The image reminded Brutus of the photo on Sullivan’s desk. “What do you bother with that shit for? Big pretty man like you, I bet you get more tang than Buzz Aldrin.”
“Everyone says you’re the one tagging that Magda bitch. Every guy in camp’s been trying to get in her pants.”
Brutus shrugged. “I can neither confirm nor deny those charges. Besides, what’s a punk like you care about a hottie like Magda anyway?”
“Fuck you.”
“Good comeback.”
“O.K., fuck you, Shakespeare.”
Even Brutus had to laugh — but he didn’t care for the allusion. What if Sparky was in on the blackmail? Unlikely, but not impossible. Sullivan was not the kind of man to leave a roommate assignment to chance. Brutus couldn’t trust anybody.
He removed his hat, coat, and boots, then he turned the heater down a notch and finally sat. His feet were killing him. Commotion filled the hallway outside. Someone was barking like a dog. He flipped on his desk lamp, which provided a nasty, halogen glow. He opened his journal, a hardbound art-school sketchbook Joan had given him as a going-away gift. The edges were painted a shiny biblical gold, and Brutus had titled it “The Myth of Syphilis” in neat block letters on the flyleaf. He filled one page every day even when he had nothing new to say. He kept the book in his underwear drawer. Sparky knew of its existence, which meant that everyone knew of its existence, but there was nothing Brutus could do about that. As a general rule, he tried to limit his worries to those things he could control. There weren’t many in the army.
He stood again and pulled a half-liter bottle of Dreher from the little dorm fridge they shared. The P.X. sold American beer, but Brutus would have his whole life left to drink that shit when he got home, and at least the Hungarian stuff had some flavor to it. The cold, uncarpeted floor stung his feet. Back at his desk, he tried to clear his head, think things through. The beer brought a flush to his cheeks.
One week — that was how much time he had. Sullivan was probably running smack or something up from the Croatian coast. Brutus knew from personal experience about the Croats’ well-earned reputation for producing high-quality pharmaceuticals. It must have been something about the weather down there. Magda had gotten her hands on some serious, not-to-be-fucked-with shit. The Adriatic kind bud was as good as the best bubonic chronic that ever crossed through Philly. Brutus grew up smoking weed the way redneck kids grew up slurping Mountain Dew. His old man knew every reggae band that came through town, and they would come around to see him. He used to jam with some of those guys back in Kingston, but sold his bass when he got married and moved to the States. Brutus would get up on Sunday morning and Bunny or Toots or someone would be sitting on the front porch rolling a fatty. The Mambo would be irate about it all day. Every Sunday she would make a huge pot of curried goat to last the week, and most of the time the old man and his friends would kill it before it got dark. She wasn’t crazy about having all that weed around either, and that may have been part of the reason she kicked the old man out. Brutus currently had half an ounce stashed in a sock, but there was no way he could light up with Sparky in the room. Maybe he was getting paranoid, like Joan always said, but he was already in enough trouble.
Carrying drugs for Sullivan would be no joke. He had singled Brutus out to make an example of him, to cure the Uppity Negro Syndrome before it could spread and contaminate the rest of the base. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Turn the other cheek in the army and you ended up with a dick in your ass. Taszár had its share of drug addicts and every variety of alcoholic. Whoring. Hookers would show up by the carload, each carrying a bottle of home-brewed pálinka and a toothbrush. The M.P.s sometimes accepted kickbacks to look the other way, or got a piece for themselves.
Independent thought, on the other hand — that was the biggest sin of them all. The only sin in the army. And independent thought from a black man was even worse. So Sullivan decided to use him as a scapegoat. He ran the base like an old Southern cracker running his plantation. He had his field niggers, like Brutus, who did the hard work — digging holes and lugging bags of concrete and shit. Then there were the house niggers, like that marine punk Doornail and the M.P.s, the adopted love children of the gay union of Uncle Sam and Uncle Tom.
Before that meeting with Sullivan, the only time Brutus had ever been officially reprimanded was the time he wrote a letter home to the Philadelphia Inquirer about some Supreme Court opinion by Clarence Thomas that he had read about online. Brutus had referred to the current administration as “Uncle Tom’s Cabinet,” and made a comment about how Ruth Bader Ginsburg and “all those other white Washington bitches” had better look out. He concluded with something about Amiri being right about 9/11. They didn’t print the word “bitches” in the paper, but the message came across all the same. The recruiter back on Broad Street, the old bastard who had suckered Brutus in the first place, saw the letter and sent a copy to Sullivan. As punishment, Brutus was confined to the base for twelve months.
He tapped his pen on the cover of his journal until Sparky got annoyed, then kept doing it. If it wasn’t running drugs, what else? Weapons were a possibility, but everyone already owned guns in Eastern Europe. They had more guns than they could use. Wasn’t a soul left who needed to buy guns from the army — with the possible exception of Brutus himself, who was still without a working firearm. Maybe someone over in the restricted camp was picking up some supplies on the down-low, cattle prods and waterboards and shit — and providing Sullivan with a taste of the action.
The whole thing could go down like this: Sullivan will send Brutus off the base, placing him at an even greater disadvantage because suddenly he would no longer be just a sodomite but also AWOL. While he’s away, Sullivan will drop a couple keys of coke in Brutus’s top dresser drawer, call in the pigs, and have his ass thrown in the pen. Hungary had fucked-up drug laws, the harshest of any non-Muslim country, all intended as a suck up to NATO and the E.U. If Brutus got nabbed with as much as a pinprick of resin in the bottom of a pipe, it would mean a minimum of a year in jail.
Sparky switched off the radio and headed out, so Brutus turned it on again and put in Fela Kuti’s Expensive Shit.
More likely than not, though, Sullivan probably planned to simply send him on some goose chase intended to frighten him into becoming a model soldier. Scare him straight. Instill in him the fear of God and of his earthly incarnation, Uncle Sam. Brutus would get his delinquent ass kicked, caught with drugs or something, and be given the ultimatum: toe the line, quit the political bullshit, and Sullivan will make all his problems disappear, including the photograph. What a guy.
Brutus wrote the date at the top of the page. Under it, he made a to-do list:
1. Reread Julius Caesar
They might have a copy at the P.X.
2. Write letter to Mom
Later. He couldn’t even think about that yet. What was he going to say? “Dear Mambo, My commanding officer has a picture of me getting fucked up the ass so I have to go buy some drugs for him. Love, B.” Doubtful.
3. Write letter to Joan
He wanted to tell his sister the whole story, start to finish. And then he would get Magda to mail it for him, in case Sullivan was going through the mail. Couldn’t be too careful. The army could open a letter without anyone knowing the envelope had been touched by human hands, read the contents, and rewrite it on the same type of stationery in the same handwriting. Signature and everything. Brutus wrote it all down for Joan, including the conversation with Sullivan, and hid it in an envelope from one of her letters.