The Sandbox (17 page)

51

I station myself
in the doorway of the Comm Trailer around 0900. It’s empty for once, but I pretend like I’m waiting in line to use the phone. The captain and Lieutenant Blankenship go into the office trailer together a few minutes later. I tilt my watch back and forth, trying to read the minute hand. I can’t. Even though it’s almost useless, I can’t seem to bring myself to throw the thing away.

When the controlled explosive event finally goes off, the ground shakes. That sure as hell wasn’t any grenade. I wonder if the captain rigged up an artillery shell. I’m far enough away that the sound isn’t painful, but it’s still loud enough to make me wince. Someone in the motor pool yells. The captain and the lieutenant come running out of the office trailer. Sergeant Guzman jogs across the parade ground. There’s a cluster of men down by the gate. I look around to make sure anyone who might see me is otherwise occupied, then duck behind the Comm Trailer.

I count out the seconds. After a hundred and eighty, I run behind the Conex units, sprinting when I hit the gaps between them. The windows of the lieutenant’s trailer have blinds. The AC unit wheezes away. My uniform is drenched in sweat and the key feels greasy in my fingers. A last look around, then I dash up the steps. When I lean against the door to unlock the bolt, it opens on its own. Frosty air slips out. If he left the door unlocked and the AC on, it must mean he plans to come back soon. I step inside and close the door behind me.

I’ve never been in one of the officers’ trailers before. Back home, this would be a small, shabby place to live. Here in the sandbox, it’s a palace. On the left is a tiny kitchen separated from the rest of the room by a counter and two barstools. The linoleum is yellow with a pattern of green squares, peeling in the corners. In the center of the living room is a card table with three folding chairs. An orange couch and a yellow easy chair fill the remainder of the space. On the wall above the couch, someone has hung a framed photo of President Bush, the official one you find in federal offices where he’s wearing a false half-smile like you sometimes see in wedding group shots. Something about his face in this picture has always reminded me of the TV puppet Howdy Doody. He looks smug, as though the inside of this trailer amuses him but not very much.

Other than this, the walls are bare. A narrow hallway leads to the other end of the trailer. I check to make sure all the window blinds are drawn before going on. This is a two-man trailer, but the lieutenant has it to himself for now. That never would have happened before they split the base. I try the first of three doors. Empty, except for a steel bedframe and a mattress with a brown heart-shaped stain. In the closet, a bent wire hanger sags from the rod. The next door leads to an extremely clean bathroom. The whole trailer feels abandoned, like a motel room after the guest has checked out.

The last room is his bedroom. A dresser, bare, and a bed so tightly made you could crack an egg on it. The AC unit whistles. As the sweat cools, my skin gets clammy. It can’t be less than 75 degrees in here, but compared to the temperature outside it feels like a refrigerator. I try and remember what the captain said. A hollow space in the wall beside the AC. I thump at the fake wood paneling. The entire wall sounds hollow. Maybe what I’m looking for is a full place. Just below the unit, I get a solid thunk when I tap on the press board. I run my hands along the base of the wall, trying to find a crack. It might just be a stud. But no, there’s a bit of splintering where two pieces of paneling come together. I pull out my Gerber knife and try to pry it open.

Not two yards outside the window, I hear Hazel calling someone a stupid asshole. At least it sounds like Hazel. I freeze and listen for a moment. Sweat drips from my chin. Was that the sound of a boot on the steps? Where can I go if the lieutenant comes back? In the closet? Under the bed? I feel like an adulterer in a bad romantic comedy.

As I shift my weight to look around, I bump my knee against the wall and something inside clicks. When I step back, a panel the size of a folded newspaper swings open. The hinge is sprung, so the little door pops free if you apply pressure in the right place. It’s very neatly done. The pressure point is no larger than a dime. I could have thumped the wall all day and never found it. The lieutenant must have fixed this himself. It strikes me as unlikely he just stumbled upon it while adjusting the AC. Handiwork like this has always impressed me, probably because I can’t do it myself. A dull green metal box is lodged between two load-bearing studs. A very tight fit. Resting on top is a photo album covered in desert camouflage material. It falls open when I pull the lockbox out. A child’s birthday party. A little girl in a bathing suit standing in a wading pool holding a hose. The water gushing out sparkles in the sunlight. A dog drinking from a toilet. I flip through it. Some wedding pictures, but not the lieutenant’s. A photo of an attractive blond woman standing on tiptoes to kiss the lieutenant on the forehead. Sister? Girlfriend? Wife? I try to remember if the lieutenant wears a wedding ring. This is the only personal item of his I’ve seen. I flip back to the beginning of the book to give it a closer look. Outside, Sergeant Guzman shouts my name, and I start so badly I nearly drop the book. What the hell am I doing messing around like this? Stay alert. Keep on task. Remain frosty.

I yank out the lockbox and put the album back. The box is heavy and secured by a combination lock with four tumblers. Something solid slides around inside. I give it a little shake. There’s also a light fluttering of paper. It sounds like it could be loose bills. The panel snaps easily into place when I push it closed. The woodwork is so good the seams vanish. I wipe the sweat off my forehead. It drips onto the carpet. I’m sopping wet.

A shadow passes by the windows at a trot; the sound makes my stomach cramp. I dig a booney hat and some sunglasses out of my cargo pocket and make sure my hair is tucked up inside and that it’s pulled way down over my eyes. Using my knuckles, I worry a roll of masking tape out of my other pocket and tear off a piece to cover the name tape on my shirt. Someone fires a triple burst with an M4, fairly close. Seconds later, they fire another. And another. I pause at the door to draw a deep breath, so I can stuff the lockbox into the waistband of my pants. The fabric pulls very tight and cuts into my back. I exhale and turn the doorknob. The last thing I notice is a small plastic figurine of the Little Mermaid lying sideways on the armrest of the couch. Go, I tell myself. And I do.

52

I hear the
shout as soon as I reach the corner of the trailer. It’s Lopez. His boots come crunching over the gravel at a quick clip. I break into a run. Flat out, as fast as I can go. I head behind the line of trailers, head ducked low. I found the booney hat I’m wearing in Common Tent 2 last night. It’s an extra-large one so the brim covers the upper part of my face fairly well, but if Lopez gets closer, he’ll recognize me. Even if he doesn’t, I’m sure he’ll think it’s me. He’ll want it to be. I don’t intend to let him prove it. When I hear him following me, I cut between the Comm and office trailers and sprint across the parade ground. I only spent a few minutes in the lieutenant’s trailer, five minutes tops, so most people are still down by the blast site. As far as I can tell, no one else notices me running. Lopez shouts again.

I duck inside the bay doors of the motor pool. No one’s here. The door leading down into the lower levels is ajar. The steps go down quite a long way, and there are several different possible exits from the building if I take this route, but this is the direction he’ll expect me to head. An old plastic mayonnaise jar filled with screwdrivers sits beside the door. At the far end of the bay, Cox has stacked truck tires. I’m pretty sure I could squeeze behind them. Lopez yells something that sounds disturbingly similar to my name. I give the jar a kick and send it bouncing down the stairs and then I run for the tires. The one at the top nearly tips as I scrape behind the sloppy pile, but I steady it with my hand and crouch behind the stacks. I can see a slice of the room between them. Lopez comes sliding across the sandy concrete and almost falls. He’s panting and wheezing. After a few raspy breaths, he jerks his head to one side. It’s my mayonnaise jar, still rattling down the steps. Bless you, little jar. Lopez smiles. A tight, mean pursing of the lips. And then he’s off.

I slip out one of the side doors. The lockbox digs into my ribs as I move. It feels alive and dangerous, a little metal mammal that wants to burrow into my chest. I follow the crumbling wall, walking quickly, until I spot a small pile of rocks about fifty yards behind the mess hall. There’s no way I’m bringing this time bomb back to my tent. If they suspect me, that’s the very first place they’ll look. I use a thin flat rock to dig. I bury the box just deep enough to stay covered if the wind comes up again in the night. Every inch of my uniform is drenched in sweat and my face is crusted with grime by the time I pat the sand smooth. I mark the spot by impaling the Marlboro box the captain gave me on the sharp tip of a broken radio antenna.

I wish I could take a cool shower, but with water rationed, that’s impossible until next week. I consider going back to my tent and using the last of my Wet-Naps. Instead, I jog over to the back entrance to the kitchen tent. It’s empty. I peek into the buckets lining the tent wall. All empty. One of the deep steel sinks is half full of dingy water. It smells like rotten onions, but I smell worse. With a metal cup, I pour it over my head. Never in my life could I have imagined how refreshing a bath in dirty dishwater would be.

The kitchen clock reads 0912. Only twelve minutes. A criminal’s life must feel ten times as long as the honest man’s.

53

The old woman
comes at dusk. She drives a wooden cart mounted on two mismatched car tires, pulled by a donkey. The back is filled with empty rice sacks and ruined clothes. No one bothers to poke through it. The cloth has a sour smell, like the dregs of a beer bottle left out overnight. Strong winds and billowing dust follow her off the plain. She’s wrapped in several layers of heavy black cloth and from a distance looks like a pile of laundry. The sentry doesn’t know what to do with her. He and Sergeant Guzman look her over and let her in. Soon after, the lieutenant sends for me.

When I get to Common Tent 2, I find Ahmed standing by the flap, staring up at the Noses. In the late afternoon light, they are the dark purple color of a deep muscle bruise. Cox told me Ahmed would be gone for the next few days because of a religious holiday. He doesn’t hear me coming and jumps when I say his name.

“Ahmed, what are you doing here?” I ask.

He shrugs his shoulders and tries to bum a cigarette. I shake my head, even though I have a sack of tobacco and papers in my cargo pocket. Ahmed seems distracted, worried even. He follows me into the tent.

The lieutenant sits across a card table from the old woman. He pulls absently at the hair behind his ear. A glass of water sits untouched beside her hands. They turn as we come in. When the woman sees Ahmed, she looks down.

Before I have time to salute, the lieutenant says, “Find out what she wants. I can’t get a word out of her.”

I attempt to ask her this in my halting Arabic. She doesn’t respond. I look over at Ahmed.

“Furdu,” he says, spittle coming out with the word. “Nasty.”

“How do you know?” I say. She looks like every other old woman I’ve seen since coming here.

He whirls a hand around his head and mumbles something about hats. She’s not wearing a hat, just a piece of dark cloth wrapped around her hair and face. It’s of an indeterminate color that could be black faded by the sun or discolored by years of grime.

“Ask her what she wants,” the lieutenant says impatiently.

Ahmed says something in a sharp voice and the old woman responds slowly, never once looking up at him. I catch something about Allah and demons.

“She’s come for the body of her brother and of her sister’s daughter’s son.”

“How did she know they were dead?” the lieutenant asks. “For that matter, how did she know they were here?”

Ahmed asks. The old woman looks down at her feet and points to the ceiling.

“She says God told her in a . . .” Ahmed bites his lip in frustration. “In a sleep movie.” He closes his eyes and puts his hands against his ear in a pantomime of sleeping. “Lies. The God isn’t speaking to nasty peoples like this.”

“What did we do with them, Durrant?” the lieutenant says. He speaks quickly and with distaste.

“We put them in body bags and Ahmed buried them behind the cement factory building.”

“We did?” He seems surprised, although he was the one to give the order. The lieutenant turns to Ahmed. “Tell her we’ll get them. But first she needs to tell us how many of her people have turned against us and gone to the Noses.”

Ahmed frowns and starts to complain. The lieutenant shuts him down with a loud, “Do it.” Ahmed salutes in his sloppy way and reluctantly turns back to the old woman. She appears startled by the question and answers at some length. When she stops, Ahmed stares at the table, rubbing his hands together. It should be obvious to everyone he’s trying to formulate a lie of some kind.

“So?” the lieutenant asks.

“It is all old-woman talk. She is telling make-up stories.”

“Just tell us what she said,” I say.

Ahmed sighs and rolls his eyes. The lieutenant clenches and unclenches his hands. The old woman tells her beads, which appear in her hands suddenly, like a dove from a magician’s sleeve. The small dry clicks sound very loud. Ahmed squints at them with disgust.

“She is saying her peoples are leaving.” He continues to stare at the old woman’s beads as he speaks, as though he would like to tear them from her hands. “But not to the Noses. They go south. To Inmar. These are lies. I know lies. Every word a fat and juicy lie.”

I wonder where he got this fat and juicy business. Probably Cox.

“Just translate,” the lieutenant says.

“She is saying she came back to make a noise. A big noise for the bad men to hear so her peoples can get away. She is alone and old. No childrens left. She is saying it doesn’t matter what happens to her.” Ahmed looks at the old woman again. She whispers something so softly it sounds like radio static. He scrapes at a tooth with his thumbnail and blinks. An odd expression passes across his face. He almost looks scared for a moment, but then he pushes whatever troubles him aside and smiles a smile so large and false that even the lieutenant looks alarmed by it. “She is saying you must go too.”

“We must go?
Must
?” The lieutenant snorts and tugs at the hair behind his ear. “Tell her we’re safe here. There’s nothing for us to worry about.”

I wonder if the lieutenant actually believes this.

Ahmed tells the old woman something. God only knows what. I try and decide for the hundredth time if it’s really possible for us to communicate this way. It’s hard enough to have a conversation with someone who speaks your language, much less to talk through an untrustworthy and incompetent translator to someone who doesn’t know a single English word. I wondered the same thing when we tried to interrogate the old man. Even if he had spoken to me man to man, would I have understood him? Probably not. I doubt the captured boy could really express what he thought either. I’m pretty sure he made an earnest go at it, but—but what we got in the end was just a crude approximation that essentially transformed what he said into a well-meaning lie. One jump is hard enough, but two must be almost impossible. From thought into word and then from one language to another. Drawing pictures might be better.

The old woman makes a low monotone humming sound and rocks back and forth, clicking her prayer beads. Then, suddenly, she stops and stares into the lieutenant’s eyes. Her voice is husky with excitement as she speaks.

Ahmed shakes his head. “She is telling to you, no one is safe. Not any more.”

The woman continues, even louder now. Suddenly, Ahmed makes an angry guttural sound and lunges across the table. She screams and spits at him. The lieutenant and I grab Ahmed’s arms, pulling him up just before the flimsy card table collapses. The old woman darts forward and pinches the top of Ahmed’s hand with her fingernails. They have the color and texture of a cow’s hoof and it isn’t easy to pry them away from Ahmed’s skin. He squeals.

When we finally manage pull them apart, his hand is swelling from a burst blood vessel. The old woman examines her work with great satisfaction. Just behind his knuckles is a purple mark the size of a cat’s tongue.

“Guzman!” the lieutenant shouts.

The sergeant appears almost immediately.

“Take this woman outside.”

“Yes, sir.”

Once she’s gone, the lieutenant starts to shout again. “What the hell was that, Ahmed? She’s an old lady!”

“No, she is a trash on the road. Nasty dead pork woman.”

“What did she say?” the lieutenant asks.

“Lies.”

“I don’t care to hear your interpretation,” he says. “Just tell me what the fuck she said.”

“She is lying that many thousands men go to Noses. Not her men. Others. She sees them walk on roads. She is hearing them pray for Allah to put strong in their arms and put more red on their hearts. This praying means they are almost coming soon. That is why her peoples go south. She is saying before the moon of Ramadan they come and kill all of your things. Trucks and houses and papers and clothes. They kill even the rocks.” Ahmed’s voice rises, as though this possible destruction pleases him a great deal. The way his eyes shine makes me want to punch them shut, but the lieutenant seems fascinated, somehow both excited and worried. “They kick your heads open like melons and make a tasty kind of soup out of your hearts and put many spices in the pot after it bubbles and then they are eating heart soup. Bowls and bowls and bowls. It puts the strong in their arms. Then they feed your sexes to dogs. These are the lies she is saying.”

“Heart soup?” I ask.

The lieutenant looks intently at the empty chair where the old woman sat a minute ago. He is out of breath, as though Ahmed’s rant was something heavy he had to lift. I have the disturbing feeling this information connects in some way with other things he knows. In the murky light of the tent, Ahmed’s eyes gleam like two wet prune pits.

“This is all a bunch of hokum,” the lieutenant says finally, but without much conviction. His face is red and splotchy and he plucks at the back of his head in a fast, uneven rhythm, like he’s tapping out a message in Morse code. “Peasant crap.”

“Yes, yes, pleasant crap.” Ahmed looks triumphant. “Lies, I am telling you. Fat and juicy lies. Now you see. She is a nasty dead pork woman.”

“Take Ahmed and dig up those bodies, Durrant.” The lieutenant sounds tired. “Then get her out of here.”

“Lies,” Ahmed says again and pumps his fist in the air. He only seems to pick up Cox’s most irritating affectations. It baffles me.