Billy Summers (29 page)

Only he's also thinking about Pill's wet washcloth treatment for panic attacks, and how it worked on Alice. Sort of a miracle, really. But that wasn't Clay Briggs's only miracle cure, was it? Smiling, Billy begins to write. The prose seems flat at first, ragged, but then he starts to get the rhythm. Soon he's not thinking of Alice at all.

Clay Briggs—Pill—was a Corpsman 1st Class. He worked on everyone who needed working on, but he was Hot Nine from top to toe. He was small and wiry. Thinning hair, beaky nose, little rimless glasses that he was always polishing. He had a peace sign on the front of his helmet and for a week or so, before the CO made him take it off, a sticker on the back that said NEVER MIND THE MILK, GOT PUSSY?

Panic attacks were common as Phantom Fury went on (and on, and on). Marines were supposed to be immune from things like that, but of course weren't. Guys would start rasping for breath, doubling over, sometimes falling down. Most were good little jarheads who wouldn't admit to being scared so they said it was the smoke and dust, because those things were constant. Pill would agree with them—just the dust, just the smoke—and wet a washcloth to put over their faces. “Breathe through that,” he'd say. “It'll clear the crap out and you'll be able to breathe fine.”

He had cures for other things, too. Some were bullshit and some were not, but they all worked at least some of the time: thumping wens and swellings with the side of a book to make them disappear (he called it the Bible cure), pinching your nose shut and singing
Ahhhh
for hiccups and coughing fits, breathing Vicks VapoRub steam to stop up bloody noses, a silver dollar rubbed on eyelids to cure keratitis.

“Most of this shit is pure hill-country folk medicine I learned from my grammaw,” he told me once. “I use what works, but mostly it works because I
tell
'em it works.” Then he asked me how my tooth was, because I had one in back that had been giving me trouble.

I said it hurt like blue fuck.

“Well, I can take care of that, my brother,” he said. “I've got a rattlesnake rattle in my pack. Bought it on eBay. You go on and stick
it between your cheek and gums back there, suck on it awhile, and your tooth is going to quiet right down.”

I told him I would pass and he said that was good, because the rattle was way at the bottom of his pack, and he'd have to dump all his shit out to get it. If it was even still there, that was. All these years later I wonder if it would have worked. I eventually had that tooth pulled.

Pill's most amazing cure—that I saw, anyway—was in August of '04. It was the slack time between Operation Vigilant Resolve in April and Phantom Fury, the big one, in November. During those months, the American politicians had their own panic attack. Instead of letting us go in full-bore, they decided to give the Iraqi police and military one more chance to clean out the muj themselves and restore order. The big Iraqi politicians said it would work, but they were all in Baghdad. In Fallujah, a lot of the police and military
were
muj.

During that period, we mostly stayed out of the city. For six weeks in June and July we weren't even there, we were in Ramadi, which was relatively quiet. Our job, when we did go into Fallujah, was to win “hearts and minds.” This meant our translators—our terps—made nice on our behalf with the mullahs and community leaders instead of bawling “Come out, you pig-fuckers” through loudspeakers as we drove rapidly through the streets, always expecting to get shot at or blown up or RPGd. We gave out candy and toys and Superman comic books to the kids, along with fliers for them to take home, talking about all the services the government could provide and the insurgency couldn't. The kids ate the candy, traded the comics, and threw away the fliers.

During Phantom Fury we stayed in what came to be known as Lalafallujah (after Lollapalooza) for days at a time, sleeping when we could on rooftops with overwatch on the four main corners of the compass, keeping an eye out for muj creeping up on other rooftops, ready to do damage and inflict hurt. It was like the death of a
thousand cuts. We took in hundreds of RPGs and other weaponry, but the hajis never seemed to run out.

During that summer, though, our patrols were almost like a 9-to-5 job. On days when we went in to win “hearts and minds,” we'd leave when the sun was up and head back to base before it got dark. Even with the fighting in a lull, you didn't want to be in Lalafallujah after dark.

One day when we were coming back we saw a Mitsubishi Eagle station wagon overturned on the side of the road, still smoking. The front end was blown off, the driver's door was open, and there was blood on what was left of the windshield.

“Fuck me, that's the lieutenant colonel's ride,” Big Klew said.

There was a CSH tent set up at the base—the Combat Surgical Hospital. Without sides, it was actually more of a pavilion with a couple of big fans set up at either end. It was over a hundred degrees that day. About like usual, in other words. We could hear Jamieson screaming.

Pill went running, slipping off his pack as he went. The rest of us followed. There were two other patients in the tent, clearly fucked up with their own shit but not as divinely fucked up as Jamieson, because they were on their feet. One had his arm in a sling, the other had a bandage wound around his head.

Jamieson was lying on a cot with stuff, I think they call it Ringer's lactate, running into his arm. The place where his left foot used to be had a pressure bandage on it, but the foot was gone and the bandage was already bleeding through. His left cheek was torn open and that eye was bleeding and all crooked in its socket. A couple of grunts were holding him down while a medic tried to get him to swallow some morphine tabs, but the lieutenant colonel was having none of it. He kept twisting his head from side to side, his good eye bulging and terrified. It landed on Pill.

“Hurts!” he yelled. There was nothing of the old bossy (but some
times funny) l-c in him. The pain had swallowed all that. “Hurts! Oh my fucking God it fucking
hurts
!”

“Dustoff's on the way,” one of the medics said. “Take it easy. Swallow these. You'll feel bet—”

Jamieson raised one bloody hand and swatted the pills away. Johnny Capps chased after them and picked them up.

“Hurts! Hurrts! HURRRRTS!”

Pill dropped to his knees beside the cot. “Listen to me, sir. I got a cure for the pain, better than the morph.”

Jamieson's remaining eye rolled toward Pill, but I didn't think it was seeing anything. “Briggs? Is that you?”

“Yessir, Corpsman Briggs. You gotta sing.”

“This hurts so bad!”

“You gotta sing. It bypasses the pain.”

“It's true, sir,” Taco said, but he gave me a look that said
What the fuck?

“Here we go,” Pill said. He started to sing. He had a good voice. “If you go down to the woods today… now you.”

“Hurts!”

Pill took him by the right shoulder. Jamieson's shirt was shredded on the other side and blood was oozing through. “Sing it and you'll feel better. Guaranteed. I'll give it to you one more time. If you go down to the woods today…”

“If you go down to the woods today,” the l-c croaked. Then: “ ‘The Teddy Bears' Picnic'? You have to be fucking shitting m—”

“No, sing it.” Pillroller looked around. “Somebody help me. Who knows the fucking song?”

It so happened I knew it, because my mother used to sing it to my sister when she was just a baby. Over and over until Cathy went to sleep.

I couldn't sing for shit, but I sang. “If you go down to the woods today you're sure of a big surprise. If you go down to the woods today—”

“Better go in disguise,” Jamieson finished. Still croaking.

“Fucking right you better,” Pill said, and sang: “For every bear that there ever was will gather there for certain…”

The man with the bandage around his head joined in. He had a lovely strong baritone. “Because today's the day the teddy bears have their piiiic-nic!”

“Give it to me, Lieutenant Colonel,” Pill said, still kneeling beside him. “Because today's the day…”

“The teddy bears have their piiic-nic.” Jamieson said most of it but sang the first syllable of
picnic
the way the man with the bandage on his head had sung it, drawing it out long, and Johnny Capps dropped the morphine tabs into his mouth, bombs away.

Pill turned his head to look at the rest of the Hot Nine. He was like a fucked-up bandleader encouraging audience participation. “If you go down to the woods today… come on,
everybody
!”

So the members of the Hot Nine sang the first verse of “Teddy Bears' Picnic” to Lieutenant Colonel Jamieson, most of them just faking it until about the third time around. By then they had the words. The two wounded men joined in. The corpsmen joined in. On the fourth repetition, Jamieson sang it right through with sweat pouring down his face. People were running toward the tent to see what was going on.

“Pain's less,” Jamieson gasped.

“Morphine's kicking in,” Albie Stark said.

“Not that,” Jamieson said. “Again. Please. Again.”

“One more time,” Pill said, “and put some feeling into it. It's a picnic, not a fucking funeral.”

So we sang:
If you go down to the woods today you're sure of a big surprise!

The jarheads who'd come to see what was going on also joined in. By the time Jamieson passed out, there must have been four dozen of us singing that foolish fucking song at the top of our lungs and we didn't hear the Black Hawk coming in to take Lieutenant
Colonel Jamieson uprange until it was swopping up dirt and practically on top of us. I never forgot

“What are you doing?”

Billy looks around, startled out of this dream, and sees Alice Maxwell standing in the bedroom door. Her bruises are stark against her white skin. Her left eye is puffed half-shut, making him think of the l-c, lying in that hot tent where the fans did jack shit even running at top speed. Her hair is all bed head.

“Nothing. Playing a video game.” He hits save, then turns off the laptop and shuts the lid.

“That was a lot of typing for a video game.”

“Do you want something to eat?”

She considers the idea. “Do you have any soup? I'm hungry, but I don't want to eat anything too chewy. I think I bit the inside of my cheek. It must have been while I was blacked out, because I don't remember doing it.”

“Tomato or chicken noodle?”

“Chicken noodle, please.”

That's a good call, because he has two cans of chicken noodle soup in the pantry nook and only one of tomato. He heats the soup and ladles out a bowl for each of them. She asks for seconds, and maybe a piece of buttered bread? She sops it in the chicken broth, and when she sees him looking at her over his own empty bowl, she offers a guilty smile. “I'm a pig when I'm hungry. My mother always said so.”

“She's not here.”

“Thank God. She'd call me crazy. I probably am crazy. She told me I'd get in trouble if I went away and she was right. First I date a rapist, now I'm in an apartment with a…”

“Go on, you can say it.”

But she doesn't. “She wanted me to stay in Kingston and go to hairdressing school, like my sister. Gerry makes good money, she said I could, too.”

“Why did you want to go to business school here? I don't get that.”

“It was the cheapest that was still good. Are you done?”

“Yes.”

She takes their bowls and spoons to the sink, self-consciously pulling the T-shirt away from her bottom as soon as her hands are free. He can tell by the way she walks that she's still in a fair amount of pain. He thinks he should get her to sing the first verse of “Teddy Bears' Picnic.” Or they could sing it together, a duet.

“What are you smiling about?”

“Nothing.”

“It's how I look, isn't it? Like I was in a prize fight.”

“No, just something I remembered from when I was in the service. Your clothes might be dry now.”

“Probably.” But she sits down again as she is. “Did someone pay you to shoot that man? They did, didn't they?”

Billy thinks of the half a million—minus his walking-around money—that's safe in an offshore bank. Then he thinks of the million and a half that hasn't been paid. “It's complicated.”

Alice offers a thin smile: tight lips and no teeth. “What isn't?”

She flicks through the cable channels on his TV, working her way up. She stops for a bit on TCM, where Fred Astaire is dancing with Ginger Rogers, then moves on. She watches an infomercial for beauty products for a little while, then turns it off.

“What are
you
doing?” she asks.

Waiting, Billy thinks. Nothing else
to
do. He can't work on his story with her in the room. He'd feel self-conscious, and besides, she'd want to know what he was writing. He thinks that of all the strange events in his life—there have been quite a few—this time on Pearson Street may be the strangest.

“What's out back?”

“A little yard, then a drainage ditch with some scrappy trees growing around it, then some buildings that might be storage sheds. Maybe from when the trains still stopped over there.” He gestures to the periscope window, now curtained. The rain is coming down in buckets again and there's nothing to see out there. “The sheds are abandoned now, I think.”

She sighs. “This has got to be the deadest neighborhood in the whole city.”

Billy thinks of telling her that
dead
, like
unique
, is a word that cannot, by its nature, be modified. He doesn't because she's right.

She stares at the blank TV. “I don't suppose you have Netflix?”

As a matter of fact he does, on one of his cheapie laptops, but then he realizes there's something better. “The Jensens do. The people upstairs? And there's popcorn, unless they ate it all. I bought it myself.”