Shorts - Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can't Put Down (12 page)

When I found out that Dan had betrayed me I went from shock to anger to bitterness. I saw him once more after my arrest when we were preparing for the setup that eventually put Peter Pride away. He told me he was sorry and really did love me, but he’d had no choice. I don’t believe he loved me, but, even if he did, I knew he’d forget about me when the next woman came along; someone who wasn’t serving the sentence that would keep me in prison for at least seven years.

There is no view from the cell I share with Sheila Crosby, a 42-year-old embezzler, but I can still see the view from Dan’s bedroom when I close my eyes.

Sometimes I imagine that I walk out of prison and Dan is waiting for me in the Rolls. We ride to the house on Pine Terrace and I take a shower to wash away the jailhouse stench. After the shower, we make love. When Dan is asleep, I walk out onto the patio and watch the approach of a storm that’s been brewing in the Pacific. It’s a magnificent storm, and when it passes, I am as untroubled and serene as the Pacific after that storm. And I am married to my prince, and I am rich, and I live in a castle on Pine Terrace.

On his Web site Marcus Sakey gives us a glimpse into his creative mind when he says, “I love traveling, especially if there’s a chance of hurting myself. I’m a wicked good cook. I never miss the Golden Gloves. I like bourbon neat, food so spicy the guy sitting next to me catches fire, and the occasional cigar.” In very few lines he’s given us a clear picture of himself, a skill he applies to his own characters. By the time you’ve finished reading “The Desert Here and the Desert Far Away,” two army buddies, Cooper and Nick, will seem to live and breathe even though you’ve only known them for a few pages. The characters and their shared history drive this story relentlessly toward an ending that is as surprising as it is inevitable.

T
he Stones are on the stereo and you are wondering what you’re doing here, in this dingy Las Vegas bar, with a man you last saw wearing combat BDUs half a world away. Cooper has his head in his hands as he says he can’t believe how fucked he is. “A mistake, man. That’s all.”

You dip a chicken wing in ranch and strip the flesh from it. Cooper makes a hysterical little sound. “Vance is going to kill me. He wants to make an example.”

And you laugh, because it sounds funny, something out of a movie, not something people really say to each other. Cooper gets that look, a half sneer, like an older brother about to pound you, only you never had an older brother, just Cooper. “I’m serious.”

“Okay,” you say, and dump the chicken bone.

“Nick,” he says, and puts his palms together like he’s praying, and for a second you’re back in the front room of a shitty cinder-block apartment, watching Cooper make the same gesture at you over a bloodstained body. “Nick, Nick, Nick, Nickie. I need you, brother.”

And you sip your beer and listen to Mick Jagger tell you that ti-iiime is on your side, and think about the best night of your life.

There is the smell of popcorn and nachos, the growl of hundreds of people talking and betting and shouting. The meaty thump of boxers warming up with their trainers, one-two-back, fists quick and feet flickering. A ring girl, five feet nine inches of toned grace in tight jeans and a black bodice chatting up the muscled soldiers at the army booth. This is the Golden Gloves, and tonight is the finals, and you are fighting next.

You stand beside the ring, legs moving like a jogger at an intersection, gloves up, savoring the good looseness of your muscles. There is fear, but you picture a tiny basement room with a bare bulb dangling, and shove your fear in and lock the heavy oak door. From the front row, your girlfriend cheers as you slip between the ropes.

Your opponent has tattoos around both biceps and two inches of extra reach. You saw him last year, and he is good. For a moment your fear bangs on the door, the hinges straining and frame rattling.

You dance the first round. Land a jab, then a hook, then take one coming out, sudden stars and black spots. The crowd roar is static singing loud as the adrenaline in your blood. When the round is over, you spit water into a bucket, and it comes out pink.

The second goes badly, and a split appears in the center of that door. Your trainer rubs your shoulders, tells you it’s not over yet. You just have to believe.

The third and final round, your opponent comes out mean. His eyes look through you. You block one punch, juke out of another. Your shoulders scream and your body has that hot trembly feeling of failing muscles. You throw a jab, but he bats it away and steps forward, winding up a swing that will knock you back to grade school.

But you remember what your trainer said, and you think of her in the front row, and instead of dodging, you step forward with a left hook to the belly that steals his wind. He pauses, just for a moment, but it’s enough. You cock your right and let yourself believe.

Then the other guy is on the ground, and though he gets up quick, the ref counts him standing, and stares into his eyes, and then shakes his head. The bell rings and the fight is yours and the crowd goes crazy, and finally you can hear it not as static but as hundreds of voices yelling in joy for you, surrounding you, making you part of something, and a rep from Pipefitters Local 597 hands you a trophy, and the photographer shoots a picture, the flash bright even under the lights, you with one arm up and the trophy in your other hand and your girlfriend in the background, long brown hair flying as she runs to the ring.

You have never felt this good before. It’s unbearable to think that this will fade, leave you nothing but a cheap trophy and a job at the Shell station, and so you walk over to the recruiting tent, where the soldiers slap your shoulders and call you a man and say it was a hell of a fight, and that they need men like you, guys who believe and won’t quit.

And you sign up.

You PT until you puke. You hurry up and wait. You learn close infantry tactics and Arabic phrases and the name of every component of your weapon. You watch war movies you’ve already seen a hundred times. But this time is different. You’re part of something. A soldier, a lean, mean killing machine ready to kick ass for your country.

A group of you go for tattoos. Crossed rifles and slogans and death’s heads. You can’t decide, think of backing out. A tall, funny kid named Cooper puts his arm around your shoulders, says, “Come on, buddy. Don’t let us down.”

You get an American flag on your bicep. Later, looking in the mirror, you flex arms grown thick with muscle, and the flag seems to wave, and you feel a surge in your chest, a soft fluttery feeling like a girl’s fingers brushing your skin.

“So how much do you owe this Vance guy?”

Cooper shrugs. “Ten grand.”

You blow a breath. “I don’t have that much.”

“Wouldn’t matter if you did.” He shakes his head. “I heard through a friend, Vance is sending a guy to waste me. Wants to show that even a soldier isn’t exempt.”

“Can your buddy help?”

“He’s just a friend, not a buddy.”

“What about the guy who’s coming after you?”

“I’ve never met him. But he’s got a bad reputation.”

You lean forward, put your boots on the bar rail. You wear jeans and a T-shirt these days, but the boots are a hard habit to quit. The thing, the army, it gets into you. It’s designed to, to teach you to walk and talk and shit the army way, to break you down and make you part of a larger whole. That was what you liked about it.

You say, “Maybe you should get out of town.”

Cooper stares at you. “Hey, Nick,” he says, softly, “fuck you.”

And the heat rises in your cheeks as you remember Cooper behind the M240 Bravo, fingers pulsing in tight clenches that rip the air with explosions. Fighting for his country, shouting and firing as you stand next to him, readying the next ammo belt and trying not to panic. Your first firefight is nothing like you expected, not like the movies you’d watched or video games you’d played. You don’t feel like a lean, mean killing machine, not even a little bit. There is a flash, and then a rocket hits the vehicle ahead, knocking it sideways in a wave of flame. You point to where the man had fired, and Cooper swings the machine gun, the bullets tearing chunks from walls and kicking up dust.

When it’s over, you walked through the humming distance of things, amidst rubble and trash and thousands of spent shell casings. The forward vehicle survived, but the rocket killed two soldiers immediately, and though the ringing in your ears muffles sound, it’s not enough to shut out the screams of a third whose belly was opened.

And the funny thing is that it’s in the aftermath that the fear really hits, as you realize that it was just chance that their vehicle was in front; not strategy or fate or a plan, just chance, a matter of which driver had pulled out first. That the difference between life and death was measured in feet and in seconds. Fear burst the door of its basement cage and seized you and didn’t let go, not then and not since.

“Sorry,” you say, and don’t explain what for, and don’t have to. The two of you sit in silence. When the door bangs open, you jump, and even though it’s been six months, reach for a weapon that isn’t there. It only takes a second to come back to the bar, but when you do, you see that Cooper jumped, too.

He gives you a sheepish grin, spreads his hands. “It’s funny,” he says. “People ask what it was like. And I can’t remember. Not really. Too big, too much. After a while, it started to feel like nothing. Beyond computation.”

You sip your beer, and nod.

“The guy Vance is sending,” Cooper says, “they say he cuts your ears off first.” He looks at you, and in the neon light of the bar, you can see fear twist in his eyes like a trash bag in a dark ocean current.

“That’s not going to happen,” you say.

The M1126 Stryker is twenty-three feet long by nine wide and features an eight-by-eight suspension, tires that can adjust pressure on the fly and roll for miles after being blown, and a 350 HP Caterpillar engine capable of driving the seventeen-ton
vehicle at speeds of sixty miles per. It looks like an olive drab duck with too many legs, and the inside smells of the sweat and farts of eleven men.

It is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.

You are the assistant gunner for the rear weapons team. You wanted to be the primary, even though you’re not sure you have what it takes to pull the trigger on a living, breathing person. Still, at the zeroing range you nailed more targets than anybody, figured you had it in the bag. But the sergeant picked Cooper as the primary. You saw the two of them talking, Coop gesturing at you, and he says that he was telling the sarge you should be gunner.

But walking around the Stryker that will be yours, the one you will share with ten other men, the one in which you will serve your country, it doesn’t matter. You run your hands gently along the armor.

“Would you look at that?” Cooper stands in the doorway. He nudges the soldier next to him. “I think we got ourselves a true believer.” He smiles to let you know he’s just busting balls. “Hey, you sure it’s your arm got the flag tattooed on it?”

After you leave Cooper in the bar, you drive for a while, watching the sun set the sky on fire. It’s that hour when the shadows are soft and everything is lit from within. Tourists wander the Strip holding three-foot souvenir glasses. People in business suits talk on cell phones. A cute girl steps out of Whole Foods carrying bags stuffed with free-range macrobiotic whatever. Everyone is happy, on vacation or on their way home.

For a second, you want more than anything to turn the wheel of the Bronco hard and jam on the gas and blast right through the bright front window of the grocery store.

You clench and unclench your fists, take deep breaths. A car behind you honks, and you move along.

From the corner market you get a cheesesteak and a six-pack.
You go to the room you rent and turn on the TV and eat dinner sitting at your counter, the news you aren’t watching running in the background.

You think about what Cooper said, how life over there had been too big to grasp, to hold. You remember a conversation with a soldier who was re-upping, how when he talked about getting back to Iraq, he slipped and called it home.

You light a cigarette and think about the girl who watched you win at the Golden Gloves. About the way her hair always smelled clean, and a moment a lifetime ago, lying in bed, when she looked up with eyes like June and said she loved you.

The body on the floor of the Mosul apartment has half a dozen wounds. He’s on his belly, one arm out like he was reaching for something, head cocked sideways and part of his face missing. You recognize him. He’s one of the men who frequently hangs around the forward operating base, selling Miami cigarettes. Other things, too, the rumor goes.

Cooper kneels beside him, bent over the body at an awkward angle as though he is going to hug it. The image sticks with you, comes back sometimes months later, along with the abruptness with which Cooper straightens as you come in, and how the first words out of his mouth are “I had to.”

You narrow your eyes, say, “What are you doing?”

“Checking for a pulse.”

The fear is in you, has been since the firefight. Sometimes you feel your fear wears you like clothing. Today is bad, a dangerous assignment, the squad split up and working the houses separately. Poor procedure, but that was the order, and so when you heard the shots, you were alone in the alley, and came running, jumping piles of trash and discarded water bottles. It occurs to you that the rest of the house is not secure, that there may be others, and the fear spikes again.

Then you notice. “Where’s his weapon?”

Cooper winces, and looks at the body, and then back at you. “I told him to get down, but he came at me, and I thought…”

You reach for your radio.

“Wait.” Cooper takes a step forward. “Wait.” He puts his palms together like he’s praying. “If they realize he wasn’t armed.”

“We have to call on this.”

“I know, but…” He rocks his clasped hands back and forth. Stares in your eyes. “I was scared, Nickie.”

Everyone is scared but no one says so, and when you see Cooper looking at you that way, something in you shivers. It could have been you alone in here, could have been you who pulled the trigger. You think of basic, him putting an arm around your shoulders and telling you not to let everybody down.

“Did anyone…” Your voice comes out a croak, and you cough, start again. “Did anyone see you come in here?”

“Just you.”

You nod. Look again at the body on the ground, the way he is twisted. The blood is thickening on the woven rug. Another dark-skinned man dead in another shitty room. You try to make yourself believe it matters.

Then Cooper says, “Please, Nickie. Please.”

In the movies, former soldiers wake up in a sweat, fresh from nightmares of a war that never ends. Not you. You don’t dream at all these days. You stretch, make coffee, shower, pull on your boots. Kill a couple of hours at a coffee shop, staring out at nothing.

The Bronco you stored in your parents’ garage while deployed is sun-faded, and the air conditioner doesn’t work, but driving it you feel something like your old self. Cooper is waiting on the corner, hands tucked into the front pouch of a hoodie the day is already too warm for. He climbs in, pulls a CD from his
pocket, Slayer’s
Reign in Blood.
You know it well. Maybe in Vietnam it was Wagner, but in the desert, it was always heavy metal.

You ask, “Where?”

“A parking garage.” He gives you the intersection. “I’m supposed to meet him with the money in an hour. Figured we’d get there first, scope it out.”

The garage is off the Strip, set amidst warehouses being converted to lofts for whoever lives in lofts. The ramp spirals up through six stories. The top floor is open to the sky. A handful of expensive vehicles are scattered far apart. Car fetishists, terrified of every ding and scratch. You park forty feet from the stairwell, on the far side of the ramp.