Fobbit (27 page)

Lieutenant Colonel Duret had been right, Abe thought. Sweeping the floor of a leaky Quonset hut was
not
the worst thing that could have resulted from his (accidental) murder of a Local National. Death by firing squad was definitely worse.

But now he was dying a slow death here at the gym, withering from shame each time the door creaked open, blasting him with a brief faceful of sunlight. Though he knew only a few of the men who came in for their daily dose of sweat and Donna Summer, he was sure they all knew
him
. He was the impetuous captain who’d done the unthinkable: destroying government property, with the unforeseen bonus of killing an innocent Local National. He was the poster child for the National Klutz Foundation and they all knew it, those men who snuck glances at him while sitting on the weight bench doing barbell curls.

Furthermore, now that he was stuck on FOB Triumph all day long, Abe Shrinkle had become the very thing his men despised: a Fobbit. If his soldiers ever came into the gym, he would have a hard time looking them in the eye. But, except for one time when Suarez and Zeildorf came in to run the treadmill and then left after only fifteen minutes, none of his company—his
former
company—had stopped by the Quonset hut. Shrinkle didn’t blame them for wanting to cut their ties. He himself didn’t even want to be associated with the killer klutz called Shrinkle.

One day in the dining facility he’d seen Sergeant Lumley but had looked away before their eyes met. Lumley had just come in from patrol and his uniform hung on his body like a dirty potato sack. There was a dark smear—dirt? grease? blood?—on one cheek. Captain Shrinkle could practically smell Lumley from where he sat on the opposite side of the room. Shrinkle’s own uniform (khaki and polo) was freshly laundered and he now carried the unblemished glow of someone who led a coddled life inside the wire. He finished his lobster au gratin and left the DFAC before Lumley saw him and was forced to make the moral decision about whether or not to sit down with his—
former
—company commander.

Save for the times he was working at the fitness center—fold, sweep, wipe, stack—Abe avoided other soldiers as much as possible. He spent the days hiding in his hooch, rereading care package letters from good, decent Americans who had no idea of his current status or that he was the perpetrator of Crimes of Atrocity, and who still kept sending him gum and jerky and lavender-scented stationery. Eventually, however, he got a little stir crazy in his hooch and set out to walk the roads that angled around Z Lake, fully unprotected in his civilian attire.

That’s how he discovered the pool in the Australian sector of FOB Triumph. Now at night, and on every second Wednesday (his one day off), he walked to the other side of Z Lake to swim laps.

The pool offered the only relief from the temperatures that climbed to the triple digits by noon and stayed there until evening chow. The heat was a Thing to be endured while walking between oases of air-conditioning. It pressed on his skin, scorched the lining of his nose, and withered his lungs. It was a mile between his hooch and the swimming pool. Around about the half-mile mark, his tongue would swell and he’d think of those words Jesus croaked on the cross: “Father, I am thirsty!” In his heat delirium, he started chanting a mantra: “Cold water, air-conditioning, cold water, air-conditioning, cold water, air- conditioning.” Once he passed a group of female soldiers and heard one say to the others, “It’s so hot even my sunburn is getting sunburned!” He started thinking about when he’d been stationed in Alaska and the times he’d take out the trash wearing nothing but flannel pajama bottoms, a pair of slippers, and a T-shirt when it was twenty below zero. He thought of bitter Decembers in Fairbanks, when he would drive out near Ester, along a desolate side road, into a deserted forest in search of that year’s Christmas tree. When he stepped out of his truck and into the subzero icebox, the air was so still, so frozen he could hear pine needles tinkling to the ground two miles away. A raven crying overhead was like a sonic boom. Walking across Triumph, Abe started thinking of how his hands, even inside the cocoon of gloves, started freezing after five minutes of hacking away at the trunk of a tree frozen hard as concrete. He thought of how, when your hands are truly cold, the skin of your fingers starts pulling away from the fingernails and you think you’re being tortured by Viet Cong soldiers. He thought of how miniature icicles used to form on the tips of his nose hairs, and then—at last, at last—there he was, he’d arrived at the pool. He could hear the cheers and minty splash of water inside the security fence and he nearly wept with joy.

Though patronizing the pool was a violation of General Order Number Five, Abe felt he had nothing to lose at this point (he had already faced the execution squad in his mind) and, besides, he liked the companionship of the soldiers from Down Under. So, Wednesdays and evenings found Abe floating in the Aussie pool, draped on an inflated inner tube, sipping a Foster’s through a straw (in violation of General Order Number Two) while holding court with the tanned, muscled sergeants from Sydney and Adelaide. None of them knew Abe was an American because he spoke with a British accent (a slippery British accent but he hoped the Aussies would be drunk enough not to notice or care).

As he had walked to the pool for the first time a week ago, he’d decided to adopt a new identity—start over with a clean slate, as it were. Walking the dusty road with his swim suit rolled up on one hand, he practiced with a few phrases like “blimey!” and “pip-pip cheerio!”

He told them his name was Richard Belmouth and that he was a London contractor who was there to advise the United States on historical preservation. Oh, how he could drone for hours on end about the horrors the Iraqi museums and libraries had suffered during the 2003 invasion at the hands of those barbarous Yanks.

“Save any statues today, mate?” they would ask, rubbing oil on their torsos and pulling the sunglasses off their heads and over their eyes. They were cheeky and seemed to be of the opinion that the war was one big winky joke, and soon enough the Americans would realize they had become the actor who flubbed his lines on the world’s stage. They were just waiting for the day when GWB (“Great White Bwana,” they called him) admitted defeat, packed up his billion-dollar toys and went home. Then they could all call it quits and let the hajjis resume their centuries-old holy war. In the meantime, it was all a big nudge in the ribs, eh, mate?

“That bloody Great White Bwana has no regard for the treasures of civilization,” Abe would yell across the pool, working his face to a beet-red fluster—to the great amusement of his new mates. “Why, just look at how he allowed the Iraqis to mindlessly loot the National Museum back in 2003. Bush’s jackanapes just stood back and did nothing, saying they didn’t want to get involved. Well, it was a bloody rape, is what it was. A rape of history!”

“Calm down there, Dickie old man. You’re likely to burst a blood vessel, you are.” They’d toss him another beer and he’d catch it effortlessly, floating there in his rubber ring in the middle of the pool. The can was frosty in his hand and it felt so good to snatch it out of the air. When he opened it, the hissing
snick
was like a miniature blast of arctic air.

Abe was not himself at the Aussie pool. It wasn’t just a matter of the British accent and the anti-American bluster; Abe Shrinkle had never been a man given to drink or decadence. When, during Friday afternoon safety briefings back at Fort Stewart, he’d preached to his company about the punitive consequences of DUIs, he’d sounded like a man in the pulpit. His soldiers had known him as someone who held himself far above the grime of liquor, sexual deviancy, and profanity. Apart from hoarding a few care packages, Abe Shrinkle had never thought of himself as a man of habitual sin.

Now look at him, floating lobster-red in the pool and waxing sarcastic about the U.S. administration with a Liverpool tongue.

The Australians called their Friday afternoon happy hour “prayers.” In fact, this is what had brought Captain Shrinkle to the pool in the first place. He’d overheard two Seventh Cav staff officers talking about the Australians while they lifted weights at the fitness center two weeks ago.

“You know, the Aussies have got it made, man.”

“How so?”

“They’re so loose over there on the other side of Z Lake even their bootlaces are untied.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“You ever hear of the Friday prayer meetings?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

The first staff officer laughed, looked around, then leaned in close to the other weight lifter, whispering in his sweat-crusted ear. Then they both laughed.

“Man, I gotta get me some of that,” said the second officer. “‘Prayers,’ you called it?”

“Prayers,” confirmed the first officer.

“Good cover.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“Every Friday at the pool, you say?”

“Every Friday starting at nineteen-hundred hours on the dot. Don’t be late or they won’t have any Bloody Hail Marys left when you get there.”

Then they both laughed so hard they couldn’t lift the weights anymore.

Standing at the counter, folding towels, Abe Shrinkle also thought the prayer meetings sounded like a good idea. He’d always been a good churchgoing boy, partly to reassure his grandmother, but partly because organized religion had pulled Abe to its sweet bosom and made him feel like he was part of something bigger and greater than them all—a club of huggers and forgivers. And Lord knows, he could use the bosomy comfort of a prayer service now that he was the worst of sinners: a murderer and waster of government property.

When he reached the Australians’ pool that Friday at nineteen-hundred-on-the-dot, however, Abe realized he’d walked into an orgy of drinking, cursing, and unnaturally good spirits for people who were in the bull’s-eye of a war zone. Abe gripped his towel in his left hand and realized the pocket-sized New Testament he’d rolled inside his extra pair of underwear would be superfluous here. He was about to turn and leave when a bikini-clad girl walked up to him and asked, “What’s your pleasure, mate?” She held out a Foster’s in one hand and a Budweiser in the other.

Abe’s tongue was momentarily strangled in his mouth. Not only could he not choose between two beers (or, better yet, no beers at all), but he couldn’t stop staring at the two breasts slung so tightly in the beige bikini.

“Oy, mate! Up here,” the girl said, giving the beers a slight shake. “You joining our prayer service or are you giving us the nudge-off?”

Abe brought his eyes up to the girl’s face and gave her a wan smile. He still couldn’t untangle his tongue so he pointed meekly at the Foster’s and nodded like a mute idiot when she slapped the cold can in his hand. “That’s the spirit, mate. Welcome to Prayers.”

Then she spun around and bounced away, her breasts moving in a synchronized dance. A whoop from the pool caught his attention and he looked over in time to see a red, beefy man take a leap off the diving board and cannonball into the water. He drenched the girl and three others lounging poolside, including another girl who had her top pulled down and was tanning her smallish breasts. The cannonballer received a smattering of applause as he climbed dripping out of the pool and several beers were raised in his honor. He took a bow and, catching sight of Abe standing there with his unopened Foster’s in one hand and his towel (with concealed Bible) in the other, walked over to the pale, agape American officer.

“Greetings, mate.”

Abe nodded and grinned.

“Why the hesitation? Grab yourself a spot of concrete and join in the fun, eh?”

Others were looking at him now. The topless girl raised herself on one elbow and shielded her eyes with one hand. For a moment, it seemed to Abe she was giving him a salute. That’s when he firmly decided that yes, indeed, he
would
change his identity and leave the old Abe Shrinkle behind.

It was as simple as entering an elevator and watching the doors close in front of him. At once, he was lifted up and away and, with the giddiness of a cold beer, bare breasts (the two eyes of nipples staring at him), and all these new eager friends, he felt that for at least the duration of a false prayer service, he could leave behind the death, stink, and shame of his failure at war.

That’s when his tongue untied and allowed these words to run its length: “Jolly good show you’ve got ’ere, guv’nor.” He raised his beer in a salute to the rest of the swimmers. “I’m Richard Belmouth, by the by. Assistant curator of Babylonian antiquities at the British Museum. I’ve been sent here to unfuck all the damage the Yanks have done to the treasures of history.”

The red-faced Australian leaned in close and let loose a blast of beer breath. “No formal introductions necessary here, Dick.”

“Right-o.” Baffled, Abe wasn’t quite sure how far he should extend his lie, at least at this first encounter with the Australians. “I just—I just wanted to let you blokes know where I stood so there’d be no, uh, misunderstandings.”

“Well, whatever your cause, I’m sure it’s a good one. Now, come along and meet me mates.”

And so the newborn Richard Belmouth walked to the edge of the blue water winking in the sunlight and joined the laughter already in progress.

19

HARKLEROAD