The Kills: Sutler, the Massive, the Kill, and the Hit (51 page)

She didn’t like the cadence of her voice, all Southern sing-song that made light of any trouble: every
burden
being a
blessing
in disguise. Christ, wasn’t that the word they used?
Blessing
? This was her family’s doing. How even the worst news came sugar-glazed, every word freighted with
blessings
. How had she escaped this life? And how was it, even after all these years, that her voice betrayed this last tail of home?

She started up the recording and spoke into the phone. Mike and Jenny have moved.
See? Even this sounds happy?
Drove by yesterday. They’re gone. Packing cases on the porch which makes it look like they were in a hurry. There were four signs of foreclosures along Ravenswood. That’s four in one block.

She’d seen a dog in the park just like Nut, except he was on a lead and barking. Nut never barked. Far across the park the dog strained against its lead, gave the man a struggle, and while it wasn’t Nut, couldn’t have been, she felt guilty for not making sure.

Cathy ended with the realization that everyone had gone. It’s me, she said, and Maggie. Ten years in this town and I know one person. How can this happen so quickly? We had a full life, didn’t we? Now I know one person.

She paused the recording and then deleted the message, and resolved to start again in the morning.

✩

The satphone worked only in the late afternoons, communications dropped and stuttered alternately compressing and stretching distance and expectation. Watts sat with Rem beside the water tanks and tried to help Rem send messages back to ACSB, when the news came back that it was closing.

‘You knew this?’ Watts asked.

‘First I’ve heard.’

‘Clark said something when we were leaving.’

‘He knew?’

‘Rumour.’

They looked down the highway.

‘Haven’t seen one vehicle.’

The highway trailed back, an empty spine. Not one thing on it.

Geezler wanted to know about the map. He’d consulted the maps at HOSCO and none of them had a highway running alongside the Saudi border. Rem asked Watts where the maps had come from.

‘Stores.’ Watts shrugged. ‘The usual.’

Rem asked Kiprowski: if the maps came from Stores, then where did Stores get them?

Kiprowski took the map and looked it over, held the paper close to his face to read, and found printed in the corner a small tagline, S-CIPA. This one came from Southern-CIPA, he said.

Rem managed to send his reply before the lines dropped. Pleased to have a result, he’d forgotten to ask the main question he’d had since they’d arrived: now they were here,
exactly what were they supposed to do?

On the second morning they were woken by the arrival of six yellow garbage trucks. Groots. The same back-loading garbage trucks he’d seen on the streets of Chicago. The convoy arrived early, pre-dawn, and the men duly rose, curious, to greet them. At first sight they thought this funny: dump trucks with the municipal labels and signs stripped from the sides, here, in the middle of Iraq. And yellow? The driver of the first truck, a Ukrainian, Stas, was surprised to find the camp occupied, and when he jumped out of his cab he asked if Rem needed a permit or a manifest now, like at Bravo and SCB Alpha. Rem admitted that he didn’t know, and Stas assured him that there wasn’t too much to it.

‘Here we come with no permits.’

Stas carried about a small towel, which he used to wipe his hands and forehead. He spoke briefly with the other drivers, called Chimeno to him, and asked him to drive the tanker from the Quonset and follow them down to the pits. A line of blocked shapes, dim in the pre-dawn, headlights busy with insects, slowly followed the track downhill, their vibration humming through the night air.

Pit 4, closest to the Beach, was the deepest. Stas explained in broken English how he’d helped excavate the pit.

‘You dug this out?’ Rem couldn’t quite follow. ‘You made this?’

Rem’s question made him laugh. ‘You dig! Yes? You. Every week, maybe.’

The idea horrified Rem. ‘Every week we dig a new pit?’

‘No, you dig
the same
pit.’

This was the reason for the two diggers parked behind the Quonset.

‘How do you know when?’

‘To dig? You’ll know.’ The pits, Stas indicated, became full, and with a chopping motion he demonstrated how the pits were extended by cutting and in-filling, and by this process they grew at one end and shrank at the other. Continually dug out of the sand they crept, caterpillar-style, into the desert. Now it made sense why they were placed in a star-like configuration, radiating away from one another.

‘How often?’ Rem wanted to make this clear.

‘Depends.’ Stas pinched his nose. ‘Sand will stop the smell. But not so much.’ He wiped the back of his neck then waved the towel in the air. ‘The fire will stop the flies. You have clothes?’

Rem had found a crate of protective suits in the Quonset. Firemen’s bunker gear, rubberized suits with reflective belts and black zippers. He sent Chimeno back to the compound and told him to hurry.

Stas tied the towel over his mouth, bandit-style, and supervised the dumping. The trucks began to unload one at a time at the near end of the pit. The first truck shivered as the pistons struggled to tip the container high enough and the contents slipped out in a dense and mudlike mass.

Pakosta started laughing. ‘That’s disgusting.’ The men watched as the black waste flopped into the pit. ‘Man, that’s graphic.’

The second truck spewed out a muddle of white bags and they watched them roll and slop, getting now a sense of depth and scale.

‘My parents,’ Pakosta shouted above the noise, ‘won a vacation on a game show. A week in Kenya. For five days they saw nothing. Some giraffes. A couple of hyenas. Someone brought them a dead snake. On their last night they stopped at this water hole and saw, like, fifty hippos – and all these hippos did was back up to the water and shit in it for something like half an hour. They made a video.’

Chimeno returned with one suit folded over his arm. Reflective strips caught the light from the trucks. ‘There’s five complete, and another one without the mask-thing, and a whole bunch of different filters.’

Stas told Chimeno to dress in the suit, then showed him how to unhook a hose from the side of the tanker, then clamp the mouth to a faucet on the back. Satisfied, Stas walked a good ten metres from the pit and scored a line in the grit with his heels. ‘Here,’ he shouted to Rem. ‘Everyone come here.’

Once the hose was fastened, Stas warned everyone to keep their distance. ‘No smoke! OK?’

He stood Chimeno at the edge of the pit, kicked the kinks out of the hose, and made Chimeno hold it up, indicating how he should stand, and how the hose should be gripped with both hands, and secured under one arm. When he turned the spigot on, Chimeno staggered back, but managed to stabilize himself and hold the nozzle up to send out a broad spray of fuel. The remaining trucks drove back to the camp. A sharp, head-splitting fume rose from the pit.

‘Jet fuel.’ Pakosta clapped his hand over his mouth and nose.

The men naturally backed away.

After two minutes Stas closed off the spigot and called Chimeno back for assistance. Once the men had tucked the hose under the tanker he drove a good distance away, then returned running to the group.

‘Now this,’ he held up his hand. ‘Watch.’

It took Rem a moment to recognize that Stas was holding a hand grenade.

Stas held the grenade upside down, twisted the base, then lobbed it softly overarm into the pit. A gesture so casual, Rem expected nothing to result from it. As Stas stepped carefully back, Santo, Watts, Clark, Pakosta on one side, and Chimeno, Samuels, Kiprowski and Rem on the other, all followed suit.

‘And now we see.’

Less than a second later with a dull thud and a plant-like plume, spidery tufts and trails of mud sprang from the pit – in itself a disappointment – then, in one sudden conflagration, the air above the pit broke into a vast orange fireball. The heat shoved them back, then rose, startlingly dynamic.

The men hooted, clapped, slapped each other’s backs. Santo swore, punched the air. Pakosta yipped and hollered. Even Samuels smiled. Kiprowski and Rem stood side by side, hands on hips, heads upturned, awe-struck. The fire, now a single branching column, sucked air from the desert and transformed into a thick pillar of grey-flecked smoke high above them. Stas stood with the towel covering his mouth and nose.

Pakosta spat then shook his head. ‘That, right there, is exactly what we’re here for.’

The second convoy arrived an hour after the first. Dawn broke as a sour orange band, across an uninterrupted plain. Rem distributed the remaining environmental suits, then returned to the Quonset, unfolded a deckchair, and sat behind the crates, feet up, cap pulled down.

Rem woke to Pakosta’s shouts. Chimeno had collapsed. He needed to come quickly.

After loading Pit 2, Santo had discovered Chimeno on his knees right at the pit edge with his back to the mounting fire, disoriented. Santo and Samuels had hauled Chimeno to one of the trucks. Rem found him still in the cab, his suit unzipped and mask pulled to the side. Sweat stuck his T-shirt to his chest, rucked up and sodden, and his hair slicked flat to his head. Chimeno, head nodding baby-like and unable to keep his eyes open, had still not properly revived and slowly swatted away their hands. The driver, a wiry Indian, sat aside to watch, smoking. Rem asked if he could cut it out, and the man looked to his cigarette, a little put out.

‘The suits are too hot. Someone’s going to fall into one of those pits.’ Santo unbuckled the mask and unscrewed the nozzle. ‘Look at this.’ He held up the filter, a thin grey fibre disc. ‘I don’t think this is right?’

Chimeno breathed slow and deep and appeared more connected. He shuffled himself upright and wiped his nose.

‘It’s too hot. Look at him. He can’t move in the suit. They’re not fit for purpose.’ Santo refitted the nozzle to the face mask and took several attempts to align the threads. ‘Maybe just the masks, then?’

Pakosta had spoken with one of the other drivers. ‘He said this has happened before. It’s the heat.’

‘Where was this?’

Pakosta shrugged. ‘Bravo? Alpha? I didn’t ask. He was talking about another burn pit.’

Rem opened the door to let air inside, asked the driver to take Chimeno back to the cabins. He called Samuels over to ride back with Chimeno then asked Santo if they could have a word.

They both agreed the suits were a bad idea.

‘That other driver just had a towel over his face. Maybe we don’t need these things.’

They walked back to the cabins, the slope nothing more a low-grade ridge, the sand soft at the roadside, but trenched in the centre into deep curved ruts which obliged the trucks to progress slowly and steer carefully. Santo wanted to know about food, water, general supplies. Rem assured him there would be a delivery every other morning.

*

In the evening the cloud collapsed. It was such a strange phenomenon, a column of smoke that rose from the ground and obscured the pit, as if the ground belched black breath, Rem realized he’d had his eye on it throughout the day, and noticed as the day drew on how the quality of the smoke and the colour changed (black first, then thin and white, then rolling bruised purples, then blue, then orange). As it fattened it began to resist the wind and lean toward the camp. The smoke darkened and slowly descended, came down as a shower of black flakes, small papery wisps thick enough to smudge.

Astounded by this, Clark stood outside his cabin, arms outspread, while everyone else scampered for shelter and watched from doorways. Their hurry drew the flakes in a whorl behind them, statically attracted, so their backs and shoulders, their heads, were quickly dressed. This snow absorbed sound, made the men quiet, and fell as a slight stickiness so delicate it itched.

The ash worked its way through cracks and gaps into their cabins.

‘Jet fuel will strip the skin off your hands and rot your brain.’ Watts set about cleaning the masks. Took each filter apart and laid out the composite parts.

Rem returned to the pits with his camera. He brought Kiprowski with him and made the boy take photos.

‘Got that? Let me see.’

Kiprowski handed back the camera.

Rem scrolled through the images. ‘You think you can manage this? Not too taxing?’

‘No, sir.’

‘What about Samuels? You speak much with him?’

‘He keeps to himself.’

‘He’s settling in? This is just between you and me.’

‘He’s good.’

‘You think that, or you know?’

The boy looked to the pit and reconsidered. ‘I think the others could ease off, maybe.’

‘In what way?’

Kiprowski brushed flies from his eyes and squinted back. ‘I don’t know.’

‘But he’s OK?’

‘I guess. They play jokes.’

‘What kind of jokes?’

‘Someone put sand in his bunk and he was up all night.’

‘Who did this?’

Kiprowski turned to the Beach. ‘I did.’

Rem looked up from the camera, surprised. ‘Why would you do something like that?’

Kiprowski looked out at the pits again, smoke whorled from a spill of black round bags. ‘I don’t know. It wasn’t a major plan or anything.’

‘Was it Pakosta?’

‘There was a group. I don’t know. Just something that came up, I guess.’

‘But you did it?’

‘There were other ideas that weren’t so nice. I thought this was less mean.’

Rem turned off the camera, set his cap back on his head. The men were bored, new to each other, settling in and testing. He understood this.

Kiprowski stood with his hands clasped behind his back, cadet-style.

‘Back in Amrah. I heard you rode alone up Jalla Road?’

Kiprowski smiled and shook his head. ‘I got a ride at the last minute.’

‘But you were going to do it?’

Kiprowski said he didn’t know. He guessed so. Maybe. ‘Seemed as safe as anything else.’

Rem had no idea who he was speaking with and the temperamental connection didn’t help, neither did an audience. Throughout the discussion he was faced with idiot grins from Chimeno and Clark, teamed up as some redneck glee-club in matching blue T-shirts. (Chimeno: ‘Lock and Load’, with an arrow pointing to his crotch, and Clark: ‘Why Does This Keep Happening?’ The T-shirts had arrived that morning in a care package from Watts’ brother.)