Via Dolorosa (36 page)

“You seem angry,” she said as she drove, not looking at him.

He did not answer her.

“Too many things to think about,” she said, answering for him.

Recalled a bank of elevators—recalled the illuminated floor numbers—recalled the slant of the carpeted hallway, rust-brown and dim
in the poor lighting—recalled the turn of the lock in Isabella’s door—
click—

“You’re very beautiful,” he said as she pushed him into the open
black maw of her hotel room.

“I know,” she said.

—Chapter XVIII—

It was like watching themselves from above, and in a dream. They crossed from one tiny village to the next. Along the white roads, desert palms stood silent in the breezeless afternoon, coming up to the sides of the roads to greet them. The squalid little huts along this leg of the journey had been previously evacuated, the streets desolate and empty and silent as a crypt. When night fell, they camped. In the darkness, it was not difficult to see the green, glowing smoke beyond some phantom horizon. It was always too difficult to tell just how far off the fighting was. It was misdirected and rarely matched up with the sounds. All of it was difficult to see. In fact, the only evidence, beyond the occasional flicker of bombs and the lightning flash of mortars, was the way the ground shook at night, and you could truly be anywhere—be anywhere at all—with your head down close to the ground, and feel and hear the vibration rushing along the earth and tunneling up through your brain. You became used to it surprisingly quick, and after so many nights with it and lulled to sleep by it, it was soon impossible for you to sleep without it.

At night, setting up camp, the sounds and voices of the men could be heard drifting up into the too quiet blackness. Most often they maintained their spirits by singing old war songs—possibly songs their fathers had sung—like “Fortunate Son” and “Run Through the Jungle” and “Who’ll Stop the Rain?” and there was always one raucous soul—usually
Karuptka
—bent on crooning just a little bit louder and throatier than the others, caught if only temporarily in the belief that he was John
Fogerty’s
fatigues-clad counterpart.

The next morning, before it was fully and truly morning, Nick and the others awoke and packed. Some of them ate quickly and just as silently as they had packed. Nighttime was always the time when the men seemed most human. It was in the daylight, perhaps too visible to one another beneath the harsh and unforgiving desert sun, that they had a difficult time pretending to be human. It was an act, a pantomime. In the daylight, strapped to rifles and grenades, anyone would have a tough time finding humanity.

Beside Nick, Joseph
Bowerman
was rubbing his beard stubble, and he looked like he’d spent an evening with the devil’s prostitute. Hungry for furlough (and too keen to know none was coming), tired of the desert, all the men now looked hauntingly like one another.

“The second I get home, I’m
gonna
drink me a whole gallon of Mountain Dew,”
Bowerman
said as he packed his gear. They were like pregnant women, all of them, with their absurd cravings and daydream fantasies.

Hidenfelter
, lacing his boots, voiced, “I’m going to drink whatever booze I can get my filthy little hands on. I’m
gonna
drink it till my eyeballs are floating.”

“Cheesecake,” said Myles Granger.

“I’m
gonna
get laid,”
Karuptka
volunteered. “I’m
gonna
get laid like a dog who’s been chained for a month to a post. Then,” he went on, “I’ll hit some of that booze with you,
Oris
, man. Get my eyeballs floating, too.”

Some of them laughed.

They departed for recon, which amputated them from the 44-man platoon. Their objective rally point established them just outside the city of Fallujah. There were six of them in the team, and Nick had requested
Oris
Hidenfelter
, their seasoned sergeant, commit to the recon. Nick had personally selected all of them in his head some time ago. When the time came, he had summoned each of them individually. War, it seemed, was nothing more than an alternating succession of collectivity and individualism.

They crossed into the city in the midst of daylight. It already reeked of gunpowder. Marines had preceded them by two full days to this point of the city…but that did not mean the city was safe and clean. The cities were never truly safe and clean, no matter how many men soldiered through them. There were always nests. You could never pause and breathe deep because nothing was ever safe and clean.

It was a slow, tedious campaign. Typically, the high road found Nick and one or two other men moving up, flank-side, searching for dens of insurgents. High roads were particularly dangerous. This part of the city had not evacuated, even after all the damage caused by the battle between insurgents and the Marines. There were still families here—still dirty children in filthy, faded clothing in the streets. Many houses had been reduced to rubble; dead animals, mostly dogs and goats, were landmarks throughout the hike toward the center of the village. On occasion, a few brave boys from the village would, with surprising little trepidation, approach the men, large, dark eyes with thick, full lashes powdered with debris, their hair filthy with the accumulation of so much dust and dirt and garbage and ruin. Many of the soldiers would ignore them; a few others would occasionally flick a hand at them, warding them off before they got too close.
Karuptka
would
shoo
them away like cats around a heap of garbage, baring his teeth behind lifted lips and dark, purple gums.

Nick saw her first. He saw her ahead of them—saw her emerge directly from a rundown hovel and hasten to articulate through the solid mass of crumbled debris that littered the gutters and side-streets. He watched her approach, a frantic look on her face (what he could see of her face, anyway, masked behind a partially shorn-away
burka
), and right away he knew this would not be good—that any one of these natives moving so quickly with any such look on their face could not be a good thing. He could see no weapons on her, but that did not discount the very real possibility that she could have explosives strapped to her body beneath her
burka
.

“You seeing this?” Nick said quickly to
Hidenfelter
, who stood directly to his right. “Lady! Lady!” Of course, it was useless to try and communicate with any of them. Even Myles Granger, who could speak the language, was useless here for the most part. They saw your uniforms and saw your Western eyes, Western face, Western nose and mouth and skin, and it did not matter what language you spoke, because to them, all Americans were the same breed of foreigner, bringing guns and ammunition and tanks and fighters into their cities and streets.

The woman did not even seem to hear or see either him or
Hidenfelter
; she continued moving past them along the side of the street. A few other women from the village, equally agitated but slightly more composed, attempted to wrangle her back out of the street and away from the marching soldiers, but this lone woman would not listen. She was bent on something—bent on moving forward, bent on completing her task, whatever that task might be. She continued down the length of the guttered street, her fast moving feet kicking up and stirring the smells of the dead and swollen and bloated things in the rubble. Then, at one point, as they continued to march on, she paused and began crying in hysterics. The men all kept a cautious, distrustful eye on her, though many tried not to make it so obvious. They just all continued to move along. The woman’s moans could be heard over anything else, even their footfalls, crunching the ancient powder in the streets of this holy land ravaged by war. Brazen, uninhibited, the woman actually reached out for one of the men. Nick and
Oris
Hidenfelter
turned, their guns leveled on her. The man—an Italian kid named Angelino—pulled his arm away from her, his face white and emotionless beneath his pitted helmet. But the woman would not relent: she cried out to Angelino, who refused to acknowledge her beyond that single rejection of his arm (though it was clear, very clear, that her moans hurt him and maybe even confused him a little, too). Myles Granger moved past her next; again, she reached out, pleadingly, sobbing while two other masked women appeared behind her and at her shoulders, holding her back. Another woman, too afraid to step into the street so close to them, cried out angrily, rattling off a series of nonsensical gibberish. They were angry; they were frightened.

“Get her out of here!” Nick yelled back to them. He had paused in his stride and stood, waving a single arm at the men. “Angelino!
Bowerman
! Get her the hell out of the street!”

The woman grabbed Myles Granger’s arm, and the boy froze. The strap of his rifle slid slightly down the length of his shoulder. He stared at the woman, who cried inches from his face. She was not speaking words—not really, not at first—and Granger looked like he could not move. He looked frightened.

“Get her away!” Nick shouted, now moving back through the men. His gun was still on the woman.

“Out!” Angelino yelled at the woman. “Leave!”

Still holding onto Myles Granger’s arm, the woman cried something—moaned something—sobbed something at him. She
spoke
to him. There was a sense of urgent begging in her voice, emphasized by the sincerity of a hand placed first above her heart, then gradually sliding down to the center of her belly, her gut, her soul.

“Out!” Angelino yelled, pointing his rifle at the woman.

“Ma’am,” pleaded
Bowerman
. “Ma’am, please, you need to get back up there and out of the street.” He sounded like a crossing guard his first day on the job. “Ma’am,
please…”

Nick approached and wrapped fingers around the woman’s wrist. With a tug he managed to pull her off Myles Granger. The amputation seemed to jerk Granger back into reality: he stumbled backward, and would have lost his balance had
Bowerman
not been right behind him to catch him around the shoulder.

“Back,” Nick told the woman, illustrating with his hands that he wanted them all out of the street. “Back.”

“You okay, Granger?”
Bowerman
asked the kid.

Granger nodded, though he still looked green. He was still staring at the woman. She, in return, was still staring at him.

“Shoot the bitch!”
Karuptka
shrilled from across the street.

“Granger,”
Bowerman
was saying. “Granger, man—you okay?”

“Yeah,” Myles Granger finally managed.

“Look at me, bro.”

“Yeah…”

“Look at me,”
Bowerman
repeated.

Myles Granger looked at
Bowerman
. Nick looked, too. For a moment, it looked as though nineteen-year-old Myles Granger was going to collapse into tears. Then, equally surprising, the kid started to laugh. Uncontrollably, he started to laugh—a deep belly-laugh.

“All right, come on,” Nick said. The woman had receded out of the street; she stood now surrounded by a corral of other robed women, watching the men in the street like deities about to pass judgment. “Come on, guys.”

“Shoot the bitch,”
Karuptka
snarled again, his voice lower and tinged with a bitter twist of humor now.