Fives and Twenty-Fives (27 page)

After about an hour, Paige lets me take the helm. The vibration of the wooden tiller against my palm sets my heart racing. We make laps up and down the lakefront, two hundred meters from shore. She talks constantly, explaining the exact purpose of every winch, line, and cheat. She walks me through the steps for executing efficient tacks and jibes.

When I turn too steeply into a jibe, she admonishes me with a smile to “Steer small. Seriously.”

I give the rudder a sudden pull.

“Asshole. Steer
small
. You almost threw me overboard that time.”

At dusk, I help her lower the sails and set the anchor.

We watch the moonrise. Pressed up against me for warmth, under a moldy blanket she retrieves from belowdecks, Paige tells me about a friend with a covered dockyard space I can probably lease on the cheap and use to work on
Sentimental Journey
. I take hold of her face and interrupt her midsentence with a kiss. Her body goes limp, and I exhale with complete deliverance as she kisses me back.

When nothing we do, no means of physical proximity we can conjure, will keep us warm, we go belowdecks. Eventually, reluctantly, we fall asleep.

In the morning, after motoring back into harbor and working to secure
Smile
at her moorings, I promise to meet her at Molly’s on Thursday night for drinks with classmates.

“They have a special on High Life,” she says. “Only a dollar.”

“Just paper, right?” I say, spooling the bowline with newly acquired craft in my wrists.

Paige doesn’t answer. She doesn’t laugh. She puts on a serious, nurturing face as she waits for me on the pier. Showing me she’s ready to hear more. More of that story about the burning money. More about the old man and his hay. More of anything else I’d like to tell her. She’s ready to listen.

From nowhere, a terror rises inside me. The thought of responsibly drinking beers in public pushes me near to panic. I imagine standing next to her and smiling, our classmates asking me questions, and I yearn for the smallest, darkest room in the city where I can hide until I’m sure she’s forgotten me. I fight it as we walk through the parking lot, back to our separate cars. But something has soured in me. I’m polite, kissing her good-bye as sincerely as I can, but I’m sure Paige notices it, too.

I sleepwalk through Sunday, and I go back to work on Monday morning. Stall isn’t as friendly as he was on Friday afternoon, and he doesn’t put up any fight when I tell him I’ll be working on Sullivan’s analytics all day. He feigns disappointment when I tell him I won’t have time to grab lunch, like he’d wanted to cancel it himself but hadn’t known how.

I leave Stall’s office and shuffle down the hallway, to my cubicle in its windowless corner. The stack of research assignments sets me at ease. This much work is a gift, a reason to hide for the entire day, focus on these quiet tasks and not speak a word to anyone.

This much work might last into Thursday night, giving me a reason to break my promise to Paige. This much work might even follow me home from the office. When my mother sends me an e-mail asking why I never answer my phone, I can claim with a clear conscience that I’ve been too busy.

I sit at my desk, triaging Sullivan’s research assignments, and try to convince myself that she’ll expect me to stand her up. It won’t surprise her, I tell myself, fighting the urge to smash my cell phone so I won’t have to see her confused messages as the hours slip away on Thursday night.

I miss the phone center. The unreachability of it all. The line of people waiting to call home. The scratchy connection. The rough smell of industrial cleaner. All the good reasons to get off the phone whenever you needed it.

On my birthday, not long after Marceau died, I went to the phone center before evening chow. The guest worker, a skinny kid with shoulder-length, black hair, handed me an index card with a number on it. He gestured to the waiting area before settling back into his chair to watch a Philippine soap opera on his laptop.

I sat down and waited my turn to call home, sizing up the middle-aged national guardsman in my booth. I tried to judge from the look of him how long I’d have to wait. Skinny and hunched over in his Army uniform, he had gray hair and deep wrinkles in his face. He’d grown frail while other men his age had grown fat. I recognized him from his job at the chow hall, where he sat on a stool and made sure Marines washed their hands. That was his whole job. It was always strange seeing a forty-year-old private. It was strange having the National Guard here, at all.

I watched him arrange five calling cards on the desk and dial four times before he found a card that worked. When someone in America picked up, he leaned forward and spat, “Put the money back in the account.” Blood boiled into his face, filling his wrinkles from the bottom up. “Put the money back in the account so I have something to live on when I get home.”

He noticed me watching, and I looked away so as not to ­embarrass him.

“Put the money back in the account. Put the money back in the account. Put the money back in the account.” Louder each time. Then this woman in America, whoever she was, went on the offensive. The guardsman reeled back in his chair and attempted to stifle her onslaught with a crisp “Sarah. Sarah. Sarah.”

I looked over again, and the guardsman had the phone held away from his ear as she screamed. He closed his eyes, peaceful for a moment, then gave up. He slammed the handset down on the receiver, grabbed his rifle, and shuffled past me. No one in the tent seemed to notice or care.

I went to the empty desk, sat down, and pulled a calling card from my breast pocket. This gift from my sister, one thousand minutes, was sent with a demand that I call my parents at least once a week. I never managed that, but I made the effort on my birthday, at least.

I dialed and checked my watch while the line rang. I could never remember the time difference, Iraq to Alabama.

My mother answered before I finished the math, “Donovan residence.”

“Hi, Mom. It’s Pete.

“Oh—Pete!”

“I’m sorry, forgot to check. What time is it there?”

“Oh, it’s about nine in the morning. A lovely one, too. So glad to hear from you! Happy birthday! Are you
having
a happy birthday?”

“I am. Thank you.”

“Would you like to speak to your father, just right quick?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Lemme run fetch him, then.”

I heard her go out on the back porch and call his name. The screen door slammed, and I made a mental picture of the white trim and the black mesh. A green world beyond it. A cool breeze, birds, and insects buzzing in the pine trees. The screen door creaked open, a bootheel hit the kitchen floor, and I heard my mother say, “It’s Pete. It’s his birthday.”

He picked up the phone. “Son?”

“Hello, Dad.”

“Happy birthday.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You do anything to celebrate, over there? A cake, or something like?”

“No, sir. Just another day, really.” Marceau’s memorial service had been the day before. I didn’t tell him. “What are you doing today?”

“Oh, not much. Working out in the yard. Trying to keep the kudzu vines from gobbling up the pine trees.”

“How’s that going?”

“Well, it’s not exactly a fair fight, if you know what I mean. That kudzu just keeps coming.” He sighed. “So, how are you? Doing good?”

“Yes, sir. Doing fine”

“Doing a good job? Working hard?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well that’s the most important thing. That’s a happy birthday, right there.”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, then. Take care of yourself. Got to go work. Here’s your mother.” He handed the phone to her and I heard him cough on his way out the back door. Into the green. Into the breeze.

My mother didn’t speak until the screen door bounced shut. “Do you need anything? Can we send you something?”

“No, ma’am. I’m about fine. On my way to grab dinner, actually. People waiting in line for the phone, too. So I should go.”

“All right, then. Happy birthday, darling.” She added in a soft voice, “Your father is worried sick, most days, you know.”

“I know.”

“And he can’t wait for you to come home.”

“I know.”

“Love you. Be safe.”

“Love you, too.”

I hung up the phone, stood, and returned the index card at the counter as I pushed my way through the tent flap. The wind pelted my face with sand. Hot as a hair dryer, even at night. I walked across the tarmac, through rows of tents and plywood huts. I passed the gym and the store. I walked over to the mailbox and dropped in two letters. One to Marceau’s father, the other one to his mother. Different addresses in different states.

“Your fiduciary responsibility,” Major Leighton had called it. “You are required by law and custom to send his parents a letter. Anything else is at your discretion.”

I walked across the unlit patch of hard dirt between the old tarmac and the chow hall while, on the flight line, the casualty-­evacuation alarm wailed. In the few minutes it took me to reach the chow hall, two helicopters had made it airborne. They banked hard in the direction of Ramadi, low and fast. I tried to remember the tasking order for the night, and if the company had any convoys out near Ramadi.

I cleared my pistol at the entrance to the chow hall by pointing it into the clearing barrel and pulling the slide back to make sure it didn’t have a round in the chamber. Every weapon was cleared before it entered the chow hall. I cleared my pistol twice while two national guardsmen watched. I put the weapon back on safe and holstered.

I moved through the chow line with my tray, and a guest worker from Bangladesh piled my plate high with mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak. Cobb and the other lieutenants sat at their usual table on the far side of the tent. I counted them. All there. No one from our company out near Ramadi, everyone safe.

A lieutenant I didn’t recognize sat with them. A tall guy with broad shoulders and a carbine draped over his back—an infantry officer, from the look of him, and not working out of Taqaddum. The lieutenants at Taqaddum never carried rifles around the base. We locked our rifles in the operations center when we came in from the road and walked around with pistols, only.

I scanned the chow hall for another place to sit, an empty table where I could eat alone without looking like I’d meant to. Doc Pleasant and Dodge sat together, away from the rest of the platoon. Pleasant’s dinner sat untouched in front of him, and I noticed for the first time how he’d lost weight, how his uniform hung loose on his shoulders. Dodge pointed at Doc’s plate with a fork and began to take from it, perhaps thinking a foreign fork might encourage Doc to eat something. It worked. Doc brushed Dodge away with feigned aggravation and grudgingly took a bite.

I spotted Zahn and Gomez sequestered in a far corner, staring at their trays and attacking their dinners. They spoke in short bursts, nodding while they arranged the chow on their plates for maximum efficiency of consumption. It seemed like they were building the scene together, with purpose and shared understanding. It reinforced an image, for the junior Marines in the platoon, of a sergeant and her senior corporal, too busy, too focused on the work of war, to taste their food.

Under the table, I noticed their feet. She tapped the toe of his boot with her own and slowly pulled her foot away. He returned the gesture, all while they stared at their trays. I pretended not to notice and took the long way around to the lieutenants’ table.

I sat down across from the new guy, the infantry lieutenant with the carbine, as the table burst into laughter.

Cobb held court. “I’m serious! They had the thing in a box under one of the cots.”

“No fucking way, man.” Wong, the Bulk Fuel Platoon commander, shook his head and tore open a dinner roll. “Hey. What’s up, Donovan. You gotta hear this. Cobb—start again, man.”

Cobb nodded to me. “Hey, Pete. Real quick, this is Brian Jagrschein.” Cobb pointed to the infantry officer. “A buddy of mine from Quantico. Brian’s with Charlie Three-Nine out in Ramadi.”

I reached across the table, shook his hand, and said, “Pete Donovan. Nice to meet you. What brings you out this way?”

“Prisoner transfer. All wrapped up. Just letting my guys get some good chow before we head back.” He made eye contact as he spoke, and I liked him immediately.

A female helicopter pilot sat on his right. I recognized her, and the call sign Moonbeam embossed on her flight-suit patch. She flew casualty-evacuation missions. She had a good reputation. A professional.

“Anyways, where was I?” Cobb recovered his thought. “Oh, right. So my platoon finds this scorpion down by the lake and they put it in an ammo can. They sneak it back into the company area and put it in a cardboard box. They throw some dirt in there, a few bits of shrub, and decide to keep it. It sort of becomes the platoon mascot . . .”

Just then, Moonbeam’s radio, sitting on the table next to her tray, squawked to life. A garbled voice said something about clearing the landing zone at the hospital. Three casualties, urgent surgical, two minutes out and prepped for rapid transfer. She put a finger in her ear to block out Cobb’s story as he pressed on.