The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (50 page)

This world looked old by design. She put on the headphones, taken by, but not quite believing, the wearing brightness and the bare sunshine. The waters of a great river brought sparingly to the plains, passed plant to plant through channels and tubes and tight little ditches, and the transformation from flat desert to a continuous roadside oasis struck her as ingenious, hard-earned, and beautiful.

She could distinguish voices under the drone of the engine. Rem, and one, maybe two other men, laughing, discussing how the village wasn’t on the map.
How wild is that? Shouldn’t be there.
Across the radio, she could just about hear a voice singing and sounding like a taunt.

*

The next morning, stopped on Lake Shore Drive, Cathy smoothed the apron over her stomach, and thought again of this oasis: a clear image of water channels, low mud walls, a wild pampas-like grass, but mostly the palm trees, strong leaning trunks, a wild bush of fronds – home to what kinds of bird? What right did Rem have crying, homesick, in some boxy room, when he was free of this monotony?

She wasn’t eating regularly, she’d lost too much weight too quickly, enough to stop her periods. These things happened when she became stressed. Outward, she appeared to manage. Inward, everything became a mess: eating, sleeping, shitting, menstruation, every basic function thrown out of whack.

✩

Rem could smell the camp before they came across it. A smell, from a distance, of newly turned earth, slightly foetid, not entirely unpleasant. Closer still the stink fastened to the back of his throat, turned penetrative and meaty.

Forty minutes earlier they’d come through palm groves and an ordered grid of dry irrigation channels surrounding an unmarked village, Khat. Now they sat at the head of an incline, a great plate of desert about them, falling on all sides – except to the west where a small bare hill concealed the camp. The tops of two water tanks half buried in the hill, a wire fence, and a cable-wire gate were all that could be seen from the road.

They drove slowly down the track into Camp Liberty. To their right a Quonset hut with a ribbed barrel roof and a long garage door, rosy in the late sun, with two blackened diggers pulled-up behind. To their left an uneven line of HOSCO cabins. This, Rem understood, was the camp, barely enough to justify the journey. The track continued in a wavering line toward the burn pits. Behind them, the highway struck straight, north–south. Further to the west the land lost distinction, the wind drove up a fleshy haze and the horizon faded to flat tones. He couldn’t figure why the camp was based here, nothing established its reason, no commanding feature, water, nothing, except that it lay equidistant between the Kuwaiti border, the Saudi border, and a small town called Khat.

When the vehicles stopped the men stepped out, and one by one looked about, expecting more and failing to find anything. Each one of them took shallow breaths and looked to Rem as if he was the source of the stink. Samuels sloped out last, a spanked dog, all tremors and passing terror, the only one not appalled by the stench.

Rem asked Pakosta if this was it.

‘Just about.’

‘Dead things. It smells of bad meat, animal fat.’ Santo pinched his nose, swatted the flies matting Watts’ back.

The plastic cabins were raised on wood pallets. Their fronts and sides, pitted by the sand, were so badly weathered that grit stuck in them and gave them a soft furred look. Santo gouged out the screws, and when the door opened he jumped back. ‘Something in here!’

The men gathered in a huddle and peered cautiously inside. The floor, black, appeared to move.

‘It’s ash.’ Santo thought this funny, and wafted the door and the ash stirred, disturbed as the surface of a lake.

The bed, a simple cot, at least had a mattress but the room was otherwise bare. Rem had the common sense to make sure the men brought fresh bedding and bed rolls, something more comfortable at least than their accommodation back at Amrah. He charged Samuels and Clark with checking each of the cabins. Fleas, bugs, roaches. Scorpions. Rats. Spiders. He had no idea what was out here.

Rem asked Pakosta to drive him about the camp. He wanted to see the burn pits as he didn’t yet know how to speak to the men about their work: everything was new and unfamiliar.

A home-made sign outside the Quonset pointed to ‘The Pits / The Beach’.

Pakosta turned the Humvee aggressively about. ‘I have one more property. I think you’ll like what we’ve done here. Honest to god.’

Pakosta drove first to the Beach. If Rem wanted to get a measure of this vast nothing, then the Beach was the place to start.

‘I was here in February. We had to haul a truck out of one of the pits. We should have just pushed it in.’

The Beach, a long dune, almost as high as the camp, formed a crescent-shaped gulley around an open tip of abandoned vehicles and equipment – most of it stripped of usable parts. The Beach rode up behind as a steep roll of sand.

‘This is where they dump hardware which won’t burn.’ He strode up the dune expecting Rem to follow. Once on the crest he struck a pose and swept out his arms to the north and north-west. ‘Nothing of interest until the border. Belongs to A-rabs, scorpions, camels, and desert rats. Nothing going out, and nothing coming back. If anything did happen to come at us we’d see it several days before it got here. Not so from the other direction.’ Pakosta turned to point south with two fingers, pistol-fashion.

‘Our closest neighbour is Khat. Sometimes the support and supply convoys from Camp Navistar to LSA Anaconda in Baghdad are obliged to take this road: and on occasion the good citizens of Khat choose to stone the vehicles, to slow them down and rob them, because the convoys come from Shuaiba or Camp Arifjan, and bring eggs, milk, bread, flour, you name it. Foodstuffs. Fuel. If we’re smart we’ll have nothing to do with them. Fortunately most of them believe that the pits are used to destroy chemicals and toxic material.’ Pakosta swept his hand to the east. ‘Which brings us to Camp Crapper, the largest and last burn pit in southern I-raq, which, to my knowledge, has never been permanently manned.’ Pakosta spat into the sand then levelled his arms. ‘So, what the fuck are we doing here?’

Rem gave Pakosta an honest answer. ‘Because this is the last job in town. Everywhere else doesn’t look so good right now. Why are you here?’

‘This is my career.’ Pakosta gave a laugh. ‘I’m serious. This country is my future. I’m never going back.’

Before returning to the cabins they stopped at the burn pits. Five long and shallow trenches, each as broad as a truck. Inside the pits a mess of black glue and scorched semi-recognizable detritus: a freezer unit, gypsum boards, a bicycle frame, half-burned boxes and bags melded together, yet to properly burn, but mostly an uneven field of papery black and grey ash.

As soon as he shut the cabin door Rem didn’t know what to do with himself. Tired? Certainly. But ready to sleep? He wrote a list of what he wanted to say to Geezler, and outlined their abandonment by the security unit, the highway that stopped in the middle of the desert, the stink of the pits, and how the camp was more remote than he’d imagined. Even so, despite these aggravations, he didn’t doubt that Camp Liberty would be better and safer than Amrah once everything began to settle into place. Rem couldn’t see there being much to report on, day to day. Whatever Geezler wanted from him had already been satisfied. The pits were now manned.

Neither his cellphone nor the satellite phone could pick up a signal. Rem wasn’t sure how to use the satphone: a handset with what looked like a folding hotplate. Tomorrow they’d resolve this. Watts would know. Communications would need to be established with Amrah, no one would be happy if contact home wasn’t possible.

Each of the men secure in a cabin. No wind. No traffic. Rem turned off the flashlight and lay on the bed in utter darkness. Wide awake.

Part way through the night the lack of sound finally bore into him. A stillness compacted by his heartbeat, the changing pressure in his ears, the random babble in his head, his stomach, his breath, mostly his breath: so that the night slowed down to these small things.

He’d covered himself with mosquito repellent. Thought it better to show caution and hope that the mixed fumes of repellent and sweat would deter anything Clark and Samuels might have missed.

Rem fretted over Cathy. He wanted a little home comfort, a presence, some body warmth. He couldn’t think of Cathy without imagining her falling down. He pictured endless scenarios of Cathy suddenly falling, sometimes heavy: on the El platform, crossing a road, climbing stairs; and sometimes slow, as if asleep: driving, in the street, in the shower, at the stove, the room catching light as she lay on the floor. And on, and on. Cathy tumbling, striking her head, not being found. All of this trouble for a ring and a couple of watches.

A sound grew from outside, the fast mechanical cut and chop of a helicopter, the twin rotors of a Chinook. A helicopter, twin rotors. By the time he’d found his boots and made it outside the drop was completed. Four crates lowered behind the Quonset, dust settling, the helicopter already leaning backward into the sky. Hard spotlights and a lit interior cabin.

He looked down the row and saw Santo smoking outside his hut. The two men waved liked neighbours in any neighbourhood.

✩

In the news the bombing of four Amrah City markets in the same day, sixty-seven dead in a strip-mall that looked much like the local K-Mart with its parking lot and a broad, stippled concrete hood sheltering the sidewalk. Both the
Times
and the
Post
ran photographs of men stumbling over rubble, startled, dusty, hands to their heads. After waiting at the checkout Cathy changed her mind and left the newspapers on the counter. She didn’t need this. Although she’d known his return was indefinitely delayed, it was today that the information sank through and began to hurt. It meant an anniversary alone. It meant reorganizing the payments on their loans. It meant that she would not move apartment until the next summer, and they needed somewhere smaller, cheaper. She’d made and cancelled two appointments at the Howard Street clinic, thinking
this can wait
, better to go when Rem returned. No more fainting, and no dizziness, instead a lack of appetite, a general exhaustion she carried as a weight, which could be something, but could simply be sadness. This
vacation
had opened up a world of trouble. She kept newspaper clippings every time she found a report mentioning HOSCO, simply for the habit. In the
Tribune
she found a report on military wives and infidelity, and wanted to call the paper to complain, to ask what they thought they were doing? Were they really so short of ideas? Cathy took herself to the loading dock, phone in hand, ready to make the call. Not that she could bring herself to make it, because she wasn’t a military wife, just someone in the same position, and she didn’t want to have to justify herself, she just wanted to complain to someone who had to listen. The news of the bombing alarmed her; while she trusted Rem’s word that he was safe, the notion that he could be harmed stuck as a superstition. She could imagine him dead but not wounded, or if wounded not maimed, a scar perhaps, but that alone. Photographs of men lying in streets shocked and scorched made no sense to her: families would look at these images and recognize their sons and husbands.

The arrival of a package with a military frank was a reminder that Rem really was absent. He’d left her to an artificial world, and she lived expecting news from elsewhere. She drove home still dressed in the store uniform that made her itch, a ring on her finger, the
Happy Shopper
stitched on the breast pocket, and felt owned. Cathy settled her hand on the package. She had her mail delivered to a post-box because packages could not be trusted with her neighbour, Mr Liu.

Three hours at the library. Stops. Starts. Disconnections. The messages recorded on Rem’s mobile and transferred to their email account. Behind Rem a digital fuzz of flat desert and rising heat broken into shifting tonal zones of spoiled muddy ochre. The image assembled out of crude blocks, bold as thumbprints.

Rem squinted into the sun, leaned forward to speak, self-conscious and awkward. The camera propped on a car bonnet. He spoke in a fake Mexican accent, a private joke. (They played a game where he, invariably, was subordinate to her, garden-boy, pool-boy, waiter, bus-boy, and these seductions were always brief and hasty. It could happen on drives, at restaurants, at home minutes before guests arrived. Nobody they knew would guess this of them.)

‘So this is home,’ he said. Rough as it was it beat the crap out of Amrah. He’d watched the razing of entire city blocks, and for what? The idea that you could rebuild a city was messy, wrong-headed, and they hadn’t done one thing right.

Rem took off his shirt, ran his hand over his chest. He coughed before he spoke, his expression serious. ‘It makes sense,’ he said, ‘I know you don’t like it, but if I came back there wouldn’t be any work. It’s coming into summer. You know we’d be right back where we started. Anyway.’ He scratched his nose (a habit of his when he wanted to move a conversation off a sticky subject).

‘I picked these people,’ he said. ‘I get to be a manager again. I run my own team.’

Pointing to the desert, Rem said that this wasn’t anything much. It was safe, a little quiet, but definitely secure. The only trouble here would be trouble they brought on themselves through boredom. The camp was a good distance from habitation. Nothing but sand and rock and maybe a few scorpions: nothing until the border.

Cathy had her own news, wasn’t sure if she had already told him. Cissie had taken Matt back to Kansas.
I’m sorry if I’ve already said.
Cathy spoke into the phone and couldn’t help but stage her voice, pick and pronounce her words with more than her usual care. The truth is the doctors hadn’t expected him to make it this far, and now he had, they didn’t know what to do with him. They start with one thing and it affects what they do next.