The Sandbox (10 page)

24

“You need to
watch your back around Lopez, man,” Rankin says.

The fabric of the tent turns everything a muted golden color. The sun drifts toward the horizon, hazy, indistinct, weary. The day has grown old. We sit on our cots and clean our rifles. Rankin dug up some graphite to use as a lubricant instead of oil. He says it will keep the dust from sticking. The smell reminds me of elementary school, sharpening pencils after school as a punishment.

“Yeah,” I say, not really interested. I can’t seem to stop thinking about the wild girl living in the abandoned toy factory. I keep trying to remember what it was that made me think the kid was a girl in the first place. But then again, what the hell difference does it make?

“You listening to me, Private Durrant? Return from la-la land.” Rankin thumps me on the leg with his rifle stock. “I mean it. Lopez is up to something.”

“I don’t understand why he has such a hard-on for me.”

“What?” Rankin snorts. “You mean to tell me you forgot already? At the time, you were weeping and moaning to beat the band.”

“What are you talking about?” I say, laying the barrel of my rifle on a cloth beside me.

“Since you’re having trouble, let’s go step by step. How’d you get kicked out of jump school?”

“I punched that little shit Reyes in the face.”

Rankin taps his nose with a finger.

I’d spent only about two weeks in Airborne training before I lost my temper and, in a moment of weakness, popped a fellow soldier one in the jaw. I was on a flight back to Fort Stewart the next morning. The sole reason I’d joined the Army was to jump out of planes, and I’d blown it all in thirty seconds. At the time, I’d considered deserting.

“So what?”

“I can’t believe you don’t know this shit, man. Reyes is Lopez’s half-brother.”

“Goddamn. Nobody told me that. Why didn’t you?”

“I’m telling you right now.”

I give him a look.

“He’s out to fuck with your shit, man.” Rankin squirts a bit of graphite into the barrel of his rifle and rams a brush in after it.

“No kidding.”

“I found him in here this afternoon going through your bag.” He clicks the stock of his rifle into place and sets it on his lap.

“What the fuck?” I say. “That asshole.”

“He says to me, ‘Durrant took my K-pot by accident during the mortar attack. I thought it might be in here.’”

“Bullshit.” I pace from my cot to the inner tent flap and back.

“That’s what I told him. Bullshit. I said to him, next time I catch you fucking around in here, I don’t give a good Goddamn if you outrank me or not, I’m going to kick your ass. He hustled his self right out of here.”

“Man, you’re right. He’s up to something. That sneaky little fucker.” I tell him what Lopez said when he cornered me in the garage after the IED attack. The whole business with him pointing to his eye.

Rankin laughs. I pace another circuit of our cramped tent.

Rankin stands up and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t let him rattle you, D. I’m going to ask around. We’ll figure out what kind of shit he’s stirring up.”

“It’s me that’ll be stirring shit. For the next month. I got the shit-burning detail.”

“For the factory thing?”

“Yeah.”

Rankin shakes his head and mumbles something.

“What?”

“This whole place is fucked up. We’re down here with barely enough guys to field a fucking football team, and if the boy is right they’re gathering up in the Noses, waiting and watching. Breeding like cockroaches. Yesterday somebody told me they spotted like forty hajjis over by—aw, fucking forget it. Since they carted off half the FOB, you can’t trust anybody.”

“But me,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, “like I said, you can’t trust anybody.”

We both laugh.

I stand there staring at my cot, wondering what the hell Lopez was looking for. I run a list of my belongings through my head. There’s nothing here that could get me in trouble. I finished off the last of my Cassandra whiskey a couple of weeks ago and buried the bottle in a sand dune behind the garage. Nothing else comes to mind.

“We’ll be cleaning this shit up for the next month,” Rankin says, upending his go bag and shaking out the sand.

I stand at the door of the tent for a moment and listen.

“I’ll be damned,” I say. “You hear that, Portis?”

“Don’t call me that.” Portis is his first name, his mother’s maiden name. An old tradition in the South. “What?” He stops fussing with his gear. “I don’t hear nothing.”

“Exactly,” I say, “no wind.”

“Shit, man, you’re right.”

I open the tent flap. A heavy breeze still blows across the parade ground, piling sand in drifts against anything vertical, but it’s nothing compared to what it was an hour earlier. I step outside. This is the first time I’ve seen the Comm Trailer from my tent since the storm started. Waist-high dunes of powdery dirt have collected on the southwestern sides of the trailers and Conexes. Common Tent 2 leans at a precarious angle, sagging under a load of sand. The guy wires droop. As the storm recedes, it leaves a filmy golden-brown mist hanging thick in the air. The wind smells like unwashed hair. The broken rocks of the Noses draw lines of purple shadow across the plain, and even here in the desert there is the sound of birds. I’m going to get that fucker, I tell them. They don’t seem to care one way or the other.

25

I wake in
the night and can’t go back to sleep. Rankin snores and mumbles in his cot. I’ve gotten used to his night sounds. In fact, I find them soothing now. He sleeps on one side with his hands tucked under his neck and his mangled pinkie stuck in the corner of his mouth like a pacifier. The only time I ever mentioned this sleeping habit of his, Rankin stormed out of the tent.

The air feels warm and moist from our mingled breath. Instead of hanging in the air, the dust from the storm now sticks to everything. When I accidentally brush the wall of the tent with my elbow, I find it’s coated with a damp paste. I sit up and rub my eyes. They’re still sore from the blowing grime. Something bothers me about the captured boy’s story. I keep turning it over in my head. It doesn’t make sense that he’d confused our three Humvees for a convoy of tribal thugs. Their overlook hadn’t been more than fifty yards from the highway. Not only that, how could he know there were insurgents massing up in the Noses and that they planned on attacking us in large numbers sometime soon? If these two tribes are enemies, it seems very unlikely the boy’s group could get such specific information. Perhaps the lieutenant is right. Maybe they are spreading disinformation. On the other hand, the boy seemed sincere. Hunches, however, aren’t always so easy to explain to your commanding officer.

The wind has risen again during the night, and I have to move from tent to tent in order to find my way over to the motor pool without getting lost. Someone has turned the emergency lights out. The steel door on the south side is blocked by sand. I have to climb in through a half-collapsed hallway in the rear of the old fort. When I turn into the hallway leading to the makeshift prisoner clinic, I hear a soft throbbing sound. I can’t quite make sense of it until I reach the door to the boy’s room. Doc Dyson sits slumped against the wall with his head in his hands. He’s sobbing so loudly, he doesn’t hear me approach. A jolt of electricity races from my stomach to my throat.

“Doc,” I say.

Dyson looks up at me and blinks. A string of snot stretches from his nose to his knee. For a moment he doesn’t recognize me, and then, suddenly, he does. His expression sours. “What the hell do you want?”

“What’s happened?”

“They’re dead.” He wipes his face with his sleeve.

“They?” I say.

“Gerling and the boy.”

“How did it happen?”

“How do you think?” he says. “They got shot, bled out, and then died. If it wasn’t for this fucking storm, they’d still be alive. They didn’t have to die from those wounds.”

I keep thinking about what the boy said about Ahmed.

“Dyson,” I say, trying not to yell, “did anything seem strange about the way they died? Could someone have made it happen tonight on purpose?”

Doc Dyson stares at me, his eyes blank and uncomprehending.

“Could it?” I ask, my voice rising.

“Come here,” he says. It takes him a long moment to stand. His knees pop like snapped sticks.

I follow him into the room. The boy lies naked on the steel gurney. His bandage has been removed. There is a hole the size of a dime in his lower abdomen, just above the hip bone. Dyson gestures for me to come closer. He rolls the body over. I suck in air and fight the urge to run from the room. In his lower back, there’s a ragged wound about the size of the boy’s own fist. I try to swallow but can’t. My throat is perfectly dry. If Rankin’s shot had been just a little bit higher, the bullet might have hit him in the heart and he would have bled out on the spot; and if Rankin had aimed just a little to the left, the boy might still be breathing. But this is one of the most dangerous games you can play as a soldier. It never leads to anything good, and so I force myself to stop. One thing at a time. Focus on the task at hand.

“How the hell did that happen?”

“These bullets are designed to roll once they hit. More stopping power.”

“Goddamn.”

“Don’t give me that shit, Durrant. You know what these weapons do.”

“It’s just—” I stop. I don’t know what it just is.

“When I came to give him a shot for pain, it was too late.” Doc Dyson makes a choking sound, which he tries to disguise with a cough. “He’d torn off his bandages. It was a mess. The kid must have been squirming all over the place. I should have gotten here sooner, but the fucking wind started up again. A gutshot is about the worst pain you can imagine. He must have pulled the sutures loose, rolling around. By the time I’d gotten here, he’d already bled to death.”

“You think it was an accident?”

“If you call getting shot in the belly an accident.”

“I mean, you didn’t see any footprints in the blood or—”

“This isn’t fucking CSI Kurkbil, Durrant. The kid got shot. He died.”

“What about Gerling?”

“Studdie sat with him all night. His body just gave out on him.”

“Could anybody else get in here?”

“You did, didn’t you? The kid didn’t need a guard. He couldn’t even walk.”

I try not to look at the body, but I find it impossible. My eyes keep getting sucked back to it like water to a drain. The boy died clenching his fists. I wonder if he was fighting someone off. Blood pooled on the surface of the gurney drips onto the floor. Near the doorway, I see a long red smudge. Like a shoe might make. This means nothing, but still I think of Ahmed, how he pushed on the boy’s wound while Doc and I were out in the hall talking.

“Shit,” I say.

“Very eloquent.” Doc Dyson presses his eyelids closed with his pinkies. “Would you please just get the fuck out of here?”

I do.

26

We hold a
brief service at dawn. Most of the base assembles on the parade ground. It is at moments like this that you really see how badly undermanned we are. Thirty-nine men stand at attention facing west. Up front, someone has set up the wobbly card table from Common Tent 2 and draped it with a green piece of canvas. Two pairs of boots. Two rifles with fixed bayonets pointed down. Two helmets balanced atop the gunstocks. I can just make out the name Saunders stenciled in black on the left helmet. The lieutenant walks to the front and looks out at us. It is so quiet I can hear the canvas snapping against the table’s leg each time a breeze rises. Sweat pours down my face and into my eyes. I try my best to blink it away. We stand at attention, so I cannot wipe it off on my sleeve. I close my eyes. Doc Greer stands to my immediate right. His stomach makes a loud gurgling sound.

The lieutenant clears his throat and asks us to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Usually we sing “Amazing Grace,” which none of us really likes. Today we sing with gusto, at least until the end of the second verse. After this, fewer and fewer soldiers know the words. Here is a song I’ve heard so many times, it’s been reduced to a gray mush. This morning it becomes something utterly new, something shiny and pure, but then we lose track of the words, start mumbling and it turns right back into mush. For a moment, I thought this service might be something special, so when it isn’t, the disappointment feels worse. The wind sucks each note from our mouths and whips it away. Across the parade ground, above the mud brick walls, and up into the dark purple hills.

Finally, when it becomes obvious that we’re all just mumbling, the lieutenant holds up his hand. Every back I see is soaked with sweat. Hazel is right in front of me. His shoulders quiver. The lieutenant bows his head and mumbles a prayer. Then he speaks about the two lost men. It is a short speech and it deals mainly in generalities. Loyalty, bravery, courage. While he babbles on, I do my best to really think about them.

The last time I spoke with Gerling was during a poker game. I took every cigarette he had with three jacks, an ace of clubs and a king of hearts. He joked about it, but I could see he was pissed off. Now I wish I’d just let him win. Gerling was the kind of guy that could shave three times a day and still have a shadow on his cheeks. Thick black hair curled up over the collar of his shirt. Doc Greer liked to call him “Guerilling.” I know he had a brother in high school. He loved the loud, fast guitar work of Metallica. What else? Not a hell of a lot. He hated beef enchilada MREs, so he always gave them to me. Gerling didn’t talk much about himself, or anything really. And Lieutenant Saunders. About him I know nada. Not even his home town. For some reason, this saddens me. These men have been knocked right off the surface of the earth. And at any moment, this could happen to me. There’s only one person who would be left to remember my face. Clarissa. That’s it. My child wouldn’t even remember me. It feels selfish to mourn my own death at a time like this, but these thoughts push themselves into my head. Like a broken faucet, they drip, drip, drip their way into my mind no matter what I try to think about.

Sergeant Oliphant presses PLAY on the battered little boom box from Common Tent 1. A shrill, tinny version of “Taps” squawks out of the speakers. An honor guard shoulders rifles and fires off a volley of salutes. Then, just after the last shots die away, the CD player skips. The final measures of the song hiccup and judder. The trumpet makes a series of blats. The sergeant jumps forward and swats the player until the song stops. We are dismissed.