Fobbit (33 page)

When the chief had read the press release and declared it to be good and squared away according to his personal judgment, he stabbed a finger at Gooding’s computer screen and barked like a city editor, “Send it!”

Chance sent the press release into cyberspace, feeling like he’d just released a dove into the air, his words now flapping and fluttering their way to newspaper editors’ desks all across America. Really, though, the Division’s little massaged, 150-word press release was a mere afterthought in the grand scheme of things because, by that point, the wire services had already filed their own stories with no help from Division Public Affairs. Nice try, though.

The chief, grunting and satisfied that he’d just single-handedly managed to turn the tide of public opinion, walked away without another word, fingers still jingling the coins in his pockets.

When he had disappeared up the stairs, Gooding said, “It’s safe now, sir. He’s gone.”

Major Filipovich’s cubicle puffed an audible sigh and said in its most contrite cubicle voice, “Okay to finish my game of solitaire now?”

“Have at it, sir.”

And so they went about their daily routine. Gooding read e-mails, he saved photos to the archive, and he lingered long enough in the bathroom to read a chapter in his current novel (
Hard Times
by Charles Dickens). The Fobbits carried on, business as usual. They went to lunch and ate their celery sticks and parmesan chicken breast and blueberry cheesecake, they came back to their desks and fell into the torpid slumber of postlunch lethargy, they passed around e-mail jokes, they compiled reports, they copied, they collated, they stapled.

Then the Bad quickly morphed into Worse.

Back at the marketplace near the al-Kadhimiya mosque, teeming with one million devout pilgrims, in an already edgy crowd still cleaning up after the mortar attack, someone yelled, “He’s got a bomb! Watch out! He’s going to blow himself up!”—Arabic words to the effect of “Fire! Fire! Fire!” in the proverbial crowded theater. Only a few dozen pilgrims actually heard the warning, but that was enough.

Hours later, a grim-faced interior minister would step up to a porcupine bristle of microphones and issue a statement, saying one person had “pointed a finger at another person, claiming he was carrying explosives . . . and that led to the panic.”

The beast with eight thousand feet had buzzed and murmured, started churning, then a wave of panic rippled outward from the ground zero of whoever had sounded the alarm (which, according to later reports, in all likelihood was a false alarm planted by a terrorist). The eight thousand feet pivoted on eight thousand heels and stampeded outward like a spreading stain. The huge mob of pilgrims pushed and screamed, shoved and ran, jostled and tripped, the fallen trying to rise but being kicked down by more and more feet fleeing the feared blast zone, those at the edge seeing the surging human tide and turning, walking rapidly at first, then, as they felt the hot breath on their necks, also starting to run and also tripping and falling and lying flat to be stomped and suffocated by all those sandaled feet, the eight thousand sandals now running, running, running with blind panic. Only to find Iraqi police had blocked off roads around the mosque, anticipating attacks on the hundreds of thousands of Shiites who were converging on the capital.

Dust clogged the air, swirled by screams and flailing limbs. The mob funneled onto the bridge, all of them squeezing toward the other end only to find their way choked by an impenetrable Iraqi police checkpoint. People were crushed, the breath pushed from their lungs, their ribs cracked, their organs compressed, the legs and arms and necks of young children snapped like thin, dry twigs.

Then, somewhere along the bridge, the pressure of human bodies grew too great and the railings broke and burst open, spilling body after body into the murky brown Tigris River forty feet below. Women covered in black from head to toe toppled over the edge and hit the water, their long abayas dragging them under with the sound of smacking lips. The current sucked and licked up the young children falling like little drops of flesh from the bridge overhead. And still the bodies pressed outward from the imaginary bomber, the pressure of the crowd at last finding an opening, a relief valve. Hundreds of bodies were jettisoned out of the break in the railing to the dirty, roiled water below.

Back among the palace’s air-conditioned cubicles, all laughter came to an abrupt halt as the SMOG speakers delivered the grim news.

CNN started reporting wildly exaggerated figures of six hundred dead, then after just one commercial break, it climbed to 650 dead. Apparently, they’d heard from someone at the scene who said they heard someone had heard on
Al Jazeera
that Iraqi police were handing out those figures.

Other reports filtered in, saying fifty people eating at the mosque had been sickened and killed by rat poison. Gooding and Filipovich drifted over and watched al-Huriya television broadcasts. They were joined by Lieutenant Colonel Harkleroad, who had nervously emerged from hibernation, his fingertips glowing with neon-orange cheese dust. They pointedly ignored him as he stood behind them and coughed softly every time a new death tally scrolled across the screen.

One of the Iraqi generals came on and said not to believe any of the numbers that were being reported. However, no matter what anyone said, it was plain to see there were lots and lots of dead—too many corpses for such a non-IED incident. No one knew if there had even been a suicide bomber in the first place. At that point, it didn’t matter.

An hour later, the number crunchers from G-2 came up on SMOG and announced that more people had died in the past half an hour than in all of the previous month.

It was the shout that killed, the words that devastated more than any shrapnel or flames could ever do.

The Fobbits, watching from their sterile distance, struggled to make sense of it. They tried to separate truth from fiction, rumor from confirmed reports. Sham Div sent teams of military police to neighborhood hospitals and the mosque to count bodies and report back as soon as possible.

Chance stared at the TV screens.
Al-Arabiya
TV was showing footage from the scene. Bodies were stacked like cordwood along the pavement. Some were covered with sheets, some were draped in tarps of gold foil (perhaps some building material dug out of the trash nearby). When they ran out of materials to use, mourners just pulled shirts up over the dead faces. Still, as the camera panned along the sidewalk morgue, the breeze lifted the corners of the blankets and the gold foil and the dead looked at Gooding through the camera—the open mouths with their teeth dirtied by river water, the rolled-back eyes, the knitted brows, the look of confusion. A young boy in a T-shirt, flies walking across his eyeballs, reached out his arms for his mother, her face up on the bridge rapidly receding from his field of vision. The camera panned. The buckled limbs, the splayed feet, the hundreds and hundreds of shapeless mounds beneath the sheets: it was almost too much for Gooding to bear.

He watched the still living walk among the newly dead, lifting the corners of blankets, taking a fast peek, then moving on to the next body. Every so often, a woman in black collapsed and started wailing, rocking back and forth over the news she didn’t want confirmed—the “Yes, it’s me” face of her sister, her mother, her husband, her child. One woman fainted completely away and several men rushed up to splash water on her face. The water was carried in plastic bags, as if they’d just come from a pet store with a few goldfish. They splashed the cold, clear water on the woman and picked her up by the still-limp arms and pulled her into the shade. One of the men yelled and waved to an ambulance crew. Two stretchers came—one for the woman, one for the dead body she’d just identified. They were both carried away, the stretcher bearers picking their way carefully through the miles of bodies that had been fished out of the Tigris and dumped along the road.

In time, the crowds dissipated, leaving the bridge to bear its sorrow alone—the span of pavement littered with trash, handbags, and the empty sandals of the dead.

Gooding went to his computer and typed his longest diary entry since he’d arrived in Iraq.

That night, when he returned to his hooch, he let his battle-rattle gear thump to the floor. He sat on his bed and stared at nothing for a full five minutes. Then, not knowing what else to do, he picked a DVD out of his collection and inserted it into his computer.
It’s a Wonderful Life
.

25

SHRINKLE

A
be was in the PX trying to decide between Doritos and Funyuns when three of his former soldiers walked in, boasting loudly about how this was their first day off in three weeks and,
by fuck,
they were gonna get them some pogey bait before all the fuckin’ Fobbits emptied the shelves. They smelled of sweat, unwashed uniforms, and, if one strained hard enough, the undermusk of blood that always reminded Abe of sniffing warm pennies.

He ducked to a crouch—down to the level of the Ruffles potato chips—so he wouldn’t be seen by Lumley, Zeildorf, and Miller. Abe was wearing his now-standard work uniform: shorts and a T-shirt. He wasn’t even wearing a helmet, let alone a hat. These days, he walked around the FOB as bare-headed as any KBR contractor. Rather than a 9mm pistol, he was now made to carry an M16 rifle like a lowly enlisted Fobbit. Shrinkle cowered in the aisle, his head crinkling against the Ruffles as he listened to the Bravo Company soldiers make their way through the PX, their smell and swagger clearing a path of Fobbits before them. They were now two aisles away from Abe, browsing through the PX’s pathetically small DVD section.

Miller—the die-hard movie geek of the platoon—was rhapsodizing about the History of Breasts in the Cinema. The PX was crowded with Fobbits taking a long lunch hour, but that didn’t stop Miller from proclaiming, loud as a bullhorn, the merits of big-screen sweater meat: Jennifer Connelly in
The Hot Spot
. Demi Moore in
Striptease
. Julie Andrews in
S.O.B.
(now,
there
was a surprise! Mary Fucking Poppins ripping off her blouse and popping right out into your face, even if it
was
only for two seconds). Kim Basinger in
9½ Weeks
.

Zeildorf said, “What about Holly Wood Hills?”

“
Who
?” Miller asked.

“Holly Wood Hills. You know—
Sperms of Endearment, Glad He Ate Her, Lawrence of a Labia
. Any of those ring a bell?”

“I’m not talking porn here, Zeildorf. Porn is completely out of the question, off the table, man. This is strictly mainstream milk muffins.” He paused and held up his counting fingers. “Now, where was I? Kim Basinger,
Nine and a Half Fucking Weeks
. . . Erika Eleniak popping out of the cake in
Under Siege
. . .”

Lumley piped up: “Don’t forget about whatzername—Miss Tit-a-licious—Rosalee Somebody-or-Other—who was in
Up the Wazoo
and then the sequel,
Out the Wazoo
.”

“Hell,
yeah
. Classic eighties teen sex comedy,” Miller said. “My mother couldn’t figure out why I was always washing my bedsheets after I saw that on HBO.”

They fell silent as they browsed through the DVDs in the PX. Abe low-crawled through the aisles, trying to make it to the front entrance before they spotted him.

“Shit,” he heard Zeildorf say. “Nothing but Disney and Adam Sandler.”

“Well, what’d you expect?” Lumley said. “A boxed set of
Little Whorehouse on the Prairie
?”

“I still say we’re wasting our time here,” Miller said. “We should go to Hajji Mart for the bootlegs.”

“All right, then,” Lumley said. “Stop talking about it. Let’s go do it.”

They headed for the door but were stopped by the sight of their former commander crawling on his knees and elbows across the floor near the cash registers.

At that same moment, Abe Shrinkle also came up short as he ran into a pair of shoes, which were attached to a stout pair of legs in plaid-checked pants, above which were a pair of wide hips cinched with a belt, upon which were knuckled two fists on either side, all of which was topped by a swollen red face that loomed over Abe like a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. It was the PX store manager and he seemed a little pissed to find a customer low-crawling to the exit.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said in a God-to-Moses voice, “but I’ll take that from you now, if you don’t mind.”

Abe raised his head. “Huh?”

“The merchandise.” The manager pointed at Abe’s chest where he cradled a bag of potato chips in his arms. “Hand it over, sir.”

What?!
How did
that
get there
? Abe got to his feet with a loud bag crinkle and a crunching-to-crumbs of the merchandise. “Allow me to explain . . .”

The store manager’s face crimsoned like a thermometer. “I’m sure there’s a very good one and I’m sure the MPs will love to hear it.”