Fobbit (36 page)

Still apologizing, Blodgett secured the needle with more tape, then wiped away the blood with gauze soaked in rubbing alcohol. “That oughta hold you for a while, Sar’nt. I gotta go man the front desk—it’s almost rush hour here at the aid station—so I’ll leave you to drink your IV cocktail in peace.” He rose with a grunt, then left the room.

Gooding stared at the four walls. There were posters showing various views of the human body—both exterior and cutaway, exposing networks of veins and skeletal structures. They had titles like “What You Should Know About HIV and AIDS,” “What You Should Know About Hypertension,” “What You Should Know About Breast Cancer.” He chose to stare at that last poster for quite some time.

Then his bladder started to throb.

“Hey, Blodgett!”

The medic poked his head into the room. “What’s up, Sar’nt?”

“I gotta pee.”

“Okay. Just gimme a minute.”

“No, I mean I really gotta
pee
!”

“All right, all right. Hold your horses.” He said something to the patients in the waiting room, then came and helped Gooding to stand and walked him by the elbow to the one-seater latrine. Inside with the door closed, Gooding groaned and sighed as he released an IV bag’s worth of white piss.

Blodgett was waiting for him outside the latrine. “Talk about your racehorses.”

They walked back to the cot, Gooding walking straighter now that his bladder had been unkinked.

“How you feeling, Sar’nt?”

“Better, actually. Doesn’t feel like I have a nest of snakes in my guts anymore.”

“Okay, whatever,” Blodgett said. “I’ll go get doc and see if we can unhook you.”

He came back with Claspill, who then breath-warmed the stethoscope again and listened to Gooding’s belly. Apparently, the NASCAR race had simmered down to a few low-speed laps around the track. “I’d say the IV’s done its work.” Captain Claspill started to yawn, then shrugged it off. He turned his sleepy gaze to Blodgett and ordered him to remove the IV, patch Gooding up, then send him on his way with two bottles of Imodium. “Remember,” he said, placing his hand on Gooding’s shoulder, “the word for the day is
water
. I’d recommend at least one bottle every three hours. Not enough to drown you but we’ve gotta keep you fluid-filled. Stop at the Twee trailer on your way back to your hooch and grab a few bottles.”

Gooding nodded weakly, greenly, thinking to himself,
No fucking way
.

“If you still have the shits tomorrow, come back and see me. This isn’t something to mess around with, okay?”

“Okay, sure, doc.”

“Good enough, then.” Claspill squeezed Gooding’s shoulder, then left the room.

Blodgett shook his head as he bent to withdraw the needle. “I don’t know how you did it, Sar’nt, but you got on the doc’s good side this morning. Good thing, too. You should see him most days. Normally, he just prescribes Motrin and kicks them out the door, no matter what they come in here bitching about.”

“That’s comforting to know,” Gooding said.

“Yeah, but that’s really all most of these Fobbits need anyway. We never get any of the good stuff like shrapnel wounds or burns or shit like that. It’s all ‘Oh my, oh my, I’ve got a headache,’ or guys who pig out at the DFAC then come in here complaining about how they can’t stop shitting. And I have to tell them, ‘Yeah, no shit, Sherlock!’” Blodgett released a few more jowl-quivering
har-har-har
s.

Gooding smiled to humor him.

Blodgett taped a cotton ball to Gooding’s forearm, then told him he could put his DCU shirt back on. Blodgett went out to get the Imodium.

Gooding stood and reached for his shirt. He felt a liquid loosening in the crook of his arm, and then blood was flowing down to his wrist and spattering on the floor. He looked down and found himself in the middle of a Wes Craven movie.

“Blodgett! Help!”

The chubby medic rushed in, practically slipped in the blood, and said, “Oh, shit! Oh, fuck!” He stood there wobbling with nervous uncertainty while a thin stream of blood jetted in pulsing squirts from Gooding’s arm. “Doc! Doc,
Doc
!”

Gooding slumped back onto the cot, woozy and tingling.

Claspill ran in, also squeak-slipping in the growing puddle of blood and shouted for Blodgett to get some gloves and clean up the goddamn mess. Claspill tiptoed through the blood, grabbed Gooding’s arm, and centered a gauze pad over the hole that had been excavated by the IV needle. He held Gooding in that vise grip for about two minutes. His eyes were bright and shiny now. At last, he had a bona fide patient with bona fide blood in his aid station.

“You doing okay, Sar’nt?”

“I see a light at the end of a dark tunnel,” Gooding moaned, his head starting to float away. “I’m heading for the light.”

“Hey, we don’t allow drama queens in here,” Claspill said with a grim smile. “Snap out of it. You’re gonna pull through this.”

Gooding groaned again, licking his dry, suddenly cold lips.

Blodgett came back in and began splashing hydrogen peroxide on the floor at Gooding’s feet. He grinned and said, “I like to watch it fizz.”

The three of them looked at the blood turning orange and bubbling into a foam. Gooding had never seen so much of his blood in one place at one time. He felt himself drifting away into a faint.

“Come on, Sarge,” Claspill said brusquely. “You’re not gonna die. But I will tell you that this arm here is gonna bruise like hell.” He pressed harder against the gauze. His fingers were wet and sticky with blood. With his other hand, he grabbed another gauze pad and did a quick exchange. This time, the blood was just a seep, like oil bubbling up from the ground, and not a full-blown geyser.

Gooding’s head cleared and he started to breathe easier. Thoughts of having to get a prosthetic arm began to evaporate. The cold tingling remained in his fingers but now he was certain he was going to make it. He
was
going to pull through this okay.

Claspill lifted the gauze and took another look. Gooding’s blood was still welling and running down his arm and there was a sizable hole in the skin. The blood, however, seemed to be slowing; certainly, it was no longer spurting like a faulty fountain.

“Looks like the clotting is taking effect,” Claspill said. He put fresh gauze on the wound, then taped it securely around Gooding’s elbow. “We can give you another IV—”

Gooding shook his head insistently.

“—or you could self-medicate with the Imodium and lots of water like I said before.”

“I’ll take option B,” Gooding said.

“Okay, then,” Captain Claspill said, wiping his fingers. “Too bad about the uniform, huh?”

Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding looked down and saw the dark-red stain that ran the entire length of his left thigh. Coin-sized drops of blood had also hit his boots.

But that was okay by Gooding. When he returned to Georgia, maybe he could wear the uniform into the local American Legion and it would get him a few free beers from all the old battle-scarred veterans sitting at the bar. “Hey, look who’s here,” they’d say. “Rambo from Iraq.”

And that was the best a Fobbit could hope for, wasn’t it?

27

SHRINKLE

A
be Shrinkle floated on his back in the Australian pool. The sun baked his skin but he couldn’t feel a thing. He was splayed across a black inner tube given to him by Glennice, one of the busty, blonde Australian sergeants he’d come to know quite well over the past two months. Bo, the captain who’d first welcomed him to the Aussie side of the FOB, had been tossing Abe cold Foster’s for the past hour and he’d been catching them one-handed, to the cheers and whistles of the others around the pool.

The Aussie pool had been put off-limits by the commanding general but that didn’t stop Abe. All pools on FOB Triumph, in fact, were verboten, with the exception of an MWR-run “splash park” that consisted of an ankle-deep wading pool, a large red mushroom that gave off a shower of tepid mist, and a turtle that squirted water the color and warmth of urine from its mouth.

Thanks to the CG’s edict (General Order Number Five), on this late September afternoon, there were no other Americans lounging on towels spread across the concrete or paddling laps in the minty-cool water. So Abe was safe. Of course, in the eyes of the Aussies, there were no Americans here at all—just the Down Unders and their friend from the British Museum, a likable enough bloke who liked to drone on ad nauseam about pottery shards.

Abe wondered how much longer he could keep it up. It wasn’t the accent he was worried about—it was quavery and came and went at random, but he’d watched enough movies to get most of it right. It was all the talk of archaeology and preservation that had him concerned about his ruse. Since he’d started rolling down the tracks on this train with no brakes, he’d been reading as much as he could about ancient Mesopotamia, leafing through
Western Archaeology Quarterly
during the slow hours at the fitness center. He was now a semiexpert on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the forty-five-day reign of Xerxes II, and the proven success of capillary gas chromatography in dating jug fragments. Ah, if only Lieutenant Colonel Vic Duret could see him now! He’d shit his pants—first out of anger, then jealousy. Abe, who had downed too many cold Foster’s on this particular hot autumn afternoon, could hear him now: “I didn’t put my ass on the line for that goddamn twinkle toes, pull his bacon fat out of the fire, and cut deals all the way up to Corps only to have him flaunt it in my face with this unauthorized rest and relaxation.”

Well, Abe was sorry, but Vic Duret and the rest of Task Force Baghdad didn’t know what they were missing when they adhered to General Order Number Five—and Numbers One through Four, for that matter. War was hell, but that didn’t mean it had to be a living hell for those who fought it. Abe was starting to rethink his views on good order and discipline.

He wasn’t about to tell anyone about his secret oasis, though. This pool was his and his alone. Call it his just deserts for doing a Fred Astaire tap dance away from the firing squad. He deserved his goddamn R&R after the wringer the goddamn Army had tried to put him through. Maybe it was just the beer talking at this point but Abe was swollen with a feeling of entitlement.

He popped open another can of Foster’s, reveling in the
ssss-nick
and that first cool-bitter slide of the beer across his tongue.
Real
beer, not the near-beer of FOB Triumph’s dining facility. Oh, if his men could see him now—floating on the water and drifting away on sun-toasted inebriation! There were times he wondered if torching that Local National to death underneath the fuel truck might not have been the best thing to happen to him. “Him” meaning Abe, of course. Not the barbecued Iraqi.

Richard Belmouth, née Abe Shrinkle, took a fresh swig of Foster’s and pushed himself away from the wreckage that lay behind him. Now was not the time to think of death and destruction. Now was not the time to dwell on mistakes and irrevocable errors—the fuckups that could not be unfucked. No, now it was his duty to concentrate on archaeology and excavating sites with a toothbrush and dental tools here in the “cradle of civilization.”

I don’t know
, he thought,
maybe things just have a way of working themselves out. Maybe it was hajji
’s
time to go and my time to realize I wasn’t cut out for this Army life. Maybe I should think about going back to school for archaeology when I get back to the States. Jolly good notion that, eh, guv’nor?

His head spun with ideas. His inner tube spun in the deep end of the pool.

One of the brunette Australian lieutenants sat up and waved at him. Then, because she was so top-loaded, one side of her bikini failed in its mission and a healthy one-eyed breast popped out to say hello. The lieutenant looked down, laughed, then just left it there for Abe and the others to enjoy. She, too, received a round of cheers and whistles.

Abe balanced the Foster’s on his lap and forced himself to concentrate on words like “Ur,” “Babylon,” “Kabala,” and “Nineveh.”

The nipple was winking at him. “Hellooo, Abe!”

Cuneiform. Mosaics. Chromatography.

This was the life.

“Oy, Belmouth! Is that a Foster’s in your lap or are you just happy to see us?” Gales of laughter cascaded as Abe paddled to the center of the pool.

“Jolly good!” he shouted back to Bo.

He was the only one floating out here now, lazily spinning on his inner tube. The others stood around the concrete walkway toweling off and gabbing about how a company of Yank engineers were taking their bloody sweet time finishing a school in Mosul. The brunette’s boob was still bobbing out there for all to see.

Mesopotamia. Mes. O. Po. Tamia. Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Bab. Y. Lon.

The water was cool as mint underneath his ass and sloshed delicately up his swim trunks to his nether region.

The nipple-eye caught Abe’s eye once more.
Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.