Brutus had attended Temple University for two years, where he studied philosophy and took computer classes, but he found he learned more on his own, reading whatever he wanted. He dropped out and took a job as a security guard at the Macy’s next to city hall, which everyone still called Wanamaker’s. Every day, on the bus ride to the store, he passed the recruiter’s office. At the Mambo’s urging he went in and, desperate to hear some good news, believed every last lie they sold him. Money for college, if he ever decided to go back. Rapid advancement. No color barrier. On-the-job training. See the world, hold your chin high, become a man. Nothing at all about the army maintaining the last vestiges of the American slave trade.
He signed on. By week three of basic training, the Seven Army Values felt like deadly sins, and he knew he had made a mistake. The limited potential for career growth afforded an inner-city brother in the U.S. Army soon became clear. They made no attempt to pretend otherwise. Now punks like Sparky dirtied their lily-white hands on ink-jet printouts while Brutus stood out in the freezing cold setting rattraps. The local rodents carried a virus that had made several soldiers sick. Brutus had personally baited over a hundred traps, but to date had caught only nine rats. The men who sucked up to Sullivan didn’t necessarily rise any quicker through the ranks, but they did get the sweetest assignments. Sparky sat in ops reading satellite images or monitoring Radio Beograd while Brutus and the other brothers and Latinos caught vermin in the snow or broke up the ice that formed every night on the runway.
Contrary to the propagandists’ advice, Brutus didn’t fear the wrath of Hungarian women and their social diseases. He had been seeing Magda for the past two months. Conjugal relations with members of the civilian crews were expressly forbidden, but when Magda could sneak loose Brutus arranged to meet her someplace quiet. To do so, he needed to cut across the base to get to the prefab buildings where the officers ran their war. In the army, Brutus had learned, if he acted like he belonged in a certain situation, no one would question him. He could do anything he wanted to so long as he did it with a little authority. Put that glide in his stride and he could probably saunter back into Sullivan’s office and wet him on the spot. If his pistol worked.
In the absence of wind, a three-foot-tall cloud of truck exhaust lingered just off the ground. He followed it to Sullivan’s building. Odors didn’t dissipate in that weather, so the entire base smelled like oil and gunpowder, plus cooking grease and fresh paint. His sinuses were so blocked that the stink didn’t bother him as much as usual. He blew his nose, filling a tissue with soot and tar that looked like the resin coating the inside of a glass pipe. Then the oily smell hit him, only for a second, until his nose clogged up again.
Someone had used a cinder block to prop open a back door. A dozen cigarette butts lay crushed on the ground. Brutus slipped inside and, as planned, found Magda in an otherwise unoccupied meeting room.
She was maybe a decade older than him but didn’t show it, and she spoke half a dozen languages. Her father was Hungarian, and although Magda grew up in America and went to Yale, Brutus thought of her as Hungarian. She was real cool, not as materialistic as most of the women he knew back home, even though he got the impression she was pretty well-off. She worked as a translator or a consultant or something like that. It was classified. She was also gorgeous, with the kind of smile that made army life and the rest of the world disappear.
It was said that after Attila the Hun conquered all of Central and Eastern Europe he rounded up the most beautiful women in his empire and set up his personal harem in what would later become Hungary. That was why Hungarian girls were so hot and why they differed so much in appearance. On the cleaning crews alone, Brutus saw girls with olive, Latin features, girls with Viking-blonde hair and blue eyes, and even girls with round faces and Asian-looking eyes. Magda had black curly hair and ruby lips. She was also five times smarter than anyone he had ever met.
He closed the door tight by jamming a wooden chair under the handle. She spilled all over him. Magda took off her clothes and underneath she had on her usual G-string panties, which he didn’t bother to remove. She obviously worked out, because she was strong for a woman and not at all averse to fighting back here and there. She had a nasty streak in her. They played rough. Brutus wondered if she had ever zapped an Arab with a cattle prod. She wore this expensive perfume she had had specially made in Dubai and as she rubbed against him, it rose from her skin. It smelled like fresh leather that had been treated with rose water and licorice. It drove him crazy.
After, as they got dressed, someone rapped at the door. “Halló?” a voice called out. It belonged to the head of the cleaning crew, a round old troll who, much to the amusement of the girls in her command, barked at Brutus in Hungarian whenever she saw him.
“Egy pillanat!” Magda told her.
Brutus gave the troll ten bucks to keep her quiet. That was a ton of money to some old lady making maybe two hundred dollars a month, and he didn’t have anything to spend it on anyway, except fast food and those bullshit Tom Clancy novels. Magda kissed him and went back to work. Before he left, he waited a few minutes to catch his breath and to allow any passersby to disappear.
He decided to put off rattrap duty and return to his room, Magda’s perfume still clinging to his body. Sparky was out. The image Sullivan had showed him remained burned onto his brain, like spots after staring at the sun. Brutus felt like he had been fucked up the ass. It was the fifth of March. Ten days until whatever Sullivan had planned. That didn’t give Brutus a ton of time to get his shit together.
Brutus put on some Public Enemy and yanked open his closet door. He threw all his clothes onto the bed, then pulled open the drawers of his dresser and dumped the contents onto the pile. Taking a pair of nail scissors from his desk, he poked it through the heart of a brand-new shirt that the Mambo had sent him for Christmas. Cutting a crude circle through the breast, he ripped the Polo insignia out and dropped the rough swatch of cloth onto the floor. Picking up the next shirt, he did the same thing. He repeated the process with every article of clothing he owned, tearing out all the corporate symbols, insignias, and logos. They were the trademarks of the white devil, of Satan himself. One after another, he stripped the tags off the pockets of his Levi’s and cut the swooshes out of his socks, until a stack of capitalist-propaganda cotton lay at his feet like broken shackles. He would have loved nothing more than to rip the U.S. ARMY patches off his uniforms, but he couldn’t go there. Not yet.
Next, he carefully refolded his T-shirts and socks, and replaced his dress shirts and pants in the closet. He picked up the discarded patches and put them in a manila envelope, like the one on Sullivan’s desk. He addressed it to his sister and included a note on a three-by-five card: “Please use these to make me a quilt.”
He put the card in the envelope, but before sealing it pulled it out again. He erased “quilt” and wrote “flag” instead. It would take ten days to get to her.
4.
Sparky was listening to a Hungarian pop station that played terrible American eighties music interspersed with heavily orchestrated Hungarian headbanger ballads while surfing the net for porn on a signed-out laptop. He lifted his chin in hello and turned the screen to face Brutus, who leaned over his roommate’s shoulder to see an image of two heavily tattooed men dressed up like pizza delivery boys penetrating different ends of the same surgically augmented woman. The elaborate set looked like the living room of a mansion, with a roaring fireplace and a bearskin rug. She was lying on her stomach on a glass coffee table and still had on her high heels. Two thick art books had been kicked to the floor. Brutus couldn’t make out the titles. Sparky, who had a way with words, said, “Looks like fun, doesn’t it?”