You Know When the Men Are Gone (10 page)

The colonel straightened, hesitating just long enough to ensure that all of the soldiers were listening. “Look. I don’t like dick-dancing around the kidnapping of an interpreter either. Get as much info as you can and I’ll pass it on to the Seventh Iraqi Army Brigade commander and ask him to personally get involved. That’s the best I can do. But don’t hold your breath.”

The next day there was a bombing at the marketplace in Dora. Moge’s squad was patrolling with an Iraqi platoon when the blast went off so close that all of the soldiers’ ears were ringing and the sounds of sirens and screams were muted like one of Dupont’s gangland video games turned down low.

Their medic was wrapping a tourniquet around the stump of a teenage boy’s leg when Moge got the call to get out of the marketplace and report to the FOB immediately.

“Sir, we have to get these people medevaced,” he shouted into the radio, barely able to hear whoever was yelling back at him, bits and pieces making it through the echo in his ears.

“Listen, Moge ... we just got intel ... secondary IED about to go off ... trying to lure American and Iraqi troops, ambulances and aid ...”

“Sir, we can be out of here in ten minutes—”

There was a burst of static, then a new voice came over the radio. “This is Warlord Six.” Moge felt the sweat under his armpits go cold. Warlord Six was the call sign of the brigade commander and his voice cut through the chaos loud and clear. “Sergeant, get the hell out of there
now
.”

Moge grabbed Doc Riley, his hands covered in blood, got the rest of his men into the Humvee, pulled out with screeching tires while women tried to stand in their path, waving at the black smoke behind them. They drove away in silence, all of them waiting for a second blast that did not come. Doc Riley was rubbing a bloody hand against his forehead, Dupont was tight-lipped in the back of the truck, and Khaled leaned over, his helmeted head in his hands.

“There was nothing we could do,” Moge said a few minutes later when there was still no second blast. “If we had stayed, they would have detonated another bomb, more people would have been hurt and killed.” He was finding it difficult to breathe and he looked out at gutters choked with raw sewage, flies sticking to the eyes of dead goats suspended in the glassless windows of butcher shops, roads blocked off with cement dividers. There was Arabic graffiti everywhere. Just ahead he saw a crude red, white, and blue American flag with a black X painted through it. He thought of Raneen in her small white room at Liberty, packing up her few belongings before heading home to see her family, her fingers lingering over the photo of her daughter, smiling her crooked smile.

“There was nothing we could do,” Moge repeated loudly, as if someone had challenged him, and the guys glanced at each other, still dazed. Moge blinked, the view out the window suddenly too much. He could taste bile in the back of his throat and his ears wouldn’t stop ringing, a high, insistent cry that would stay with him for days.

“Marissa? Marissa, I’m sorry to call so late.”

He could hear her struggling with the covers of her bed, the click of her lamp, the squeak of bedsprings as she sat up against her wooden headboard. He thought how tightly her hand would be clutching the phone, how she liked telling people that she had been in love with him since the third grade, how once she said she worried about him more than anything else in her entire life.

“What’s going on?” she asked breathlessly.

Moge could see her bedroom, the few drawings from her students pinned to a corkboard over her bureau, a framed picture of the two of them drinking margaritas in the Hamptons two summers ago, a stack of gossip magazines by the side of her bed, the whole room smelling of the soapy lilac candles she burned each night.

“I just turned in my final paperwork,” he said. “I’ll be out of the army a month after I get back. I need you to know that I’m sorry. ... Can you hear me?”

There was a patch of static as a helicopter lifted from the Camp Liberty airstrip. Moge could see the legs of soldiers dangling as it rose dark and insect-like against the sun-white sky. It seemed impossible that the phone lines could connect this dirty little piece of Baghdad to Marissa’s split-level in Long Island, sand swirling around him while she rested in her down-comfortered bed, unchanged and whole.

“David? Are you there? David?” she called into the phone.

“Yeah,” he replied. “It’s me.” He felt everything coming apart, felt himself sweating and shivering at the same time, and he had to sit down in the dust, stretching the phone cord as far as it would go. “It’s David.” He closed his eyes. “I’m coming home.”

He didn’t care that there were soldiers watching him, listening, glancing at each other with their foreheads creased, that he was letting them all down. He was getting out, he was going home, and suddenly, finally, that was all that mattered.

REMISSION

E
llen Roddy tried not to stare at the bald-headed, denim-coated baby of indeterminate sex that cried in the chair next to her. The mother faced the baby in the direction of the waiting room’s television set but did not attempt any means of comfort, just occasionally broke off a bit of chocolate and shoved it into the toothless mouth. Ellen held her back very straight and resisted figuring out the rank of the woman’s husband by her clothes or level of parenting skills. She would not play that game today. Today she was waiting to hear Dr. Pierce’s results—the word
results
sounding so innocuous, like the scores from a sporting event rather than the evaluation of Ellen’s mortality—and assessing a stranger’s rank according to social ineptitude felt like bad luck.

She leaned away from the chocolate-mouthed baby and shivered; the hospital’s thermostat was set for the cool comfort of men in layers of camouflage rather than the belly-revealing T-shirted wives and runny-nosed children in the crowded room. She had sped across Fort Hood, racing to arrive in time for her appointment, knowing that if she was fifteen minutes late it would be automatically canceled, and a cancellation meant some mystery major would call her husband and rat her out. That was how the army worked its system of checks and balances; there was an ever-present chain of command, a shadowy specter that haunted the soldier as well as his or her civilian spouse, ready to swoop down with a raised voice and pointed finger at the least infraction.

Then Ellen’s cell phone, from the depths of her purse, began to shriek the theme song for
Sesame Street.
Four sets of eyes glared at her from the receptionist desk where a large sign proclaimed TURN OFF CELL PHONES (even the requests in an army hospital were orders, no wasted
please
s here). Ellen searched through balled-up tissues and empty raisin boxes until she found the thin metal phone, glanced at the number, didn’t recognize it, then clicked the ringer volume all the way down and stared at her feet, refusing to apologize to the waiting room even with her eyes. When her phone chimed, letting her know that a message was waiting for her, she got up and exited the sliding doors. People who lived in states other than Texas were always telling Ellen, “At least you have a dry heat,” which Ellen found insulting. Dry or wet, it didn’t matter when the doors opened up to weather that felt like a blowtorch melting off her newly regrown eyebrows.

She dialed her voice mail, pressing the phone to her ear, looking in the window next to the NO WEAPONS ALLOWED placard to make sure Dr. Pierce’s nurse wasn’t calling her name. There were soldiers mixed among the women and children, some thin with acne scars but most displaying a healthy, broad-chested beauty even in the way they slouched in their chairs. Those waiting with wives were usually better-looking than their spouses, which was the curse of an army base where women were scarce and the enticement to get laid all too often led to the altar. Ellen glimpsed her own image in the glass of the sliding door, her knee-length beige skirt and casually draped blouse. She was thinner now than she had ever been: the bright side to cancer.

There was a message from her daughter’s high school secretary, primly informing Ellen that fourteen-year-old Delia was not in attendance and that the principal would like Ellen and her husband, John, to come in and have a chat next week. Their third “chat” in two months.

Ellen snapped the cell phone closed. Last month, during social studies, Delia had been found in the handicapped stall of the girls’ room paging through a
Cosmopolitan
. Last week, during biology, she was sitting at the edge of the playground eating a bag of sunflower seeds, spitting the shells on the asphalt. And now this—did kids still call it “playing hooky”?

She took a step forward and just as the automatic doors whooshed her with the morgue-icy air, Ellen’s phone rang again. Another unfamiliar local number. She felt a flicker of unease, stepped aside, and answered her phone.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Roddy, this is Miss Lane from Meadows Elementary School. We need a letter from your son’s doctor.”

“I’m sorry? Are you calling about Landon Roddy?” Ellen saw Dr. Pierce’s nurse enter the waiting room with a clipboard in her hand. She could read the nurse’s lips as she enunciated,
Ellen Roddy, Ellen Roddy?
Ellen tapped her knuckles against the glass.

The secretary breathed deeply into the phone as if she had been dealing with inept parents all morning. “Yes. When Landon wasn’t at kindergarten attendance and we didn’t have the requisite note from you, we called the bus driver. He said your daughter came out of your house, holding Landon’s hand, said that he wasn’t feeling well, then the two of them walked away. Mrs. Roddy, you know the rules, and your daughter giving a verbal excuse is not acceptable. We need something official in writing.”

Ellen’s hand slipped off the window and skidded into the rough brick wall of the hospital. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Landon should be at school.”

He wasn’t. First her fourteen-year-old daughter, now her five-year-old son. Gone.

A young and very thin military policeman, Sergeant Jaboski, met Ellen at her house in Patton Park. His lashes, eyebrows, and hair were so white-blond that the combination of elbows, shoulder bones, and spiky “high and tight” haircut made him look like a piece of hot glass. He stood in the center of the living room while Ellen paced around him, recounting how her daughter, Delia, had glared her way through breakfast, storming about the kitchen because Ellen had sliced and sugared strawberries for Landon and not for her. Ellen glanced up at the sergeant, looking for a nod of empathy, a shake of his tenuous head that said,
Yes, I understand what you are going through and I am sure you are a good mother,
but he was too busy scratching ink-smeared notes into his little book.

Ellen continued. She always watched the kids in the morning; of course she had watched them, hadn’t she?

“Ma’am?”

But of course she had not, or none of this would be happening. Instead of watching Delia put Landon on his minibus, Ellen had been applying lipstick, twisting her feet into leather flats, buttoning her blouse. Instead of checking on her son and daughter, she had glanced at her watch, hoping she would be on time for Dr. Pierce.