Mal nodded, her ears buzzing. She told the Professor he didn’t have a daughter, because he was a known homosexual. She asked him if he liked the barrel of her gun in his ass, if it excited him. She said, “Where is the house of your partners who make the dogs into bombs? Where is your homosexual friends go after murdering Americans with their trick dogs? Tell me if you don’t want the gun in the hole of your ass.”
“I swear by the life of my little girl I don’t know who those other men were. Please. My child is named Alaya. She is ten years old. There was a picture of her in my pants. Where are my pants? I will show you.”
She stepped on his hand and felt the bones compress unnaturally under her heel. He shrieked.
“Tell,” she said. “Tell.”
“I can’t.”
A steely clashing sound caught Mal’s attention. Anshaw had dropped the crutches. He looked green, and his hands were hooked into claws, raised almost but not quite to cover his ears.
“You okay?” she asked.
“He’s lying,” Anshaw said. Anshaw’s Arabic was not as good as hers, but not bad. “He said his daughter was twelve the first time.”
She stared at Anshaw, and he stared back, and while they were looking at each other, there came a high, keening whistle, like air being let out of some giant balloon… a sound that made Mal’s racy blood feel as if it were fizzing with oxygen, made her feel carbonated inside. She flipped her M4 around to hold it by the barrel in both hands, and when the mortar struck — out beyond the perimeter but still hitting hard enough to cause the earth to shake underfoot — she drove the butt of the gun straight down into the Professor’s broken leg, clubbing at it as if she were trying to drive a stake into the ground. Over the shattering thunder of the exploding mortar, not even Mal could hear him screaming.
Mal pushed herself hard on her Friday-morning run, out in the woods, driving herself up Hatchet Hill, reaching ground so steep she was really climbing, not running. She kept going until she was short of breath and the sky seemed to spin, as if it were the roof of a carousel.
When she finally paused, she felt faint. The wind breathed in her face, chilling her sweat, a curiously pleasant sensation. Even the feeling of light-headedness, of being close to exhaustion and collapse, was somehow satisfying to her.
The army had her for four years before Mal left to become a part of the reserves. On her second day of basic training, she had done push-ups until she was sick, then was so weak she collapsed in it. She wept in front of others, something she could now hardly bear to remember.
Eventually she learned to like the feeling that came right before collapse: the way the sky got big, and sounds grew far away and tinny, and all the colors seemed to sharpen to a hallucinatory brightness. There was an intensity of sensation when you were on the edge of what you could handle, when you were physically tested and made to fight for each breath, that was somehow exhilarating.
At the top of the hill, Mal slipped the stainless-steel canteen out of her ruck, her father’s old camping canteen, and filled her mouth with ice water. The canteen flashed, a silver mirror in the late-morning sun. She poured water onto her face, wiped her eyes with the hem of her T-shirt, put the canteen away, and ran on, ran for home.
She let herself in through the front door, didn’t notice the envelope until she stepped on it and heard the crunch of paper underfoot. She stared down at it, her mind blank for one dangerous moment, trying to think who would’ve come up to the house to slide a bill under the door when it would’ve been easier to just leave it in the mailbox. But it wasn’t a bill, and she knew it.
Mal was framed in the door, the outline of a soldier painted into a neat rectangle, like the human-silhouette targets they shot at on the range. She made no sudden moves, however. If someone meant to shoot her, he would have done it — there had been plenty of time — and if she was being watched, she wanted to show she wasn’t afraid.
She crouched, picked up the envelope. The flap was not sealed. She tapped out the sheet of paper inside and unfolded it. Another thumbprint, this one a fat black oval, like a flattened spoon. There was no fishhook-shaped scar on this thumb. This was a different thumb entirely. In some ways that was more unsettling to her than anything.
No — the most unsettling thing was that this time he had slipped his message under her door, while last time he had left it a hundred yards down the road, in the mailbox. It was maybe his way of saying he could get as close to her as he wanted.
Mal thought police but discarded the idea. She had been a cop herself, in the army, knew how cops thought. Leaving a couple thumbprints on unsigned sheets of paper wasn’t a crime. It was probably a prank, they would say, and you couldn’t waste manpower investigating a prank. She felt now, as she had when she saw the first thumbprint, that these messages were not the perverse joke of some local snotnose but a malicious promise, a warning to be on guard. Yet it was an irrational feeling, unsupported by any evidence. It was soldier knowledge, not cop knowledge.
Besides, when you called the cops, you never knew what you were going to get. There were cops like her out there. People you didn’t want getting too interested in you.
She balled up the thumbprint, took it onto the porch. Mal cast her gaze around, scanning the bare trees, the straw-colored weeds at the edge of the woods. She stood there for close to a minute. Even the trees were perfectly still, no wind to tease their branches into motion, as if the whole world were in a state of suspension, waiting to see what would happen next — only nothing happened next.
She left the balled-up paper on the porch railing, went back inside, and got the M4 from the closet. Mal sat on the bedroom floor, assembling and disassembling it, three times, twelve seconds each time. Then she set the parts back in the case with the bayonet and slid it under her father’s bed.
Two hours later Mal ducked down behind the bar at the Milky Way to rack clean glasses. They were fresh from the dishwasher and so hot they burned her fingertips. When she stood up with the empty tray, Glen Kardon was on the other side of the counter, staring at her with red-rimmed, watering eyes. He looked in a kind of stupor, his face puffy, his comb-over disheveled, as if he had just stumbled out of bed.
“I need to talk to you about something,” he said. “I was trying to think if there was some way I could get my wedding ring back. Any way at all.”
All the blood seemed to rush from Mal’s brain, as if she had stood up too quickly. She lost some of the feeling in her hands, too, and for a moment her palms were overcome with a cool, almost painful tingling.
She wondered why he hadn’t arrived with cops, whether he meant to give her some kind of chance to settle the matter without the involvement of the police. She wanted to say something to him, but there were no words for this. She could not remember the last time she had felt so helpless, had been caught so exposed, in such indefensible terrain.
Glen went on. “My wife spent the morning crying about it. I heard her in the bedroom, but when I tried to go in and talk to her, the door was locked. She wouldn’t let me in. She tried to play it off like she was all right, talking to me through the door. She told me to go to work, don’t worry. It was her father’s wedding ring, you know. He died three months before we got married. I guess that sounds a little — what do you call it? Oedipal. Like in marrying me she was marrying Daddy. Oedipal isn’t right, but you know what I’m saying. She loved that old man.”