“Then why are you going?”
“That’s not the point. The point — this Lithuanian prick has no honor. He should have respect for her and for Richie, and stay the fuck away.”
“Hmm.” He was speaking so fast that I had a hard time keeping up. I was hungry. And stoned.
He went on to wax eloquent about HONOR. And INTEGRITY. And that lesser-known army value of NOT BEING BALTIC EUROTRASH. It all sounded quite significant and convincing, even to my pond-water mind, but one question lingered. When he finally stopped, it came off my tongue in a deluge of potato chip crumbs.
“Will. Like, why do you care so much?”
He looked at me, wild-eyed. “I don’t. I’m just saying.”
After the weed wore off, I figured out why he cared. The night after he’d graduated West Point, he had proposed to the daughter of a Connecticut senator he met at a Boston bar. She said yes. Some months later my family received a terse, slightly fanatical e-mail saying the engagement was off, the wedding was off, it was all off, that Will had sworn to himself that he’d never compromise and this was proof. He was going to be a man of principle, even if it meant sacrificing his own temporary happiness, because what was happiness in the long run but a silly, stupid emotion that was just a particular pattern of synaptic connections?
We never talked about the e-mail or mentioned it to Will. There wasn’t much to say, other than we were there for him when he needed us.
The wedding ceremony went well. Will was sharp and polished in his dress blues, and though the old, rich white relatives picked at him like vultures, he didn’t seem to mind. My mom patted my arm and told me perhaps I’d had a point earlier.
“Those are the type of men who will keep your brother at war,” she said, her voice both proud and furious. “Not a grunt among them.”
“How do you know that word?” I asked.
“Army moms know lots of words,” she said. Then, after a pause, she smiled. “Navy daughters do, too.”
The minister pronounced them man and wife. Bells clanged and spirits flowed. The world had never seen such joy, we all thought, and we all meant it. The stars were out, the night was calm, and the lakeside breeze blew with peace and joy and all sorts of particular patterns of synaptic connections.
Near the end of the reception, I slow-danced with Marissa. She wasn’t a girl who got done up often, which made her loveliness all the more palpable. In her uniform of a floral, ruffled bridesmaid dress, half drunk on wine, she clung to me, describing our future house, naming our future babies, planning a life together as idyllic as it was ordinary. I beamed, belly full of beer, knowing that sloppy, irresponsible sex awaited. Shouts and screeching chairs suddenly came from behind us, near the bar. We turned that way, same as everyone else. Will was standing over a dazed Tomas, fist clenched.
“Who am I? Who the fuck am I?” Will said. In that moment, his words almost sounded natural. “I’m an infantry officer. I’m a man with purpose. I’m a man who knows what’s right, what’s wrong, and what you are.”
Tomas had trouble finding his feet, but his friends surrounded my brother and started crowing, chests out, drunken mania gliding through their eyes. I told Marissa that I’d be right back. Then I grabbed a metal chair, pushed into the circle, and told them if they wanted a fair fight, the Brothers Porter could certainly oblige.
Mom polished off her glass of Irish cream and told us to get in the car — she was driving us home just as soon as she thanked Julie and Marissa’s parents for the evening.
We didn’t say anything to one another on the drive home. As I stared out the car window at the streetlights and cul-de-sacs, I decided I wasn’t going to be a man of nothing. I wasn’t going to be a man of the idyll and ordinary. I was going to be the type of man who punched out Baltic Eurotrash at weddings for principle’s sake.
I was going to be a soldier. I was going to be an officer. I was going to be a leader of men.
Then I smiled at Will and patted him on the back. He needed that.
36
We waited out the afternoon fall storm, the insistent pat-pat-pat of water meeting packed slabs of earth. I stood at a window watching my men teach Rana’s boys poker. They’d gathered in a Stryker to keep dry, but had lowered the ramp to let in air.
“You brought this,” she said from across the hut. “We haven’t had so much rain for years.”
She was teasing. At least I thought she was. I smiled shyly.
Her home was neat and tidy, everything from winter blankets to tableware organized into wood baskets stacked like bricks in corners. I’d thought the baskets a sign of a transient lifestyle, but Rana explained she fashioned herself a “minimalist,” preferring an open space.
“How’d you learn that word?” I asked.
“There is a show—The Real Housewives of Cairo. My cousin in Karrada has a television. We watched it for hours when we visited last year. It was very…” She knocked on her forehead as she searched for the English word. “Educational.”
I ran a hand through my sweaty hair. I’d been growing it out some, pushing the regulation length. My helmet and rifle lay near the front door. A pair of Persian carpets covered much of the main room with red diamonds and purple snowflakes. I returned to my plastic chair on the carpets, facing her. Every Iraqi man I’d met with had insisted on sitting on the ground for tradition. Rana said they just enjoyed messing with foreigners. She rose, gliding like a specter to the window, her dress concealing her feet and long black hair falling behind her.
“It’s kind of your soldiers to play with Ahmed and Karim,” she said. Her English was no longer clipped by breaks between syllables, improving with every conversation. “They get lonely.”
The other homes in the hamlet were abandoned and had been since the sectarian wars of 2006. Rana’s husband, an older cousin so infatuated with her that he hadn’t minded marrying the disgraced ex-lover of an American, maintained the other buildings in case any displaced al-Badris returned to the area. His name was Malek. I hadn’t met him, nor did I wish to.
Rana moved to the kitchen counter, a thin piece of granite on the other side of the room. My eyes followed, and my nostrils filled with her perfume, a curiously muggy scent that reminded me of swamp blossoms.
“Still no chai?” she asked. “Or food? Most Arabs don’t follow the rules of Ramadan, you know. Just the crazy ones.”
My stomach growled from days of inattention, but I shook my head. Another meal of cold leftovers awaited after sundown.
She brewed her tea differently from Saif, with more familiarity and less care. She scoffed when I’d said not to use distilled water, and had been more interested in the cost of his electric kettle than dismissive of it. She began boiling water and looked up, catching my eyes before they could dart away.
“Tell me again,” she said. “About finding him.”
“Nothing more to tell.” I’d grown weary of the topic. “Haitham told us where to dig. We dug. We found the skeleton and sent it home.”
“To Texas,” she corrected.
“To Texas.”
“But how do you know it was him?” I marveled at the control in her voice, as if we were still discussing the weather. “Because of tests in a lab?”
“Yeah,” I said. Then I tapped at a bottom tooth. “And this was missing.”
A whimper escaped her throat, and she bent against the countertop like a broken vane. I stood, ready to do something, anything, but clueless as to what. Then the kettle whistled. I blinked and Rana was upright, pouring water into a pot. She let the green mint leaves soak and resumed her seat. At her gesturing, I did the same.