“I’ll get rid of them if you want.”
“We can’t be rude, Pat.”
“Yes, we can. This is your dinner, Iris.”
“Then I’m sure not going to let them ruin it.”
“I have bad feelings about this.”
“I won’t cave in to negative thinking.”
Patrick ignored his anger. Back in the dining room he poured the red wine and Marcos held out his empty margarita glass and offered a glassy grin. Patrick didn’t serve him. Finally seated, Iris asked Mary Ann if she’d like to say a prayer and everyone around the table joined hands. It was brief and heartfelt. In the silence after “amen” Grier burped and Mindy shushed him.
“You three,” said Patrick. “If you can’t behave yourselves, you’ll have to leave.”
“Says Colonel Patrick Norris of the Three-Five!” said Grier. He was a big man, heavier and older than Patrick.
“We’re not so bad are we?” asked Marcos.
“Patrick is right,” said Mindy. “So we’re going to behave starting right now.”
“Man,” said Salimony, “these enchiladas are good.”
They passed the dishes and the food dwindled quickly. Messina handed a bottle of white wine back to Mindy and she poured some into her margarita, her little finger raised preciously, then set the empty bottle on the floor.
“Mind if I turn up the music?” asked Grier.
“No, thank you,” said Iris. “I’d like to hear the conversation.”
“In that case I’ll tell you what I did today,” said Messina. “I worked my butt off training my replacements. See, I’m twenty-six years old next month and the Corps doesn’t need me anymore. Not when they got eighteen-year-old cherries to do what I did. They don’t want third-tour men. We’re washed up and too expensive and even the brass thinks we’re too crazy to fight anymore. Plus, it’s all winding down.”
“Maybe it’s time you left the Corps anyway,” said Natalie.
“I don’t want to leave the Corps,” said Messina. “Alls I’m good at is fighting. I can’t exactly get a job as a sniper, can I?”
“In the French Foreign Legion you can,” said Salimony.
“Ain’t fighting for no Frenchmen,” said Messina. “So, Natalie — pretty, genius Natalie. Did I embarrass you when I kissed your hand upon our recent introduction?”
“I’ve never had a man do that.”
“Oh, boy,” said Messina. “I could say something on that subject, but I won’t. Anyway, you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”
“Why thank you!”
“I just want it to be on the record.”
There was scattered laughter to this, but underneath it the silence was uneasy. At one quiet moment Patrick was aware of several glasses being lifted at once. He went into the living room and forwarded the music player to a peppier song. When he sat down he saw that Iris had gathered herself — shoulders in, forearms on the table, hands steadying the base of her wineglass. Her smile was fraudulent.
The men talked about who was short and who might re-up. Patrick and Grier were already out of the Corps for good. Grier had a part-time job as a night watchman at Qualcomm headquarters, said he mostly read between rounds, boring as hell but perfect after Helmand. He offered flamboyant descriptions of combat violence for which he kept apologizing to the women, and Patrick quickly deduced that Grier was just a Bagram jarhead stationed north of Kabul in the biggest American base in-country. Which, in spite of his gory posturing, made Grier just a Fobbit — a Forward Operating Base Marine — who’d never seen combat, fired a gun, and probably never been outside the wire. Patrick had learned that the more emotional and detailed the description of combat action, the greater the chance it was mostly, if not totally, secondhand. He stared off through the living room and the French doors to the night.
The women listened and asked questions. Salimony told a carefully edited story of the Labrador, Zane, saving a life. Patrick talked about crazy Reichart collecting gigantic spiders in empty ammo boxes, naming them and trying to feed them MRE leftovers. To Patrick this didn’t seem like terrific table talk, but Iris and her friends were plainly interested in their lives in Sangin. They started out curious about everyday things: was it hard to live on one hot meal a day and one shower a week? With all those spiders around, how did you sleep? What was worse, the heat or the cold? Then their questions got harder and came faster: Was it hard knowing that the Taliban would murder and maim villagers they suspected of collusion? Was it true that Afghani women could be stoned to death for conversing with anyone in the Coalition military? Why all the amputations? Was it strange to protect fields of poppies instead of destroying them, as the military had done in the past? What could be done about the “insiders”? Was trust even possible anymore?
“If you chicks are so interested, why didn’t you sign up and go?” asked Grier.
“Natalie and I talked about covering the war for the Village View,” said Iris. “But they had no budget for it.”
“You’d need a whole budget just for your hair and makeup,” said Marcos. “You didn’t really want to go. You wanted to stay here and decorate your little play house.”
“You don’t know one thing about what she wanted,” said Patrick.
“You only think you do.”
“I saw some of the press corps babes,” said Messina. “There was some stone-ass hotties. I saw one do fifty-one push-ups.”
“Any more tequila out there?” asked Mindy. She lurched up and knocked over the empty wine bottle beside her chair. It rolled and echoed brightly, dribbling the last of the wine, but she was oblivious to it and walked in short, weaving steps toward the patio. She wore high wedge heels and it looked as if she might tip over.
Grier rose to pick up the bottle but hit the Cash farm photograph with his head again, and again it slid down the wall and hit the floor. “You ought hang this thing higher, Iris.”
“There’s one above it and I like it there,” she said sharply.
Grier tried to hang the photo but he missed the hook and it hit the floor for the third time in half an hour, and the frame broke into two L-shaped pieces. He picked them up and sat back down and held them back together. “I can glue it.”
Mindy wobbled back in from the patio with the tequila bottle in her hand. “Do you ever think that we were all put here to learn certain lessons?”
“Sure,” said Marcos, “the lesson a Marine learns in California is he isn’t going to get a date with any of the really hot babes. They’re already hooked up with lawyers, actors, and tech nerds. All the jarheads get are leftover idiots like you.”
“Fuck you,” said Mindy.
“But that’s not true,” said Salimony. “Just having dinner at this table is a good thing for us. Look around you, Marcos. You should be thankful to be alive and not blown to smithereens.”
“Marcos is right,” said Grier. “Bitches like these aren’t going to roll out the welcome mat for me. Patrick, I think you must have drugged Iris here. At the very least.”
Patrick stood. “Time for you Marines to hit the road.”
Grier stood too. “Sir, yes sir, General Pat.”
Marcos said: “You don’t get it, do you? After tonight, you guys won’t see any of these high-end cunts again.”
Messina threw back his chair, wheeled, and hit Marcos in the nose with a terrific cracking sound. Iris screamed, “Stop!” Marcos charged through the blow, stomped on Messina’s foot, then raked his fingers across Messina’s eyes. Patrick and Grier met each other halfway around the table and locked up. Grier, heavier, bulled Patrick back into the china cabinet, which shattered as if hit by a grenade. Patrick felt the frame collapse under his weight, the shards of glass spraying against his neck and rattling down, heard the woeful explosions of plates and bowls on the hardwood floor. He gave in to his anger. He flew into Grier’s slower, drunker body, throwing kicks and punches that landed and landed again. Blood flew. Salimony and Messina pummeled Marcos into the living room, knocking an heirloom mirror to the floor with an explosion of glass. Iris and Mary Ann fell on top of Mindy, who screamed nonsense and flailed away with a table knife in one hand and a napkin in the other. Grier swiped the blood from his face and smiled, then shot in low to grapple Patrick, but Patrick caught him with a knee square to the forehead and elbow-piled him to the floor. Grier dropped to his hands and knees on a bed of broken glass. Patrick lifted one of the heavy oak chairs and crushed the man flat with it. Then he registered motion on his left: Natalie snapping action shots.