Repo Men (16 page)

I
’m pretty sure this place used to be a Laundromat; though there are no longer washers or dryers here, I’ve noticed some heavily spray-painted vending machines that still smell more of detergent than they do of urine, and in this part of town, that’s a blessing.

I half-carried/half-walked Beth through the city streets, resorting to occasional slaps to keep her as awake as possible. The longer we were on the streets, the more likely we’d be tagged by some happy-dappy Bio-Repo guy out scanning for his jollies. I’d packed all my weapons—and, of course, my trusty Underwood typewriter here—into a duffel, and between the weight of the metal and Bonnie’s slumped form, it was slow going.

This joint seems safe enough, though—a small, protected room in the back of the main space, easy access to the alley behind for a quick getaway. Only one main entrance through smoked plate-glass doors out front, easy to see out but not so much in.

Bonnie’s still asleep. When she wakes, we’ll go to work on that knee. Until then, I’ll type. I can feel the noose getting a little tighter with every passing day. Eventually, someone’s going to kick the chair out from under me, but until then, I’ll keep putting it all down on paper. It’s outdated, I know, but it’s all I’ve got. At this point, I’d rather be obsolete than forgotten.

After Beth’s divorce papers showed up in mail call, I applied for a forty-eight-hour leave and threw myself into the deepest, blackest bender I could work up. Most of my time was spent badgering the proprietor of the local liquor mart near base to sell me more alcohol, and after a protracted series of arguments, he could tell I wasn’t going to leave him alone, so he up and gave me two pints of tequila, a fifth of scotch, and a case of this odd African beer, just to get me away from the store. Sometime during my stupor I must have run into Antonio, the old Italian who liked my clothes, because when I returned to base, ranting and raving about the whore bitch who’d left me, I wasn’t wearing a stitch. It was nighttime, and the African desert was two degrees Celsius.

Lucky for me, Tig caught me before the higher brass did and sent me into barracks to sleep it off inside a control chair. When I was finally sober enough to manipulate my limbs, Tig placed me on bathroom detail as punishment, which was actually the ideal place for a hangover of Roman proportions, mainly due to the proximity of magical porcelain receptacles. As soon as I’d vomit and clean out one of the toilets, I’d stand and be ready to desecrate the next one over.

All this blubbering over a girl—a prostitute, no less, a whore if we’re calling a spade a spade—may seem like petty nonsense from a man who would, ten years later, feel no remorse at taking a child’s lung implant because his father frittered away the monthly artiforg payment at the dog track, but at the time I was still not much more than a boy who had lost the only woman he thought he could love forever.

It got much worse before it got much better.

The day Harold Hennenson died was a warm one. Most days in the desert were warm, of course, but I remember it as being particularly hot that afternoon, sweat dripping down my cheeks even before I climbed into the stifling atmosphere of the tank. We’d eaten a hearty breakfast of MREs in foil, made our guesses as to the actual content of the meal, and been given stock orders from the commanding officers to resume the maneuvers we’d been at all week.

The enemy, we were told, was retreating faster than we could advance, and it was up to our division to claim as much territory as possible in the most rapid fashion we could muster. The military didn’t want any dead space; they looked upon a neutral zone as nothing but a vacuum for other foreign interests to fill, and the last thing America needed, we were told, was to engage yet another enemy out here on the sand.

We were running after them, more or less, charging with our guns held high, sighting only their rumps as they ran away wholesale, only a few lone snipers and gung-ho religious nuts staying behind to fight us off. I remember one fellow who came charging out from behind what must have been the only palm tree—the only tree—the only living thing—for miles, finger hard on the trigger of his Uzi, spraying the advancing line of American tanks with rapid-fire ammunition, screaming something in his own language that could have been anything from a religious battle cry to a nursery rhyme; I’ve never understood what the hell those people were saying.

Don’t know who targeted him first, but three of our tanks released million-dollar heat-guided rockets at the exact same time, each one exploding in a bright wash of fire that hardened the desert into a thick, twisted mass of burnt glass and obliterated any mortal sign of the lone gunman.

Three missiles, one man: The modern Marines in action.

But the day Harold died, there were no fireworks or heroics; just a row of tanks rolling through the desert, side by side, a giant kick-line of metal strutting its stuff across the dark continent. There were eight of us per rank, stretched out across a three-mile-wide expanse of land, gunners in back manning the turrets, keeping the watch out for an enemy we knew would never show.

My concentration was focused on the terrain ahead and the topographical map laid out before me, the three-dimensional image floating in front of my control chair ray-traced in bright green lines. Each of our machines was represented by a dot—blue for mine, red for Harold’s, and so on—and the hills and valleys of the desert peaked before my eyes long before the tank ever made the climb or descent, enabling me and the other drivers to chart our course in advance.

The talkies were on the fritz again, static hissing through any communication we attempted with each other, our frequencies limited to local range. This was a common occurrence out in Africa; some thought it was the sand, the dust storms. I had a hunch it was crap engineering due to a little bit of nepotism in the military bid process, but kept my feelings on the matter to myself. As a result of the headset malfunctions, I could converse with Jake holed up at the gun in the back, but was unable to relay information to any of the tanks around me.

I could hear some of the other tank conversation, though, in the odd moments when the crackling died down, and was relieved to hear that while imagining themselves safe in their confines, the other soldiers talked about the same stupid stuff we did in ours: money, girls, and the things we’d done to get them.

“How’s the back?” I radioed to Jake, who’d been passing the time by sighting and summarily destroying any insects unfortunate enough to pass by his scope.

“Clear. Like always. Second line of tanks are in some goddamn awful shape, lookin’ like a buncha runners at the end of a race. Tig would kick their asses good and proper, he saw that.”

“Not our problem,” I said. “Long as our line’s in order, we’re doing our jobs.”

I remember pulling up a second view of the topographical map, a small display winking into existence next to the first; as the original map scrolled forward, this one scrolled backward, marking the progress we’d made. A second line of colored blips steadily made its way across the desert, only this one was as convoluted as Jake had said, the tanks all out of alignment.

Static on the talkies, and I heard a nearby missile gunner, a kid from Omaha named Percy who would wind up spending the bulk of his post-military life in a military jail, saying, “I’m getting feedback from the second row. They’re slowing down on the right side.”

“Why?”

“Can’t make it out. Something about…there’s a…a drop…?”

A third map popped into place, hovering above the first two—more desert, the altitude graph climbing sharply, oddly, and I turned my legs in such a way as to pan the entire map to the right. The soothing blue digits on the map’s altimeter quickly darkened into a flashing red, and as I swung the map around a full 90 degrees, I saw in bright green lines, boldly drawn through the air in the small tank compartment, the rise and fall of what we would later find out was the largest sand dune ever seen in Africa. Harold’s tank was heading directly up its sloping face.

“They’re not turning,” said Percy. “They don’t see it.”

“They can’t see it, they’re
on
it,” another gunner piped up, and now it was getting hard to hear, the static was so strong. “Its huge…can’t see the…but it….”

But Harold’s tank kept on rolling, climbing up the dune, unaware that they were 300 meters from the edge—unaware that there even
was
an edge. Our topographical information came from a network of all the tanks’ radar put together, which allowed the drivers a full 360-degree view of the terrain. If that network was out—which is what the Marines later surmised happened to Harold’s tank—then the immediate area in front of the machine, especially if it was on an incline, was off-limits to the driver. Radar doesn’t turn corners, and it doesn’t bounce off clouds.

The talkies cleared up for a moment, and I used the time to frantically dial into Harold’s frequency, hoping to get a message across to his tank’s driver. But the crackles started up as soon as I locked in, and though I could hear their words, I know now they could never have heard mine.

“…sweet babies falling for these muscles…” I heard Harold saying, bragging to the other kid in his tank, the static cutting into his words. “Gonna get me a…when I get on back…gal for me. Hey, you think…with the same…am I right? And you know…he’s the driver three tanks over? He’s a buddy of mine, got a great gal down…maybe she’s got a friend…”

I punched buttons. I spun dials. I screamed and I yelled and I shouted into that talkie headset, and I know neither Harold nor his driver ever heard a word of it. In a last desperation attempt, I violated Marine policy in every possible way by unbuckling myself, squirming out of the control chair—Jake yelling at me, screaming at me to sit and drive, for chrissakes, drive—and blowing the top of our tank, climbing out and up, imagining that somehow I could leap onto the sand and outrace Harold’s machine, banging on the side, scrambling up top, pulling open the hatch, and applying the brakes myself just inches before the tank made its fateful dive.

As it was, I opened our hatch and reached air just in time to watch Harold, his mates, and 54 million dollars’ worth of Marine equipment plummet over the edge of the sand dune and fall 200 feet before exploding on the sand.

The sandstorm was what did it, they said. Mucked up the talkies, mucked up the topographical displays. Billions of particles no bigger than flea snot, bringing down the mighty force of the marching military. Maybe the enemy should have tried to harness the power of the desert rather than resort to modern-grade weapons in order to fight us off. It doesn’t come much lower-tech than sand. Perhaps next time they’ll wise up and try stoning us to death.

Nostalgia, of the good kind:

Peter, my son, did a report for his third-grade class on the disciplinary procedures of cultures before the common age. I wasn’t usually around to help out with homework, especially during that part of Peter’s life, but he was in my custody that weekend, as determined by the courts, and I was obligated to take care of the little pisser for at least those two days every other week. He hadn’t learned to hate me yet, and I like to think it was for a good reason: At that point in his life, I hadn’t yet done anything to incur his wrath.

I was sitting in my workroom, going over a few last bits of paperwork from the last artiforg I’d brought in, and Peter ambled over. It was late, and he was already dressed in his pajamas, feet and all.

“My teeth are brushed,” he announced, “and I washed my face.”

These were bedtime procedures Melinda insisted upon; I always forgot about them, but Peter was a good-enough kid to remember on his own.

“Great, champ,” I told him. “Run off and I’ll see you in the morning.”

But he stood there, a sheet of paper in his right hand, and waddled to where I was sitting. “Dad,” he said, “why did the Romans stone people to death?”

“Because they didn’t have any guns,” I answered.

I think he got a B.

When Peter was younger, just a tyke who didn’t want to go to sleep, who wanted to stay up with Mommy and Daddy and dance and play, Melinda and I used to sing nonsense songs to him in place of lullabies. He was never interested in the conventional “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” but he did close his eyes and drift off to our own improvised tunes.

Melinda was much better at it than I was; her songs, at least, made sense. But Peter’s favorite, the song he’d ask for over and over again once he got old enough to put in requests, was a silly little number I’d constructed one restless evening when he had a cough and a fever and nothing else was working.

It was like a Dixieland riff on a Hawaiian melody, jangly and fun and soft, and I still remember the words today:

Melinda and I sang it to each other well after the first movement of our marriage had come to a close, the love of our son the only thing that still bound us as a couple. I wonder if Peter still remembers it. I wonder if it still helps him go to sleep. I wonder if he remembers that his pop made it up.

Tig asked if I could write a little something to be sent back to Harold’s parents along with his ashes. There wasn’t much to say, I told him. At least, not much I could say to his parents. We’d hung out together, sure, gone to bars and clubs and whorehouses. Fought side by side, talked about what we wanted out of life and how we thought we’d get it. Where we thought the world was going to and whether or not it was going to leave us behind. But that wasn’t anything to write home to parents, was it?