Thriller 2: Stories You Just Can’t Put Down

On his Web site Marcus Sakey gives us a glimpse into his creative mind when he says, “I love traveling, especially if there’s a chance of hurting myself. I’m a wicked good cook. I never miss the Golden Gloves. I like bourbon neat, food so spicy the guy sitting next to me catches fire, and the occasional cigar.” In very few lines he’s given us a clear picture of himself, a skill he applies to his own characters. By the time you’ve finished reading “The Desert Here and the Desert Far Away,” two army buddies, Cooper and Nick, will seem to live and breathe even though you’ve only known them for a few pages. The characters and their shared history drive this story relentlessly toward an ending that is as surprising as it is inevitable.

THE DESERT HERE AND THE DESERT FAR AWAY

The Stones are on the stereo and you are wondering what you’re doing here, in this dingy Las Vegas bar, with a man you last saw wearing combat BDUs half a world away. Cooper has his head in his hands as he says he can’t believe how fucked he is. “A mistake, man. That’s all.”

You dip a chicken wing in ranch and strip the flesh from it. Cooper makes a hysterical little sound. “Vance is going to kill me. He wants to make an example.”

And you laugh, because it sounds funny, something out of a movie, not something people really say to each other. Cooper gets that look, a half sneer, like an older brother about to pound you, only you never had an older brother, just Cooper. “I’m serious.”

“Okay,” you say, and dump the chicken bone.

“Nick,” he says, and puts his palms together like he’s praying, and for a second you’re back in the front room of a shitty cinder-block apartment, watching Cooper make the same gesture at you over a bloodstained body. “Nick, Nick, Nick, Nickie. I need you, brother.”

And you sip your beer and listen to Mick Jagger tell you that ti-iiime is on your side, and think about the best night of your life.

There is the smell of popcorn and nachos, the growl of hundreds of people talking and betting and shouting. The meaty thump of boxers warming up with their trainers, one-two-back, fists quick and feet flickering. A ring girl, five feet nine inches of toned grace in tight jeans and a black bodice chatting up the muscled soldiers at the army booth. This is the Golden Gloves, and tonight is the finals, and you are fighting next.

You stand beside the ring, legs moving like a jogger at an intersection, gloves up, savoring the good looseness of your muscles. There is fear, but you picture a tiny basement room with a bare bulb dangling, and shove your fear in and lock the heavy oak door. From the front row, your girlfriend cheers as you slip between the ropes.

Your opponent has tattoos around both biceps and two inches of extra reach. You saw him last year, and he is good. For a moment your fear bangs on the door, the hinges straining and frame rattling.

You dance the first round. Land a jab, then a hook, then take one coming out, sudden stars and black spots. The crowd roar is static singing loud as the adrenaline in your blood. When the round is over, you spit water into a bucket, and it comes out pink.

The second goes badly, and a split appears in the center of that door. Your trainer rubs your shoulders, tells you it’s not over yet. You just have to believe.

The third and final round, your opponent comes out mean. His eyes look through you. You block one punch, juke out of another. Your shoulders scream and your body has that hot trembly feeling of failing muscles. You throw a jab, but he bats it away and steps forward, winding up a swing that will knock you back to grade school.

But you remember what your trainer said, and you think of her in the front row, and instead of dodging, you step forward with a left hook to the belly that steals his wind. He pauses, just for a moment, but it’s enough. You cock your right and let yourself believe.

Then the other guy is on the ground, and though he gets up quick, the ref counts him standing, and stares into his eyes, and then shakes his head. The bell rings and the fight is yours and the crowd goes crazy, and finally you can hear it not as static but as hundreds of voices yelling in joy for you, surrounding you, making you part of something, and a rep from Pipefitters Local 597 hands you a trophy, and the photographer shoots a picture, the flash bright even under the lights, you with one arm up and the trophy in your other hand and your girlfriend in the background, long brown hair flying as she runs to the ring.

You have never felt this good before. It’s unbearable to think that this will fade, leave you nothing but a cheap trophy and a job at the Shell station, and so you walk over to the recruiting tent, where the soldiers slap your shoulders and call you a man and say it was a hell of a fight, and that they need men like you, guys who believe and won’t quit.

And you sign up.

You PT until you puke. You hurry up and wait. You learn close infantry tactics and Arabic phrases and the name of every component of your weapon. You watch war movies you’ve already seen a hundred times. But this time is different. You’re part of something. A soldier, a lean, mean killing machine ready to kick ass for your country.

A group of you go for tattoos. Crossed rifles and slogans and death’s heads. You can’t decide, think of backing out. A tall, funny kid named Cooper puts his arm around your shoulders, says, “Come on, buddy. Don’t let us down.”

You get an American flag on your bicep. Later, looking in the mirror, you flex arms grown thick with muscle, and the flag seems to wave, and you feel a surge in your chest, a soft fluttery feeling like a girl’s fingers brushing your skin.

“So how much do you owe this Vance guy?”

Cooper shrugs. “Ten grand.”

You blow a breath. “I don’t have that much.”

“Wouldn’t matter if you did.” He shakes his head. “I heard through a friend, Vance is sending a guy to waste me. Wants to show that even a soldier isn’t exempt.”

“Can your buddy help?”

“He’s just a friend, not a buddy.”

“What about the guy who’s coming after you?”

“I’ve never met him. But he’s got a bad reputation.”

You lean forward, put your boots on the bar rail. You wear jeans and a T-shirt these days, but the boots are a hard habit to quit. The thing, the army, it gets into you. It’s designed to, to teach you to walk and talk and shit the army way, to break you down and make you part of a larger whole. That was what you liked about it.

You say, “Maybe you should get out of town.”

Cooper stares at you. “Hey, Nick,” he says, softly, “fuck you.”

And the heat rises in your cheeks as you remember Cooper behind the M240 Bravo, fingers pulsing in tight clenches that rip the air with explosions. Fighting for his country, shouting and firing as you stand next to him, readying the next ammo belt and trying not to panic. Your first firefight is nothing like you expected, not like the movies you’d watched or video games you’d played. You don’t feel like a lean, mean killing machine, not even a little bit. There is a flash, and then a rocket hits the vehicle ahead, knocking it sideways in a wave of flame. You point to where the man had fired, and Cooper swings the machine gun, the bullets tearing chunks from walls and kicking up dust.

When it’s over, you walked through the humming distance of things, amidst rubble and trash and thousands of spent shell casings. The forward vehicle survived, but the rocket killed two soldiers immediately, and though the ringing in your ears muffles sound, it’s not enough to shut out the screams of a third whose belly was opened.

And the funny thing is that it’s in the aftermath that the fear really hits, as you realize that it was just chance that their vehicle was in front; not strategy or fate or a plan, just chance, a matter of which driver had pulled out first. That the difference between life and death was measured in feet and in seconds. Fear burst the door of its basement cage and seized you and didn’t let go, not then and not since.

“Sorry,” you say, and don’t explain what for, and don’t have to. The two of you sit in silence. When the door bangs open, you jump, and even though it’s been six months, reach for a weapon that isn’t there. It only takes a second to come back to the bar, but when you do, you see that Cooper jumped, too.

He gives you a sheepish grin, spreads his hands. “It’s funny,” he says. “People ask what it was like. And I can’t remember. Not really. Too big, too much. After a while, it started to feel like nothing. Beyond computation.”

You sip your beer, and nod.

“The guy Vance is sending,” Cooper says, “they say he cuts your ears off first.” He looks at you, and in the neon light of the bar, you can see fear twist in his eyes like a trash bag in a dark ocean current.

“That’s not going to happen,” you say.

The M1126 Stryker is twenty-three feet long by nine wide and features an eight-by-eight suspension, tires that can adjust pressure on the fly and roll for miles after being blown, and a 350 HP Caterpillar engine capable of driving the seventeen-ton vehicle at speeds of sixty miles per. It looks like an olive drab duck with too many legs, and the inside smells of the sweat and farts of eleven men.

It is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.

You are the assistant gunner for the rear weapons team. You wanted to be the primary, even though you’re not sure you have what it takes to pull the trigger on a living, breathing person. Still, at the zeroing range you nailed more targets than anybody, figured you had it in the bag. But the sergeant picked Cooper as the primary. You saw the two of them talking, Coop gesturing at you, and he says that he was telling the sarge you should be gunner.

But walking around the Stryker that will be yours, the one you will share with ten other men, the one in which you will serve your country, it doesn’t matter. You run your hands gently along the armor.

“Would you look at that?” Cooper stands in the doorway. He nudges the soldier next to him. “I think we got ourselves a true believer.” He smiles to let you know he’s just busting balls. “Hey, you sure it’s your arm got the flag tattooed on it?”

After you leave Cooper in the bar, you drive for a while, watching the sun set the sky on fire. It’s that hour when the shadows are soft and everything is lit from within. Tourists wander the Strip holding three-foot souvenir glasses. People in business suits talk on cell phones. A cute girl steps out of Whole Foods carrying bags stuffed with free-range macrobiotic whatever. Everyone is happy, on vacation or on their way home.

For a second, you want more than anything to turn the wheel of the Bronco hard and jam on the gas and blast right through the bright front window of the grocery store.

You clench and unclench your fists, take deep breaths. A car behind you honks, and you move along.

From the corner market you get a cheesesteak and a six-pack. You go to the room you rent and turn on the TV and eat dinner sitting at your counter, the news you aren’t watching running in the background.

You think about what Cooper said, how life over there had been too big to grasp, to hold. You remember a conversation with a soldier who was re-upping, how when he talked about getting back to Iraq, he slipped and called it home.

You light a cigarette and think about the girl who watched you win at the Golden Gloves. About the way her hair always smelled clean, and a moment a lifetime ago, lying in bed, when she looked up with eyes like June and said she loved you.

The body on the floor of the Mosul apartment has half a dozen wounds. He’s on his belly, one arm out like he was reaching for something, head cocked sideways and part of his face missing. You recognize him. He’s one of the men who frequently hangs around the forward operating base, selling Miami cigarettes. Other things, too, the rumor goes.

Cooper kneels beside him, bent over the body at an awkward angle as though he is going to hug it. The image sticks with you, comes back sometimes months later, along with the abruptness with which Cooper straightens as you come in, and how the first words out of his mouth are “I had to.”

You narrow your eyes, say, “What are you doing?”

“Checking for a pulse.”

The fear is in you, has been since the firefight. Sometimes you feel your fear wears you like clothing. Today is bad, a dangerous assignment, the squad split up and working the houses separately. Poor procedure, but that was the order, and so when you heard the shots, you were alone in the alley, and came running, jumping piles of trash and discarded water bottles. It occurs to you that the rest of the house is not secure, that there may be others, and the fear spikes again.

Then you notice. “Where’s his weapon?”

Cooper winces, and looks at the body, and then back at you. “I told him to get down, but he came at me, and I thought…”

You reach for your radio.

“Wait.” Cooper takes a step forward. “Wait.” He puts his palms together like he’s praying. “If they realize he wasn’t armed.”

“We have to call on this.”

“I know, but…” He rocks his clasped hands back and forth. Stares in your eyes. “I was scared, Nickie.”

Everyone is scared but no one says so, and when you see Cooper looking at you that way, something in you shivers. It could have been you alone in here, could have been you who pulled the trigger. You think of basic, him putting an arm around your shoulders and telling you not to let everybody down.

“Did anyone…” Your voice comes out a croak, and you cough, start again. “Did anyone see you come in here?”

“Just you.”

You nod. Look again at the body on the ground, the way he is twisted. The blood is thickening on the woven rug. Another dark-skinned man dead in another shitty room. You try to make yourself believe it matters.

Then Cooper says, “Please, Nickie. Please.”

In the movies, former soldiers wake up in a sweat, fresh from nightmares of a war that never ends. Not you. You don’t dream at all these days. You stretch, make coffee, shower, pull on your boots. Kill a couple of hours at a coffee shop, staring out at nothing.

The Bronco you stored in your parents’ garage while deployed is sun-faded, and the air conditioner doesn’t work, but driving it you feel something like your old self. Cooper is waiting on the corner, hands tucked into the front pouch of a hoodie the day is already too warm for. He climbs in, pulls a CD from his pocket, Slayer’s Reign in Blood. You know it well. Maybe in Vietnam it was Wagner, but in the desert, it was always heavy metal.

You ask, “Where?”

“A parking garage.” He gives you the intersection. “I’m supposed to meet him with the money in an hour. Figured we’d get there first, scope it out.”

The garage is off the Strip, set amidst warehouses being converted to lofts for whoever lives in lofts. The ramp spirals up through six stories. The top floor is open to the sky. A handful of expensive vehicles are scattered far apart. Car fetishists, terrified of every ding and scratch. You park forty feet from the stairwell, on the far side of the ramp.

The sun is brutal, burning the sky white. The windows are open, and the sweat slicking your chest feels familiar. “It’s good.”

Cooper nods.

“How many?”

“At least two.”

“Armed?”

He nods again. You take a breath, look around. Electricity crackles and snaps between your fingers, the same old feeling you used to get as the squad mounted up. With terrain like this, there’s no reason even to discuss the plan. “Okay,” you say.

Cooper opens the door, pauses. Turns to look at you. “Nick-”

“Forget it,” you say. The two of you share the kind of look that only men who’ve gone to war together can. Then he slides out of the car and walks over to the stairwell, leans against the wall.

You sit behind the wheel for a moment, listening to the relentless hammer of the heavy metal guitars. Remembering Fritz, the gunner for your Stryker’s forward weapons team, a skinny kid with a Missouri twang and a pinch of Skoal perpetually in the pouch of his lip. Two hundred and ten beats a minute, he’d said, and smiled. At the time, you’d thought he was talking about his heart.

You turn off the engine and get out. Stand for a moment in the sun, the same sun that lights the other side of the world. You twist the passenger mirror up at an angle, then take a breath, go prone and wriggle underneath the truck.

It isn’t long before you hear a car climbing the ramp. The sound gets louder, fainter, then louder again as it winds to the top. You take a deep breath and remember the best night you ever had, how you mastered your fear and let yourself believe.

The problem with the best moment of your life is that every other moment is worse.

The car is a BMW. It cruises up the ramp smooth and soft. You keep your face pointing down, watching out of the corner of your eye, trying to picture a basement room with a dangling bulb and a heavy door. The car parks about twenty feet away, near the stairs, where Cooper stands with his hands in his pocket. Gently, you slide out from under, keeping the truck between you and the men, using the mirror to see.

Two of them, one in a suit, no tie; the other, bigger, in jeans and a muscle shirt. Muscle Shirt gives a casual scan of the parking lot. He doesn’t look concerned, lacks the edgy readiness of a man expecting trouble. Still, when he turns his back, you see a pistol tucked into his belt. Cooper raises one hand in greeting, says something you can’t hear.

Keeping low, you ease around the back of the Bronco.

Your heart slams in your chest, and you can taste copper. You slide one foot forward, then the other. The distance is only twenty feet. A couple of car lengths. It seems like miles. You feel strangely naked with your hands empty. Step, beat, step.

The man in the business suit says something to Cooper. You screen it out. Fifteen feet. Ten. The sun fires jagged glints off the polished BMW.

You’re almost to the man in the muscle shirt when he turns around.

The stars in the desert night were unlike anything you’d ever seen. They flowed across the sky like God had spilled them. Growing up in Chicago, the stars you saw were man-made, skyscrapers turning the night purple. Even when you went camping out in Wisconsin, it was nothing like this.

Sometimes, when things got bad, you closed your eyes and thought of those stars. Imagined yourself on a rise, alone, arms out, a figure cut from the sky. Looking upward. Waiting to be pulled into them.

Hoping.

Muscle Shirt’s eyes go wide, and he starts to speak, but you don’t hesitate, just take three quick strides and snap off a jab that catches his chin. Your bare knuckles sing. Adrenaline howls in your blood. The fear is gone. You feel better than you have in months. You throw another jab, and he gets his hands up in a clumsy block, and then you crack him hard in the side of the head, near the temple, a wildly illegal blow. His eyes lose focus and his legs wobble, but it’s in you now, the rage, the anger that swelled every time a mortar landed on the FOB, every time a man in a terrorist-towel stepped out of an alley leveling an AK, every time the counselor at the VA said that what you were experiencing was typical, that it would pass. You swing again and again. His head snaps back and blood explodes from his nose and he’d fall if only you’d let him.

A loud gasp pulls you from your trance. You forget Muscle Boy. Turn to the man in the suit and start his way, and in a panicky voice he says, “Cooper, what is this-” and then you break his nose. He whimpers and drops to his knees. He looks up with wide, scared eyes, one hand on his nose and the other up to ward you off, like a child menaced by a bully.

The anger and power vanish. You lower your fists. Then Cooper pushes past you, flips Muscle Shirt over. Grabs the pistol from his belt and comes up fast. The man in the suit screams.

You say, “No-” and then there are three explosions and the man stops screaming. Cooper turns to the one on the ground and fires three more times, two bullets in the center of mass and one in the head, just like they taught you in basic.

And you stand there, hands trembling, a shattered body on either side of you as the sun beats down.

“Nick,” Cooper says.

You stare.

“I had to. It’s done now.” He takes off his hoodie and uses it to wipe the sidearm clean. He drops it next to one of the bodies, then starts for the Bronco.

You look at what’s left of their heads.

Then Cooper says, “Nick!” His voice sharp. “Come on. Move your feet, soldier.” He walks around to the other side of the Bronco and opens the door.

You bend and do something without really thinking about it, and then the sun carves your shadow in concrete as you walk to your truck.

The drive out of Las Vegas is a surreal falling away, first the casinos and bright lights, then the subdivisions that spring up overnight-all those houses, all those people, all the same-and then retail and then diners and then garages and then warehouses and then nothing. Just dirt and sun on either side of US-15.

Cooper is all energy, the window open and fingers tapping, his whole body vibrating like a tuning fork. “Fuck, that was intense,” he says, grinning. “I knew you’d boxed, but you beat the shit out of those guys.”

Your fingers on the wheel are raw and dark with drying blood. He slaps the side of your truck in time with the heavy metal screaming through the tinny speakers. “Where we going, chief?”

You press the power button on the stereo. Cooper looks at you. A long stare. Some of the energy falls away. “I had to.”

You say nothing.

“I had to show Vance that coming after me is a bad idea. That it will cost him.” He scratches his chin. “Now we can deal. I’ll even pay him, when I get the money.”

“The guy,” you say. Hot dry air roars in the open windows. “He knew your name.”

“Who? On the parking deck? So what?”

“You told me you’d never met him. But he said, ‘Cooper, what is this?’”

He shrugs. “Vance must have told him.”

“It sounded like he knew you.”

“He didn’t.”

Your hands tighten on the steering wheel. You wait. You know Cooper. Silence he can’t take.

Finally, he laughs. “Ah, shit, okay, you got me.” He turns to you. “I did know him. But the rest of what I said, it was true. And Nickie, thank you. I mean it. I always knew I could count on you.”

You nod. It was true. He had always known that. You ride in silence for another couple of moments, then pull off at a lonely gas station. “I’m thirsty.”

“Get me something, would you?”

In the minimart you snag a couple of Gatorades and a pack of beef jerky and a can of lighter fluid. The woman behind the counter is as old as death. When she counts out your change, the motion of her lips fractures her cheeks like sunbaked mud. In the Bronco, Cooper has his feet on the dash. As you put the truck into Drive, he opens the jerky, says, “You got a destination in mind, or we just cruising? Because the chicks, man, they’re the other direction.”

The highway is nearly empty, cars strung out like beads on a necklace. You open the Gatorade and take a long pull. After a few minutes, you take the exit for US- 93, a two-lane straight into the cracked brown American desert.

“Seriously, Nick, where we headed?”

“What were you doing when I came in?”

“What?” His eyebrows scrunch. “Came in where?”

“In Mosul. The apartment. When I came in, you were bending over the guy’s body. What were you doing?”

He cocks his head. “I was checking for a pulse.”

“I’ve thought about that a lot since I got back. The way you were bent over him. It was strange.” You set your drink in the cup holder. “You weren’t looking for a pulse, were you? You were going through his pockets.”

“That’s crazy.”

You say nothing, just look at him sideways, put it all in your eyes. For a moment, he keeps it up, the facade, the Cooper Show. Then he says, “Huh,” and the mask falls away. “When did you know?”

“I guess I knew then. In Mosul. I just wanted to believe you.”

Cooper nods. “See, I knew I could count on you.”

“What I want to know is why.”

He sighs. “I had a sideline going with the guy-weed, meth-but he got unreliable. Always talking about Allah, you know.” He shrugged. “And today, well, I really did owe Vance ten grand.”

“That why you shot him? He was the one in the suit, right?”

“You don’t miss a trick, Nickie.”

“Why bring me into it?”

“I couldn’t be sure how many guys he’d have.”

“No. Why me?”

“What do you want me to say?” He shrugs. “Because you buy the whole lie. You win the Golden Gloves and to celebrate, what do you do? Get drunk and nail your girlfriend? Not you. You join the army.”

“You used me.”

“You let yourself be used.”

“I could go to the cops.”

“They’d arrest you, too. But you know what?” He shakes his head. “That doesn’t matter. You didn’t do that in Iraq, and you won’t here. That’s why I came to you. Because you’re predictable, Nickie. You never change.”

The moment stretches. You remember your trainer saying all you had to do was believe. Remember the feeling of being part of a team, a soldier, and what it got you, a diagnosis of PTSD and a rented room in a city you hate and a raw and formless anger that seems some days more real than any version of you that you once thought might be the real thing.

And then you raise the pistol you took from the parking deck and put it to Cooper’s head and show him he’s wrong.

Your knuckles hurt and your lips are chapped. There’s a line from an old Leonard Cohen song running through your head, something about praying for the grace of God in the desert here and the desert far away. Sometimes you’re thinking of Cooper. Sometimes you’re not thinking at all.

When the sun slips below the horizon, you get up off the boulder you’ve been sitting on all day. A quiet corner of searing nowhere at the end of an abandoned two-track, brown rocks and brown dirt and white sky and you.

The Bronco’s passenger window is still open.

You reach in your pocket and pull out the can of lighter fluid and pop the top and lean in the window to spray it all over your friend and the front seat and the floorboards, the smell rising fast. You squeeze until nothing else comes. You think you might be crying, but you’re not sure.

The butane catches with a soft whoomp and a trail of blue-yellow flame leaps around the inside of the truck you once loved. The upholstery catches quickly, and Cooper’s clothing. Within a minute, greasy black smoke pours out the windows, and a fierce crackling rises.

You stand on the ridge of the desert and watch. Another truck engulfed in flame beneath another burning sky, and you still standing, still watching.

And then you turn and start walking alone.