The Sandbox (7 page)

14

The sun does
not rise. When Rankin shakes me awake, I find my blanket covered with a thick layer of dust and sand. We both slept with our earplugs in. Rankin even wore his goggles. I wish I had. My eyeballs feel as though they’ve been scoured with steel wool. The storm continues to howl outside. If anything, it sounds worse than yesterday.

“MREs for breakfast today,” Rankin says. He looks unaccountably happy.

“What’s got you so cheerful?”

“It’s like a snow day in Savannah.”

I laugh.

When I thump my boots for critters, a large black scorpion comes rolling out. It’s nearly the size of my palm.

“Damn,” I say, lifting up my boot to mash it.

“Wait, D, wait.” Rankin dumps a pile of letters out of a Tupperware container and uses this to trap it. “She’s a beauty. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen one this big.”

“What in the hell do you want with it?” I ask.

“I think you might just have found a way to get our money back from Nevada.”

Suddenly I understand, and it makes me laugh so hard that I cough up sand.

15

Kurkbil is the
village a klick or so away from the base that we are supposedly keeping secure. It lies on the main north-south highway that runs from the capital down to Inmar. The Turkish Highway. Route 6A. I doubt if there are more than a thousand citizens all told. Strung along this one paved road is the business district, as the lieutenant optimistically calls it, which consists of a six-table café, a butcher shop, a garage that literally uses one of the town trees as a hoist for engine blocks, a drygoods shop, and a public fountain. Calling it a fountain is a bit misleading. It’s really just a rusty spigot that dribbles water into a shallow concrete trough.

The only buildings that aren’t constructed from mud bricks are the café and the dry goods shop, which are made of cinderblock and corrugated green fiberglass. Packed dirt paths wiggle off from the paved road like earthworms after a rainstorm. This is where the town’s inhabitants live, mainly in single-story mud huts surrounded by fences made of sun-baked bricks or woven palm mats and rows of planted cacti. Each family seems to own at least a half dozen chickens and a goat. The more prosperous among them have a donkey or some sheep. Kurkbil’s animals outnumber its humans by nearly three to one.

The town’s most prized possessions are its five trees. The largest is an ancient fig tree growing beside the fountain. The townspeople refer to it as Grandfather. This confused me at first because whenever someone gave me directions, Grandfather always figured in. For a while I imagined an impossibly old man who had sired everyone in town.

The citizens were happy to see us at first, but now they don’t pay us any more mind than they would one of the countless pariah dogs that patrol the town. When they do take note, it is usually to cross the street when they see us coming or to dart away into the maze of paths behind the shops. This is especially true of the women. All of them, even the teenage girls, dress in dark clothes and keep their faces covered. The young women used to giggle when they saw us walking into town; now they hunch their shoulders and scurry off onto one of the side paths. The men stare at us until we turn and notice, then they pointedly look away. On my first area patrol, Sergeant Guzman told me to remember that someone is always watching, no matter how late the hour or how empty the town looks.

Part of the problem, aside from the fact that we’ve rousted a couple dozen of the town’s families out of their beds in the middle of the night and thrown all their belongings on the floor as we looked for nonexistent weapons caches, may be the Middle Eastern Visual Language Survival Guide. These helpful booklets, which are made of laminated cardboard and fold up like gas station maps, were sent out to us about a month ago from CENTCOM. On one side there are cartoon-strip–style drawings of bearded suicide bombers with deranged facial expressions, several of whom appear to have fangs. Coincidentally, one of these cartoon villains bears a striking resemblance to the town’s mayor. As you might imagine, that didn’t go down too well. For a good week after we started using them, much of the populace was frightened and bewildered, fearing we planned to assassinate the mayor, Rashid Hamid, who went into hiding until the lieutenant himself showed up and guaranteed his safety. On the other side of the guide there are basic phrases in English printed next to translations in Arabic script. For example, “Where can I find a latrine?” Or “Where is the man with the gun?” Whenever one of us whips a survival guide out, it invariably causes more confusion than communication. Whichever hajji we are trying to communicate with will almost always get distracted by the colorfully depicted deaths of cartoon soldiers and immediately protest his innocence, when all we want are directions to the nearest latrine. Or land mine. Even the children have become wary and hostile. A couple of weeks ago, Hazel got hit in the neck with a clod of donkey shit thrown by a tiny girl in a Backstreet Boys T-shirt. On Monday, the day before the IED attack, a small boy wearing nothing but a pair of patched-up red shorts told me, in perfect English, “You are my bitch, faggot.”

16

The insect pit
is a large cardboard box that once held MREs. In order to keep it stable, the outside of the box is completely covered with duct tape; and for that natural desert look, someone has sprinkled an inch of sand inside it. There is a huge crowd of spectators this morning. All enlisted Joes. The tent is nearly full. Sergeant Guzman came and placed a bet, but he left before the fights started. He can’t risk getting caught in here during the match, but neither can he bear missing the chance for a little gambling action. Somehow Doc Greer convinced Lopez that the lieutenant wanted to speak with him. Now that the tattletale’s gone, we can all relax and enjoy ourselves.

Doc Greer makes book. His K-pot overflows with damp wads of bills. Boyette pours out cups of homemade Tang wine for all comers. After every sip, he shouts, “Up went the devil.” I decline. It smells like he brewed it from his dirty skivvies. The last time I drank some, I was hung over for days. Usually these death matches are held behind the motor pool because they are so strictly forbidden. No one is really sure why. Oddly, Cox, who loves insects, could care less about the fights. His only complaint is that camel spiders aren’t really spiders. It irritates him that we have the classification wrong.

The reigning champ is Nevada’s enormous camel spider, Fangella. Rankin and I have lost a substantial amount of money betting against her. Her record stands at 6–0. Also in the lineup are Dyson’s spider, Lindsay Lohan; Boyette’s scorpion, Daffy; Sergeant Guzman’s scorpion, Cream Puff, handled by Cox; and our monster, just now dubbed Uday.

Each time I look over at Rankin, he’s giving the Tupperware container gentle shakes to make Uday irritable. When he sees I’m watching him, Rankin flashes me a mad grin. It pleases me to see him in such a good mood. Last night, he didn’t say more than two words. This is true of the whole crew. The storm has left everyone feeling on edge and antsy. Yesterday, around 2000, Nevada broke a chair and Salis punched Doc Dyson in the back of the head for no reason. However, you’d never know how jammed up they were yesterday looking at them now. Someone I can’t see is giggling like a girl.

“Who the hell is running the base?” I ask Boyette.

“What’s to run? Not even the sand nigs are crazy enough to come out in this shit storm.” His cheek is puffy with dip. He makes a production of spitting, allowing the brown glop to drip slowly into the empty shell casing he’s holding.

“Who’s on guard duty?”

“You’re looking at him, hoss.”

“Jesus,” I say.

“Don’t worry, Durrant,” Boyette says, edging closer to the pit. “If the bad mens come, I’ll protect you.”

The rules for spider fighting are relatively simple. The bell, in this case an artillery shell casing, rings and each handler lets his creature loose in the pit. If the fighters don’t act suitably aggressive, two neutral helpers will push the creatures together with sticks. The winner is the one alive at the end of the match. There has been a lull in fights over the past couple of weeks because no one has felt confident enough to send up a contestant against Nevada’s Fangella.

After the first match, Cox sidles up next to me and asks if I’ll roll him a smoke. I sigh and take his sack of tobacco. He came into the tent in the middle of the first fight.

“What kept you so long?” I say.

“Sergeant Guzman had me in the Comm Trailer helping him. They can’t get the satellite phone working, the radio is all static, and the land lines are down again. I told him it was the fucking storm, but he made me go through all the systems checks anyway. We haven’t had contact with HQ since just before the storm.”

“And it didn’t work?”

“Hell, no,” he says, disgusted, “I knew it wouldn’t.”

“That’s a sort of lonesome prospect,” I say.

“The El-Tee was going fucking ape shit. Finally, Oliphant showed up and got him out of there. I could barely work with him hunching over my shoulder.”

“I don’t blame him,” I say. “Doc Dyson told me Gerling’s getting worse. He thinks somebody should take him out by truck if they can’t get a helicopter in.”

“No,” Collin says, “it’s more than that.”

“What?” I say, holding out his finished smoke. A perfectly rolled beauty, if I do say so myself.

He looks around, hesitates, and then lowers his voice. “Sergeant Guzman spotted a group moving along a ridge two Noses back from the base. Yesterday, just before the storm hit.”

“A group? Like a fire-team–sized group? So what?”

“No, bigger.”

“Like how much bigger?” I feel my asshole pucker.

“He counted thirty-seven, but he thought there might be more.”

“Shit,” I say.

“Yeah,” he says, “shit. But also, there’s something going down with Intel. They’re sending a replacement for Saunders.”

“That makes sense.”

“Maybe, but I got the feeling the El-Tee thinks they’re coming to investigate him about something. He kept telling the sarge ‘I got to find out who they’re sending. Then I’ll know for sure.’ That’s when Oliphant pulled him into the hall. Like he didn’t want me to hear what that was all about.”

The room goes up in a cheer and I miss the rest of what he says. Our match has started. It looks to be going well. Uday has Fangella cornered. She’s moving in an awkward crab-like fashion and raising her forelegs. Uday makes feints with his stinger. I wonder if he’s already nicked her with a little venom. Fangella’s moving much more slowly than usual. Suddenly, they engage. The spider has to fight the scorpion off from two sides, pincers and stinger. Uday snips off one of the spider’s legs. Rankin pumps his fists in the air. His face is a mask of joy. Cox nudges me and hisses something. He points to the doorway. It’s Lopez. He’s dusting off his fatigues and still has his goggles on.

“Uh-oh,” I say.

Cox just laughs.

Lopez doesn’t make sense of the situation right away. He blinks and watches Rankin do a little victory dance, rolling his shoulders and wiggling his butt. The room is in an uproar. No one but me and Cox has noticed he’s here. I glance back at the pit and find that we’ve won. Nevada kicks a chair. Rankin ululates like a local woman and swings his fist around his head. Lopez frowns, then scowls.

“What the hell is going on?” he shouts.

The room goes quiet. Someone, it sounds like Doc Greer, says, “Eek a bug,” and chucks a dead scorpion at Lopez. He makes an odd, squeaking sound and brushes frantically at his shirt. Several people laugh. It is well known that Lopez is frightened to death of scorpions. The story goes he was stung by one on the head as a child and nearly died. This might be apocryphal, but his fear is genuine.

“I can’t believe you all are doing this,” Lopez says. He looks utterly flabbergasted. “Shouldn’t some of you be on—”

It is then that the first mortar hits. A dull thud that makes the crate beside me rattle. From the sound of it, the shell lands somewhere near the front gate, but it is difficult to tell because of the storm. Then another one. This one closer. I look down at my watch. It is 1030, still morning, but it feels much later. A third lands close enough to make my teeth rattle and my inner organs slosh in my belly. I hit the ground.

17

“Because we lost
Lieutenant Saunders yesterday,” the lieutenant tells me, pacing back and forth behind his desk, “some things around here are going to have to change. A shifting of responsibilities.” His voice is flat, expressionless. He waits, glancing over at me for a moment as though I might be somehow responsible. “Do you know what his duties were?”

I just look at him.

My eyes burn and my shoulders feel as though someone’s been beating on them with a rubber hose. It is 1900 hours. Hazel had come and fetched me from Tower 4. I’d been up there since midmorning, long enough for the blowing sand to scour my watch face so badly I can barely read it. Just after the mortars started dropping, Sergeant Guzman ordered me and Boyette out to the tower to stand guard. “Fire off an occasional grenade,” he told us, “even if you can’t spot anything out there. We can’t allow them to start thinking they can get away with this kind of shit scot-free.”

Boyette and I couldn’t see a damn thing beyond the railings, and if I took a couple of steps away from him, I could barely see him. The wind blew so hard, we had to put our mouths right up against each others’ helmets and shout to make ourselves heard. Boyette being Boyette, he still managed to pack his cheeks with Skoal. Every so often, a glob of dip spit would spatter my arm. When I’d tell him to spit in the other direction, he’d grin like a monkey and pretend not to hear me.

Boyette is the youngest of five brothers born in a trailer up on Tiger Ridge, a tightly knit community just northwest of Savannah. This small group of families was famous in the early part of the last century for robbing travelers and stealing their women. In Savannah it’s common to joke about the closeness of their eyes and their penchant for romancing their siblings. Soon after meeting him, I decided to keep those kinds of jokes to myself. Boyette has hair the color of dirty sand and thin arms gnarled with hard muscle. His eyes look like dull nickels, and when he levels them at you, you get the feeling he doesn’t much give a shit about anything, including himself. Boyette’s the kind of guy that runs toward gunfire when he hears it. I wouldn’t call myself Boyette’s best pal, but I felt bad leaving him up there alone. He didn’t seem to mind. I’m almost certain Hazel was supposed to stay and replace me, but he acted like he didn’t understand me when I asked him. It pissed me off a little bit. The two of us got lost on the way back to the parade ground and somehow found ourselves near the front gate. The metal doors looked as though they’d been rammed by something. It took almost an hour to get to the office trailer, normally a five-minute walk, if that.

The lieutenant coughs. “Look, I know you’re tired, but stay with me here. It’s important.”

“I know—” I clear my throat. “I know Lieutenant Saunders sometimes did interrogation, sir.”

“Well, there’s a little more to it than that, but you’re in the ballpark. The point is that we still have the same tasks to complete. I spoke with HQ just after we returned yesterday and they don’t know when they’ll be able to send helicopters in. In fact, they don’t even know when they’ll be able to bring us up to normal troop strength. If you can call what we had ‘normal troop strength’.” He pauses. A long pause this time. The lieutenant scrutinizes me. His eyes are the wet brown color of used coffee grinds. I worry the sand on the back of my teeth. I wish I could spit it out. The lieutenant seems to be waiting for something. The wind picks up and makes a sound like a dying cat.

“Sir,” I say, a neutral statement I’ve found to be safe in most situations involving officers.

The lieutenant lets out a breath. He looks down at the folder again. “We need you to speak to the prisoners,” he says, staring at my face without making eye contact. He does this every time we talk, and it never fails to make me extremely uncomfortable. “You think you can handle that?”

“I’m not sure what ‘that’ means, sir.”

“Lieutenant Saunders was investigating something.” He glances over my shoulder at Sergeant Oliphant. “He didn’t have a chance to discuss it with me before he died. We planned to talk about it in Inmar, but I—”

Behind me, the sarge coughs.

“Anyway,” the lieutenant continues, “we believe something’s coming up. There’s been a lot of activity out in the Noses. These prisoners are obviously from the same group that attacked us this morning. They might know what’s going on.” He takes a deep breath and winces, as though what he has to say next pains him. “I’ve watched you since you’ve come here, Durrant. You get along with most people. At least I haven’t heard of any recent fights.” He stresses the word ‘recent.’

Because he stops again, I say, “No, sir.”

“I’ve also noticed people seem to like to talk with you, tell you things. Perhaps we can make use of this skill.”

“Sir, like I said yesterday, I’m not that proficient an Arabic speaker and—”

“You’ll work with a translator. We have two. One’s better than the other, but—”

“We have two terps, sir?” This comes as something of a surprise. I know about one, a guy everyone calls Baba. His real name is something much longer, but he doesn’t seem to mind this abbreviation, even though in the local slang it means a thief or a generally seedy character. He’s an older guy with a thick pelt of hair on his arms and a face as round and shiny as a pie tin. Maybe in his forties. Recently, he moved onto the base, supposedly for his own protection. I don’t doubt it. Hajjis working with the Army have a short life span.

“The mechanic’s assistant speaks English, doesn’t he?” The lieutenant points toward the window with his thumb.

“Ahmed?” I’m skeptical, but then again I’ve barely spoken to the guy. Ahmed looks to be about my age. Cheerful. Quick to laugh. “A little, sir. I guess.”

The lieutenant glances over my shoulder again. “Right,” he says. I’m not sure whether he’s talking to me or the sergeant.

“I don’t mean to be disrespectful, sir, but I have no training in interrogation. I wouldn’t know where to start. Perhaps you should ask—”

Lieutenant Blankenship smiles, showing me a row of white, even teeth. It looks about as genuine as a plastic squirt gun. In fact, it looks as though he’s trying to maintain his composure while someone jabs him in the leg with a safety pin under the desk. I bet he has caps. His teeth seem unnaturally white, like they might give off light in a dark room.

Sergeant Oliphant places a hand on my collarbone and squeezes. I clench my jaws. A little more pressure and he’ll snap the bone. I want to say all right, I get it, let go. After a few seconds he loosens his grip, but he doesn’t take his hand away.

“We need an interrogator, Private.” He says the word ‘private’ as though it’s something unpleasant he has to scrape off of his tongue. “Ours has died. Until a replacement comes, you’re it. You write the best reports and you’re very creative with requisition forms. That shows promise. Think of these interrogations as tricky requisition forms. Got it?”

The sergeant’s hand comes to life and applies pressure.

“Yes, sir.”

I am released.

“Good.”

“May I ask a question, sir?”

The hand readies itself with a gentle squeeze. The lieutenant and I have a rare moment of eye contact and I take this as permission to go on.

“What kind of questions do I ask the hostages, sir?”

“Prisoners, Durrant, prisoners. We’re not trying to extort money from the native population.”

Sergeant Oliphant laughs, but it is a polite, meaningless sound. I feel my face burn. What the hell is wrong with me?

“I’m sorry, sir. I—well. What questions should I ask them?”

The lieutenant gives me a disgusted look. I’m wasting his time. “Who are you? Where do you come from? What are your plans? Use your head, Private.”

“Maybe I should write some out,” Sergeant Oliphant says. It sounds as though his mouth is right beside my ear. “Perhaps we should check and see if Lieutenant Saunders left behind any material that could help us.”

“Yes,” the lieutenant says finally, “right. Durrant, go find Baba and report back. We’ll have a list of questions for you then.”

Something bothers me about this. And not just the fact that I don’t know the first thing about prisoner interrogation. We may be shorthanded and we may be a small isolated base, but I’ve never heard of a private doing this kind of intelligence work. In the past, we’ve always shipped prisoners to the capital to be sorted out by the CIA or MI or whoever. But that’s not all. I’m not even the obvious first choice. Or the second. There are several other soldiers I can think of right away that would be much more qualified to do this. The lieutenant, for example. This doesn’t make sense on any level. It feels like I’m being told to descend a long and tricky staircase while blindfolded. I’m worried about what I’ll find at the bottom.

“Now, sir?” I ask. My soul droops.

“When else? This sandstorm isn’t going to protect us forever.”

By the time I stand up, Sergeant Oliphant has opened the door. He gestures toward it with his hand. “Buck up, fuckwit,” he whispers as I pass, “or I’ll make sure you’re burning shit for the rest of your tour.”