The Sandbox (19 page)

59

Hazel sits Indian-style
in the sand outside Common Tent 1 with his head in hands. His shoulders shake, vibrate. But he doesn’t make a sound. Either he doesn’t notice me or he doesn’t want to. Inside the tent, men shout. It’s impossible to make out who’s yelling at who. Or what about. I take a knee in the sand beside him and put my hand on his shoulder. He jerks away. Like I prodded him with a hot rifle barrel.

“Hazel?” I say.

He keeps his face in his hands.

“Hazel?” I reach over and try to pull his hands away, but they stay stuck to his face. “Come on, man. What happened?”

Hazel makes a wet growling sound like an injured dog.

“Guy, come on. What’s going on?”

“Boyette,” he mumbles through his fingers. A string of drool hangs from his chin.

Understanding comes fast and hard. A load of wet sand dropped on my head. “Not—”

Hazel jumps up and whirls around. He kicks the tent’s guy wire. He kicks sand. Rocks fly. He kicks me in the leg. He kicks and kicks and kicks. All the while, he covers his face with his hands. He goes around and around in this jerky, angry dance.

“Shit!” he shouts. Spit and snot and tears drip from his fingers. “Shit, fuck, shit, shit, shit, motherfucking shit fuck shit!”

“Do you want—”

“Get the fuck away from me or I’ll kick your fucking ass!”

I step away. I feel like someone’s wrapped a rope around my neck and is slowly pulling it tight. Air whistles in my throat. I don’t know what to do with my hands. I don’t what to do.

Hazel stops spinning and drops to the ground face-first like he’s been shot by a sniper. His boots continue to kick at the sand. He makes that wet growling sound again. Boyette gave Hazel constant shit, but they were rarely apart. Once I even saw Boyette cutting Hazel’s hair with a battery-powered razor. Way out in the sand behind the mess tent. Just the two of them. Hazel in a chair and Boyette stepping around him with the razor. Laughing their heads off about something.

My thoughts are all jammed up in a tight knot. All I can think to do is go look for Rankin. Rankin. He’ll know what the fuck.

60

Nobody goes to
bed. As tired as they are, nobody’s sleeping until they get the story out of their system. It’s always this way after a shitstorm. After any kind of fight, actually. We tell ourselves the story over and over again. Tonight we sit around in Common Tent 2, wishing we had beer, wishing we had whiskey. Wishing. Sergeants Guzman and Oliphant are off somewhere else. The rest of us have piled into the tent. Even Ahmed’s here. He sits in the corner with his hands in his lap and watches us, like a wasting disease that will eventually kill us all. When I tell Lopez to get rid of him, Ahmed glares at me.

“Somebody locked the guy in a closet, Durrant,” Lopez says.

I shrug.

Nevada’s starting the story when I sit down in the circle. His voice is the only sound in the room. It sounds hollow and fragile, like he’s talking through a cardboard tube. “We got pretty far with the Humvees. Further than I thought we’d get. Shit, I didn’t think we’d get a klick away from the base before we’d have to start humping. Oliphant has us stop at the bottom of a trail. We can see it stretching up the side of the hill—”

“And smoke,” Greer says. He hasn’t washed. His face is black with ash. Rusty bits of dried blood flake away from his cheeks when he scratches them.

“Yeah, and we see this itty-bitty little dribble of smoke coming up in the distance. This makes Oli happy.”

“Small smoke, small force.” Rankin usually does a pretty good Sergeant Oliphant imitation, but there’s something missing from this one.

“So our man Rankin here is on point. He’s lugging that big M249 right on down the trail. Has that SAW up on his shoulder like it was just a little stick. The man’s got rounds wrapped every which way. A regular Mexican bandit.” Nevada looks over at him and smiles. A tired smile but a real one. Shit, I think, when did this start? They’re making eyes at each other now, like teenagers on the way to the prom. It takes me a moment to realize I’m jealous of their shared experience, bad as it might be. It’s an ugly reaction and it irritates me to realize I’m having it. Nevada takes a drag off his cigarette, blows a thick blue spurt of smoke at the ceiling, then continues the story. “He takes us all the way up the hill. How many klicks you think, Mr. R?”

“Ten maybe,” Rankin says.

“That’s right, y’all, that’s right.” He sings this to us like a sad song. “Ten klicks straight up the Nose. Up there at the top, when we’re getting closer to the smoke, Oli tells us to get ready, we’re leaving the trail. We’re going up and over. So get on your bellies. We crawl through them rocks like lizards. The sun’s sucking the sweat right out of us. It’s hot, man. I mean pizza-oven hot.”

“Pizza-oven,” Hazel repeats, as though it’s a word he’s never heard. This is the first thing he’s said in almost an hour.

“Big bad Rankin here, he’s on point and when he gets to the top, he’s like—” Nevada holds up his fist, sign language for stop. “Oli creeps up there beside him and glasses something with his bee-nocks. The rest of us, our cheese is melting, bubbling.”

“They were holding a conference up there,” Doc Greer adds.

Rankin frowns. His eyes are pink and glassy. If he shut them, he’d be asleep before he hit the floor. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he’d just smoked a J. But I know better. Battle fatigue can be a sort of intoxication.

“Oli comes back and tells us to shut the fuck up. We’re too loud. They must have heard us coming, ’cause they’ve skipped. We follow him over the ridge. There, in a little flat spot carved out of the side of the hill, is a tiny, baby camp. Ain’t hardly nothing. A pile of dirty filthy clothes. A boot with holes. A blanket that smells like Greer’s meemaw’s nookie.”

“Hey, my granny’s got a washcloth,” Doc Greer says and tries to smile. But that smile is about something else. It’s a look of pure relief. I’m not dead, this half-smile says, I’m not dead.

“Then I notice they left behind their dinner. A big old pot of stew boiling over the fire. And I’ll tell you what. It smelled good. Real good. Ain’t that right, Salis?”

“It did. I’m thinking it was goat.” Salis’s hair is mashed down and matted with yellow dirt. The patchy growth on his cheeks looks like mildew. He listens with a clenched fist on either knee, nodding like an autistic child.

“Well, I grab the stirring spoon off a rock and dip me up a bite. We hadn’t stopped to eat for a long, long time. Right before we hit the trail I had one of them chicken MREs. You know the kind. No flavor, just a block of tough old meat.”

“I like them,” Salis says, surprised to hear someone else might not.

“You would,” Greer says.

“My stomach’s growling and fussing. I need some fuel. This here’s a snack, I tell myself, just to hold me over till supper. Right as I’m fixing to pop it in my mouth, Rankin comes by and swipes it out of my hand. Goddamn, I told him, what the fuck? I was fixing to pop him one.”

Everyone looks over to see what Rankin thinks about this. He stares at the tent wall like he can see right through it. I’m not even sure he’s listening.

But Nevada doesn’t stop. “Rankin says, ‘Could be something’s wrong with it.’ ‘Nah,’ I say, ‘they just left a second ago. It’s their dinner. What’d be wrong with it? They don’t know we’re coming to lunch. Looky here,’ I tell him, ‘that cat’s eating it and it looks fine.’”

The men who made up the fire team all laugh. A raucous angry laugh. A hellish in-joke. They bare their teeth like rabid dogs. The rest of us look around, feeling left out and maybe glad to be that way. Rankin winks at me and mouths the words,
Fucking Nevada
. Then he falls back into his head. His eyes go as blank as hard-boiled eggs.

“Well, I leave it at that. No time to fuss over it. ’Cause here comes Uncle Oli telling us he’s spotted the hajjis running off on the far hill. We got to hustle. Here’s our chance to get the assholes who’ve been shooting up our base this week.”

Salis says, “I was looking to fuck somebody up bad.”

“I know you were, baby. I know you were.” Nevada thumps him on the shoulder. “Well, we take off after them.”

“Booking it,” Cox says.

“Flat out,” Salis agrees.

“We must a chased them two more klicks. Right down into this shallow wash. Even though we’re being careful, traveling overwatch and moving from cover to cover, Oli, he tries to stop us with a raised fist and says, ‘Whoa, this here ain’t right.’ I’ll admit I heard the man, but we were close on them. Close enough to smell their dirty towels. Too close to stop. And these two, they needed killing bad.”

Salis laughs his agreement. It’s an awful sound.

“I didn’t even hear him,” Rankin says, perking up for a moment.

“Me neither,” Doc Greer says.

“Well, here’s where it gets hairy. Whoa, man, I mean hairy. Like a gorilla. Starts to look like Durrant’s ass.”

A laugh comes out of my mouth. I don’t think about it, but all of a sudden there it is. In a sense, Nevada saying this about me is a compliment. He’s putting me in the story even though I wasn’t really there.

“Rankin and me, we’re popping off some rounds now. He’s got that heavy 240 and it’s louder than shit in this little canyon. I’m feeding in the rounds. The muzzle blast’s blowing the sweat off my face. And then—” Nevada snaps his fingers. “—they’re gone. Vanished. So Rankin and me, we screech to a stop. Look around. Doc Greer and Boyette come slowpoking along.” He takes a breath after this. The sound of this name casts a spell on the room. We all look down at our feet. “And then, and then—” Nevada’s voice gets squeaky and high. “Cox, doing his—” Nevada bounces his shoulders, pulling his chin down tight against his chest. “—his monkey march.”

Nevada waits for the laugh. Nothing. Cox has his eyes closed. He might be asleep. A couple of guys smile. This would have brought down the house last week. But last week was a month ago.

“Oli shouts, ‘Back. Get the fuck back.’ And then the air fills up with lead. This wash we’re in ends about fifty yards away in a pile of boulders. A dead-end. And waiting behind them rocks are about thirty fuckers with their heads wrapped up in dishrags throwing lead at us. Thank God almighty they can’t aim for shit. Spray and pray is all the training these kids got. Still, we are smack up against a shitload of hajjis. That bunch in front, and then a handful up on the hill trying to flank us.”

We’re all leaning in to hear what comes next. The ones who went and the ones who stayed. We’re all in this story now. We hear the guns. We feel that hot, greasy metal. We smell the cordite. We smell the fear in our sweat. All of us here have lived this story. We might have known different actors and different settings, but the plot is just the same. There is only one war story. And we all know the ending.

“Oli pulls us back behind a couple of big rocks. There’s a kind of overhang in the side of this wash that gives us a little bit of cover. They can’t get at us, but we ain’t going nowhere neither. Shit, man, it looked bad. I was saying my prayers.”

“All one of them,” Lopez says.

“Yeah,” Nevada says, “but I was saying it as many times as I could.”

“I know that prayer,” I say. “Please God, save my ass.”

This gets a couple of smiles.

“That’s the one.” Nevada forces his lips into a smile, but the rest of his face stays blank.

“We were goners,” Salis says.

“No doubt.” Nevada leans in, his storyteller face back on. Wide eyes, serious brows, and a tight, crafty mouth. “Oli looks around with that badass expression he’s got. They must teach you that shit at sergeant school. I can see them all lined up in a classroom, ‘All right, you all, give me your fight face.’”

Rankin returns from his head to do a pretty good imitation of Sergeant Oliphant’s mean look and we laugh, but quietly, like we’re all still trapped behind that rock until Nevada brings us out and away, back to the base. Back to our little lockbox, our safe little mud-brick womb. Ollie, ollie, oxen free.

“He looks at us, face to face to face, and says, ‘What we got to do here, men, is set up a diversion.’” Nevada whispers this, the way the sergeant must have done while they were behind those rocks.

Rankin chimes in. “And I said, ‘What the fuck with, boss?’ I thought he was out of his fucking mind.” He is inside the story now, telling it like it’s happening again. I can almost see the scene playing out across his pupils, upside down and tiny, like looking in the lens of a movie projector.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Doc Greer says, squeezing his knees and shaking his head back and forth. “I thought he was shitting us.”

“And then it gets crazier,” Nevada says.

Hazel lets out a soft groan.

“He says to us—” Nevada looks around the room, catching every eye.

And then every one of the men who went on this mission shouts, “Tighten up your bootlaces!” Busting up with laughter once they’re done. The first honest laughs I’ve heard all morning.

“What?” I say, confounded like the rest of us shut-ins.

“Nobody asked, ‘What,’ D,” Cox tells me. His face looks as serious as a knife blade. I see he misunderstands my question, which was just a sound of surprise. “We didn’t say shit. It looked that bad.”

Nevada waves this away. “He has us give him all our smoke grenades and star clusters, and he lines them up on a rock. I had a feeling I knew what he was going to do then, but I kept my mouth shut. Then good old Uncle Oli says, ‘I’m going to give you all some covering fire. And when I say “get,” you get the hell out of here. Hear me?’ Then Rankin says to him, ‘What about you?’ Oli, he just spits. ‘Let me fucking worry about me. You worry about your own ass. I’m going to throw out some smoke and set up behind that rock up there where I can lay down some suppressive fire.’ He points to a big white boulder about ten yards ahead of us that’s split in two like somebody’d chopped it with a great big ax. He gives us all a hard look and says, ‘When I run, you got to give me a big blast of covering fire, I mean big. Then once I’m in place up there, I want you all to let loose with the rest of them smoke grenades on my signal. Every Goddamn one of them. Fire off a couple of star clusters too. Once we got this wash good and choked with smoke, it’s time for you to get the fuck out of here. Don’t wait too long. I’ll put down as much cover as I can, but then you all got to run. Don’t slow down till you get back to that little camp.’” Nevada closes his eyes and shakes his head. His voice sounds suddenly gruff. “I tried to ask him what he was going to do, but he don’t give me a chance. ‘On the count of three,’ he says, before we can think too much about what we’re about to do. ‘One, two, three.’ He chucks out two blue smokes and sprints to the rock. Every last one of us lets go of a clip.

The wash ain’t that wide, maybe fifteen feet across. Tops. We can hear those fuckers jabbering back there at the other end, probably thinking we blown ourselves up. One of them laughed.”

Cox shivers. “I heard that. I heard that.” From the way he says it, I don’t think he’ll ever be able to get it out of his head.

“We all heard it, Collie,” Rankin says softly.

“It didn’t sound like a person,” Cox says. “No real person could make that sound.”

Without warning, Nevada points to the tent flap and shouts, “Go, go, go.”

All of us jump. Ahmed gets out of his chair and starts to run. We laugh at him and jeer. The tent sounds like a kennel. After a second, Ahmed sees it’s just part of the story and stops, but he makes it all the way to the tent flap before he notices he’s the only one running. His face turns red, but he doesn’t say a word. Nobody really cares. We want the story.

“That’s all he says to us. He don’t shout it. Somehow, though, it felt loud. And believe me, every last swinging dick of us is on the move. When it comes time for us all to cut out of there, Oli, he ain’t moving. ‘What about you?’ I yelled over at him, ’cause I had a feeling this was going to happen. I yell this at him just before we throw out the rest of the grenades. ‘I’ll meet you,’ he says. And that’s it. That’s all he says. I think right then, he’s dead. He’s killing himself for us.”

Greer makes a grumbling sound deep in his throat. His eyes are bright and wet. Dyson punches him softly on the leg.

“We run. Shit, do we run. Back through the smoke and up out of that fucking death wash. Bullets were winging off rocks all around us. I caught one—” Nevada bends down so we can see the top of his head. His hair is short, cropped down to about half an inch, but running from ear to ear, there is a crease. I bend in to see it and get a whiff of burnt hair. “Those fucking helmets ain’t worth a shit. That bullet went right on through. Knocked me on my ass and made my eyes cross. I was out cold for a second. Rankin, he yanks me up, and then him and Boyette had to drag my ass on up the hill. Like to of carried me for some of the way.” He gives Rankin one of these new looks of theirs. No smile this time. But now I think I see where this new thing between them came from. Nevada turns back to the rest of us. “And this whole time I’m hearing Boy firing off bursts and shouting, ‘Get some. Get some. Get some.’ That fucking Boyette. He could do some shit. In a tight spot, you wanted him on your team.”