The Sandbox (21 page)

62

Sergeant Guzman doesn’t
want to let me see the lieutenant. And it’s not because he’s naked. We stand near the cab of the water truck and speak in whispers. The sergeant carries a clipboard and a thick sheaf of requisition forms. The wind has risen again. The truck rocks back and forth on its shock absorbers like a small ship. When the wind gusts, it makes a low humming sound as it passes over the roof, a single deep note like the lower register of a pipe organ. Sometimes I catch a quick glimpse of the lieutenant between the cab and the tanker hooked up behind it, scrubbing himself with a soapy rag. Water splashes in the bucket and the lieutenant hums something tuneless. I try to step around the sergeant, but he’s too quick for me. Behind him, I notice three different sets of muddy prints, two entering and one leaving the spout we use to collect our bi-weekly allotment of bathing water. Today is not one of the usual allotment dispersal days.

“It’s very important, Sarge. Time is an issue.” I’ve said this same thing before in several different ways.

“Then tell me,” he says, examining my face as though it were a situation report full of dubious facts. “We have a chain of command in the Army, remember? You talk to the NCO and the NCO, you’ll like this part, the NCO, he talks to the lieutenant. And up it goes. Right on up to the president.”

“It’s sensitive, Sarge.”

“And you don’t trust me? Is that what you’re saying?” The sergeant attempts a comic grimace. Each time I shift my body weight, he shifts along with me. Nevada once told me the sergeant wrestled on a scholarship at some big midwestern university. Watching him now, I believe it. When Sergeant Guzman sits or stands still, he looks oafish and clumsy, but he blocks each of my attempts to dart past him as deftly as a bantamweight boxer slipping punches. For such a large man, he has very dainty feet. I bet he’s a good dancer.

“It’s about the ambush, sir. I believe I know who’s responsible.”

“From what I understand,” the sergeant says, narrowing his eyes, “the lieutenant’s already got a theory about who’s responsible for the ambush.”

This startles me and then, after a moment of thought, worries me. The last time I saw Lopez, he was toting a dripping plastic jug. I glance over at the muddy footprints again.

“What do you want, Private Durrant?” It’s the lieutenant. He steps around the front of the truck wearing only green flip-flops. Sudsy water drips from his crotch. He puts his hands on his hips and frowns, as if he was in full uniform. “Don’t think I can’t hear you pussyfooting around out here.”

“I need to speak with you, sir.” I find his pale skin and water-shrunken genitals very distracting. “About the probing mission.”

“Fine,” the lieutenant says in a voice that suggests he’d rather be having a cavity filled than deal with Private Durrant this afternoon.

Sergeant Guzman shakes his head, but he lets me pass. I follow the lieutenant around to the other side of the truck, where he continues to sponge himself with dingy gray water from the bucket.

“Have you heard any word about the supply drop, Guzman?” he asks.

“They’re saying 0700 hours tomorrow, sir,” the sergeant calls out from the other side.

“So,” the lieutenant says, bending over to scrub a foot. “What the hell do you want?”

“I believe I know who’s leaking info and how.” This is overstating the case a bit, but—

“Who?”

“Ahmed.”

The lieutenant looks at me for the first time. Then he twists to wash the other foot, and I’m forced to look at the three large pimples on his ass. Tendrils of blue cigar smoke drift around the cab of the truck.

“Funny you should come along with this information just now.” He glances over his shoulder at the purple evening shadows. The sun sets so quickly you can almost see it move. “At this time.”

“Why is that, sir?”

“Not thirty minutes ago someone else came by to see me with the same claim. A fairly plausible one.”

My heart tries to climb up my ribcage and out of my mouth.

“About Ahmed?” I ask, barely able to respond. “Sir.”

The lieutenant laughs. It is a dry sound. A jackal barking in the winter dark.

“No, Private Durrant,” he says, wearing his smile like a crooked necktie, “and, I might add, I find it somewhat disingenuous of you to suggest it.”

“I don’t understand, sir.”

“Of course not.” He stops rinsing his legs for a moment, so he can study my face. “And how, Private Durrant, did you arrive at this conclusion? Ahmed hasn’t left the base for the past two days. I had Sergeant Guzman check the sentry logs. Then how did he warn the insurgents? Smoke signals? Did he fly?”

“No, sir, he went through a door in the perimeter wall.”

This surprises the lieutenant in a very satisfying way. His hand pauses midway between bucket and leg. Water dribbles from his fingers. I fight to keep the smile off my face.

“Explain.”

I tell him about the night I saw Ahmed leaving the motor pool and exiting the base through a door in the wall. And what I think it means.

“A magic door?” He purses his lips together.

“No, sir, a normal door disguised to seem like part of the wall. It looked very old. If you don’t believe me, it would be simple to show you.”

The lieutenant grabs my wrist to examine my watch and grunts with irritation when he sees that it’s unreadable.

“If you’re wrong, Durrant—” The lieutenant leaves it at that.

63

We take a
Humvee. A very skeptical Sergeant Guzman drives. I sit alone in the back. The wind blows just hard enough to fill the air with dust, lowering the visibility to about ten feet. The locals call this wind a
dourma
, which is their word for coffee dust. A
dourma
lifts up only the smallest particles of dirt and sand, turning the air into a thick soup. It is worse in some ways than a hard wind, because the dust doesn’t blow away. It just hangs there, suspended. I ask the sergeant to drive along the wall. In the dark, it’s a good deal harder than I thought it would be to pick out the spot where I left the cigarette butt. I hadn’t expected the lieutenant to want to look tonight. But here we are.

“It’s going to be a bit tricky to find with all this sand blowing around,” I suggest.

“Already starting with the excuses?” The lieutenant smirks.

Sergeant Guzman laughs. This irritates me more than it should. The men consider Sergeant Oliphant a brass-licker, but I always figured Guzman to be on the side of the enlisted. I feel betrayed.

“No, sir,” I say, worrying now, “it’s just that it might take a while. I marked it with a cigarette butt.”

“A very distinctive marker. And just when was it that you saw this magic door? Last night? I heard you locked Ahmed in a closet last night.”

“No, sir.” This won’t sound good. “It was several nights ago.”

“What?” The lieutenant nearly yells this. Even Sergeant Guzman looks around in surprise. “If that’s true, why in the hell did you wait so long?”

“I’m not sure, sir.” Which is true. “I wanted to make sure that—”

“You waited for three days after finding an enemy breach in the perimeter?”

We pass a section of the wall that’s faced with purple stone instead of mud bricks. I ask for the sergeant to slow down. This looks like it might be the right part of the wall, but it could be anywhere along this hundred-yard section. A terrible apprehension perches on the crown of my head like a large, ungainly bird. I have them stop the vehicle so I can get out. The sergeant turns on the floodlight attached to his outer rearview mirror. I raise my hand to thank him. The wall stretches on and on with an awful sameness. A cigarette butt! What the hell was I thinking? I trudge along for some time, feeling the stones with both hands and straining my eyes for any sign of the metal keyhole or the cigarette butt. It’s impossible.

The lieutenant sits in the Humvee and watches this for thirty minutes. Once I hear his muffled laughter. The wind scours my right cheek and fills my ear with dust. Every few minutes I stop and knock the side of my head with the heel of my hand the way I would to clear my ear of water. I wish I had a scrap of paper I could use to block it up. My tongue feels like it’s coated with thick, grainy paste. I berate myself in rhythm with my steps. A cigarette butt? You are a worthless son of a bitch. A fucking cigarette butt. I don’t hear the horn at first. I’m too busy searching for my phantom cigarette butt.

“Private,” Sergeant Guzman shouts, “get your ass in the vehicle.”

I run a list of excuses through my head as I drag ass back to the Humvee. None of them sound too good, especially after the way I acted back at the water truck. I’m fucked, but good. No one speaks on the drive back. Five minutes seem like five hours. They drop me at my tent.

“Report to Common Tent 1 tomorrow morning at 0630.” Sergeant Guzman barks this out like a parade drill call. It almost sounds as though he’s been practicing it. Maybe he has.

“Yes, Sarge,” I say.

The truth, I think, is not setting me free.

64

A dark figure
slips out of the left latrine. The wind is rising. Larger grains of sand now whip across the open space between the trailers. This blowing sand has turned the moon to mud. I yell over at the person who just came out. He either doesn’t hear me calling or doesn’t want to respond. I shout again. “Hey, guy, slow up.” But he hunches over and runs off in the direction of the motor pool, quickly disappearing in the murky night.

OUT OF SERVICE. One of the two holes has this sign pinned to the canvas curtain. It flutters and flaps in the wind, and I have to grab the paper to read it. The handwriting is a jerky scrawl, the penmanship that of a spastic second-grader. It takes a few seconds for me to puzzle out the words. I don’t know how in the hell a hole over a fuel drum can be out of service. It seems unlikely they’d be full already. I emptied both yesterday. Great, I get to kiss butts with whoever it was that just left. I duck inside and give the plywood seat a quick inspection. Taking a shit is not the primary reason soldiers use these latrines, and it only takes one sticky surprise to make you forever diligent. The tarp flaps violently in the wind. Thankfully, it also blows off some of the stink from the barrels.

After a few mikes, I hear a noise that tugs at my attention. A sort of fizzing sound. I stand up and flash my light around. Something isn’t right, but I can’t quite place it. I tilt my head and listen. The fuel drum explodes. A hollow boom. I’m instantly covered in liquid shit. The smell chokes me. Putrid brown gunk drips from my face and hands. My hair is soaked with it. I’m still not sure what just happened to me. I tear open the tarp and step into the wind. Within seconds I’m coated with grit. I kick off my pants and pop a button pulling off my shirt. The wind catches it and sucks it away into the dark.

I look around for the perpetrator. Was this supposed to be a joke? I shout at the sky like an angry dog. The moon is the same color as the gunk on my arms. I take off at a run toward the water truck. I’m washing this off me, water ration or not. The parade ground is empty. Just as well. Had I seen even a hint of a smile on anyone’s face, even the lieutenant’s, I would have attacked him. Instead, I take out my rage on the water nozzle’s flimsy lock. I hit it with a rock so hard, I nearly knock the toggle switch clean off.

65

“An MRE bomb,”
Rankin says, knocking his flip-flops against the stack of tires he’s sitting on. “Got to be.”

Rankin sniffs when he thinks I’m not looking. At least he tries to hide it. He can see where my head is at tonight. An eggshell filled with nitroglycerin. I walked back from the water truck naked but for my boots. The rest I threw away. I would have thrown my boots away too if I thought I could get some new ones. Rankin wouldn’t let me back into the tent until he was sure I’d cleaned myself off completely, so he gathered up all my antibiotic cream and the germ-killing gel Clarissa sent me, and we moved operations over to the motor pool’s garage. Rankin sits a short distance away and watches me rub hand gel over my entire body. A single fluorescent tube lights the room, making my shadow look gawky and frantic. At least the smell of dirty oil and spilled diesel cancel out some of my stink.

“MRE bomb. No, man, it—” I try to explain, but Rankin won’t let me.

“You’re still able to sit on that skinny ass of yours, ain’t you? Well, then, it couldn’t of been all that big of an explosion.”

“It was big enough.” I stretch my arm out and rub gel in as hard as I can. Rankin watches, disgruntled.

“You ever seen one go off?” he asks.

“Of course, man. I’ve made one myself. It’s just a tiny—” I make a little pop sound with my mouth.

“Listen here, if you take the powder out of a few of those plastic sacks and pour it into a two-liter emergency water bottle and then you put glow-stick juice in there, those fuckers are loud. What did this one sound like?” He picks at a rubber nub on the tire and thinks this over.

“Big, Rankin. Big.” I splash myself with cloudy black water from the bucket where Cox washes his hands after work. “If I hadn’t of gotten up to look for the sound, it would have knocked me off the seat.”

“Shit,” he says, solemn and insincere, “that’s big.”

I pace around the room. My arms are raw from scrubbing, and now they sting from the alcohol in the gel. My face hurts. Back at the water truck, I didn’t have any soap, so I scoured my body with sand. It took off plenty of skin, but it didn’t do a whole hell of a lot about the smell.

“Why’d you get up off the pot?” Using a broken strip of an aluminum measuring tape that he’d picked up off the floor when we first came in, Rankin points to a place I missed on the back of my neck. The man’s not touching me for anything, not even with a two-foot piece of metal. I rub in more gel.

“I heard something in there.”

“Like what? Make the sound.”

I make a little hissing noise by blowing air through the gap between my front teeth. “That ain’t quite it, but—”

Rankin chucks the tape across the room like a wobbly spear. It hits a stack of worn engine belts and they tumble onto the floor. Something about this makes him grin. “You’re right. That don’t sound like an MRE bomb. Let me marinate on it a bit.”

“Marinate?” I say. Rankin has two words that drive me crazy, and he knows it. Marinate and conversate. He attended college. He knows. He just doesn’t care. Let me express myself in the manner I choose, he usually says to me when I mention it. Always in his most proper voice.

He ignores this. “Maybe Cox would know. I think he took a demolition course. He wanted to be a sapper.”

“Think we should tell him about this?” Wind whistles in through a broken window on the other side of the garage. I shiver. My legs are covered with goose bumps and starting to turn purple. I want to go to bed.

“Maybe you’re right: after all, someone did try to. . . .” He doesn’t even want to say it. He stares off into space

I walk back and forth, rubbing my arms for warmth. The plastic gel bottle is empty, so I squirt a little antibiotic cream into my hand and work that onto my legs. “What I don’t understand is how they knew I’d be there. Maybe it wasn’t for me. I don’t know. Am I being paranoid? I did see someone come out just before I got there.”

Rankin laughs quietly. I glare at him.

“No.” He jumps down from his stack of tires and picks up the measuring tape again. “I’m laughing because anyone who’s spent a week around you would have known.” He pokes my ass cheek with it and I jump. “Your ass is like a cuckoo clock. 2100 hours. On the nose. Every night.”

“Is that right?” I say. This surprises me. I think about it for a moment and decide it’s true.

“Whoever did this set it up for
you
. The little sign. The time. All for you, D.”

“Lopez?” The obvious choice.

“No, man, this ain’t his style. He’s a dick, but he ain’t vicious, at least not like this. Besides, he’s too fussy to fuck around in a field latrine. The problem is a hajji wouldn’t know about your alarm-clock asshole.”

“This is true.”

I’m out of medicinal cream of any sort. Rankin watches me try to squeeze out the last little blob from the tube. “You ain’t done yet. I can still smell you.” He digs through his knapsack for a few seconds. When he finds what he’s looking for, he grins and tosses me an aerosol can. It’s jock-itch spray. As I’m spraying it onto my back, I realize I need to tell him about Ahmed. The whole story. Including the hidden door. So I clear my throat and spill it all. When I finish, he squints at me for a long time.

“We need to fix this shit,” he says. “And soon.”