The Sandbox (5 page)

10

I sit on
a cot in Common Tent Number 2 and roll cigarettes. For a tent, it’s fairly large, bigger in fact than my apartment back home, but on days like this the extra space only makes it seem emptier, somehow, and shabby. Pinned up on the west wall is a collection of centerfolds, mainly from copies of
Jugs
and
Barely Legal
sent through the mail from friends back home. Pornography is strictly against the rules, but the NCOs put up with it as long as there aren’t any female soldiers around, and there haven’t been since the base was split. The rest of the tent’s space is filled with a beat-up old TV, a ping-pong table that no one uses because the balls are all gone, ten or so folding camp chairs, a cot that Cox rigged up like a couch, and a couple of coffee tables made from ammo crates.

The sandstorm has swallowed us. It’s almost impossible to go outside, which is a relief because I’m waiting for the lieutenant to send for me. I’ve heard from two people now that he’s looking for me, but for the time being I’ve decided to play stupid. I’m not sure, but I think it’s possible the lieutenant could give me an Article 15 for what went down today. The wind outside sounds like a crowd of hajji women at a funeral. It shrieks and moans and pulls at its hair, which sets all of us on edge, but no one talks about it. Sometimes dust whispers through the sandbags and under the wall of the tent, creeping over the cement floor like smoke from a forgotten cigarette. Sand gets into everything, no matter how carefully you wrap it up and pack it away. Rifles are the worst. You have to clean them twice a day, and that’s when the weather’s nice. I can feel the grit at the back of my throat when I swallow. Sand crunches between my teeth and my eyes feel like they’ve been blow-dried.

A few chairs away from me, Lopez cleans his rifle for something like the tenth time today. He hasn’t said a word since we spoke in the motor pool, but occasionally he looks over and glares at me. Anger pours off of him like a bad smell. On the other side of the room, Nevada and Cox play the video game Guitar Hero, a favorite around here. Each player takes turns flicking their thumbs and punching buttons on a fake plastic guitar in time with a variety of heavy metal arena anthems. Cox is working his way through a Black Sabbath song. He’s a cheerful, stringy-looking guy who grew up on a truck farm outside Macon, Georgia, and if it’s mechanical in nature, he can fix it. His tent is littered with oily machine parts, tools, and dozens of jars filled with the desert insects he likes to collect. Salis sits in the far corner hunched over his laptop. He has his headphones on and whatever DVD he’s watching makes him crack up every few minutes. Soldiers here watch DVDs more than they work, sleep, or fight.

Doc Greer, the more sociable of our two combat medics, comes into the room with a Coke, checks out the game momentarily, and then sits down. Immediately, everyone eyes the Coke. According to Sergeant Guzman, we ran out of them last week.

“Do I smell piss in here?” Doc Greer asks me with an innocent look. He rubs a hand over his dull black flattop. A bit of dust puffs up with each stroke.

“Hilarious,” I say.

“Wanna hear some weird shit?” he asks me.

“No,” Lopez says, not looking up from his rifle. A few days ago he shaved his moustache, probably because Nevada kept calling it his dick tickler, and now there’s a light spot on his upper lip the size and shape of an index finger. “None of us want to hear any of your stupid Joe rumors.”

Joe rumors
are those rumors spread around by grunts in the field. Usually false, and often pathetic. We’re being shipped back to the States in a week. They’re sending down some Deltas to run a mission with us. We’re getting an Internet café. The best cure for monkey butt is a mixture of Bugle Boy, mayonnaise, and gunpowder. Joe rumors might not be true, but they’re a pretty good indicator of morale among the enlisted guys.

“Was I talking to you, Limp Dick?” Doc Greer says. “I think fucking not.” Greer can talk this way to Lopez because they’re both in the same E grade. Lopez pulls rank more than anyone I’ve ever met.

“Goddammit, that fucking solo gets me every time,” Cox says, passing the plastic guitar over to Nevada. In Nevada’s hands, it looks even more like a toy. He may be a relatively short guy, but his hands are huge.

“What’s so weird?” I ask Doc Greer, licking the rolling paper and twisting it up. There, twenty. I stuff them into an old Marlboro box. That ought to keep Rankin satisfied for a while. I still feel bad for making him radio the lieutenant at the factory this afternoon.

“One of my pals from training, he works down in Inmar now, directly under the new general.” Doc Greer grins. “Get this. When that first guy took over the country as head ambassador, he had the reconstruction funds shipped over in cash. Dollars.”

“What?” I say. “That’s like millions of dollars.”

“Try
billions,
Bubba. They wrapped it up in blocks of ten, twenty, and fifty thousand dollars. In blue cellophane, like shrinkwrap.”

“That much cash would be like a mountain of paper,” Nevada says, the mention of money having gotten his attention. “No joke, you could fill up a couple of swimming pools.”

“Or a couple dozen C-130 transport planes,” Doc Greer says.

“Jesus,” I say, “where’d they store it all?”

“At first, they kept it in that big old library downtown in the capital, but here’s the weird part: it’s all gone.”

“Gone,” Nevada says, as if he knows where it is.

“Gone?” Cox and I say.

“And they don’t know where eighty percent of it went. Seven billion dollars.” Greer shakes his head.

“You’ve got to be shitting me. How could someone steal seven billion dollars? That’s got to be like the biggest heist in history,” Cox says. “I don’t believe it.”

“No, it wasn’t stolen outright. A little went here, a little went there. And when I say a little, I mean millions. It got paid out to politicians and tribal chiefs. Like here, Sheikh Shish Kabob, take ten million and build a road. Here’s a bag of ten million, Sheikh Dishcloth, go fix that school we bombed. But the rub is, no one kept track.”

“Some of that shit’s got to be floating around out there someplace. Ain’t no way they spent it all
here
,” Nevada says. “Man, I wish—”

“What a waste,” Lopez says, “what a disgusting waste. If it’s even true.”

“Oh, it’s true, all right,” Doc Greer says. “My pal heard it from the grand poobah himself.”

“Then why hasn’t it been on the news?” Lopez asks, making a face.

“It has. We just don’t get it out here in chickpea land,” Doc Greer says. He looks triumphant.

“I wouldn’t touch it,” Lopez says.

“You mean to tell me you wouldn’t want just a little of that money if you found it?” Nevada raises his voice in disbelief. “Just enough to buy your mama a house?”

“No,” Lopez says, folding his arms across his chest.

“Then what would you do with it?” I ask.

“Give it back to the government,” he says, baffled that I would even ask.

We all laugh.

“So they can lose it again,” Doc Greer says.

“I don’t believe any of this, this bull malarkey,” Lopez says.

As you might imagine, this gets a laugh.

“You want to hear something else strange? It’s been a strange day all around.” Doc Greer flashes me a conspiratorial grin.

“What?” I say, waiting for the joke.

“That girl we found?” Doc Greer gives me a sidelong glance. For a second I think he’s talking about the one I saw at the factory, and I feel a strange elation. “The one they covered with lye to make her look like a white girl?”

“Yeah?”

Cox turns from the TV screen to listen. He didn’t go out with us today, but I have no doubt he’s heard about what happened. Word travels fast here. Doc Greer notices and shifts slightly, so he can address both of us.

“Well, when we got back, the lieutenant sent over to check and see if anyone was missing from the village.”

“And?”

He shakes his head. “Nada.”

“Where else could she have come from?” I lick the grit from my front teeth and spit into an empty artillery shell lying on the crate beside me. Someone’s been using it as an ashtray and the ashes fly up into my eye. “There isn’t anywhere else.”

“Somebody’s lying. That’s what I think,” Cox says, moving over to a chair near the cot. The sand has made his hair, normally the color of orange soda, look like a helmet made from old pennies. “They don’t want us to know they’re involved.”

“I don’t know,” Doc Greer says. “Who shoots their own daughter or sister in the head and wires her up like a bomb? Even a hajji wouldn’t do that. Somebody else’s kid maybe, but not their own.”

“They blow themselves up all the time. It don’t make a fucking bit of difference to them.” Cox points at the roof of the tent. “Going home to Allah.”

“I don’t buy it,” Doc Greer says, running a thumb along the scar on his neck. It zig-zags down from the base of his ear all the way to his collarbone. Rankin says it’s a shrapnel wound from a tank shell, but I’ve never actually asked him. “They’re not as bad as all that in the village. They’re mostly just normal people. If a kid was missing, everybody’d know about it.”

Outside, the wind whips into a frenzy, making it impossible to speak. The air inside the tent fills with millions of tiny particles. Cox coughs and coughs. The lightbulbs develop blurry yellow haloes. It feels like trying to breathe flour. This big blow only lasts a minute, but in that time each face tightens, each of us sinks a little deeper inside ourselves.

I spit a mouthful of yellow mud into the artillery shell casing. “Well, maybe they’re worried that if they tell us which of the bad chickpeas took her, the ones who did it will come back and take another one.” I’m not sure I believe this. I’m just throwing something out there. Sometimes silence is worse than aimless chatter.

“No,” Lopez says, snapping the stock of his rifle into place with a heavy click and laying it down on the crate in front of him. The rest of us flinch. He treats us to a smug grin. “She wasn’t from the village. You’re looking in the wrong direction.”

“So, General Bull Malarkey, where should we be looking?” Doc Greer asks. It’s difficult to tell whether he’s being sincere. This is often the case with him. I’m not even sure
he
knows when he’s being serious.

“If they were up your ass, you’d know where they were,” Nevada says.

I snicker. It’s not very funny, but I can’t seem to help myself.

“There’s a battalion of insurgents up in the Noses just waiting for the right moment.” Lopez glares at me. “They’d do something like that. They’re all a bunch of sickos.”

“Bullshit, Lopez,” Cox says, irritated. “If there was a battalion up there, they would have shown up on satellite by now. That’s just a ghost story.”

“Satellites can’t see into caves. You’ve been up in the Noses. There’s a cave every ten feet. Enough to hide half a dozen battalions. Some of those caves even have water, underground springs.” Lopez looks around the circle, pleased with our reaction. “Right now, they’re probing our defenses, seeing how well we hold up. It’s just the beginning. Things are going to get worse.” He thumps his chest with a fist as though the idea invigorates him.

“I don’t know, man.” Doc Greer shakes his head. “Sounds farfetched to me. They’ve been lobbing the occasional mortar at us since I got here last spring. Probably just a handful of hotheads from Kurkbil with a crate or two of shells. They never fire off more than one or two a night.”

“Just wait and see,” Lopez says.

Even Nevada’s listening now. He joins us, lighting up a cigarette and peering at us through the smoke. Lopez has cooked up some serious bad vibes. They fill the room with a smell like ozone. I don’t like this kind of talk. It’s no help, and it starts the kind of thinking you can’t shut off. It creates a sort of paranoia feedback loop. I roll a finished cigarette between my fingers. The craving to light up is almost overwhelming. As I reach for a book of matches on the table, the outer flap of the tent rattles open, and even though the inner flap is shut tight, yellow tendrils of dust come snaking across the floor. I drop the matches. Boots thud. A muffled conversation goes on out in the vestibule, a little canvas hallway set up at an angle from the inner flap to keep the dust from blowing straight into the tent. I look over at Doc Greer, who is chewing at his tongue and staring hard at the floor. Everyone’s waiting to see who’s coming in.

“How’s Gerling and Kellen?” I ask him, hoping for better news.

He stops chewing at his tongue and looks over at me with a pained expression. “Gerling’s lost a shitload of blood. A chunk of shrapnel went clean through him. It grazed his liver. I’m almost sure of it. Dyson and I got him stabilized the best we could, but . . . at least he’s unconscious. Not hurting. I just left him with Studdie and Dyson. We’re waiting on a medevac, but until this storm lets up. . . .” He nods his chin toward the ceiling and makes a puffing sound of frustration. “The fuckers should have sent us a chopper just as soon as it happened. They had plenty of time to get in and out before the sand started blowing. It doesn’t make sense to me. At least Kellen’s pumped full of morphine and feeling no pain. He just got his ticket home.”

The flap slaps open and Sergeant Oliphant trudges in, looking from face to face until he finds mine. Everyone stiffens. White skin circles his eyes, but his cheeks are powdered with sulfur-colored grit. A cloud of dust comes in behind him. It tastes like talc and stale cumin. He points to me.

“Durrant. Outside.” He shakes his goggles. “Grab your eyepro and a mask.”

Lopez grins at me.

11

The winds blow
in every direction. Even with the protective earplugs, the sound is enormous. It feels as though it might lift you up. There are a thousand notes inside of it—a deep rumbling like a diesel tank engine, the squeal of tearing metal, a hollow moaning, a multitude of voices. I do not mean people speaking words. It sounds like singing. Or crying. Visibility is cut down to four or five feet, sometimes less. The sergeant and I follow a trail of emergency lights on plastic sticks that run from building to building, blurry blue shapes that pulse and wobble. The air heaves and shifts around us like a solid thing. When I look down at my arms, the hair is standing straight up. Static.