhere. Fuck that asshole.”

And now this guy starts laughing, and I think maybe I’m sobering up, but that can’t be because I’m still seeing the lieutenant sitting here next to me.

“I am an asshole. This is true.”

“Sir?” I poke him in the face.

He pushes my finger aside. “Yes, but don’t call me that. I went through the same thing with Zahn. Just skip it, okay? Call me Pete.”

I reach out again, and when he swats my finger away like a fly, I come back to the world. There’s no reunion or nothing. No hugging or any great-to-see-you bullshit. Or maybe there was earlier in the bar when I was too drunk to realize it, but for now it’s right back to work.

He takes me over to this diner he knows, around the corner. I’m still staggering drunk. Doing better, but still leaning on him every now and again. The poison is on its way out, though. That’s made certain enough when I puke into a gutter. The lieutenant hustles me away, worried the cops might put me in lockup for the night if they see.

He sets me down at the counter and starts ordering food. He makes me drink water, like we’re back in the desert and he’s making us hydrate. I tell him so. “You gonna check the color of my piss, too, sir?”

“Don’t call me that.”

Next, it’s a plate full of french fries. These fries taste so good, I just want to tell everybody. I start raising my voice about it. The lieutenant keeps putting his hand over my mouth, trying to shut me up. I guess he thinks we’re about to get kicked out of here, too. He might be right, but I can’t tell.

It starts working. The coffee, the water, the fries, and the talking. And pretty soon I’m sober enough to understand that this is crazy. Running into the lieutenant in a random bar on New Year’s Eve? He thinks so, too.

“Were you really out alone on New Year’s Eve?” I ask him.

“I was. Were you?”

“No. I was with a girl for some of it.”

He doesn’t push me for details. “I was thinking about Dodge. Five seconds before I walked in there.”

“That a fact, sir?”

“It is. I was wondering what ever happened to him. Where he ended up.”

“You know his real name is Kateb, right, sir?”

“No. First I’m hearing it. And stop calling me that. Please.”

“Okay, sorry.” I put a finger over my lips and shush myself.

“What else do you know about him?”

“Well, I knew he liked shitty metal bands. But then, you knew that, too. He never shut up about that. Also, before he came to work for us, he’d been hanging out at some lake with his friends from school. Trying to leave Iraq and open a beachfront bar someplace. Didn’t work out for some reason.”

The lieutenant laughs. “He would’ve been good at that.”

“And I knew something went wrong for him. Real bad, right after our Humvee got hit, remember? While Zahn was at medical? Just before Ramadi.”

“Yeah? What was that?”

“It was one of those escalations of force. Out on Route Michigan, you know? Someone from the construction platoon shot up this old taxicab when it got too close. One of those Baghdad taxis, you know? That’s why they got suspicious. It was out too far west of the city to make good sense. Anyways, they brought the two guys from the taxi back to Taqaddum. One of them got airlifted up to Al Asad, right away, and I heard that he died a short time later. The other guy, a real big dude, he got patched up at the shock trauma center and brought over to the company headquarters.”

“Why did they bring him over to us?”

“Because Major Leighton had to give him money. The civil affairs people showed up with this stack of Iraqi money. It was our mistake and we owed the guy, they told us. Major Leighton came and got me and Dodge. He wanted Dodge to translate for him, and for me to check on the guy. Make sure he was well enough to travel, since Lieutenant Cobb’s platoon was about to take him over to Habbaniyah and hand him over to the Iraqi police.

“That whole episode shook Dodge up pretty bad. This young Iraqi, a real burly guy about Dodge’s age, was sitting in the truck all bandaged up. And Dodge was talking to him in Arabic, trying to give him all this money and saying a lot more than what Major Leighton was asking him to interpret. But the big guy . . . he wouldn’t budge. He wouldn’t say nothing. He wouldn’t even take the money. He just kept staring at Dodge with these fucking dagger eyes. And eventually Dodge just lost it, just started throwing money at him. Like, begging him to take it. But nothing doing. Big guy didn’t say a word. They had to haul Dodge away from the truck, eventually.”

I start feeling bad, like I’m talking too much, and going on too long like drunks do.

But the lieutenant doesn’t seem put off at all. He’s listening close. “Did Dodge know this guy or something?”

“Not sure. He went straight over to the intel guys in that bunker by the flight line after that. Took a week off for leave. Remember? Then, when he came back, we were back on the road before I had a chance to ask him anything. And then Ramadi . . .” I trail off, thinking he might not want me talking any more about that.

“Ramadi,” he says, picking up my train of thought. “And Gomez. And then a few weeks later, I had you brought up on charges.”

I nod my head. “Yes, sir.”

“I’m sorry, Doc.”

“Wasn’t your fault.” I mean it.

Through all his travels and adventures
, and in spite of
many moments of
sadness and defeat, Huck will always shun pity. Even the Widow Douglas, for whom Huck has obvious affection, is brushed aside when she tries to pity him.

“The widow she cried over me,” Huck remembers. “And called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of
other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it.”

Fadi al Baquii

My flatmates spend all day making calls on the satellite phone in preparation for the next rally. They talk to journalists in France and America and tell me that tomorrow, at the rally in front of Sousse Government Center, the cameras will be there. Western journalists will come to ask questions and I will speak in English on behalf of the student committee.

I tell them the last time I spoke English for a job it went badly for everyone.

They laugh like I am making a joke for them. We love our brave Fadi, they seem to say. We love his jokes and how he tries to make us brave like him.

Then they ask me to write a letter for the cause. A press release to the American media, announcing the founding of our little chapter of the revolution.

I refuse at first. How will I even release such a letter, when it is time? The Internet works for us more and more seldom now. Ben Ali will shutter it firmly in a matter of days. Surely, before he sends the Army into the streets.

My flatmates, the committee members, say that I should use what Internet we have left to obtain telephone numbers. In this way, we might be able to use the satellite telephone to call a friend in America, perhaps the one with whom I am exchanging those Facebook notes.

“Get his phone number, yes? He can listen to the letter as you read it. Then he can write it down and send it to the media.”

Why would Lester do this for me? My flatmates labor under the misconception that fighting together necessarily makes men friends.

I should tell them about the passport of a Syrian from Michigan named Fadi al Baquii, left carelessly in a desk drawer. I should tell them about Taqaddum.

The Americans in the bunker paid me my wages in dollars. An astonishing sum, handled with indifference by these unknowingly rich men. Enough money to take me all the way to Jordan, or farther if I was economical. Then they told me to enjoy my visit with family. Enjoy your holiday, they said. Come back safe.

I signed the checkout sheet on the clipboard, placed the clipboard back on the desk, and took the long stairs up from the bunker. A patrol took me to Habbaniyah and set me free inside the police station. Come back in five days for a return escort, the sergeant, a stranger, told me.

When the Americans left, I told the Iraqi policemen a lie. I said the Americans wanted me to sleep there in the police station and to patrol with them as a sort of training for me, and way to gather intelligence about the neighborhood. I made myself sound important, and how would they know otherwise? The Americans only ever spoke to me in English.

For three days, I traveled with the policemen through town. Always, I looked down the dirt road where my father and brother lived in their borrowed villa. I looked for a time when few would be home. No militiamen or workers. Only my family.

And I asked them about a big guy, shot by the Americans and brought to the police station a week previous. What had become of him? Were his wounds healing? Where was he taken when he left here?

“Oh, him?” The police chief smiled. “Big Mundhir? Abu Muhammad took him to the house down the road. He will be fine there. Abu Muhammad is a good man.”

I nodded as though this news were of no great concern to me.

On the evening of the fourth day, I tied a cloth around my face to hide, snuck from the police station, and ran through a field protected by army checkpoints. The rat lines, the Americans called this path. A place where men who worked in the American base could run under the protection of machine guns in their guard towers and perhaps make it to their homes and families without the militias seeing who they were.

I ran with a big group leaving their work and reached the wall of my father’s home with the sunset. I walked around to the gate like a stranger, listening always for talking, but hearing nothing. No voices. No generators. No air conditioners or televisions. Against the will of my pounding heart, I climbed the gate.

My father’s house was dark, and the old Mercedes was gone. In the quiet, I heard soft crying, a woman sobbing. I snuck across the courtyard, with its silly lawn, and moved to the window of the kitchen where the sobbing became something I understood. A voice I knew. It was Nasim, my brother’s wife, crying alone on the floor of the kitchen.

She had a rifle across her lap, and she reached for it when she heard the crunch of my feet on the dying grass.

“Wait. Nasim.” I entered the kitchen. “Just me. Just Kateb.”

She stood and took me into her arms. Her wet cheek settled on my neck.

“Where is my father? Where are Muhammad and Ibrahim?”

“I do not know,” she sobbed. “They left last night. Ibrahim was sick.”

“What?”

“He developed a fever in the night. Vomiting next, then diarrhea. Cholera, Kateb.
Cholera
. It was after curfew, so Muhammad and your father argued, screamed at one another. Your father wanted to wait until sunrise, saying it was too dangerous to travel at night with the checkpoints. But Muhammad insisted that they leave right away. So they put Ibrahim in the car and left to take him to the Fallujah hospital. They have not come back.”

“But where are all the men who guard the house?” I gasped.

“Sheikh Hamza took them a week ago. He needed them all to guard himself, he said. With all the foreigners making threats on his life.” She paused. “I thought you knew? Isn’t that why you sent your friend? Mundhir?”

“Yes,” I lied. “Of course. Where is he now?”

“The roof.” She started to calm. “Watching for headlights. Perhaps the sheikh’s men coming back to protect us. Perhaps not.”

I held her cheeks and told her it would be fine, that my father and brother were both smart and that they would bring Ibrahim home, soon. Then I left her in the kitchen and felt my way through the dark house, up the steps to the flat roof. Near the edge, I saw Mundhir’s back in the moonlight. He did not move, but he knew I was there. He must have heard the whole conversation with Nasim, the way voices carried at night.