Fobbit (35 page)

Gooding, coughing simoom dust, mounted the wooden steps and opened the trailer door to an empty waiting room. This was his first time at the aid station—he prided himself on being the kind of Fobbit who worked so hard he didn’t have time to worry about sniffles or coughs—and he was surprised by how cramped and threadbare the doctor’s office seemed to be at first glance. A row of plastic orange chairs lined one wall, facing a small table with a computer and a vomit spill of papers and files. On the wall above, there was a dry-erase board that charted patient intake and time of release (blank at this point); in one corner, someone had drawn a daisy with a smiley face and written
SHIQUANDA WAS HERE
. The place smelled like dried blood on week-old bandages. Also, a little minty. A fluorescent light flickered and buzzed overhead. But that was it, nothing else in this room. Not even a pile of year-old magazines.

“What the hell kind of rinky-dink operation are they running here?” Gooding muttered. Then, overcome by a fresh wave of nausea, he slumped into a nearby seat. His M16 thumped to the ground and he held his head in his hands, waiting for the sickness to pass.

He heard someone come out of a room at the rear of the trailer and walk across the creaking floor.

“Help you, Sar’nt?”

Gooding looked up through the lace of his fingers. It was Specialist Blodgett, a guy he recognized from the support platoon, a medic who also happened to be one of the laziest, fattest slobs in the company. Gooding remembered seeing Blodgett on the monthly “esprit de corps” runs back at Fort Stewart (which he liked to call “spirit of the corpse” runs due to the lack of any real camaraderie generated by jogging six miles in the Georgia heat). Blodgett was always at the back of the pack, barely moving his feet above an Airborne shuffle as the other two hundred members of the company outpaced him down the road. It wasn’t until they were back at the field outside company headquarters and the commander was wrapping up his falsely cheerful motivational speech that Blodgett would finally come into view, by this time walking across the field, blowing hard and shaking his thick, reddened head from side to side. He was a medic, for fuck’s sake! He should have been one of the healthiest soldiers in the company. Physician, heal thyself!

“Help you?” he repeated, his sausage-y fingers poised with a pen over a clipboard.

“I’m sick,” Gooding said.

“Yeah, no shit, Sar’nt. You and every other person who walks through that door.”

“But I’m
really
sick.”

“Yeah, okay,” Blodgett admitted. “Your gills
do
look a little green. Here—” he held out the clipboard “—need you to fill out some basic information then we’ll get you triaged, ’kay?”

Gooding nodded and took the clipboard. As he was filling out the intake form, the door banged open with a howl of wind and another soldier stumbled inside, crying out, “Fucking A! Goddamned wind nearly ripped off my fucking face out there.” He slammed the door shut behind him and unwrapped the scarf from around his mouth, then announced to the room, “I’m sick!”

Blodgett called over his shoulder to someone in the back room, “Hey, it looks like we got us an epidemic on our hands—now there’s
two
people out here who say they’re sick. Oh, me, oh, my! Whatever will we do?”

A voice sounding thick and sore from swallowing too much windborne dust came from the back room: “Cut the comedy, Blodgett. Just get them triaged and bring them back here.”

“Roger, sir.” Blodgett rolled his eyes and stage-whispered to Gooding and the other soldier, “Doc’s in a bad mood today. I’d watch out if I were you.”

Gooding returned the clipboard. “Here. This all you need?”

Blodgett glanced over the intake form. “Looks good enough to me. We’ll make up the rest as we go along.” He turned to the other soldier. “Have a seat and fill this out. We’ll get to you when we get to you, after we get through with Sarge here.”

“Fine by me,” the soldier said. “I got nothing to do and plenty of time to do it in.” He sat and started humming to himself, tapping his fingers against the barrel of his M16, which he still wore in a sling around his neck. His gills did
not
look green and he seemed almost happy to be here at the aid station. Fucking malingerer, Gooding thought, swallowing another gob of bile.

“C’mon back, Sar’nt,” Blodgett said, leading him to a larger room at the back of the trailer. “Step into my laboratory—
mwuhahaha,
” the medic said in a lame attempt at a mad-scientist imitation. His jowls quivered with laughter.

Blodgett sat at a computer and started copying the information off the clipboard, punctuating it every so often with
hmm
or
mm-hmmm
. Gooding took a seat next to the desk because his knees had turned to jelly. Blodgett told him to remove his DCU shirt, then wheeled over a blood-pressure machine on a long silver pole. A cuff went on Gooding’s biceps and a thermometer was jabbed into his mouth. Blodgett watched the digital numbers on the machine, listening to the accelerating short blips, then frowned when they eventually settled and gave a long beep. “Hmmm. Okay, now I want you to stand up and we’ll take your vitals from that position, too.”

“Why?”

“We like to see how your blood migrates through your system. Systolic and asystolic, and so on, so forth.”

It sounded like bullshit to Gooding but he stood anyway, trying his best to hide the tremble in his knees.

When the machine beeped again, Blodgett was still frowning. “Hmm. Okay, wait here and I’ll go get Doc Claspill.”

Apparently, Gooding’s blood wasn’t doing so well on its migration.

Blodgett returned, followed by Captain Claspill, a sleepy-looking man with a shock of tousled black hair sticking up off his head—as if the follicles themselves were still upset and angry at being pulled off the pillow an hour ago. When he spoke, there was sand in his voice. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.” He took the clipboard from Blodgett, read what was on the computer screen, then went back and forth from clipboard to monitor for nearly a minute before he looked at Gooding sitting there with his drained face and throbbing stomach.

“All right,” he croaked. “What I’m gonna need you to do now, Staff Sergeant Gooding, is remove your boots, loosen your belt, then hike yourself up onto this bed over here.” He patted a cot—dust puffing up from beneath his fingers—and gave Gooding a wan smile. “You do that while I take a short break, then we’ll see what’s going on inside you, hmm?”

He left the room and Blodgett smirked at Gooding, holding two fingers to his lips then blowing out a puff of invisible cigarette smoke. “Doc’s got his bad habits.”

“I see.”

“Says it opens up his blood vessels, helps him focus and concentrate.”

“I’m not about to stop him.” Gooding started unlacing his boots.

“Anyway,” Blodgett said. “Just do what doc says and I’ll be back after I go see what’s ailing this other dude.”

Gooding unbuckled his belt, then looked at the cot. It was covered with a stained wool blanket—Army-issue green—and sagged in the middle. At one end was a large, embroidered pillow with the silhouette of a grizzly walking across it—probably hand stitched by somebody’s mother and sent over here to Iraq. Before he lowered himself into the sinkhole of the cot, Gooding wondered how many other unwashed heads had touched this grizzly pillow in the past week. Sterility appeared to be an afterthought here in the aid station.

He lay there for several minutes, eyes closed and hands folded across his chest like he was in a coffin, while the doctor sucked his way through a cigarette out back in the Iraqi wind and Blodgett interrogated the other sick-call patient in the outer room. Gooding closed his eyes, letting the rise and fall of voices match the rhythm of his lungs. First, he thought of his ex-wife, Yolanda, and wondered who might be screwing her even as he lay here dying in Baghdad. Then he thought about his desk in the palace and pictured a snowstorm of paperwork—Sig Acts and drafts of press releases—falling around his computer and burying it in deep white drifts. Then he thought about the disgraced captain Shrinkle and wondered what had happened to him. No doubt shipped home to a desk job back at Fort Stewart. Then, thinking about Shrinkle’s hand grenade blowing up the truck drifted his thoughts to a suicide-bomb attack that had ripped through a bus terminal near the Green Zone last week. Gooding hadn’t heard the blast from where he worked at his desk in the palace, but he’d read about it online like it was a dispatch from a war he was watching through opera glasses. One line in that news story, however, had brought it rushing close enough to punch him in the heart:
Ahmed Mahjoud returned to the blast site to search for his brother’s head after identifying his headless body at a hospital morgue by the belt he was wearing.

Gooding’s bowels shifted and he clamped down. At the same time, a fresh wave of sour bile rolled through his stomach and threatened to blurp up his esophagus. He swallowed and pushed away the suicide bomber’s head with its singed, bulging eyes.

The stink of cigarettes was sharp in his nostrils. Gooding opened his eyes to find Captain Claspill leaning over him, staring at him through those heavy-lidded eyes with what looked like boredom.

“You back with us now?”

“Yes, sir. Just closed my eyes for a second and I guess I drifted away.”

“Hey, don’t make me jealous. You don’t want to know how long it’ll be till I feel a pillow again. Damn double shifts.” He blew out through his nose and the ghost of smoke was just as strong and sharp. He stood quickly, clapping his hands on his knees. “Well, okay. Let’s see what’s going on inside you.”

Claspill pulled a stethoscope from his pocket, blew tar and nicotine on the metal disk for nearly a minute, and said, “Just one of the complimentary services we offer here at the aid station—no cold metal on skin.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Now just relax and give me three deep breaths and hold it on the third one.” He lifted Gooding’s T-shirt and placed the stethoscope in the center of his belly. Gooding breathed, breathed, breathed, held . . . and Claspill gasped as he listened to what was migrating through Gooding’s innards. “Whoa!”

“What is it, doc?”

“I’m listening for normal digestive sounds but I’m not hearing any. The average person’s guts are making noise all the time—little pings back and forth. Normally, it sounds like Rice Krispies. Yours, however, sounds like a NASCAR race in there. What’ve you been eating?”

Gooding gave him a rundown of the previous two days’ menu, leaving out the episode of the tainted water bottle. He was too embarrassed to admit he’d almost been killed by a contract employee, a grinning little Pakistani/Filipino who, in the end, probably meant him no harm.

Claspill moved the stethoscope back and forth across Gooding’s stomach, giving him breathing instructions, and continuing to frown. Eventually, he straightened, rubbed his eyes, and said, “Let’s start you off with an IV. You’re dehydrated, and we need to get fluids in you. Then I’m gonna prescribe some Imodium—just for shits and giggles. Pun intended.”

Gooding thought,
Hardee-har-har. Excuse me if I don’t laugh, doc, but I’m using all my muscles to keep my anus locked up tight.

“You just wait here and I’ll go tell Blodgett to start that IV. We’ll get you fixed up and on your way in no time.”

Gooding closed his eyes and thought about the drifts of paperwork and the headless bodies waiting for him back in the palace.

Blodgett was back with an armload of needles and clear plastic bags and a bedpan. “Doc says we gotta fill you with fluids, huh?”

Gooding shrugged weakly.

Blodgett organized his materials on a tray, put a paper pad under Gooding’s arm, wrapped a tourniquet around his biceps, then held up a needle that glistened in the flickering fluorescent light. “Hope you aren’t afraid of needles.”

“I hate them, actually.” Gooding turned his head away and put his mind on Pleasant Things: vanilla-scented candles, a Dickens novel, Vivaldi’s concertos.

Blodgett smacked Gooding’s forearm with two fingers, pulled the skin tight, then stabbed the needle into a vein. He held it there with one hand while he tore off a piece of tape with his teeth. Once the needle was secured in place, Blodgett reached for a rubber tube but had some trouble maneuvering it with his fat fingers. “I hate these damn screw-on caps,” he grumbled. “They used to have ’em so they just slipped on.” As he tried to attach the IV, Gooding could feel the needle move back and forth, carving out pieces of his vein beneath the skin. Blodgett panted, sweated, and cursed the pharmaceutical makers of the IV tube. The needle sliced back and forth through Gooding’s epidermis like a scythe harvesting a wheat field. For a minute, the new pain took his mind off his nausea and loosening bowels.

Gooding felt a gush of wet warmth across his forearm.

“Well, shit!” Blodgett cried.

Gooding didn’t want to look. Feeling it was bad enough.

“Sorry about that, Sar’nt. Damn! Real sorry.” Blodgett’s breath whistled back and forth across his teeth. Then he grunted as the IV tube made a solid connection with the needle. “There. Success at last.” He turned a little plastic wheel near the IV bag and Gooding felt something like cool spring water running uphill along his arm.