You Know When the Men Are Gone (7 page)

The woman spoke to Raneen and Raneen nodded, then whispered to Moge, “She says so many soldiers will bring unwelcome attention.”

Moge glanced around, noticing how quiet the streets were. “This is a dangerous neighborhood, ma’am, but we’ll be out of here in a few minutes. Dupont!”

Dupont, covered in a sheen of sweat and grimacing, carried three boxes stacked on top of one another. Moge had tasked him with the job of handing out the school supplies to help his quest for “Muslim cultural awareness.”

There were no desks in the classroom and the only light came from the windows and the hole in the ceiling left behind by the mortar attack. About twenty young girls in tattered but brightly colored dresses were sitting on the floor, eyes wide, hands folded in their laps. Dupont dropped the boxes, pulled out his knife, and slit them open, the cardboard emitting a low scream. When he started handing out the notebooks and Crayola crayons, the girls could sit still no longer and got to their feet like skittish does, hiding behind one another but pushing closer to Dupont and his magic boxes, their hands reaching out thin and spindly for his gifts. After securing a book and a pencil or crayon, the children ran into the corners of the room and flopped back down on the ground, opening up the fresh pages of paper and writing on them, tiny letters or shapes so as not to take up too much room, to make the paper last.

“Do you mind giving us a tour?” Moge asked the headmistress, the lines of her face softer now, her hands patting the heads of the children around her. Raneen translated and the woman nodded and led the way.

There were two other rooms. One had stacks of thin blankets folded against the wall, the other small wooden cupboards and a rusty sink that clearly had not produced water in a long while. He was glad that they had managed to bring the peanut butter and apples, and before he left he would have the men open up their MRE lunches and hand out the food to the kids. He had seen only a small cracked blackboard but no books and he looked at the headmistress again, wondering if she was the only teacher. Raneen and the woman spoke in whispers and Moge did not mind that she didn’t translate every exchange for him; he trusted his terps enough to realize they always told him what he needed to know.

Moge heard a shout from outside and ran to the window. The soldiers, their guns slung across their bulky, Kevlar-shielded backs, had dumped out the box of soccer balls and were kicking them around, and the girls, barefoot and holding their long dresses up to their knees, started kicking them back.

He sat in front of Raneen on the return ride to the base.

She leaned forward in her seat and asked him, “Will the battalion commander approve the generator?”

“I’ll write up a report; I’ll even talk to the company commander myself.”

“The little girls, they sleep there, you know,” she continued. “Their parents have sent them from very far away. There is no wash closet or running water but the headmistress, she finds ways to feed them.”

She looked to see if anyone was listening but the guys were all intently looking out the windows, the streets still eerie and empty. Moge knew that it was beginning to dawn on them that, while they had been kicking around soccer balls and drawing pictures of American screaming eagles in the little girls’ notebooks, insurgents had had plenty of time to plant improvised explosive devices in every roadside pothole or pile of rubbish all the way back to the base.

Raneen continued, “She told me there is a factory one half of a mile east, that it is rumored to have many foreigners working there. She was not explicit but I assume it is where IEDs are perhaps created.”

Moge straightened in his seat, lowering his voice. “Are you kidding? How did you manage to get that kind of information?”

Raneen blinked at him. “It is the information we were meant to get. Of course that is why your battalion commander sent us to a girls’ school so far away. Dora, as you said, is a bad neighborhood. The headmistress understands that in order to get a generator she must have very good information. You must know that also.” She turned her face away as if insulted by Moge’s ignorance. Her voice continued, so softly that Moge had to lean closer. “No one notices the women in this country, and therefore no one notices how much the women notice.”

Dupont slammed his tray down next to Moge’s in the chow hall, his freedom fries sliding across the table.

“Boom Boom.” Moge moved his elbow so Dupont could sit down. He could never say the nickname without cracking a smile.

“Sar’nt.” Dupont took a few bites of his hamburger and Moge could feel Dupont’s brown eyes boring a hole through his cheekbone.

“What?”

Dupont swallowed, then gulped down half his Gatorade. “I appreciate doing the humanitarian crap and all, but now that we have a woman terp, are we going to get tasked with all the pussy missions?”

Moge sipped his soda, thought of the IED factory that Raneen was now briefing the battalion commander and some Special Forces guys about. “You’re not tired of getting blown up?”

Dupont looked down at his food, pushed his fries around in a red sea of ketchup. “It’s because I got blown up that I want to shoot the shit out of the bad guys.” He spoke as if he had practiced the line, and Moge wondered if Dupont was writing his own rap and broadcasting himself on YouTube.

“Patience, Dupont. We probably did more for the war giving those girls notebooks than any other mission in the past five months.”

“You know”—Dupont drawled his words in a swift change of mood—“that new terp is kind of hot, if you like the stuck-up schoolteacher type.”

Moge laughed and stood.

Dupont flashed his easy, college-athlete “Ain’t I something?” smile. “The last woman terp, that skinny-ass one working with Blackthorn? She got hitched to a Swedish contractor. Y’all let ’em walk around without a burka and they don’t ever want to go back to the imams. Watch out, Sarg, you might be next.”

Moge lifted his tray. “Just don’t let me hear you asking any more questions about pork.”

Moge went home to New York for his two weeks of mid-tour leave. His parents had moved out of the city soon after 9/11, to a house on the outskirts of Cold Spring, a small town north of Manhattan, near the Hudson River and commuter trains. Marissa came to visit, carrying a huge suitcase twice the size of Moge’s duffel bag, wearing a short wool skirt and high-heeled boots. Her parents and Moge’s had been friends for decades; they used to share a house together in the Hamptons in the summer, where Moge would make fun of Marissa’s braces until she cried, and now his parents had a guest room done up in lavender that they called “Marissa’s room.”

His mother sent them out before dinner for wine and French bread. Moge drove his father’s BMW too fast, his eyes everywhere, looking for abnormalities on the side of the road that might be hiding an IED, waiting for a truck to come careening into him. Marissa tried to laugh from the passenger seat, holding on to her seat belt.

The grocery store was overwhelming, the shelves high, so many colors and options, the lights too bright. Marissa slipped her arm through his and led him to the cereal aisle, boxes of primary-colored cereal rising from floor to ceiling, accosting him with leering cartoon characters and flavors painted to look like they were exploding from bowls of milk.

“Are Trix still your favorite?” she asked, as if it was a private joke between them, but Moge just shrugged.

He could smell her flowery perfume, probably something ridiculously expensive and advertised by a rock star. He knew he’d been cold toward her; he had not yet told her how beautiful she was, that he liked the new highlights in her hair, that he was happy she had come upstate to see him. “Get whatever you like,” he said. “I can eat anything.”

She blinked and then reached for the Trix anyway, putting the box in the basket next to the California Zin and still-warm loaf of French bread.

As they left the aisle, Moge heard a tall woman speaking to a young man in a red grocery vest, “—how many times do I have to ask for Organic Fresh O’s? It’s the only cereal my Ashley will eat. I have been shopping here faithfully for five years—”

Moge stopped and stared at the woman in her cobalt blue horn-rimmed glasses. He thought of the barefoot girls in the Dora school and he suddenly wanted to punch this woman in the head.

“Dav-vy!” Marissa called from the end of the aisle. The woman in the glasses had stopped speaking and was watching Moge, her plucked eyebrows lifted with annoyance and perhaps fear at the way he was standing too close. Moge turned and followed Marissa’s boots to the cashier.

He had a runny nose and he was tired all the time. He told his family it was jet lag and he tried to stay in bed even when he heard Marissa’s voice outside his bedroom door each morning, offering him coffee and pancakes.

His father asked him if he wanted to go down to the city one day, to the Diamond District, perhaps? And Moge had coughed behind his hand. So they all thought he was about to propose, or that he
should
propose, which would explain why his parents kept sending him and Marissa out each night to a different restaurant, and Marissa’s red-rimmed eyes each morning when he had not. They had had sex only twice during the last week, when his parents were out golfing, and it had been fast and unsatisfying, Marissa stunned and silent on his childhood bed when he was done. She was leaving in two days, home to Long Island and her second-grade class, and Moge was glad.

He wanted to be back in Baghdad. The platoon leader was new and Moge worried about his men. It was a pain in the ass to find a different route back to base each day with the roads blocked off, covered in shit and rubble, and he knew his men would get complacent. Would the young lieutenant remember to rearrange the order of the Humvees so that the insurgents didn’t know where the leadership was situated in the convoy, especially with his satellite “bat wing” antenna sticking out his passenger window like a big bull’s-eye? Would the LT know to stay away from the corner of Yarmouk, near the marketplace, where IEDs seemed to always go off no matter how many times they barricaded and searched the street? What about the overpass on Route Tampa where Jaish al-Medi dumped the bodies of the people they had tortured and killed? Did the lieutenant know that they had also started placing bombs under the corpses, hoping to kill the American or Iraqi soldiers who gathered them up and brought them to the morgue?