“Nothing,” I said. “Think I could hang on to this for a while?”
His eyes followed the photograph in my hand. He seemed to be in deliberation with himself, though I couldn’t tell why.
“A gift,” he said with a tight smile. “We are partners now.”
I nodded and handed him my glass and saucer. After a handshake and arm clasp, I left the room, stealing a glimpse of him locking his trunk behind me. Later I pulled out my own trunk and stuck the photograph into the Lawrence of Arabia book with the sworn statements. It seemed the thing to do with a bloody vest.
22
Dawn found me on the back patio listening to the call of the muezzin, waiting for Alia.
Rise, rise and offer the Fajr prayer to Allah, the muezzin called. I pulled out a cigarette and lit up, holding smoke in my chest as long as I could, exhaling slowly.
I hadn’t slept. Because of Saif. Or Alia. Or Marissa, who’d finally written back with three paragraphs about a life I no longer understood. Or because Alphabet was less clear in my memory with every new day. Or because of Grant. Or Dead Tooth. Or Chambers, who, other than detesting me and possibly being a bloodthirsty murderer of innocents, had kept the platoon together during the previous month like a goddamn professional. Or because I’d returned from my chat with Saif to find Ibrahim waiting to tell me that the Muslim jokes had started in our platoon, and could I make the soldiers stop? Or because of Rios’ bloody vest. Or because I still needed to call my mom, who wanted to hear my voice so much she was pretending to be fine. Or because of the clerics, both the one who’d killed Alphabet and the one whose spirit watched over Ashuriyah from the stone arch.
A burning oil refinery far in the west licked the horizon, its orange flame hovering like a torch. Slightly nearer, a sea-green minaret lacquered in grime shot up out of Sumerian dust. It was mounted with speakers that carried the call to prayer throughout the Shi’a slums. There were rumors that during the sectarian wars it carried calls to battle instead. Calls to battle the heretic Sunnis. Calls to battle the foreign infidels. Calls to kill and calls to die and calls to martyr.
When Will and I were kids, we’d hated going to church. We’d preferred talking to God on our own terms. And as children of a half-Catholic, half-Presbyterian divorce, we were able to. Catholicism provided pomp and ceremony, which had its place, but the Presbyterians promised access, and who didn’t have something to yell into the ear of God?
Will always had plenty to say. He didn’t think I could hear him at night, when he cried and prayed underneath his pillow, but I could. The wall between our rooms wasn’t that thick. He’d burned with righteousness his entire life, something that didn’t go over too well in high school, not with teachers, coaches, or girls. He’d had it tougher than I did growing up, something I never gave him credit for, because acknowledging it would only have made it worse. I’d always managed to fit in, even when I wanted to be different.
He went to West Point because that’s what people like him did. I went to regular college because that’s what people like me did.
We both went to war because that’s what people like us did for countries like ours.
I considered the minaret and thought about our grandma. The spring before she’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, she attended my middle school’s poetry recital. She’d come to California some six decades earlier as a young girl, part of the great Okie migration. She never left, valuing home and family over everything but the Presbyterian Church, pocketing sugar packets and clean napkins at every restaurant we went to.
Will had just gotten into West Point, and even though 9/11 was still three years away, she held on to him in the audience as if it were December 1941 all over again. He sat there like a raw-headed figurine while our grandpa made sure everyone in a ten-row radius knew that they were sitting near the future chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
I stumbled through the four stanzas of “The Road Not Taken,” which somehow made it more endearing to the audience.
“I’m very proud of you both,” our grandma said after the recital. After she passed away, I learned her first fiancé had been mowed down by Japanese machine guns on a tiny island called Guadalcanal. “But, William, Jackson, too much introspection is bad for the soul. All things in moderation. Pray, then poet, then pray again. You come from devout stock. Never forget that.”
I tried to remember, but some days were harder than others.
Back in Iraq, I held up my cigarette and blotted out the minaret. A curl of smoke drifted from it, and I narrowed my eyes until the minaret fell out of focus and looked like a burning Twin Tower on a television screen. That day was a long time ago, now.
Alia would be in at eight, I remembered. As I checked my watch, a small rock skipped by my feet.
“Molazim!” I heard a voice trying to whisper and shout at once. My eyes scanned the patio, but no one was one there. “Molazim Ja-ak!”
It was coming from the other side of the perimeter gate, to the north. I charged my rifle and walked that way, to where Chambers had dumped the prizefighting scorpion a couple of months before. The chain-link fence was covered with a semitransparent camo screen. Squinting through the zig hooks and the screen, I saw an outline of a frail man with a hunch in his back.
“Haitham,” I said, letting my rifle sling go slack. “How’s life on the lam?”
His response was irritated and incomprehensible. I’d no idea how he’d gotten through the outer perimeter of blast walls or avoided the American eyes on the roof — so much for our improved security, I thought. His soccer jersey was caked in dirt. Grabbing the walkie-talkie clipped to my belt, I considered my options.
“Snoooop,” Haitham sounded out. He pointed at me. “Molazim.” He pointed at the outpost. “Snoooop.” Then he crossed his forearms into an X, something I took to mean he’d only speak to us.
“CP,” I said into the walkie-talkie. This is Hotspur Six. Wake Snoop and send him to the back patio. Got some paperwork for him to look over.”
We waited in silence, the early morning slashing our faces with light. I didn’t mind being alone, but hated sharing quiet with other people, something about the way it made my brain roll around. I began whistling a jingle from a Disney musical about a group of 1890s newsboys on strike, something Haitham mimicked. Is he making fun of me, I thought, or have I found a fellow fanboy? As a kid I’d memorized the matching dance steps, but before I could test the Iraqi on the routine, the metal door of the outpost clanged open. I whistled again, shrill and without melody, to get Snoop’s attention.
The terp proved too groggy to be confused or bothered. When I explained we had a visitor, he just shrugged and stuck a clump of sunflower seeds into his mouth.
“Arabs,” he said.
I asked if they’d speak slowly so I could pick out words and phrases; I was getting better at understanding Arabic, though getting people to understand mine was something else altogether. Snoop obliged, but Haitham was in no mood to play tutor.
“He asks about Ismail,” Snoop said. “The townspeople say the Iraqi Police are hitting him.”
“Who?” I didn’t know an Ismail.
“His nephew,” Snoop said. “The Barbie Kid.”
“Of course.” I’d heard the same rumor, and had been meaning to check on the teen, though I didn’t have the same pull with the Iraqi Police that I did with the jundis. I promised Haitham I’d look into it and make sure his nephew was being treated well, though it might be a while until he was released. Through the fence screen, the little man nodded.