“This will just take a minute,” he tells her.
In the house, in the kitchen with its floor covering of disturbingly bright blue, Jeremy picks up a bottle of water as Grandmother America stands with her back in a corner. He has a thought, and he gives it a voice: “Do you need to go to the bathroom?”
“Please,” she whispers. “Don’t hurt me.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay.” The way she’s standing, as if she’s trying to press herself into the wall, to also become invisible just as he wishes to be, touches Jeremy. “My name is…Chris,” he decides to say. He takes his cap off, to show her his shaven head. When the police find her, she will say a shaven-headed man named Chris took her car. “What’s your name?”
She doesn’t reply. Her head is down, her hair stringy over her shoulders, her crispness all burnt up and gone.
Gunny comes to stand in the doorway on the other side of the kitchen, just looking in, just marking the progress. Then he goes away again.
Jeremy can’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses, and this bothers him. “Would you take your sunglasses off, please?” He motions with the gun.
Those thin, veiny, trembling hands come up and remove them. She has brown eyes, sunken down in nests of wrinkles. She will not or can not look at him.
“I’m from Texas,” Jeremy says, but why he tells her this he doesn’t know. “Do you live around here?”
She makes a noise that sounds like muh, like her lips are stuck together, and a slow tear courses down through the wrinkles on her left cheek.
“I’m in a little trouble.” Jeremy realizes this is the first person he’s spoken to, for any length at least, for…how long? Really speaking, that is. Human to human. Gunny is his angel, but Grandmother America looks to him like she would be a very good listener. “There are some bad people in this world,” he contiunues. “Some liars, about what happened in Iraq. They’re carrying lies around with them, and they’re poisoning the air. And you can bet…you can fucking bet…they wouldn’t have lasted one day over there. Because, you know, sometimes you don’t get a choice about the things you have to do. No, ma’am, you don’t. You go right along following the road, doing what you’re supposed to do…what you’ve been trained to do…and all of a sudden, wham!”
Grandmother America flinches at this, and tries to push herself further into that corner, and another tear slides down her face but on the other cheek.
“All of a sudden, something crashes into you from the side and you never saw it coming,” Jeremy says. “That’s what.”
He stops speaking, because he feels there is a movement in his face that he can’t control. He feels like insects are in the muscles and bones of his face, winnowing down in there, breaking up all the structures that make him appear to be a human being, and when they are through eating at him, when they are finished eating and laying their eggs and destroying his face in their eagerness to consume him so that they might live, whatever will be born inside him will be a monster that used to be a really good guy.
He stares down at the blue tarp on the floor, at the sickeningly bright blue, and he remembers. In remembering, there is a hot passing flash and a shockwave that tells him exactly why he is here.
The young lieutenant that everybody knew as a Fobbit came in the middle of the night to get Jeremy and Chris out of their bunks. They were taken to an Ops tent at the center of the base, and at a table with directional lights around it sat a captain neither of them knew, and a civilian in his mid-thirties, wearing a khaki jacket, a white shirt and jeans. He looked like cowboy material, or maybe a Christian In Action.
Color photographs and the map of a section of Baghdad were arranged on the table. This is the task, said the civilian, who was not introduced. You will be accompanied by a squad to this position at oh-five-hundred. You’ll make your way here, to this building, and set up by oh-five-thirty. The target will walk along this alley between oh-seven and oh-eight hundred. Our source tells us he will in all probability be wearing either black or gray cargo shorts, a red, black or camo T-shirt that might bear a Nike swoosh and either a red Houston Rockets cap or an orange cap with a Fanta logo. I understand Houston is your home, Sergeant Pett, so this might be called ‘fate’, if you believe in that. The target will be moving toward this opening here, in this building on the northeast corner. He should be removed before he reaches it. I can’t answer or acknowledge any questions, but I can say that the removal of this target will help us put a stop to some of these goddamned IEDs. One more thing: we need positive verification of the kill. That can be done by bringing back an article of clothing. His cap will do. One more thing, gentlemen: however this mission turns out, our meeting never happened. Good luck and good hunting.
At the site, hunkered down in the yellow building under the dust-hazed sun at oh-seven-forty-one, Chris had been watching the alley through his spotter scope when he said quietly, “Target. Orange cap.”
Jeremy had peered through his own scope. Yeah, there he was. A gangly little bastard wearing black cargo shorts, a camo T-shirt—plain, no swoosh—and the orange Fanta cap. That little dickwhacker wanted to be seen, because in addition to the orange topper he was wearing bright blue plastic sandals, a common type of cheap footwear for these ragheads. That little dillweed was lit up like fucking neon, and he was burdened under a black backpack that was not built for speed.
It was barely a two-hundred yard shot, easy squeezy, but Chris started feeding in the ballistics numbers to his small PDA. Chris took another scope-look, and then another, and the target was walking along getting ever closer to the opening in that building he was not supposed to enter before he was hit, and then Chris looked over at Jeremy and said, “That’s a little kid.”
“A kid? No, he’s—” One of those really small Johnnies, he was about to say, and then Jeremy had adjusted his scope to get a sharper view of the face, and he saw that their target was maybe ten years old. He pulled his eye back as if a hot ember had spun into it.
The kid in the orange cap was walking right along. Maybe thirty feet now from that opening, a square dark hole in the rubbled building on the northeast corner.
“That’s our target,” Chris had said, in the grim voice of finality. “The motherfuckers have sent us out here to kill a kid.”
“No way.” Jeremy had exhaled it. “No way, no way. No.”
“He’s moving, man. What are you gonna do?”
“That’s not the target.”
“The fuck it’s not. Man, he’s almost to his hole. You want the wind call?”
“Don’t push me,” Jeremy had said, with only a hint of the panic that was rushing upon him. Kill a kid? Somebody had to be fucking insane. Who was this kid, Saddam’s baby brother? Was he a messenger, about to go down into a lamplit pit where the IEDs were being loaded with nails, broken glass and ball bearings? Did he have a couple of dozen cheap cellphones in that backpack, to be used as triggering devices?
The kid was there, and now he started to bend over to get into the hole because it was a narrow opening not much bigger than himself.
“Jeremy, do you want the wind call?” Chris asked, also feeling the panic.
The kid was going in.
“Shit,” Jeremy whispered. His finger rested on the trigger. He put his eye to the scope and readjusted, bringing his target in for the kill. “Shit shit shit shit,” was all he could think to say.