The Writing on the Wall: A Novel (23 page)

I noticed something about her when she took the first swallow from her drink—as professional and competent as she looked, she seemed tired, tense, even weary, and the only reason I noticed is because the vodka forced some of that away. Her hands never strayed very far from the glass. They were beautifully long and tapered, a model’s, and yet red and chapped, like she still believed in washing dishes by hand.

“The only surprise is that even more of them weren’t caught up in this. So I wouldn’t be too hard on Cassie. They were badly trained—hardly trained at all. Reservists, amateurs. It all seemed just too weird to them, like a video game that moved too fast so they needed to smash the screen. The MPs who were prison guards back in civilian life ran things on the worst tiers. The hard site they call it. You notice how comfortably they use those terms?

High value detainees. Stress positions. Previously existing lesions. They can really talk the talk.”

“Yes, it’s awful,” I said, to the coffee mug more than to her.

“They were pumped so full of anthrax vaccine it made them half-crazy. There was no privacy, hardly even toilets. Bladder infections, UTI’s. There was hardly a girl who didn’t have one. She had one, right?”

I nodded.

“There must have been pressure from higher-ups. You think privates like your daughter knew anything about Muslim customs, how to humiliate them? They were being told to soften them up for interrogation and they were being told exactly how. All the rest is just covering up.”

You could see that her anger lay very close to the surface. Again and again she would try to lay out a simple, matter-of-fact explanation, find her voice rising, grimace, close her eyes, then start over.

“I had an e-mail from Jimmy just before he stepped on the mine. He realized it was all wrong by then, he wasn’t stupid. We knew when he joined the reserves there was always a chance he would have to go fight somewhere. But we needed the money, the benefits. I hadn’t found a job yet, and when I did it was only halftime.”

I had a sudden intuition.

“Do you teach?”

She nodded. “Fifth grade art.”

I smiled. “Middle school science.”

“Middle school’s hard, good for you . . . So, we went into it with our eyes wide open, or at least that’s what we told each other.

But we were blind of course. What bothered him most was how much the people hated us, and how he could put nothing against that except being nice to the Iraqi kids. He loved his men. He had the best men possible he wrote in his last letter. Everyone thinks I’m protesting the war just because of him, but it’s because of his men and those kids and girls like Cassie and moms like you . . . It hurts to think Jimmy knew the bigshots were lying, but it would hurt even worse if he had believed them.”

She told me about her organization, how it had started, how many parents, wives and husbands they had recruited and how more military families were joining every day. Who could speak out better than people who had loved ones over there, how could their voices not be heard? They couldn’t be dismissed as radicals, they had given too much to their country. Their pain and despair needed an outlet, and she was no longer surprised at the depth of that anger and their determination to fight back.

Somewhere during this I realized she was asking me to join. It bothered me a little, it made it seem that all along she’d had this secret agenda to recruit me and Dan.

“I don’t know how you get up the nerve to speak in public. It’s all I can do to talk to my class.”

It was the best I could come up with. I said nothing about the shame involved, that my daughter could smile so vivaciously over a dead man. Or the guilt, that I hadn’t protected her from monsters.

“I would have said the same thing once,” she said. “When I got invited to the White House after Jimmy died, I hesitated for a long time. I was still in the fog that descends, I couldn’t see straight. Half of me wanted to buy into it all, the idea that he had died defending his country and fighting for freedom. The other half worried he had died for a lie. When the Pentagon called and said I was one of ten wives the president wanted to meet with to express his condolences I decided to go, because I thought maybe that would decide it, whether Jimmy was a hero or a sucker . . . Okay, here’s where we get to the emotional part. Ready? More coffee?”

That was her way of ordering another vodka. When it came, she kept it in the middle of the table where the glass caught the light.

“It was a photo op for him, his poll numbers were sinking, so that’s why the ten of us ended up in the Oval office with the generals and cabinet members and TV cameras. We stood in a semi-circle on the carpet, the one with the presidential seal. I was toward the end and I could see him putting his arm around the other women’s shoulders and saying something that judging by his little smirk was supposed to be a gentle joke. Despite the solemn men behind him he was enjoying himself greatly. There were three more women before me. I’m from Nebraska, it said that on the name tag along with Jimmy’s name and rank, and I was absolutely certain he was going to say something about football, like ‘Go Cornhuskers!’ or something awful like that. He came up to me, a general leaned over his shoulder to tell him who I was, but his eyes fastened on my name tag and the word Omaha. ‘Go Cornhuskers!’ he said. Then he mumbled something that was meant to be comforting and moved on to the next woman in line.”

She reached for the drink, put it to her lips, put it back down without tasting.

“They had refreshments for us in the next room. Punch and cake. There were knives on the table to cut the cake, surprisingly sharp ones. You know how you wonder if you ever had the chance to meet Hitler whether you would have the courage to kill him? Kill evil? That’s what I was thinking about, staring at those knives. I thought of grabbing one and plunging it into his chest and then I thought about stabbing myself instead, and it didn’t really matter, the important thing was to put death into that room as a fact, something real, not just the abstraction he and his henchmen could talk about so smoothly. I didn’t have the courage, obviously. But all that emotion was still in me, and so when the president went before the cameras to make his little speech I screamed ‘Butcher!’ as loud as I could, and the rest you probably know about.”

I knew about the rest. The uproar. The storm of attention. The hate. I read that she received more death threats in a day than anyone in the country, and I’m sure that was no exaggeration. Reading about her, seeing her on TV, I had been curious, I wanted to listen to what she said, but Dan always grabbed the remote from me and pressed mute.

Until now the only sound in the bar had been the click of pool balls, but the bartender turned the music on and three or four of the sergeants began dancing. I wondered what they would do if they knew the notorious Pam Cord was sitting there. Beat her? Shake her hand? I thought of what she said, how you could tell the brutal ones by the shape of their mouths, but with all of them chewing gum or sucking on beers it was difficult to tell.

I had the feeling, turning back to face her, that she was trying to decide whether or not to invest more emotion in me. As I said, there was a professional, even steely side to her, sympathetic as she was. And she was harried and overworked—I could see that, too.

“I haven’t known you long, I can’t read what’s in your heart, but I sense you need to be part of something larger than just your worry over your daughter. Speaking personally, leaving aside matters of right and wrong, I’ve grown tremendously thanks to my involvement. I was big-time Barbie before that, all I cared about was shopping and clothes. So I’ve grown. Three cheers for me. But you know something? Despite all the uplift I’ve found and the solidarity and consolation, sometimes I wish I had grabbed that knife.”

She finished her vodka, waved to the bartender for our check.

“Here’s the business card they made for me, with my phone number and e-mail. Contact me directly, okay? My flight isn’t until tomorrow afternoon. Are they letting you see Cassie?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Tell her Pam Cord say it’s not her fault. She’s a victim, too.”

She dropped me at the hotel where Dan waited. I didn’t tell him about meeting her, mumbled something about getting lost. There was so much distance between us it was intolerable, so we lay in bed together watching TV, touching, holding each other, but not saying a word. It wasn’t any easier in the morning. We packed so we could leave on time, paid the bill, ate breakfast in the coffee shop, talked about the fleecy clouds we could see out the blinds. I needed the car to get into the base, which left Dan with nothing much to do, but our waiter told us about a World War Two museum in town and that’s where I dropped him off.

“Say hi for me,” he said. “Tell her how proud we are.”

The camp looked purposeful and empty at the same time. There was a tank, but it was an old one, harmless, mounted on a pedestal. I asked the first soldier I saw where the stockade was and she pointed to a low building I had already passed; it resembled the kind of motel you would only stay in if you were desperate.

Someone invisible buzzed me in. The visiting room had a high counter in the middle there was no way around. Strands of wire mesh ran along this counter like a ping-pong net, with metal stools on either side. There were no bars on the window, no surveillance cameras, none that I could see.

I sat there for a long time before Cassie came in. Alone, thank god—all the while we talked there was never any sign of a guard. She gave me a smile which didn’t last very long. She touched one side of the ping-pong net and I touched the other. She looked pale compared to how she looked in the courtroom, tired. I had the feeling she would have been happier if she could have rested her head on the counter, not have to sit up straight.

“How are you?”

Any mother would ask that first. Any daughter would frown in just that way.

“Yucky. I’ve started. Of all the bad times.”

“Are you taking anything? I have Motrin in my purse.”

I started to dig.

“I don’t think you better do that, Mom.”

“For cramps.”

“Uh, I’m a prisoner?”

“Well, do they have a medic? Ask them for some. Are you getting enough to eat?”

She shrugged. “Food was better over there. Tons better.”

“Your hair looks nice. You’re letting it grow long in back again. I’ve always liked it that way.”

She patted it, frowned, but not as deeply as before.

“Dad sends his love.”

“Yeah. Me, too. Tell him?”

“I will. Is there anything you need?”

“My phone back. They won’t let me have it. It’s going to be way boring.”

“I could send you some books.”

“I hate books.”

“You never used to. You always begged us for ones about horses and dogs.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, magazines then. Do you have any favorites?”

It was what I expected, a back and forth not much different than her phone calls from Iraq. Cassie’s always had two looks, the shy quiet one she uses on most of the world, and the easier happier one she saves for us. If boredom is sometimes mixed in with this, if sometimes her eyes drift elsewhere, like all parents we had grown used to that a long time ago.

Like on our phone calls, I filled in her silences with the latest news.

“Dad’s had to lay off three of his carpenters. It’s really bad out there. All your friends you graduated with can’t find work. I ran into Robbie Zimmer the other day and he’s so sick of getting turned down everywhere he’s thinking of joining the army.”

“Robbie? He’d last three days.”

“Nancy’s moving to China, it was the only place she could find a job.”

“China? Cool.”

“Jeannie and Uncle Tom bought an old house way out in the boonies. They’re going to fix it up and use it on weekends.”

“Neat.”

“Ida Rosenberg’s taking my classes at school while I’m down here.”

“Sorry about that.”

“No, it’s okay. That’s not what I mean. School year’s almost done anyway.”

The army was clever with the ping-pong net, too clever, since it seemed more a barrier than solid bars would have been. Sitting there five minutes and already I wanted to rip it apart. Small talk was horrible, there was so much else to say, and yet, like with the net, it seemed impossible to find a way around.

Cassie was the one who tried first.

“So. Wheat did you think of my big trial?”

“We think you were picked on. Not picked on—singled out.

Used for an example. Made a scapegoat. Blamed.”

“Uh, that was me in the photo?”

“Of course it was you. But you were badly trained, you were shipped over there without any preparation. Higher ups must have known how bad conditions were.”

“You haven’t seen shit.”

“I’m sorry?”

“That’s what this terp kept telling me after the photos were taken. He and Truck.”

“What’s that mean, terp?”

“Interpreter. He and this contract interrogator, that’s what they told me. Swear you have not seen shit.”

“Truck?”

“Sergeant Mendoza. He’s built like one.”

“They told you to keep quiet?”

“Not exactly.”

“Cassie?”

She shook her head, this time with real energy.

“It wasn’t a cover-up, not at first. It was Truck’s brilliant idea to snap the pictures, not only of the iced guy, but of everything they did before that, like the dogs and the pyramid and underwear and what they did with sticks. He thought if he took pictures he could sell them for big bucks over the internet to rich guys who get off on that, seeing pictures of real-time interrogations. But then copies were made without his knowledge and so he couldn’t sell them anymore, they went on line for free, and that’s when he got busted. All those guards on the hard site? He was their leader.”

“Why didn’t that come out at his court martial?”

“About doing it for money?”

She gave me the look every mother knows, the one saying how could I be so naïve, so totally clueless.

“But it’s true, what happened? They called you to come down for a picture?”