The Five

She is startled just a little bit, and when she turns her face to him Jeremy sees a slight quiver of her pale pink lips that means she doesn’t know whether to be afraid or not. He quickly says, “I’m lost, can you help me?”

“Lost?” she asks. She has the throaty voice of a lifetime cigarette smoker. Maybe she’s in her middle sixties, with a sharp chin and deep lines bracketing her mouth. Lots of worry lines across her forehead. “What’re you looking for?”

“LaPaz Estates,” he answers, and instantly—instantly—he knows this is something he should not have said.

“Well…it’s—” She glances in that direction, and then Jeremy takes the gun out and holds it just south of her takeout food, and he says, “I’ll shoot you if you scream. Get in the car.” And he’s had to say this as if he really means it, because she must obey him before somebody else comes out to the lot.

She trembles all over. Her mouth is slightly open. Her teeth are also gray. “Put that bag in the car, down on the floor,” he tells her. “Get behind the wheel. Do it now.” She doesn’t move; maybe she can’t move. “Ma’am,” Jeremy says, the sweat crawling on his neck, “I’m not going to hurt you. I want your car.” She starts to give him the keys. “No, you’re going to drive and I’ll let you out up the road.”

“Please don’t hurt me,” she says in a smoky gasp.

“I’m going to let you out up the road,” Jeremy repeats, and he says, “Go on, now, be a good girl. Unlock the other side. If you touch that horn, I’ll get very upset. Okay?”

“Please don’t hurt me,” she says again. “I’m going to my sister’s.” She unlocks the passenger door and puts the paper bag on the floorboard as Jeremy quickly walks around to the other side, keeping his eyes on her. She gets in and he gets in, and neither of her trembling hands touches the horn. She is being a very good girl.

Jeremy closes the door, and when he feels her suddenly tense up as if she’s decided she needs to make a break for it, he says calmly, “Just do what I tell you.” He keeps the gun down low, so she can see it from the corner of her eye. “Start the engine and drive.”

“Alright,” she says, and something catches in her throat. “I will.”

Just then a heavy-set woman comes out of the consignment shop carrying a red table lamp with a shade that appears to be decorated with Indian symbols. Jeremy’s captive turns her head toward this other woman, who has paused to pick up a shopper’s newspaper from a wire rack.

“Start the engine and drive,” Jeremy repeats, and now he aims the gun at her side.

Grandmother America does as she’s told. The other woman with her red lamp and her shopper’s paper walks past the Accord, and continues on to her Ford Taurus a few spaces away.

“Which way do you want me to go?” Grandmother America asks, and now it sounds as if she can barely get the words squeezed out.

Jeremy realizes he’s made a big mistake. A big omission. He has forgotten something very important. He could grind his teeth down over this one.

He has forgotten to bring a bottle of water for her to drink in the desert.

He can’t just put her out somewhere nearby. Can’t put her out on one of these streets. So he decides he has to go get a bottle of water for her, so nobody can ever say he was a bad guy.

“Turn left,” he tells her.

Then, about a mile further on, at the stand of mesquite trees and the rock wall with the tarnished brass letters: “Turn right.”

He directs her to his street and his house. He directs her to pull the Accord up alongside the house where its blinding sunlit whiteness can be hidden. And then he tells her they need to go inside because he’s going to get her a bottle of water before he sets her free out in the desert.

“Alright,” she says, in that weak old smoky voice. “I’m going to my sister’s, she’s waiting for me.”

“This will just take a minute,” he tells her.

In the house, in the kitchen with its floor covering of disturbingly bright blue, Jeremy picks up a bottle of water as Grandmother America stands with her back in a corner. He has a thought, and he gives it a voice: “Do you need to go to the bathroom?”

“Please,” she whispers. “Don’t hurt me.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay.” The way she’s standing, as if she’s trying to press herself into the wall, to also become invisible just as he wishes to be, touches Jeremy. “My name is…Chris,” he decides to say. He takes his cap off, to show her his shaven head. When the police find her, she will say a shaven-headed man named Chris took her car. “What’s your name?”

She doesn’t reply. Her head is down, her hair stringy over her shoulders, her crispness all burnt up and gone.

Gunny comes to stand in the doorway on the other side of the kitchen, just looking in, just marking the progress. Then he goes away again.

Jeremy can’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses, and this bothers him. “Would you take your sunglasses off, please?” He motions with the gun.

Those thin, veiny, trembling hands come up and remove them. She has brown eyes, sunken down in nests of wrinkles. She will not or can not look at him.

“I’m from Texas,” Jeremy says, but why he tells her this he doesn’t know. “Do you live around here?”

She makes a noise that sounds like muh, like her lips are stuck together, and a slow tear courses down through the wrinkles on her left cheek.

“I’m in a little trouble.” Jeremy realizes this is the first person he’s spoken to, for any length at least, for…how long? Really speaking, that is. Human to human. Gunny is his angel, but Grandmother America looks to him like she would be a very good listener. “There are some bad people in this world,” he contiunues. “Some liars, about what happened in Iraq. They’re carrying lies around with them, and they’re poisoning the air. And you can bet…you can fucking bet…they wouldn’t have lasted one day over there. Because, you know, sometimes you don’t get a choice about the things you have to do. No, ma’am, you don’t. You go right along following the road, doing what you’re supposed to do…what you’ve been trained to do…and all of a sudden, wham!”

Grandmother America flinches at this, and tries to push herself further into that corner, and another tear slides down her face but on the other cheek.

“All of a sudden, something crashes into you from the side and you never saw it coming,” Jeremy says. “That’s what.”

He stops speaking, because he feels there is a movement in his face that he can’t control. He feels like insects are in the muscles and bones of his face, winnowing down in there, breaking up all the structures that make him appear to be a human being, and when they are through eating at him, when they are finished eating and laying their eggs and destroying his face in their eagerness to consume him so that they might live, whatever will be born inside him will be a monster that used to be a really good guy.

He stares down at the blue tarp on the floor, at the sickeningly bright blue, and he remembers. In remembering, there is a hot passing flash and a shockwave that tells him exactly why he is here.

The young lieutenant that everybody knew as a Fobbit came in the middle of the night to get Jeremy and Chris out of their bunks. They were taken to an Ops tent at the center of the base, and at a table with directional lights around it sat a captain neither of them knew, and a civilian in his mid-thirties, wearing a khaki jacket, a white shirt and jeans. He looked like cowboy material, or maybe a Christian In Action.

Color photographs and the map of a section of Baghdad were arranged on the table. This is the task, said the civilian, who was not introduced. You will be accompanied by a squad to this position at oh-five-hundred. You’ll make your way here, to this building, and set up by oh-five-thirty. The target will walk along this alley between oh-seven and oh-eight hundred. Our source tells us he will in all probability be wearing either black or gray cargo shorts, a red, black or camo T-shirt that might bear a Nike swoosh and either a red Houston Rockets cap or an orange cap with a Fanta logo. I understand Houston is your home, Sergeant Pett, so this might be called ‘fate’, if you believe in that. The target will be moving toward this opening here, in this building on the northeast corner. He should be removed before he reaches it. I can’t answer or acknowledge any questions, but I can say that the removal of this target will help us put a stop to some of these goddamned IEDs. One more thing: we need positive verification of the kill. That can be done by bringing back an article of clothing. His cap will do. One more thing, gentlemen: however this mission turns out, our meeting never happened. Good luck and good hunting.

At the site, hunkered down in the yellow building under the dust-hazed sun at oh-seven-forty-one, Chris had been watching the alley through his spotter scope when he said quietly, “Target. Orange cap.”

Jeremy had peered through his own scope. Yeah, there he was. A gangly little bastard wearing black cargo shorts, a camo T-shirt—plain, no swoosh—and the orange Fanta cap. That little dickwhacker wanted to be seen, because in addition to the orange topper he was wearing bright blue plastic sandals, a common type of cheap footwear for these ragheads. That little dillweed was lit up like fucking neon, and he was burdened under a black backpack that was not built for speed.

It was barely a two-hundred yard shot, easy squeezy, but Chris started feeding in the ballistics numbers to his small PDA. Chris took another scope-look, and then another, and the target was walking along getting ever closer to the opening in that building he was not supposed to enter before he was hit, and then Chris looked over at Jeremy and said, “That’s a little kid.”

“A kid? No, he’s—” One of those really small Johnnies, he was about to say, and then Jeremy had adjusted his scope to get a sharper view of the face, and he saw that their target was maybe ten years old. He pulled his eye back as if a hot ember had spun into it.

The kid in the orange cap was walking right along. Maybe thirty feet now from that opening, a square dark hole in the rubbled building on the northeast corner.

“That’s our target,” Chris had said, in the grim voice of finality. “The motherfuckers have sent us out here to kill a kid.”

“No way.” Jeremy had exhaled it. “No way, no way. No.”

“He’s moving, man. What are you gonna do?”

“That’s not the target.”

“The fuck it’s not. Man, he’s almost to his hole. You want the wind call?”

“Don’t push me,” Jeremy had said, with only a hint of the panic that was rushing upon him. Kill a kid? Somebody had to be fucking insane. Who was this kid, Saddam’s baby brother? Was he a messenger, about to go down into a lamplit pit where the IEDs were being loaded with nails, broken glass and ball bearings? Did he have a couple of dozen cheap cellphones in that backpack, to be used as triggering devices?

The kid was there, and now he started to bend over to get into the hole because it was a narrow opening not much bigger than himself.

“Jeremy, do you want the wind call?” Chris asked, also feeling the panic.

The kid was going in.

“Shit,” Jeremy whispered. His finger rested on the trigger. He put his eye to the scope and readjusted, bringing his target in for the kill. “Shit shit shit shit,” was all he could think to say.

The kid was almost all the way in, almost gone.

Jeremy’s finger did not move. God help me, he thought, and he wanted to weep.

Those IEDs. Those IEDs were cruel bastards, and the people who put them together and the kids who brought them backpacks full of American tragedy should not be allowed to live.

The kid stopped. He was backing out. A strap on his backpack had been caught by a piece of exposed pipe. He reached up to free himself, and that was when Jeremy sent the bullet.

“They don’t know, they don’t know,” Jeremy says to Grandmother America. “What that’s like. They don’t know. They don’t want to know.”

“What…what is like?” she asks, because he has voiced none of this.

He draws a long, sad breath, and he tells his captive that he would like for her to go into the bathroom. He would like for her to get on her knees in the bathtub, because the plan has changed. The new plan, he tells her, is that he will have to hit her on the back of the head with his gun, and then he will leave her and go away. He says all this with the gleam of sweat on his brow, and he has begun to fidget with the safety.

She goes, stumbling along in front of him, her hair in her face. On the way, Jeremy gently takes her handbag from her and lets it drop to the blue-covered floor in the unfinished hall. She is sobbing, but not very loud. “I’ll try not to hurt you,” he tells her. “I’m a good guy, really I am. I’m just…you know…in a little trouble.”

In the bathtub, when she is on her knees in the cream-colored tub with her back to him, she gasps, “I’m going to be sick,” and then she shivers and heaves and throws up. “Please,” she says, as she struggles for whatever dignity and hope she can hold onto. “Please, please, please.”

A shadow moves across the mirror. Gunny is standing behind Jeremy; Jeremy sees the reflection, beside his own.

Jeremy aims the gun at the back of Grandmother America’s head. When Jeremy retracts and releases the slide to cock the pistol, feeding the first round into the chamber, Grandmother America suddenly turns toward him with hot rage in her eyes, as if she is condemning him for telling such a lie. The bullet he fires digs a smoking groove across the side of her jaw. She does not scream so much as make a catlike mewling, but she is no meek pussy; in the next instant she comes up out of the tub with a bitter snarl and tries to claw her way past him and out of her death chamber. He shoots her again, somewhere in the midsection, but she keeps going, a desperate woman leaking out her life and trying to get to her sister’s.

Jeremy shoots her a third time, in the back in the hallway on the blue-tarp floor lah de dah de dah la boom. She is made of strong stuff, because though she nearly collapses against the wall she still keeps going, and he thinks of himself back at his apartment in Temple, staggering along a hallway between life and death.

Oh, how far we have come.

In the front room, she goes for the door. She is making a high whining sound now, not unlike air escaping a tire at several punctured places. She falls upon the bright blue before she gets there, and yet amazingly—and there are some hardcore members of the Green Machine who could learn from this lady—she continues to crawl and reach and wheeze.

At last, so very close to the door yet so very far from who she was an hour ago, Grandmother America flops over on her back and looks up with hateful reproach at Jeremy, who puts a bullet between her eyes.

This is one big mess, Gunny tells him from the gory hallway.

Jeremy realizes he did not finish his story. He did not tell her that when the bullet was sent, it hit the kid in the side of the neck and the kid had slithered into the hole in the building and out of sight. And that he and Chris had to go through those streets, turkey-peeking over every wall and around every corner, and raghead men and raghead women were gawking at them and screaming like they were from another world. Then right in front of that hole was one of the kid’s blue sandals, a bright blue, a happy blue, unforgettable. Lots of blood, too. And going in after that kid, they’d found his other blue shoe on the broken concrete. And him too, lying curled up. His orange Fanta cap was still on his head and he hadn’t yet left this life, and over in the corner was—would you believe this, lady?—a fucking goat tethered to an iron bar, and a water bowl next to it. And—get this, now—the kid is crying, and bleeding from the mouth and the neck, and somebody—a woman—at the entrance really starts wailing, and Chris says Man, we’ve got to get our asses out. So, an order being an order and because I am the prince of my profession, I shoot the kid in the head and take his cap, and then we haul ass out but you know the woman, his mother it must be, is silent now, just staring at us as we go past, and she is holding that fucking blue sandal against her cheek like it was the perfect rose of Araby. See what you missed, lady?

And then…and then…at the base we get flash-blasted by that captain we don’t know. Done in the middle of the night, in a secure place where nobody else can hear. He roars at us, Did anybody tell you to take out any secondary targets?

Secondary targets? Oh… I know what he means. The goat. He’s pissed because after I killed a kid who had gone to feed and water his pet goat, I shot the goat in the head since there was no civilian Christian In Action standing around for me to kill. See, I figure…and I’ve thought about this a long time, I’ve had a lot of time to think…that the whole shitbag was about the goat. A feud between families, maybe, or between tribes. Was information about IEDs passed along because I killed a kid who stole another kid’s goat? Or did I kill the kid who stole back the goat that some kid stole from him? Did I do somebody’s dirty work for them to exchange for info on the IEDs, and I brought back the cap to prove it?

“I don’t know, lady,” Jeremy says to the body on the floor. “They don’t tell you everything over there. They just say some things are fate.”

He sighs deeply. He’s going to miss having someone to talk to. But there’s always Gunny.

In the bathroom, Jeremy looks at himself in the mirror and sees the bones and muscles of his face moving beneath the flesh. A lump comes up on his right cheek and subsides; another rises, squirming, on his forehead. A third bulges up alongside his left eye, and it appears his jaw is trying to break loose from its hinges.

Gunny was right, he thinks. I’m not ready yet for Mexico. Before I get there, I have to—

Shut their mouths, Gunny says from behind him. Somehow, they know. That video speaks volumes, Jeremy, and all it can do is hurt you and the good soldiers who carry out their jobs. Now here is the thing…they have to be silenced, because they’re doing something that is going to hurt so many, many other people. They don’t even know what they’re doing. That amateur today had his chance. But you…you are the professional, Jeremy. You have a car now. It’s time to get packed, and get serious.

Jeremy agrees. He will leave the pickup in the garage, right where it is. How long will it be before anybody finds it? How about…a month of Sundays?

Time to get serious. If they played at Stone Church, they might be going on to their next date. The list he wrote down from their website said The Casbah in San Diego, tomorrow night. If not there, then the Cobra Club in Hollywood on Saturday night. He figures he ought to go through Grandmother America’s handbag, check it out for cash. It would be for a very patriotic cause.

Yeah.

Time to get real serious.

Jeremy’s face has stopped moving, for now. He is himself again. He almost sobs, almost lets out a wail that would’ve echoed in this little bathroom and scared him enough to keep him sweating and sleepless every night for the rest of his life, but the feeling of dark despair soon passes. He forces it to pass, because a person can’t live with that kind of feeling inside him. She was collateral damage. She’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happened. A casualty of the mission, no big whoop. You just put your head down and keep going. And one thing he knows is that after he’s completed this mission he’ll be doing the good guy work against the druglords of Mexico and saving thousands of lives, so it all evens out. It is called fate.

Gunny gets up close, cheek-to-cheek in the mirror, and he says that there is one more thing Jeremy should know. That the new police advancements in computer and forensic science make it possible for them to cut open a victim’s eyeballs and see the face of a killer burned on the retina by the inflamed optic nerves, and maybe it would be wise if Jeremy did something about that.

Jeremy thinks about it, and then he agrees with that too.

Time to get way fucking serious.