Knife (9780698185623) (6 page)

“So I'm disgusting for watching that?” Hagan followed Massey into the light. “It's education.” Hagan kept his bag shouldered. He ran his thumbs across the nylon straps. “Every dad sees it. Donna's full of shit. The nurses clean it up.”

“It's educational, you mean,” Massey said, dropping his bag on the concrete. “And regardless, you're sick, that's sick, and you're making me sick.”

Hagan slammed his bag on the floor. Dust fanned out and clung to his pants.

“Educational? What the hell's that? Whatever. It's the miracle of life, Espresso. Everyone knows that.”

Shaw laughed. He pointed at Hagan.

“There. Espresso was good. End on that.” Massey had dark skin, so the men got clever with him. Hagan, especially, liked it. He probably wrote down good ones that came to him while he was alone in his room. Coffee and bean relations were common. Burrito. Beaner. Java. Jo. Java-Jo. Tobacco-Jo. Cocoa-Jo. Cocoa Puff. Fudge. Brownie. Fudge brownie. “The birth shit's a stretch. This place doesn't smell like birth shit, which is probably no different than my shit or your shit, or anyone else's shit. PBS or not, giving birth or not. It just smells like shit. No one wants to think of birth shit, you animal. Especially not Donna.”

“Why not? He's the only one that's seen it. Live show, at least.”

“Hog. Think about it. He just left his daughters and wife. His ladies. He's got a son in the oven. You think he wants to think of that now? More than that. You think he wants you, or any of us, talking about Mirna like that? Thinking about Mirna like that?”

Hagan nodded and looked at the ground. He lifted his face, bounced his eyebrows, and smiled. “Espresso was good, wasn't it?”

He looked relieved after defending himself for so long. Proud.

“I thought of that a while back.” He pointed behind himself with his thumb. “During poker.”

“You fell asleep during poker, you big idiot,” Dalonna said. He and Cooke dropped their bags next to the rest and Hagan shook his head at Dalonna. He mouthed,
I know you've seen it,
and kicked Dalonna's bag. “And why the hell didn't we carry our rucks instead of the hop bags? I think I've got one of Hog's dead prostitutes in mine.”

“You bitching already, Donna?” Hagan asked.

Dalonna spit at Hagan's boots and Hagan looked at Cooke and brightened. Cooke was smiling. He had his head tilted back and took in a deep breath of air.

The men were briefed about the air quality after each hop. Government reps would welcome them from the bird, tell them they were glad they made it home safe, and then shake their hands and let them know they'd receive compensation in the future if the air they just left carried carcinogens and they got sick. They meant if the men got cancer and died.

Hagan smiled. “Nowhere else you'd rather be, huh?”

Cooke shook his head.

He looked comfortable, relieved. Happy.

Home.

•   •   •

T
he squadron they were relieving lined the outside walls of the hangar. There were twelve men. Beards trimmed, shaved, or styled. Skin tanned. Their gear formed a protective perimeter around themselves and most of them sat with their backs propped against the wall, sleeping or staring at the ceiling. They looked deflated in their wrinkled fatigues and they sprawled limp across the floor like they were shrinking or trying to hide in their clothes. A few guys stood in tight circles with their arms crossed, toeing the floor with their boots. They'd leave in a few hours, after their bird gassed up and passed its checks. None of the men from the exiting or entering squadrons spoke to the other teams as the forklifts dropped off the rucks for the entering squadron.

Red taillights crept up to the hangar in the dark and four black short buses wheeled onto the concrete floor. The squadrons just off the bird threw their hop bags and rucks into the trunks and Shaw sat in a middle seat with Massey, in front of Cooke, Dalonna, and Hagan. The seats were rough with dirt and hard spots. Mud or melted hard candy was worked into the fabric. The buses left the hangars, the smooth concrete giving way to rough rock, and Shaw looked back through the dark windows. None of the men in the hangar watched the buses leave.

“Man,” Hagan said a little while later. “That smell.”

“I'd already forgotten about it,” Cooke said. He winked at Hagan.

“At least we're not building a FOB out of a damn hillside with Hajji pissing down on us,” Hagan said. “Remember that, Donna?”

Dalonna didn't answer, so Massey and Hagan looked back. Dalonna had his head on the window glass, and his snores and the sound of rocks hitting the underside of the bus filled the cabin. He might have been faking it but was more likely already asleep. Cooke stared out the window and, though he'd dug the forward operating base out of the hillside with Hagan and Dalonna years ago, said nothing. Massey and Shaw had been with another team then, another country. Hagan shrugged and closed his eyes.

Their FOB was one of the largest in the country. Not yet a full-blown base with Burger Kings and McDonald's, it was nestled in a low valley separating Shiite and Sunni communities where a formerly private airport had been turned into a public engine of war for the Americans. The original dirt airfield had been paved, expanded, and maintained for the cargo planes that unloaded endless troops and mountains of munitions daily. Numerous helipads had been erected on both sides of the runway, where gentle mounds of earth and air-traffic shacks once stood, and rows of dust-colored clapboard buildings erected from cheap siding and tin roofing housed expensive air conditioners and even more expensive computer systems. The rows of clapboard buildings expanded from the airfield in all directions like the ripples sent out from a rock thrown into a pond. The ripples spread throughout the low valley until the land had been turned into a blanket of concrete slabs, watchtowers, concertina wire, and temporary architecture linking the two Islamic communities that were often at war with each other. Most of the structures lining the perimeter of the FOB housed supplies and troops who would patrol the nearby Sunni and Shiite communities. Smaller communities that flanked the main airfield were separated from the larger FOB by twelve-foot-high concrete blast walls on all sides. Special operators lived in the small communities and built their own private helipads off the main airfield. They maintained their own aircraft for the missions that would take them hundreds of miles away from the FOB in all directions. The maze of concrete checkpoints leading from the main airstrip to the Special Operations communities took the longest to navigate even though they were closer to the airstrip than the conventional unit communities—in some cases by five miles or more.

The buses maneuvered through the endless concrete barriers and checkpoints in the moonlight while small flashes of light burst through tiny holes and cracks in the concrete. If Shaw had strained his neck he could have seen stars and clouds floating above the barriers, but he was asleep. They all were. The buses wheeled past two large concrete slabs joined by a large metal gate with concertina wire coiled from the ground to the top, and then took a nauseating set of sharp turns to pass through a quarter-mile of stone switchbacks, erected to prevent suicide bombers. Then the brakes hit and the buses stopped. The men woke up, got out of the buses, and grabbed their bags and rucks from the trunks. They stacked their bags against a section of wall so the GMVs could pass through and then the buses backed out, navigated the switchbacks in reverse, and sped off.

“Walk it out,” their CO called out. “Briefing room's got a green ChemLight, war room blue, phones and computers yellow. Tents are red. Anything without a light is a shitter. I'll check on the chow. Briefing room at 0530.”

Their CO was tall and dark-haired. He had a sharp face with angles that could cut a hand. His mind was tireless and quick, and he didn't sleep much. He couldn't stand still or grow a beard the way he wanted, so he grew the hair on his head to his shoulders and kept his face shaved close. Never one to comb his hair, he embraced the mad-scientist look but was handsome enough to be in a boy band. He never doubted his men's decisions or let anyone else take the fall for a fuckup. The men loved him and would do anything he asked.

It was 0500 hours when the buses had offloaded the men, and their bags and the sun had already begun softening the dark. The men didn't need headlamps since they could see by the sun preparing to jump from beneath the horizon. Shaw grabbed his hop bag and ruck and followed Hagan and Massey down a wooden walkway to the last tent with a red ChemLight taped to the door handle. Four tin shacks without lights sat opposite the four tents with red ChemLights. A bathroom opposite each tent—four ribs on either side of the wooden walkway sternum. Cooke got to the door of the tent first. He opened the handle and stepped into a fridge. The tents were air-conditioned and running full blast. Years ago they'd land somewhere and have to carve out living quarters in rock or dirt and sleep in the holes they'd dug. Their beds were mounds of dirt and sweat-stained rock. Now they had climate-controlled tents. They were certainly winning the war of comfort.

Hagan danced the length of the tent with his hop bag cradled around his shoulder like a girl he'd decided to fireman-carry. He moved his feet gracefully over the wood floors and each step kicked up a small cloud of dust that vanished in the dark of the tent. He threw his bag on the top bunk of a set in the right corner and Massey took the bed next to Shaw, and Dalonna and Cooke spread out along the opposite wall. The men put their hop bags on the top bunks and unrolled sleeping bags and blankets on the bottoms.

“Let's find some bottles,” Hagan shouted.

Pissing outside when the temperatures would stay above the century mark for another few weeks was frowned upon. The sun would bake the tin-shack shitters into ovens, so the men used empty bottles. Empty Gatorade ones were a favorite for the large mouth. Bowel movements demanded tolerance for the shit ovens or well-timed breaks during the dark hours.

“That's fine,” Dalonna said. “But take that shit outside every morning. Last hop I grabbed for some water and drank someone else's dip spit or piss. I don't want to know which it was.” The guys laughed and Dalonna turned around to a whiteboard nailed to the door of the tent. It had black lines taped in a grid pattern. “I'm serious. It was sick.”

Dalonna wrote their names in the empty column on the left with a marker tied to the board with a white string. They'd mark an
x
under the column where they were at all times. Shitters. War room. Briefing room. Gym. Chow hall. Phones. The range.

Shaw grabbed his baseball glove from his hop bag and threw it on his bed. It was ashy black and beautiful, the gloss faded from a decade of sun and dirt and being broken in under the tires of Humvees. It fit like a surgical glove. The ball practically hit his bare palm. Massey threw his on his bed, too. It was a ratty brown, dried-up nightmare. Shaw's fingers nearly bled just looking at the sharp edges and frayed straps around the mitt.

“Did your dad bring that from Cuba?” Hagan asked.

“Guatemala,” Massey said. “And no. And fuck you.”

Hagan laughed. “Guys,” he said, and put his big arms around Shaw and Massey. “I forgot mine.”

Hagan never had a glove. Hagan was a mooch. Shaw grabbed a catcher's mitt from his bag and threw it at him.

“It's stiff,” Shaw said.

“That's okay, Shaw. I love stiffies.”

Hagan smiled and hugged Shaw from behind. Shaw knocked on his ribs with his elbow until Hagan let him go and Cooke smiled and brought a foot-long metal pole out of his bag and some horseshoes.

“Yeah, you do,” Cooke said. “But stiffy lover or not, we're gonna knock down these shoes.” He had a huge wad of fine-cut in his lower lip and raised his eyebrows. Then he left the tent.

Dalonna said he was going to the war room and grabbed his rifle and ruck and left the tent. Shaw and Massey followed him while Hagan helped Cooke put the horseshoe stake in the ground outside their tent.

The three found the blue ChemLight leading down a set of stairs not far from their tent. The room was built into the ground, the roof raised a few feet above the earth. Wooden lockers spanned the room from floor to ceiling and end to end. Everything smelled of metal, Velcro, gun oil, and dust. Other teams had already claimed spots, set their helmets on top of the lockers, with their rucks, kits, and weapons placed neatly in the lockers. Cases of batteries and full mags lined footlockers with the tips of their rounds winking bright in the light. Someone had taped up a picture of a woman spreading her legs and pointing a pistol through her panties with
Local pussy kills
written underneath her in black ink. Hagan kissed his fingers and tapped the woman's crotch when he passed, and Shaw found a spread of open lockers spanning two walls and a corner and grabbed five. He put up a couple pictures of his grandparents and Hagan saw them and nodded.

“How do, Gramms.” He said it slow, with respect.

Shaw smiled and looked at his grandma. His favorite picture had her billowing white hair tied up in a handkerchief while she held tomatoes from her garden in her hands. She smiled wide and the tomatoes looked huge in her small hands, her pint-sized body. His grandpa's hand was reaching toward the vegetables at the edge of the shot he'd taken himself. She had a smooth face until the day she died and she wore an agate necklace in the picture. It was deep blue, with smoky white lines running around the circumference. His grandpa said he'd found it on a beach, which was a known and loved lie. Shaw held the necklace in his pocket. He'd had it with him ever since she passed. Dalonna took out a picture of his family and taped it at eye level, flush on the wood that would house his helmet and NODs. His daughters held a shared hand over his wife's belly. One of the girls was prettier than the other, but they were both cute. They were dressed in purple and pink ballet leotards and smiling wide, both missing a whole mess of teeth. One of the girls had orange painted across her lips and must've gotten into a bag of Cheetos before the shot. Dalonna never tired of saying his son was high-fiving his girls in the picture. He smiled while he taped the pictures to his locker. Besides the pictures of his girls, he taped up a photo of an ultrasound that made his son look like a wrinkled old man, a picture of his wife on their wedding day, and one of himself with his grandfather during a visit to the Philippines years before.