Purple Heart (11 page)

M
ATT’S THIGH MUSCLES WERE TWITCHING AS HE CLIMBED OUT
of the Stryker and he wondered if it was the Stay Alert Gum. Or the second cup of instant coffee he’d had. Or both.

McNally had paired him up with Charlene again, but this time she didn’t act all offended and she kept a normal pace.

“You have plenty of water in your CamelBak?” she said.

He didn’t want her babying him. But he didn’t want to pile on right after Justin had been so hard on her. So he just didn’t say anything.

They walked along a main thoroughfare in clusters of two, simply taking in the situation. It was a commercial district and the street was lined mainly with open stalls selling spare auto parts and the Iraqi equivalent of car-repair joints. Before the cease-fire this was an iffy neighborhood; the U.S. troops suspected some of the vendors of selling IED parts to the insurgents. So the squad entered the area a little more cautiously than they had at the market.

Charlene stuck close by him this time. “What’s the
matter with your pal Justin?” she said eventually.

Matt shrugged. “How would I know?”

He was sorry the minute he’d said it. Charlene was just trying to make conversation, but it annoyed him to be connected with Justin and his little temper tantrum. And it was strange the way the whole squad got quiet when Justin blew up. What was that about?

He took a sip of water, then turned to Charlene. “So how many days left in the cease-fire? You think they’ll extend it?”

“I don’t know, Duffy,” she said. “I’m just a woman. They don’t tell us anything.”

She was still mad. He tried another approach. “What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get back home?”

She stopped in her tracks. “You serious?” she said.

He nodded. It dawned on him that no one really talked to Charlene much. She was probably dying for someone to just shoot the shit with.

“You won’t tell the guys?”

He nodded again.

“Go to a Rangers game.”

Matt checked to make sure she wasn’t goofing on him.

“Me and my mom,” she said. “We have season tickets.”

Charlene’s face had softened, and for a minute Matt
entertained the possibility that she might actually be sort of good-looking. If she had on regular clothes. And makeup. And if she smiled.

Then she did smile. “Twenty-five days and counting.”

“What?”

“That’s right, dude. Three weeks and three days from now, I’ll be on a plane home.”

Matt sighed. He had more than five months left on his tour. “Does that mean you’ll be sending me some Little Debbies next month?”

Charlene shrugged. “You never know.”

They passed a car-repair stall where an old man was sitting on a white plastic chair, yelling at his young helper, who was lying on the ground faceup, working on the underside of a car. The old guy was angry; he was waving a wrench at the kid and shouting insults over the noise of a nearby radio.

Matt felt himself tense up. He told himself there was no threat. The guy was old. He was angry, but not at them. And all he had in his hand was a wrench. Matt took a deep breath as he walked by, but he had an uneasy feeling, a slight sense of apprehension, as he passed the man.

“Maybe I’ll send you Rice Krispie Treats….” Charlene was saying. “Or how ’bout some brownies….”

Matt wasn’t listening. He heard the static of a radio, then a few chords of a song. An Arabic love song. He spun around and aimed his weapon at the man.

The man dropped his wrench and it fell to the ground with a clank. He stood up, his hands in the air. He was terrified. In an instant, the other men on the street had gathered. They were shouting at Matt, cursing him.

Then Charlene was next to him, talking in a low, steady voice. “At ease, Duff,” she said. “No hostile intent here. You hear me? No hostiles.”

Matt lowered his weapon. He stood still and watched the men mouthing curses under their breath as they dispersed. But what he heard was the song. The quivering voice of a woman hung in the air.

Charlene nudged him forward and they continued walking. “What the fuck was that all about?” she said when they were a few yards away.

He didn’t answer. They walked on, then he stopped and pulled out the bottle of headache pills Kwong had given him.

Charlene looked at him. Her smile was long gone; her usual disapproving expression was back.

Matt didn’t care. “My fucking head is killing me.”

I
T WAS NEAR THE END OF THEIR SHIFT WHEN
M
ATT FELT A TUG
on his sleeve. He spun around, his gun at the ready.

It was a little girl. A little girl with wild, tangled hair in a dirty yellow dress. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even flinch at the gun barrel pointed just inches from her face. She simply looked up at him, cupped her hand, and silently put it to her open mouth, as if she were eating an imaginary heel of bread.

Matt lowered his gun and stood there looking into her mournful brown eyes. Then he shouldered his weapon, turned, and walked away.

H
E COLLAPSED, FULLY DRESSED, ONTO HIS COT THE MINUTE
they got back. He didn’t even bother to take his boots off. He woke up, at some point later, dimly aware of the smell of food—stew—but he was too tired to eat. Later, he heard the stutter of fake, computer-generated machine-gun fire. Someone was playing Halo. He opened his eyes and saw Justin, his face lit by the bluish glow of the video
game screen, then he fell back to sleep.

He woke up in the middle of the night, though, to pee. It was probably all that water Charlene had made him drink. That and the fact that he’d been asleep since four in the afternoon. He tried to go back to sleep, but every time he closed his eyes, he heard that song from the radio and it started the whole thing all over again. The alley. The candy wrapper fluttering on the razor wire, the dog trotting by.

He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the cot. Itchy gave him a dirty look as Matt dislodged him from his spot at the foot of the bed. He bent over, his head in his hands, and tried to make the replay of images stop. Tried to will himself to forget. To turn it off.

He thought about what Father Brennan had said. “Be still. And know.” At the time, it had seemed profound; now it was just an empty expression. He pictured Father Brennan sitting in the linen closet, his head bowed, and finally he knew what to do.

He stood, turned to face his cot, then got down on his knees and prayed.

T
HEY WERE BACK PATROLLING THE AL-
H
IKMA
M
OSQUE
sector again, but it was some kind of festival, some religious thing, and the streets were more crowded than usual. With women, especially, many of them in billowing black dresses—
abayas
—that covered all but their faces and hands. The women had seemed strange, otherworldly, to Matt when he first arrived in Iraq, as if they’d stepped out of a distant century and into streets full of cars and trucks and radios and cell phones.

But as time went on, he came to see past the yards and yards of black fabric and notice their faces, especially their eyes. With every other aspect of their bodies covered, their eyes took on an almost mysterious importance. Matt knew better than to stare, but he often found himself hoping to catch them in an unguarded moment—for a hint of who they really were under all that fabric.

Matt tried to gauge the mood of the crowd. The streets were lively, the air thick with the smell of cardamom, coffee, black pepper, and there was a celebratory feeling in the air. The people were almost friendly, as friendly as he’d ever seen. And he had a sudden pang of something—fondness? goodwill?—for the Iraqi people.

He wouldn’t tell the guys, though. They’d make fun of him for sounding like a beauty-pageant contestant. But in that moment, he really did wish for peace. So these people could go back to living their lives. And so that he could go home. And see Caroline and his mom and Lizzy. And go to McDonald’s. And drink a cold beer. He smiled at the thought that it would be a lot easier to find someone to buy him a six-pack now that he was a vet.

He’d prayed last night for some peace of mind, some grace, to help him to stop thinking about Ali and to get back to soldiering. He was no good to the squad the way he’d been acting lately and he’d asked for the willpower to go back to being the soldier he used to be, the guy who could be counted on to look out for his buddies. Maybe, he thought as he looked around at the people milling happily around him, God had answered his prayers.

He was also a little more relaxed because he hadn’t had any coffee today. No Stay Alert Gum. And no headache pills, either. The coffee and the gum made him twitchy; the pills made his head fuzzy. A bad combination. He was jumpy and out of it at the same time.

Charlene was a few feet away watching a bunch of kids splash water on each other from a roadside ditch. She was actually smiling.

Matt started walking toward her. He would tell Charlene she could stop worrying about him, that he was
fine now. He was. He really was.

He was heading toward her when an old man, leaning heavily on a cane, crossed his path, a pair of goats in tow. Matt stopped for a minute to let the man pass. And in that momentary pause, he heard the scratch of static, then the wail of a muezzin broadcast from high atop a minaret somewhere nearby.

The sound was like a short, sharp current of electricity coursing straight through him. All muezzin calls were slightly different. But this was the exact same one he’d heard the afternoon he was trapped in the alley.

He spun around to see where it was coming from. There was a slender white minaret just over his left shoulder. He turned again to get his bearings. About a block away, up ahead, he saw the bootleg shop where he and Justin had bought a copy of
Spider-Man 3.
He was only a block away from the alley.

The voice of the muezzin, high and quavering, echoed in the air. Matt was aware of movement around him, a vendor pulling the gate over his store, an old man rolling his prayer rug next to the stall where he sold used tires. All around him, people were preparing to pray. But it sounded as if the muezzin were calling directly to Matt.

He walked over to Charlene. “I need you to cover for me,” he said.

She looked puzzled.

He shook his head. “I don’t mean covering fire. I need to go somewhere right now and I need you to cover for me if anybody asks.”

She held her hand up like a police officer stopping traffic. “Oh no, you don’t.”

“I have to, Charlene,” he said. “And I’m going whether you help me or not.”

She shook her head. “You and your little Rambo buddy might pull that kind of shit but not me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not taking off down some dead-end alley with you,” she said. “I like the rules, Duffy. And I like staying alive.”

Matt tried to grasp what she was saying.

“And McNally’s not going to let that shit slide a second time. You guys got away with it last time because there was no officer present, but…” She looked behind them, down the street, where the rest of the squad was patrolling.

Matt took a step back as her words sunk in.

He and Justin were never supposed to be in that alley. To follow an insurgent vehicle down a main street was one thing, but it was suicide to chase them into the maze of dead-end streets in Baghdad where snipers would be waiting. Why hadn’t that occurred to him before?

He turned away from Charlene and started walking.
She grabbed him by the sleeve. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said.

“I’m not asking you to come with me,” he said. “Just say…”

“Just say it wasn’t bad enough almost getting killed once? That you want to go back for seconds?”

“Say whatever you want,” he said, and wrenched free of her grip.

T
HE OVERTURNED CAR WAS STILL THERE ON THE RIGHT-HAND
side of the street. The plaster wall above it was pitted with bullet holes. That was where Matt had been pinned down.

He looked up to where the sniper had been shooting at him. That wall was also flecked with bullet holes.

And in between, on the sidewalk, there was a giant crater where the RPG had exploded.

He didn’t linger there; he walked quickly up the alleyway, determined to see the spot where Ali had died, moving as fast as he could before he lost his nerve.

It was just a doorway. A set of mud-brick steps winding up to a second floor. There was no sign that anything had happened there. Matt didn’t know what he expected.
Bloodstains would have been washed away long ago. He ran his hand over the steps, then along the rough, plastered wall until his fingers found it. A single bullet hole. Right behind the corner where Ali had slumped over, dead.

There it was. Proof that it had really happened, just the way he imagined it. He closed his eyes and whispered a brief prayer for forgiveness. From God. From Ali.

Then he turned and walked back down the alleyway. There was no time to be emotional. He had to get back to the squad before anyone noticed he was gone. He tried to pick up a jog, but his legs were heavy and uncooperative, and so he walked on, scanning the windows to make sure no one was watching.

No one was living on the street anymore. But there was one window that caught his eye. It was across the alley from the doorway where Ali had stood, on the second floor. A tattered gray curtain waved from behind it, and all around it, the wall was scarred with bullet holes.

The ground beneath Matt’s feet seemed to tilt. He stopped and stared at the window. It had a perfect line of vision toward the doorway where Ali had been shot. The pavement seemed to heave up again, then pitch forward. He was going to pass out here in a dead-end alley—easy prey for one of the insurgents who hid in this warren of bombed-out buildings.

Matt closed his eyes. And saw the whole thing all over again. He saw Ali being lifted off his feet by the blast, saw his expression change from delight to terror.

He opened his eyes and looked back toward the doorway. The angle at which Ali’s body fell meant he’d been shot from across the alley. From the window with the tattered curtain.

Where Justin had been positioned.

T
HE WHOLE SQUAD WAS MILLING AROUND AT THE CORNER
, right in front of the bootleg store. They must have been looking for him. He swallowed and walked toward them.

“Jesus Christ!” said McNally. “A donkey cart loses a wheel and traffic is tied up for twenty minutes. Duffy, get over there with Charlene and direct cars over thataway.” He pointed toward a street across the intersection.

McNally hadn’t even noticed he was gone. Matt glanced over at Charlene. Her expression gave nothing away.

Matt crossed the street to join her on the other side of the intersection and started diverting the traffic—a line of beat-up cars and carts—in the other direction.

“Well?” Charlene said after a few minutes.

She didn’t say any more than that. If she’d asked what he found, then she’d have information she might not really want. Another version of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

“I’m all right,” he said. “I really am. You don’t have to worry about me.”

She considered this, then turned toward the line of cars. “I told them you had to take a leak.”

It took a minute for this to sink in.

“The advantage of being paired up with a female,” she said. “I couldn’t exactly go with you, could I?”

Matt blinked. “Char—”

“Let’s just forget about it,” she said.

M
ATT FINISHED OUT HIS SHIFT AS TRAFFIC COP, BARELY PAYING
attention to what he was doing. A kind of fog had lifted for him when he saw the alley. And he couldn’t stop picturing the line of fire between the window with the curtain, where Justin had been, and the window diagonally across the street, where the sniper had been.

But he was still confused. Why had Justin fired at Ali—in the doorway on the ground floor—if the sniper
was in the window on the second floor? The two positions were far apart, not even in the same line of fire. And Justin was an excellent shot, the best in the whole battalion.

It made no sense. Worse than that, it meant that Justin had shot Ali intentionally.

Matt pushed that idea out of his head. Justin could be a hot dog sometimes, a little too gung ho, but he wouldn’t have killed an innocent person, a little kid, a kid he knew, no less. There was no way.

Charlene had implied that McNally had known they’d disobeyed orders going into that alley and that he “let it slide.” That didn’t make sense, either. McNally wouldn’t sanction an unauthorized mission that had nearly gotten one of his men killed.

Now they were in the Stryker, on their way back to base, and Matt was sitting directly across from Justin. No one was in the mood for games now. They never were. The joking all took place on the way to a mission. It kept them from thinking about what you were about to face. On the way home, though, people were always exhausted. Even if it had been an uneventful patrol. It didn’t matter. The sheer tension of walking a street where anything could happen, at any moment, was so grueling that if you lived through it, you just wanted to forget about it and stare into space.