The Sandbox (2 page)

2

My watch seems
to believe it’s only been eleven minutes since we stopped to check out the dead girl’s body. My watch and I, we often disagree.

Behind the second Humvee, someone pants and wheezes. “Fuck,” they say, “Goddamn.” I wipe my face with my sleeve and peer up at the line of broken boulders on the rise above the road. Nothing moves. Not even the air. Okay, I think, let’s get this shit finished and get out of here.

“I’ll be back in a couple of mikes.” I squeeze Kellen’s hand, but he doesn’t respond. Shit. His eyes are closed. A fresh trickle of blood runs from his ear and drips once, twice, three times. For a long moment, this is all I see. These slow drops. I fight the urge to wipe the blood away. “Listen, you fucker, don’t die on me.”

He groans. I let out a long breath.

I duck-walk over to the blast site, careful to look out for any potential second improvised explosive devices—IEDs—hidden in the trash along the gravel shoulder of the highway. This is a famous trick. Attract with the first blast, kill with the second. Daisy chains, they’re called. But it’s hard to see much of anything. The sunlight stings. Somewhere between here and the Humvee, I lost my sunglasses. Goddammit. I get down on my hands and knees and crawl, hoping I don’t draw the sniper’s attention. I’m looking for something like a speaker cord. I should be traveling overwatch, the standard squad formation where each man covers the rest as they move ahead, but I just want to get this done with. Blood from the pavement soaks the knees of my pants. It has already turned tacky. Sometimes I feel small bits of flesh under my palms. My hands make a nasty smacking sound each time I move. If I think about what I’m crawling over, my mouth fills with spit and my throat tightens up. One thing at a time, I tell myself. Find the wire. After a few very long moments of scanning the roadside, I start to worry they might have used a cell phone as a detonator, that there isn’t a wire. We’ve heard this is common in the capital now, but I’ve never seen it out here.

And then something I don’t see starts it all up again. Behind me, several men fire their rifles in bursts of three. My ears continue to ring from the explosion, so the reports sound far away, but they’re still as sharp as snare-drum pops. Bap, bap, bap. Bap, bap, bap.

“Motherfuck,” someone says in a slow, distinct voice. “All I wanted was to snag some Goddamn toilet paper from the PX.”

I look up over my shoulder. Nevada squats in the back of the lead Humvee with the Ma Deuce. It’s an old .50-caliber machine gun we jury-rigged to a wooden crate and ratcheted down to the truck bed. Another example of making do with fucking trash when they don’t send us the right equipment. He doesn’t fire. He just squints up at the rocks.

I keep on crawling. Right when I decide to quit and move back behind the Humvee, I see it: a thin yellow cord snaking up into the gravel. I whistle to Rankin and hold it out for him to see. He gives me the thumbs up and runs behind the line of vehicles to where I’m taking cover behind a rock. Another soldier, anonymous behind the smear of blood on his face, follows Rankin. It might be Boyette, but I don’t take the time to puzzle it out.

The wire twists up between the rocks to a massive egg-shaped boulder on the rise above the highway. I give it a flick, so we can see where it leads. Rankin indicates with hand signals that we should run for the next group of rocks. I suck in a breath and nod. Rankin fires off three rounds. I look up just in time to see a small figure in a blue windbreaker throw something before falling back behind the boulder. Whatever it is, it thuds into the sand on the other side of our rocks. He must be out of ammo, I think, if he’s chucking stones at us. Two things happen almost simultaneously—on the ridge above us, someone cries out; and just as I’m standing to get his position, I’m knocked backward by an explosion.

3

“How you doing,
Durrant?” It’s Rankin, standing above me with the sun behind his head. He’s just a fuzzy silhouette. “You all right, Big D?”

I try to sit up, but the world goes gray and I decide to stay where I am for a while. My pants feel warm and heavy and wet. Shit, I think, they’re filled with blood. I wait for the pain. It doesn’t come. I must be in shock. I guess I’m going home.

Doc Greer holds up three fingers. “How many fingers, Durrant?”

“Three,” I tell him, feeling around with my mind for the pain. “I think I got hit in the stomach or the leg. I’m bleeding all over the place. Can you see it? Is it bad?”

“Oh, man,” Rankin says, smiling.

Somewhere in the middle distance I hear Lieutenant Blankenship shouting. Another voice yells back in fast, jittery Arabic. On the pavement beside me, Lopez changes a tire. His mouth is pinched tight, and his thin black eyebrows are bunched up like angry inchworms. He seems annoyed, but all of his movements are measured and precise. Every once in a while, he glances up toward the rise where the shooters had been. I think we got at least one of them. Rankin grins at me.

“What?” I say. “What?”

“You ain’t hit.” Rankin says.

“When the grenade went off,” Doc Greer tells me, smiling now too, “you voided your bladder. It’s not an uncommon response.”

Rankin nudges my leg with his boot. “Phooey. From the smell of it, he voided more than that.”

They both laugh now. Lopez frowns at us and shakes his head. Even in the harsh sunlight, I see where his constant ironing has made permanent crease lines in his desert fatigues. I notice he’s made one of his little black crosses on the waist of his pants. Lopez draws a black cross in indelible ink on everything he owns—rifle, helmet, shirt, boots.

“Don’t you have something to do, Rankin?” Lopez says, his mouth a tight line of disapproval.

“Shit, man,” Rankin says, laughter still in his voice. “We got them. Lighten up, little Fobbit.”

Lopez doesn’t respond, but I know he’s irritated. Fobbits are what we call soldiers who try and escape the hairy missions by finding ways to stay back at the Forward Operating Base. The FOB. Lopez isn’t really a fobbit, but it entertains Rankin to call him one because it never fails to get his goat.

“I pissed myself,” I say. “I fucking pissed myself.”

Rankin gives me a long, slow nod. “You sure did.” He pulls out his tobacco pouch. “Nothing like a good smoke after a firefight. Don’t you think?” He raises his eyebrows at me.

“Let me sit up first,” I tell him. Our base has been out of ready-mades for almost two weeks. Along with toilet paper and coffee filters and about a dozen or so other basic necessities of life. I quit smoking before I left the States, right after I found out my girlfriend was pregnant, but I relish the smell of unlit rolling tobacco and the sticky residue it leaves on my fingers.

“Give him a second, Rankin,” Doc Greer says. “Let him catch his breath. Poor guy just pissed himself.”

They laugh again.

Two soldiers crunch by on the gravel, carrying a stretcher. The sun obscures their faces, but I get a good look at the guy on the stretcher. It’s the hajji in the blue windbreaker. He has the face of a twelve-year-old boy. Every few seconds he convulses with pain, clutching his belly and whimpering like a kicked dog. The hajji and I look at each other as he passes. His eyes are the same warm brown color as rolling tobacco.

“What happened?” I ask them.

“When he jumped up and chucked that grenade at you, I popped a few off and hit him just above his pelvis.” Rankin tosses the pouch and papers onto my stomach. “Right about there. I didn’t know he was just a baby.”

“Shit, man, I’d rather get hit in the head,” Doc Greer says, making a face. “At least it’s over quick. A gut shot can take days to kill you. The kid doesn’t even look like he’s got pubes.”

“I bet you’d have a good time finding out,” I say. “If you hurry, you might even have time to play pop-goes-the-weasel before they put him in the back of the Humvee.”

“Don’t ask, don’t tell,” Rankin says.

We laugh. All of us, that is, except Lopez.

Lopez stands and brushes the dust off his knees. “That poor
kid
killed Lieutenant Saunders and he just about killed Durrant here with a grenade. I hope the wound does kill him. I’d like to go over and finish him off with a pop in the head.” Lopez does the obligatory finger against the temple gesture. “It’d serve that little so-and-so right.”

“So-and-so,” Rankin says and laughs. “Man, you crack me up. So-and-so. You talk like my meemaw.”

“If you hadn’t of shot that poor
kid
, he would have killed both of you. He was holding another detonator. Look, Hazel and the hick are getting rid of it.” Lopez points to the other side of the road, where Hazel and Boyette are tearing ass across the gravel.

“Fire in the hole!” Hazel shouts.

The earth erupts behind them, making the cracked windows in the Humvee behind us rattle. The sound rumbles up through the asphalt and into my vertebrae. It seems to go on for a very long time. Dust rises above the blast site and floats across the landscape in a dense yellow cloud. I realize I’ve been holding my breath. This seems to happen a lot lately; I’ll suddenly notice I’ve been holding my breath. I’m not sure when it started. This bothers me obscurely, so I push it out of my head and exhale slowly. Someone, probably the wounded boy, begins to make a high-pitched keening sound that rises and falls like a civil defense siren.

“Shit,” Rankin says in a soft, almost apologetic voice. “You know that’s got to hurt.”

“Shut up,” Lopez says, his face purple and clenched like a fist. “Just shut up.”

4

My head clears
quickly, but even so, Rankin insists on driving back to the base. He tells me the rest of the story as we go. After I blacked out, the other hajji held us off with an AK-47 for a few minutes until he ran out of ammo. Then he tried to run away. Boyette caught him with a flying tackle and dragged him back. “There was hardly any hajji under the robe,” he told Rankin. “After I scared the shit out of him, all that was left was a beard and bones.” Rankin said the older insurgent looked like he might be the boy’s father or uncle. The old guy spat on Boyette, so he chucked him into the back of the Humvee like a spare tire. Rankin thinks they’ll send a helicopter down this afternoon to pick them up along with Kellen and Gerling. They can’t do it now because there’s a sandstorm between us and HQ. I don’t say much to all this. I keep looping the moment Kellen squeezed my hand and made that sound. It isn’t so easy to cram that one in the box.

Our original mission for the day, the whole reason both lieutenants came along, was to drive a few hours south to Inmar, the capital of the South Western Department or, as the military calls it, Six Zone, and have a meeting with the local tribal sheikhs. It was a bullshit detail, and everyone knew it except Lieutenant Blankenship. The real purpose of the trip was to trade GameCube games with some of the men at division HQ and try and snag a few cases of toilet paper and cigarettes. Lieutenant Saunders loved his video games even more than the enlisted men. Myself, I was hoping to score some Turkish Cassandra whiskey, the kind with the sexy harem girl on the label, or at the very least a bottle of arak, a fiery homemade liquor they make here. It tastes like licorice, which I hate, but it’ll fuck you up something fierce. Strictly off-limits, but the noncoms let us get away with the occasional nip as long as we’re quiet about it and they don’t actually see us drinking.

Since none of this was on the up-and-up, the only one who didn’t know the real score was Lieutenant Blankenship, the same one who’d probably end up taking the heat for this little trip turning into a soup sandwich. Lieutenant Blankenship’s a West Point ring-knocker, five months in-country and strictly by the book. In fact, he carries the book around with him. The seven-dash-eight, the infantryman’s bible. He’s a couple of years younger than I am, twenty-two or twenty-three. When I first arrived, we had a captain running the show. But after HQ decided to scale down operations, they left Lieutenant Blankenship in command of the forty-five men who remained on base. Lieutenant Saunders didn’t show up until later. This reduction was supposed to be a temporary situation, no more than a week or two. Just until they decided whether to close the base down or nudge it up to battalion strength and turn it into an operational center. It’s gone on for quite a while now, nearly a month. The lieutenant’s in command limbo. No one really knows what’s going on. Least of all him. I almost feel sorry for the guy, but not enough to set him straight about the real reasons for going to Inmar.

I wonder what effect Lieutenant Saunders’s death is going to have on the leadership of the base. Before this, the two lieutenants had shared an uneasy balance of power. Now Lieutenant Blankenship will be the sole commanding officer, along with First Sergeant Oliphant, the man who really runs the day-to-day operations. Sergeant Oliphant’s the oldest man among us, a grizzled old-timer in his forties with a gray-streaked buzz cut and arms as hard and thin as hickory ax handles. If you want something done or you want to talk with Lieutenant Blankenship, you go to Sergeant Oliphant. His relationship with the lieutenant goes beyond suction. In all the ways that really matter, Sergeant Oliphant leads and the lieutenant follows. Even Lieutenant Saunders deferred to him. As far as rank, the third in command will now be Sergeant Guzman, who is easily the most popular NCO on base. Sergeant Guzman’s a huge Puerto Rican guy in his late twenties, born in Queens and raised in Atlanta. Maybe six-foot-five or -six with gigantic muscles. He has biceps each the size of a normal guy’s thigh and a beautiful singing voice. On some nights, Rankin and I can hear Sergeant Guzman singing old Spanish ballads in his Conex about a hundred yards away. Although he’s got a temper that comes on so fast you’d think there was a switch on the back of his head, he’s the NCO most of us go to first if we’re in trouble. He’ll listen. Right now he heads up my group, but with this new leadership shuffle, I worry that this might change. I look over at Rankin and consider asking him about it, but there’s really no point since he won’t know any more than I do.

Rankin sings softly to himself as he drives, tapping out the time on the steering wheel and looking over at me occasionally with a concerned expression. Before he let me climb into the seat, he covered it with a tattered oil rag. He doesn’t say anything about my piss-soaked pants, but I’m still embarrassed. The silence is almost worse than if he’d ragged on me about it. It won’t last long. Once I get back to base, I’ll never hear the end of this.

My stomach gurgles and throbs. I think back to my last meal. A chili Meal, Ready to Eat, or MRE. These are the modern version of C-rations, but to hear tell of it from Sergeant Oliphant, not a whole hell of a lot tastier. It doesn’t seem to be sitting too well. I close my eyes and try to think about something else. My girlfriend. How she looks when she’s getting dressed, picking up her bra off a chair and smiling at me as she reaches around to hook it into place. Or the kind of vehicle I want to buy with my hazardous-duty pay when I get back. A blue Ford F-150 pickup with—my stomach gurgles again, much louder this time, and the muscles spasm. It feels like someone’s jabbing me in the belly with a fork. My mouth fills with spit.

“You all right?” Rankin says, peering at me over the tops of his sunglasses. “You got that same green look you got when you ate those bad oysters back in Savannah.”

I can’t respond. I’m concentrating on keeping the chili down.

“D?” Rankin asks, raising his eyebrows and bunching up his lips. “You hear me over there in la-la land?”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“Then why are you holding on to your belly like that?”

I hadn’t even noticed I was doing this, but he’s right. At some point, I’d started cradling my stomach with both hands.

“You best not be puking in this vehicle, D. The smell will never come out.”

“I’m fine,” I say, trying to sound as if it’s true.

Rankin clucks his tongue at me, but leaves it at that.

The landscape drifts past. A single smudge of dark yellow below an angry blue sky. Rocks protrude at random here and there like carious teeth. The sandbags on the floorboards shift each time we bounce over a bump in the road and fill the cab with extra dust. We do not pass a single vehicle. Out south of the base, the land is mostly flat and treeless. An occasional boulder or a clump of dead weeds are about as much variety as you get on this bleak plain. Driving here can make you feel as though the whole world is blasted and burned and you are the last humans left on the planet. But as we approach the base and the small village of Kurkbil, a series of lumpy purple hills appears on the horizon. They are the only geographic feature of note between the capital city and Inmar. In the local dialect, they are called the Noses because of their sloping triangular shapes. They are rumored to harbor small bands of resistance fighters. The area is riddled with caves and narrow box canyons. The only way in or out is by mule or helicopter.

The convoy moves slowly. One of the bullets has damaged our lead Humvee, and we can only move as fast as our slowest car. A dozen or so klicks from the base, we approach an abandoned factory. The grounds take up a space about the size of a Wal-Mart parking lot and are surrounded by an eight-foot mud-brick wall topped with rusty strands of razor wire. Inside, there is a sprawling complex of low cinder-block buildings covered with peeling green sheets of corrugated steel. At the very center stands a larger building, maybe two and half stories tall, with double rows of windows just below the roof. On clear days, the factory is visible for almost twenty klicks because the owners originally painted the walls a vivid scarlet. Over the years, the paint has faded into a bright Pepto-Bismol pink. The factory once produced stuffed animals for children and novelty items for adults: cigarette lighters shaped like pistols and fake teeth that chattered when you wound them up. It’s been abandoned since the invasion. The three brothers who owned it packed up as much of their inventory as they could and fled the moment they saw our tanks. The road to the capital is still strewn with dusty pink rabbits and purple bears. According to Rankin, who had to pull guard detail at this place a while back, the machinery is still in good condition; but even from the road, the pockmarks from machine-gun fire and RPG blasts are visible on the main building’s sides, and the wall surrounding the factory grounds has crumbled in many places.

Rankin looks over and raises an eyebrow. “You look bored, D. Maybe you should take up a hobby.”

“Like what?”

“Well,” he says, putting on his thoughtful face, “like speed cigarette-rolling. Stateside, it’s really catching fire. I hear ESPN2 even has a show. You could time yourself and see how fast you finish a sack. Here, give it a try.” He digs into the front pocket of his fatigues and throws his pouch of tobacco into my lap. “But D?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Careful you don’t get it too close to your pants.”

“I was waiting for this shit to start.”

“You got to mind your hygiene out here, D,” Rankin tells me with a straight face.

I shake my head and start to twist one up. I’m glad to have something to distract me from my stomach cramps. They’ve gotten worse. Each time we hit a bump in the pavement, I think I’m going to spray the Humvee with half-digested chili.

As I’m lighting the cigarette for him, the Humvee in front of us rolls to a stop.

“Goddammit, Greer, what is it now?” the radio squawks.

“Uh.” Greer whispers a quick question to someone in his vehicle before talking into the radio again. “A nobby, sir.”

This is our base’s radio code for a flat tire. Since we use these crappy toy-store walkie-talkies for foot patrols and the radios in our Humvees operate on a standard civilian band, the lieutenant worries that the insurgents are capable of monitoring our radio transmissions. Most of us are of the opinion that these new codes do more to confuse us than the enemy.

“Goddammit,” the radio says. I imagine the lieutenant spraying the dash with spittle. His voice is painfully loud.

Rankin reaches over and turns the volume down a notch, and I thank him. I hand him the cigarette and lean back in my seat. This stop might last a while. I take shallow breaths and hold my belly with both hands. Every few seconds, the muscles in my stomach clench up and pointy little fingers of pain jab at my insides. A vulture glides down into the rubble-filled yard of the factory. Then another. I wonder what has crawled in there and died. Lopez and Nevada and two others hop out of the first Humvee to set up a defensive perimeter. Hazel mans the second vehicle’s .50-caliber and scans the factory’s rooftop with binoculars. He looks as bored as I feel. Doc Greer gets out too and opens up the back door so they can get the jack. I catch a quick glimpse of the older hajji huddled back there. Doc Greer slaps his foot to get him to move it. He’s none too gentle. Their lips move, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. Nevada points to the tire and lights a cigarette. Lopez pulls a face, but he kneels and starts cranking up the jack.

Rankin laughs. “Fucking Lopez.”

My stomach squeezes itself into a ball and stays that way. Little BBs of greasy sweat pop up on my forehead and my throat constricts. I close my eyes and try again to think of something else. It’s no good. I’m going to puke. I have to get out of this Humvee. Rankin glances over at me but doesn’t say anything. Sweat drips down my cheeks and beads on the tip of my nose. I lean out the window to spit.

“Rankin,” I say through my teeth, “I’m going to yurp.”

Rankin frowns.

“I’ve got to move, man. You know I hate to have people watch and—”

He turns and looks me full on. “This ain’t the time or place for this kinda shit. There could be a sniper up there. Pull yourself together, D. Just lean out the window. I’ll close my fucking eyes.”

“No, really. You know I can’t do it out there in front of—”

Rankin rolls down his window and looks around. “Jesus Christ, D.”

“I got to go. Radio ahead, if you want. I won’t go far. I just have to—” A bit of vomit comes up into my mouth and I’m forced to swallow it down. I close my eyes and unsnap my seat belt. My head spins. For a moment, I’m not sure which way is up and which way is down.

“Shit.” Rankin chews at his lower lip and gives me the stink-eye. “You’re going to get us both in trouble.” All the same, he flicks his fingers at me like he’s shooing a fly out of the car. “It’s your ass.”

I open the door and jump down. As I run around the rear of the Humvee, I can hear Rankin complaining. “You owe me for this, man. I expect five hundred smokes.”

I am recognized as the best roller of cigarettes on base. I make them plump, tight, and even. Nevada is a distant second, but Rankin and Nevada don’t get along. Rankin would smoke a hundred loose, crumbly cigarettes before he’d ask Nevada to roll him one. Nevada grew up wild in New Orleans in a project near the number two St. Louis Cemetery, and Rankin was raised in a middle-class black family in south Georgia who sent him to community college in Savannah. They might as well be from different countries. A week back, the two of them almost came to blows over a rap Nevada made up about Rankin trying to lighten his face with Clorox and Q-tips. Then Rankin reminded Nevada who it was that joined the Army because a judge gave him a choice between Basic or three to five up at Angola State Prison. It took five guys to pull them apart. Rankin and Nevada exchanged hard looks for a few days, but then it blew over. They still won’t play video football together.

I lock my gun and run across the road. Puke rises in my throat and some of it dribbles out of the corner of my mouth as I go. Doc Greer shouts something I can’t quite make sense of. I keep running. Up to the gate and in. Feeling my way around with the tip of my rifle. Just after I turn the corner, I let it all out. Gallons of it. The sound of liquid hitting the ground makes me retch twice as hard. I dry heave until bitter strings of bile drip onto the dirt. Behind me on the road, someone shouts my name over and over again. My throat stings and my eyes fill with tears, but I feel better almost immediately. I spit several times and slump back against the wall, trying to catch my breath.