Rock Paper Tiger

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

WE MET AFTER our shifts like we usually did, on the berm by the guard tower. It wasn’t yet dawn, and the air was shirtsleeve-cool, with a slight scent of rain. Trey was hyper, pacing back and forth, smoking cigarettes, jamming his hands in his pockets, then waving them around, like he was high on something, except I don’t think he was.

“Ellie. I think we got the guy,” he said. “The one who’s been dumping mortars on us the last three months. I think we finally got him.”

“That’s great, Trey.” I meant it. The mortars were why I was at this shithole in the first place, one of them having wounded my predecessor. Plus, the week before, a round had landed on our rec tent, taking out an exercise bike and the rowing machine, which seriously sucked.

Trey flopped down on the berm next to me. “Yeah.” He tapped a cigarette out of the package and offered it to me, then tapped out another one for himself. “I feel like we’re finally getting somewhere,” he said. “You know? We take out this guy, he’s the leader-maybe we cut the guts out of this whole bullshit resistance around here. If that happens, we can finally get things running the way they should. Fix the sewers and the power plant, show the locals it’s all been worth it.”

He flicked his Zippo to light my cigarette, but the wind came up, so he cupped his hand around mine to form a break, and I felt his palm on the back of my hand, and all of a sudden, neither of us gave a shit about the cigarette any more. We were kissing, sitting there on the berm, his hand on my back, on my tit, the beard coming in on his chin scraping against my lips, and I’m thinking, Hallelujah, fuck me now.

Then he stopped.

“We can’t do this,” he said.

“We can’t?”

“Not here.”

I almost asked why, and then I realized that he was actually making sense.

“Yeah.” I sat up, pulled down my T-shirt, and picked my cigarette out of the dirt.

Trey stared at me. “We could go someplace,” he said. “If you want to.”

“Yeah,” I said, staring back. “Yeah. I want to.”

THE THING ABOUT Camp Fucking Falafel was that, unlike my first FOB, there weren’t a lot of places to go for privacy. My first thought was the laundry facility (seeing as how that had served me well back at the old FOB), but Trey had another idea.

“People’ll be showing up at Laundry any time now. But there’s some rooms in the Admin Core nobody’s using.”

I’d hardly ever been in the Admin Core: once when I got here for processing, and a couple times for mission briefings when I was subbing for Menendez or Hilliard, the medics who usually pulled the off-campus patrols. Otherwise, I didn’t have any reason to go there. My bunk was in an outbuilding, part of the old barracks, and so was the aid station.

Trey took me to a wing I’d never been to, through an entrance guarded by a soldier I’d met a few times.

“Hey, Morris,” he said casually. “You know Doc McEnroe, right?”

“Sure,” he said, trying not very hard not to stare at my tits.

“I got a PUC problem she’s gonna help me out with. Off the books.”

The soldier gave a half-shrug, like this was the last thing he cared about. And we went inside.

You ever been in a place you know is wrong?

I’m not going to claim I figured that out right away. That night, that early morning, it was just another Iraqi dump as far as I was concerned: a concrete-block maze that had been painted this sort of baby-food puke yellow, now scabbing over the walls like an infection, revealing the plaster and cement underneath. The lights were bare bulbs, sometimes encased in rusting metal cages.

Trey and I walked down the hall, passing a couple of closed doors, then an open door into a room containing a bunch of battered file cabinets, where another soldier sorted papers. We crossed a wider hall. At the very end I could see a couple soldiers loitering by a door, laughing, giving each other shit. Then we turned down a smaller corridor. At the end of that was a staircase. At the top of that, another hall, this one with a wooden floor and baseboards and molding.

Trey stopped at one of the doors and jiggled the knob. Unlocked. He opened the door, and we went inside.

There was a desk and a couple chairs, like this had been somebody’s office. At the back of it was a narrow door.

“It’s not much,” Trey said, in a hushed voice. “I wish I could give you something better.”

It was practically a closet, with a cot stuck inside that took up almost all the room. I guessed whoever had worked here used to take naps or even spend the night. An old wool blanket was spread on top of whatever thin, lumpy mattress covered the springs.

“It’s fine,” I said. “It really is.”

We didn’t talk. He didn’t whisper how much he cared about me; we didn’t fall asleep and wake up in each other’s arms. We fucked until Trey came and I felt like my butt was bruised from the busted springs in the bedframe. I didn’t come, and neither one of us did anything about that.

But it felt like what I needed right then.

Afterward we lay there for maybe fifteen minutes, a half hour at most, smoking cigarettes and not saying very much.

“We’d better go,” Trey finally said.

“Yeah.”

We got dressed and walked out of there. I went to my bunk, and he went to his.

The next day-night-after our shifts, we met up on the berm as usual. We didn’t talk about what we’d done. We just sat there, smoked cigarettes, and chucked rocks at the storage shed. We didn’t get around to doing it again for about a week. It started with us sitting up on the berm, me talking about some shit, Master Sergeant Dickhead Blanchard, I think, when Trey suddenly leaned over and kissed me and mumbled, “Do you wanna go to the room?” and I of course nodded and said “Sure.”

So that became our pattern. We’d hang out; we wouldn’t talk about what we were doing; we’d go and fuck; we’d wait a couple days and then do it all again.

And that was fine by me. I was crazy about the guy. So what if we didn’t talk about it? I didn’t want to talk any more than he did. I just wanted to be with him, to hang out on the berm, to fuck as much as we could. To just get through all of it somehow.

I think I figured that if we talked about us, maybe we’d have to talk about other things as well. Like about what was going on in the Admin Core.

Sometimes, after we finished, I’d lie there and think I heard things. Laughing, sometimes. Shouts, now and then.

And other things. Moans, maybe. Crying.

I’d tell myself that wasn’t what I was hearing. I was hearing the wind. I was hearing stray cats.

I think now that I didn’t really hear that stuff. Not any of it. No moans, no stray cats. My mind was just filling in the blanks, of what I knew and didn’t want to see.