Counterinsurgency meant building infrastructure and relationships. Some people believed in it more than others. The captain, he was one of the believers.
Just after we turned the convoy, we got reports that the road-clearing crews had been pulled from the main supply route north of Samarra. I remember saying to the captain, “It’s a good thing our guys aren’t going there.”
4.1 Danny Joiner
Danny raised his binoculars to his eyes and peered up the road, searching for the rest of the convoy. “We should have caught up with it by now,” he said.
“You’re sure this is the right road?” asked Pig Eye.
Danny pulled out the strip map and said it had to be, because of the canal that was visible down a slope to their right. But just in case, he radioed up to Betts, who was in the second vehicle.
“Affirmative,” said Betts. “This is it.”
As Pig Eye drove, Danny fingered his weapon and scanned the roadside from eleven to three o’clock and back again, looking for shadows or movement, but all he saw was an endless expanse of brown-upon-brown that faded to blue at the horizon but was greener down by the canal. Now and then they passed a burned-out vehicle or a ramshackle farm or a farmer and, once, a kid on a bicycle who stopped and waved at them as they passed and then a group of kids who didn’t wave, and through it all, the dusty and colorless road.
He wondered vaguely what Dolly was doing now. It was very early at home, so she was probably still in bed wearing the animal-print nightgown or the one with the hearts on it. He wondered if she had rubbed lotion onto the calluses on her feet and if it was the almond-scented lotion or the stuff that smelled like milk. He wondered if she had replaced the torn coverlet or gotten new curtains for the windows the way she kept talking about.
Then something wasn’t right — a shift in the color spectrum, an eddy in the shimmering air. He scanned the road for the hundredth time: left to right, then right to left, then a glance at the driver’s side. There! Movement behind the low wall of an animal enclosure. A glint of metal by the side of the road. The lead vehicle slowing down. It was probably nothing, but a prickle of alarm jumped across the synapse separating him from Pig Eye.
“What is it? What is it?” asked Pig Eye, twisting toward him from the driver’s seat. Danny saw a wrinkle of worry cross his brow just as the lead vehicle exploded and the next one swerved into a ditch. Pig Eye slammed on the brakes, causing the top-heavy cargo truck to wobble and roll and catapulting Danny forward while Pig Eye fell away and down, as if he had pulled a rip cord or performed a trick and disappeared. Before he lost consciousness, Danny heard a daisy chain of detonations. He tasted cordite and heard the beginning of a shout just as he remembered the last lines of the Shelley poem: The lone and level sands stretch far away.
4.2 Pig Eye
Pig Eye was thinking about the day he had first met Emmie. He hadn’t been called Pig Eye then; he had been called Nerf. And she hadn’t been called Emmie. She had been called E.Z.
It was back before he had joined the army, back before the two big guys came looking for him and before the altercation in the bar when one of the guys insulted Emmie and grabbed her by the hair. Back before Earl had said, “I’ll take care of things here if you need to get out of town for a while.” And it was before, just when they were getting the repair shop on its feet, the landlord raised their rent. He cited improvements in the property even though Pig Eye and Earl had been the ones to improve it. They had converted a corner of the shop to a convenience store, and the neighbors were grateful because the nearest grocery store was two miles away, right smack next to a second grocery and a Walgreens and a Stop-N-Go and a bank, but too far away for them to easily get to. The landlord cited the new laundry and the Dollar Mart, despite the fact that without the convenience store, the laundry and the Dollar Mart would never have opened. Instead, the crack dealers would have moved in and property values would have gone down, not up. Now there was talk of a bus stop and a school.
Pig Eye had arrived one morning to open the shop and found Emmie passed out in a corner of the second bay, blood on her clothing and a pool of vomit crusting over on the concrete slab. With a high forehead and tangled hair and knobby knees that stuck out from underneath her satin dress and, he found out later, slanted eyes with a hint of green in them, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
“What kind of a name is E.Z.?” Pig Eye asked her after she had been there a week and had started to smile.
“I’m from New Orleans,” she said. “The Big Easy is too long for a name, doncha think?”
“But you’re not big,” said Pig Eye, not putting two and two together about her name because that was when he was noticing the slanted eyes and the dimples in her cheeks and the hole in her earlobe where something had ripped clean through.
“And you’re not a Nerf,” she replied, so even though Pig Eye kind of was a Nerf back before he had joined the army and muscled up, it seemed to him like the nicest thing anyone had ever said to him.
“I’m going to call her Emmie,” he told Earl when she had been there a month and Earl had started asking when she was going to leave. “She’s going to stay for a while, and I’m going to take care of her.”
“She’s not a pet,” said Earl. “Are you going to teach her to fetch the coffee in the morning? Are you going to teach her to roll over on command?”
That was the first time Pig Eye laid Earl flat, and Earl let the subject drop until the day a couple of big guys who seemed to know Emmie showed up.
“She’s going to cause trouble,” Earl said, and Pig Eye laid him flat again.
“They don’t call her E.Z. for nothing,” Earl said when Pig Eye announced that he and Emmie were getting married and if Earl didn’t like it, he could be the one to find other accommodations.
And she had caused trouble, but she hadn’t meant to. Trouble followed Emmie, and after she moved with them into the apartment over the shop, trouble seemed to follow Pig Eye too. It followed him in the form of the two big guys and the raised rent and the expensive things Emmie needed and Pig Eye wanted her to have. Even so, the vision he had of Emmie was one of near perfection. He thought of her as flawless and still, like the exact center of the universe, like the shining point around which the stars and the planets and even the truck he was riding in were spinning — spinning and veering out of control.
4.3 Pig Eye
Pig Eye thought he was having one of his escape fantasies. He was face down in the dust, pinned by a force he couldn’t name. Situational awareness was a prerequisite to forming any plan of action, but he couldn’t turn his head far enough to see more than a patch of what looked like earth from a distance but was, up close, a mix of powdery dust and desiccated vegetable matter and glittering crystals mixed with stones of various sizes and also unidentifiable bits of garbage and ash and, for all he knew, bleached and pulverized bones from the years of strife and fighting that had taken place in that desert since the dawn of civilization. Gradually he realized he was stuck underneath the truck, and all that kept him from being crushed was a shallow depression in the earth.
As a precaution, he took an inventory of his body parts as if he were doing a vehicle pre-check or filling out a spreadsheet of parts for Earl to order. He could wiggle his fingers and toes — check. He could move his legs — check. And although his right arm was lodged beneath him and starting to go numb, his left hand and arm were free — check. When he raised the arm as far as it could go, he could feel a flange of hot steel, but whether it was hot from the explosion or hot from the sun, he couldn’t make out. He pushed against it and it moved slightly, but his arm was weak in that position, so he scrabbled in the dirt until his right arm was free too. This opened up another inch between his shoulders and the metal above him, which he now suspected was the heavy armored door of the truck. He thought of his escape kit and recognized the folly of believing that a few miniature tools would help him against all of the machines of war. A spool of wire, for Chrissakes. A powerberry protein bar. A tiny slingshot and a miniature frigging clock. Even if he could have reached the cargo pocket, the things it contained were useless for raising the reinforced slab of metal that was holding him down. Still, he despaired that he couldn’t reach the pocket. He despaired until he remembered what the colonel had said about his center of gravity, which wasn’t the pocket after all. The most useful part of his escape kit was his body, and the most useful part of his body was his wits.