The Survivor

Chapter 6

Standing with his ROTC battalion in neat formation on the pristine green lawn of the Los Alamitos Training Base, Nate senses a new kind of sharpness in the air. At his side, Charles casts him a wary eye and says, “There’s no free lunch.”

Sure enough the sergeant appears, grimacing beneath his patrol cap, and paces before them with the ramrod posture of a man who has seen too many war movies. “We’ve known this was coming for a long time now, gents. Yesterday I got the order that we’re going to the Fight. We’ll be deploying for an eighteen-month rotation.”

Nate closes his eyes. He thinks of the family portrait above the mantel, Janie reclined on the couch with her feet in his lap, the Lorax lifting himself up, up, and away by the seat of his pants.

He tells Janie immediately, of course, but they wait for the weekend for him to break the news to Cielle. At bedtime she shifts beneath the covers and fixes her serious gaze on him. “I wanna go with you.”

He forces a smile, though it feels plastic across his face. “It’s a long flight, honey.”

“Will there be snacks?”

Nate swallows around the bulge in his throat. “I’ll miss you.”

“If I go with you, you won’t hafta miss me.”

He stays with her until she falls asleep, and when he slips from her room, he finds Janie just outside, sitting in the hall. He offers a hand, and she wipes her nose and rises like a lady, and they head back to their bedroom.

* * *

The battalion is deposited on an air base in the middle of nowhere, positioned for missions into rural towns. In the Sandbox heat dominates every waking minute. The thermometer regularly creeps to 120; some days Nate pictures it making a cartoon bulge. The soldiers hump an unreasonable amount of gear-ammo and water, flak jackets and helmets, M16s and Beretta M9s coated with PVD film to withstand the sand, which rises into yellow-orange dust storms at the slightest provocation. Grit gets in their guns, their sweat; it turns the collars of their green-and-khaki ACUs to sandpaper. Nate’s rucksack frame digs into his shoulder above the flak jacket, buffing the skin to an angry red. The moisture-wicking socks don’t wick. No matter how much he drinks, he still pisses bright yellow.

A few weeks in, while sweeping a house, they come upon a retarded man-boy shackled to an outhouse. The weathered soldiers joke and laugh, and Nate, who has lost his breath at the sight, realizes that he will need to navigate a steep learning curve to make it here.

Somehow, despite it all, Charles’s optimism remains undiminished. He is one of the rare few for whom war is not hell. On patrol he is laid back, deals easily with the locals, and has a sixth sense for snipers.

The months blend into a single sun-baked episode. They get shot at and do some shooting, mostly returning fire at sand dunes and heaps of rubble. They play policeman and janitor and try to avoid getting blown up by IEDs, car bombs, and booby-trapped corpses.

During morning formation one day, it is announced that their eighteen-month deployment has been extended to twenty-two months. That night Nate takes a very long shower. He buys an AT amp;T card at the PX and heads to the phone center. The booths are lined wall to wall, as in a prison, with hard wooden chairs. In the stall he is assigned for his ten-minute allotment, someone has scrawled, IF THE ARMY WANTED YOU TO HAVE A WIFE, THEY WOULD’VE ISSUED YOU ONE.

Janie’s voice trembles when she hears him, as it always does. “Still alive?”

“I think so.”

“Cielle keeps calling you on her play phone, having conversations with you. She sits there dialing and dialing.”

His mouth is too dry to swallow. “Can I talk to her?”

“Of course. Hang on.”

Some rustling, then Cielle says, “Knock-knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Smell mop.”

Nate smiles. “I won’t do it. I shall not. I shall not be fooled.”

Cielle giggles. Then her tone shifts. “Why can’t I ever call you?”

“It’s hard to get through here, baby. I have to call you.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No. It’s not.”

“Zachary C called me Thunderthighs when I went up to write on the board, and everyone laughed. He had to say it all loud.”

According to Janie, Cielle has been eating at a steady pace in the seventeen months since Nate’s deployment. His guilt mixes with rage. He wants to cut off Zachary C’s head and feed it to jackals, but all he can do here, in a prison-size phone booth on the far side of the world, is say, “I’m sorry, baby.”

“That’s okay. I drew you a picture at school. Come home and see it?” A pause. “Daddy?”

“I can’t, baby.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too far. But I will.”

“Promise? Promise you’ll come home?”

He pictures her first beach trip-soggy diaper, pink suit, floppy hat, her standing against the backdrop of the waves, clear as a Kodak-and feels a mounting pressure behind his face. He thinks of his mother at the end. Her mouth, rimmed with cold sores, sipping ice water through a straw. The weight of her absence in the house. How his father crawled into a bottle and evaporated. And he saw himself at Cielle’s age, alone at the kitchen counter, eating Cap’n Crunch for dinner.

“Yes,” he tells Cielle. “I promise.”

The next morning he is awakened by Charles at oh-dark-hundred. They’ve been tasked with finding a guy possessing critical information, who, judging by the photograph, is not exactly distinctive in appearance. Charles is not worried about the mission, however; his biggest concern is his mother’s cookies, which arrived yesterday in a care package. Charles does not want to eat the cookies but is too respectful to throw them away. He owes much to his mother, not least his irrepressible good nature. A single parent, she lavished her only child with endless love and support. But while Grace Brightbill is a world-class mother, she is a terrible baker. Conflicted, Charles carries her package down the hall as if he has been burdened with the custody of a holy relic.

Rubbing his eyes, Nate trudges outside to where their convoy patrol waits in the dark, the men stuffed into Hummers. The interpreter, a bone-skinny teenager with sleepy eyes, wears a too-big helmet, a threadbare rucksack left by someone from a previous rotation, and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. The shirt features the Adidas trefoil logo across the chest and, written beneath in the appropriate font, ABIBAS. The ’terp smiles at Nate and Charles, showing a sideways front tooth, and says, “What up, niggahs?”

Nate says, “Mah brothah,” and they bump fists.

On the jostling ride, Nate is distracted by Janie’s words from last night, upset that he can’t be on the other end of his daughter’s pretend phone calls. Charles is still going on about his mom’s shitty cookies, so finally one of the guys says, “Give ’em to Abibas.” The ’terp receives them with a smile, they vanish into the threadbare rucksack, and Nate enjoys a few hours of relative silence.

By the time they arrive at the town center, the sun has asserted its presence. They get out and scan the surroundings, their M16s aimed at the ground but tightly held. All around are cinder-block walls, street dogs, TV dishes nailed to corrugated roofs. And eyes everywhere. Windows. Rooftops. Doorways. People talking on cell phones, whispering, ducking from sight. A quartet of old women in burkas, all expanses of black cloth and jutting chins, stare from a front porch, as still and craggy as a rock garden, the skin under their eyes so dark it seems grafted on. Looking through the open door behind them, Nate sees a child-size coffin.

Nate’s squad heads to a house with the front door busted off the hinges from the last raid. At least twenty people are jammed into the front room, which has a vague barnyard smell. A rug covers the cement floor, the walls are bare aside from pina-colada-size Iraqi and U.S. flags stuck in the cracks. Everyone inside is focused on a TV the size of a toaster. The men command the couch, holding hands. The women sit on the floor chewing flatbread. A little girl stands in the middle of the room, hitting a paddleball. Whack whack whack.

The men rise and offer tea, but the mood changes when the sergeant pulls the women into the next room, as is SOP. Nate takes off his Wiley X sunglasses so he can make eye contact as he helps settle everyone down. He figures that ordering people around in their own house is disrespectful enough when you’re not sporting shades on top of it. The girl continues-whack whack whack-but this seems not to bother anyone except Nate, who sees his own daughter in her deep brown eyes. The soldiers show the photo of the man they’re after, but no one knows anything; the entire assemblage has gone as deaf, blind, and dumb as the proverbial three monkeys.

Charles comes in from the back with a skinny little man who has plastic zip ties around his hands. Shaggy hair frames the guy’s drawn face, and he wears a white man-dress and black flip-flops.

“Found him hiding behind the generator,” Charles says.

They get Abibas over to the man, who denies being whoever he is supposed to be. The dispute continues in translation, Abibas jotting down parts of the exchange in his notebook, and finally the sergeant lowers his radio and says, “They want him in now. I’m calling up a helo. You six get him to the meet point. Overbay, you’re in charge.”

The little girl trails the half squad out and follows at a distance, her face betraying no emotion or interest, the paddleball never ceasing its elastic dance. Whack whack whack.

They trudge under the heat, the houses turning to shacks, the shacks eventually giving way to sand dunes. The captive makes not a noise. Abibas is perspiring through his clothes, and McGuire makes a crack that maybe the sweat stain’ll fix the spelling of his damn shirt. The little girl with Cielle’s eyes crests the rise with them-whack whack whack-and there below, the Black Hawk waits. They pile in, Charles waving good-bye at the girl who stands silhouetted against the sun, her paddle in perpetual motion. The helo vibrates and shudders, revving to life.

Abibas shouts at Nate, “Damn eet to shit. I forget my notebook. Sarge tell me must always have notebook. At house. I go back.”

He looks ill with concern, so Nate waves him off duty, figuring where they’re heading there’ll be professional interpreters, and the kid scrambles down and starts to jog away. The Black Hawk begins to lift.

“Hey!” Charles shouts after him, pointing at the threadbare rucksack wedged between the seat and the cabin floor. “You forgot my mom’s cookies!”

Abibas stops and looks back at them.

Then he turns and runs.

The seconds slow to a molasses crawl. The Black Hawk hovers four feet above the sand. All six soldiers have gone as stiff as statues in a half rise above their seats, oriented toward the rucksack. Nate is nearest. It is right there across from him. Above the panicked roar inside his head, Nate hears the pledge he made last night to Cielle. Promise? Promise you’ll come home? And he cannot unlock his muscles.

From the seat beside him, Charles leaps. He lands atop the rucksack, smothering it, and a brilliant white light frames his body as the bomb detonates. The Black Hawk pitches to the right, the pilot overcorrects, and they lurch into a nose-down spin. Nate sees the fan of the beating rotors kiss the sand, and then there is a great violence of physics and an eardrum-rending screech. Images and sensations strobe, rapid-fire: The slid-back door. Weightlessness. Nate’s open mouth pressed to the sand.

He rises, uneven on his feet. An explosion surges behind him, a wave of heat propelling him to his knees. Atop the dune the girl bears silent witness, the whack whack whack lost beneath the roar of flame. There are parts everywhere, parts of flesh and metal. Half faceless, McGuire is screaming and holding his severed leg, and then he stops screaming. It is suddenly silent. Sand swirls, settling like rain. Though a whoosh of white noise streams in Nate’s ears, he hears a ragged breathing coming from somewhere, and he spins in the cloud of grit and yells, “Charles! Where are you? Where the fuck are you?” and realizes he is stepping on his friend’s hand. Charles is alive, his gut a muddle of tattered fabric and dark, dark blood. His hands press into his stomach farther than they should, and his eyes are wild and rolling.

Everyone else is dead. Nate’s radio shattered. Supplies on fire. The nearest medic with the squad back in town.

Nate stands dumbly still for a moment, then crouches and hoists Charles over his shoulder. Charles gives off a sound that is not human. Nate staggers up the slope, past the girl silently watching with Cielle’s eyes-whack whack whack-and Charles is howling and sobbing, “-don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t you-”

Nate runs. Pain screeches down his spine, ignites his muscles. The heat rising through his combat boots and Charles’s weight on his shoulder are oppressive; the burn spreads through his thighs, his calves, the taut muscles of his groin. He feels as though he is inside a pizza oven. Charles is sputtering and shrieking, the journey a jarring kind of hell-don’t leave me don’t leave me don’t you leave me-and Nate’s shirt is saturated with his friend’s insides. He runs harder as if to stop the blood draining into his eyes. His vision is a painted haze of brown and red, red and brown, smudged together as if by a child’s fingers.

“Help me!” Nate shouts. “Somebody … ’elp … me.…”

Charles is quieter now: “… don’t … leave … please.…”

Nate’s lips are coated with dust, and his voice is gone; he can’t generate saliva. He blanks out on his feet, still running. Then suddenly the squad is all around, the sergeant trying to pull Charles off his back, saying, “Let go. Nate. You can let go now. Let go of him. Let go.”

Nate topples over, Charles landing beside him, long dead, the blank stare inches from Nate’s face. And Nate is talking, but no one can hear him.

“He’s okay,” Nate pants into the hot sand. “He’s okay. Just make him breathe again.”