The Deluge, page 4
“That sounds pretty fucked.”
He offered her a tepid bob of his head side to side. “You learn to get by. Iraq taught me you can get used to just about anything. I mean, shit, don’t ask me to take a memory quiz or nothing, but I can still work. Been a product development engineer for a few years. Braking and transmission systems. But compared to EOD the stakes are so low—you know, if you fuck up no one’s getting killed. Basically feels like I can sleepwalk through it. Don’t tell my boss.”
“Ever go home? Do you have family around?”
“Mom got smoked by cancer of the thyroid a few years ago—I swear it’s that shit they’re putting in the ground to get at the gas. No Pops to speak of. Gone before I was even abortion material.”
“Any love life?” she pushed on.
“Between exes right now. Was hooking up with a girl I met online for a while, but she didn’t work out.” His hard stare told her to get to the point.
“Who do you spend your time with?”
“A few buddies at work, a few from Iraq who I still see now and then.”
“No best friend?”
“Nah, I keep to myself. So are you like writing a screenplay about me, Alvarez? Christ.”
Alvarez. She hadn’t gone by that surname in five years. She did not correct him as to what was on her driver’s license now, though. She pushed forward, sensing his itching curiosity. Allen Ford Jr., her mentor and comrade, had once clued her in that people mostly just wanted to be listened to. They wanted to tell their story, and if you could get to their story, you could get to their conscience.
“That first time we met, back in D.C., you told me you missed it. The war. Do you still?”
Murdock considered the advertisement for the Wildfire Chicken Salad on the laminated card propped up out of the condiment basket.
“Not as much no more. Sometimes. There’s the brotherhood, the camaraderie of it, combat love, that’s one thing. And there’s the adrenaline—best high you’ll ever get. No such thing as blood pressure meds for a heart attack, right? But there’s also a calm to it that you can’t really get back here.”
UNTRUE He never saw the EOD guys anymore. Once he got involved with IVAW, Murdock’s views left him with the loneliness of both the prophet and the traitor. They didn’t get how he could shit on the cause that some of them had given it all for, and he didn’t want to argue with the people he cared for most in the world. Loving your brother in arms was a more profound experience than loving God. Better if they speak of it all in another life. Kieran Slade had called him up when he found out the guy they’d nicknamed Murder was going to IVAW protests. “So you’re with these fucking brain-damaged Marines telling everyone we’re war criminals? All so a bunch of fat, happy, self-righteous pussies who’ve never been afraid of shit in their lives can sit back and judge us? Fuck that, man, and fuck you. T would fucking lay you out, man. He’d fucking cripple you if he saw this. You’re a coward, Docker.”
“How was the war calm?”
“When I got back, I was dating this girl at Penn State—she’d sort of latched on to me even though I kept telling her I wasn’t much in the mood to get married, and that’s clearly what she was after. I remember this one time we were driving through a McDonald’s, okay? And we’re picking up food to take to her family’s house for dinner, and she’s got this huge list of everyone’s orders. But the speaker box or whatever that is don’t work so well. It keeps cutting out, so the lady on the other end keeps missing stuff and she needs to keep repeating herself, and then they’re confused about what she’s already ordered and what she hasn’t, and I’ll tell you—right in that moment, I would have given anything to be back in Baghdad. Any fucking thing in the world if it meant I could go back and get shot at.”
His water glass was nothing but ice at the bottom, so he tossed back a few cubes and crunched them loudly with his molars. He began nodding as his story morphed.
“There was this guy over there. This bomb maker we called Toy because his devices always used the radio frequency from kids’ toys. Remote-control cars and Buzz Lightyear dolls and such. He came up with some real ingenious shit. Like he’d find a way around our Warlocks—our electronic jammers. He’d plant decoys. He’d wire a bomb with a different trigger three times out of five and then the other two would be callbacks. He was a meticulous cat. And we never caught him. Thought we did a few times. Once, near a bomb site, we took DNA swabs from everyone at the scene, and this shopkeeper matched. So a unit rolls up on the shopkeeper. Bingo-bango-bongo. No more shopkeeper. But a month later, there’s a new bomb, and you could just tell it was his. The Warlock Red jammed it—we were in that protective bubble. But the style was his, the way the wire braided from the battery to the blasting cap. Had a little receiver from a remote-control helicopter for the detonator. He’d put his signature on the IED, you know? Cuz he wanted us to know he was still out there. Now, don’t get me wrong, we all wanted to find that motherfucker and put a few through him, but at the same time I had this respect for him because I had to be better, smarter, quicker.”
HE RETURNED To Whitehall’s office hours because he liked having someone who could talk honestly about the thing. Whitehall didn’t give two fucks what you were supposed to say to fellow vets. “Don’t dwell on what’s been done,” he said. “When I got back I threw every medal and patch and memento and symbol of the American empire into a lake.” He handed Murdock books, a lot of Chomsky, Hobsbawm, Bacevich, and Chalmers Johnson. He read them at the dining room table of his one-bedroom apartment while loading and unloading his M9. It was dismaying how quickly his illusions eroded, a bad paint job that once attacked with mere sandpaper just flakes to the floor on its way to dust. He hadn’t understood how ready he was, and the puzzle pieces of his reading and his experience began to snap together. He carried it around in the back of his throat. However fury, sorrow, and undefended humiliation tastes. It made him want to go back to Iraq, finally hunt down Toy, and say, “I’ve had some time to think about it, and I sorta see your point, dawg.”
The waitress tried to come over again, thinking they might be ready, but Shane gave her a too-impatient Halt gesture. “We’re still going to need another minute.” Bambi smiled impatiently and turned heel. “What about IVAW? Do you have a foot in activism anymore?”
“Nah. I did a year more after we met, but the surge started to settle things down, and troops were on their way out. Got tired of lefty activist types explaining the war to me.” He ticked one cheek in a partial grin.
“Turns out you might’ve been premature given the whole situation over there now.”
“Not too hard to predict, I guess.” Murdock took the fork from the silverware and began twirling a tine against his thumb. “And I’ll tell you something else—the beheadings, the torture, this shit ain’t going nowhere. Barbarity is a powerful thing. Almost a faith in and of itself. We opened a can of worms there that’s gonna writhe for twenty, thirty, fifty years.”
Shane watched as his eye twitched, and he looked down at his cold coffee.
“So,” Murdock grumbled. “Maybe it’s about time you got around to telling me what this is all about. Why I drove halfway to Pittsburgh to not eat breakfast.”
THE LOVE OF THE SUIT Like bundling up for a Pennsylvania winter. First, armor: leggings, collar, breastplate of Kevlar. Then pants with suspenders and spine guard, the diaper that encases the groin. Slip on the overcoat. All of it weighing “half a good woman,” as Ta’amu liked to say. Your buddies helping you in, checking all the zippers, ties, and quick-release tabs in case you caught fire. Finally, pop on the helmet, check the microphone, the air snorkel, and above all, make sure that power fan works and the batteries are fresh because it’s probably 120 fucked-up degrees out. Then it’s just you peering through a visor two inches thick that gets dustier every minute you’re out. Like wearing the chitinous molt of a prehistoric colossus. Ta’amu would babble reassuringly in his ear on the lonesome walk. Just the captain’s way of creating the calm: “I’ve been meaning to give you your performance review: You’re a funny little monkey, Manfuck. Think about the millennium of your progenitors who’ve lived and died, son, so that when the cum spilled out of your mommy’s asshole at the wrong angle a mastermind hick like yourself could be born into the light of consciousness. You are Blown Away, kid. Bombs don’t survive you. You make IEDs IEDon’ts. Just remember, my man, if you offer to carry the weight then you can’t complain about the load.” Then it was just the safe. When all the focus and training came zipping down to a zero-point, a moment of creation. Peeling apart foam chunks to get at the plastic-encased detonating cord of an EFP. The bomb makers versus the EOD. It was a battle of intellect and observation and obsessive skill. He crouched in his own airtight astronaut-suit world, a piercing attention for the detail that tells no story or tells the whole one. You matched wits. There was no syllabus, there were no rules. Only adaptation and improvisation or mutilation and incineration. Blast lungization.
“What do you think it’s about, Kel?”
He threw up a hand. “Hell if I know. Maybe you are writing a movie. People love war stories.”
“It’s good to see you,” she said. “When my partners and I started this thing, this venture, I thought of you. But I’d been thinking of you for a few years anyway.”
Murdock watched through a window as a woman struggled to her car on a walker, helped along by a husband with thinning gray carefully moussed back.
“So this ain’t about Hurt Locker 2: Hurt Harder?”
“Do you remember,” she said carefully, “when we met that weekend in D.C., we had a conversation about what it would take—what would have to happen—to actually change this country?”
He lowered his voice.
“I’d consider myself still a kid at that point. Feeling angry and alone and saying stupid kid shit.” He scanned the Bob Evans to see what the other diners were doing. “My point wasn’t that I wanted to do shit like that. It’s that there ain’t no point in doing shit like that.”
“I’m not trying to sell you on anything here.” She said this with great care, each word handled, examined, and chosen. “I’ve been where you’ve been, Kel. You didn’t have to go to Iraq to feel despair about what’s happened and what’s happening now. All I’m asking is for you to hear me out on this.” She could feel the agitation wafting off him. “And if you don’t like our idea, no problem. You walk away, we walk away. No hard feelings.”
HOME Ta’amu saw that Murdock rarely made calls home, mostly because his mom didn’t have a computer or phone and had to go to the neighbors’ to take the call. He started inviting Murdock to join him on the video phone when he called his family back in LA. This consisted of his wife, the dogs, and like seven little brown kids running around screaming the whole time (though he understood only three of these were Ta’amu spawn and the others belonged to a sister in rehab). His wife was a phat collection of gorgeous curves and beautiful Samoan-next-door features. The first time he made Murdock sit in on the herky-jerky, screen-frozen call, Ta’amu told them this was Uncle Murder, and after the children bombarded him with questions about war and how cool was their dad and did he know how to play Call of Duty and was he coming to Los Angeles with their dad after it was all over, Ta’amu replied that he’d have no white Shit-Demon from the Sticks in his house and the kids screamed with laughter and the wife reprimanded him for cursing, and Murdock had to get up and leave, at which point he began to cry, violently, until Ta’amu found him at the entrance to the HAS and told him to stop being a pussy—of course Manfuck could come visit him in LA. They’d grill steaks.
“Christ, you got a hell of a way of piquing a guy’s interest.” He relaxed back into the booth. “Not just a cerebral hick here. Also an open-minded hick.”
Shane was not satisfied yet.
“Here’s what I mean by that: This is going to be a conversation you can’t ever repeat. To anyone. We don’t know what this thing will be, but I need your word this is only between us.”
“And you got it.”
“I’m not being clear.” She put her hand over his again and squeezed. “This is not about hurting anyone, but we could get into trouble just talking about it.”
“I’m telling you, gal, you got my ear. Start her up.”
“I think you understand, Kel, that you have an important set of skills. First, I tell you the bones of what we’re doing. Then if you dig that, we move on to the next step, and you meet my partners.”
“Who are your partners?”
“You don’t need to know who they are until you need to.”
“Inscrutable doesn’t really do it for me, Alvarez. If you hadn’t noticed, I’m a detail-oriented fella.”
“It’s actually Acosta now,” she said. “You’d call me Shane Acosta.”
THE RON KOVIC FANTASY Whitehall’s self-flagellating term. That once you got home you could take up the righteous cause because you’d been there and you knew. He could only read so much about the fat margins of the contractors making fortunes not just off Iraq and Afghanistan but the empire of bases, exporting their equipment and training to a world hungry for a taste of American military supremacy; or about the symbiotic tether between the Pentagon and petroleum—the work of the oil companies guarded and protected by taxpayer dollars; or how rapid and unchecked free-market globalization incubated inequality, which incubated instability, which would eventually incubate more excuses for militarism. He’d seen the way the American empire operates. He understood its vascular system and the grainy detail of its red cells. He could wage peaceful war against its patriotic heart. “That’s the only impulse to follow,” Whitehall told him. “Find yourself purpose in dissent and dig in. Maybe it feels pointless, but it will give you direction, and really, who knows—it might even bring a couple kids home who would’ve got packed into boxes otherwise. Don’t think about your life before, don’t dwell on the people you lost, over there or at home, and whatever you do don’t start drinking. Once you open the bottle, you’ll never put the cap back on.”
RAGE Shane could sense this restless anger in him, he was sure. His left eye still went through spasms of uncontrollable twitching, and he still thrashed in bed half of every night, and he still got that uncategorizable panic bubbling in his chest in crowds, and he would still hear the distinctive sound of bullets snapping by his head, that noise they made as they broke the sound barrier when they zipped by your ear, and he could still never remember his mom’s face or where she’d first showed him how to tie a turle knot. Because all that rage reading—fuck. How inadequate those explanations ultimately felt for all that he’d seen and lived through. There was still no account, no explanation, and no going back. Just him and his ghosts gazing in shared awe over the edge of darkness.
His lip curled and relaxed. “Do I even know who you are? Seems like maybe we start there.”
“You know me, Kel. Even if you don’t know who I am.” She held his gaze to make sure he understood. “There’s four of us. This started back when I worked on the wetlands.”
“What’s up with the wetlands?”
“Just another harbinger on a long list. The point is, the four of us are kind of, I don’t know what you’d call it—the hub of the spokes. The core of the thing.”
“Yeah, Shane, well, what’s the fucking thing?”
“We would want you to be our fifth.”
“You know…” He chewed on his tongue and spent so long thinking, she wondered if he’d say anything. Finally, he went on. “I spent a lot of time in IVAW dealing with folks who wanted to tell me about my life and what I’d done. They tended to sound a lot like you, no offense. So while you’re dancing around whatever you’re dancing around, let me ask you something first: What did you do during the war?”
He said this with great hostility. Ferocity. She had never heard either of those things in him before.
“I went to college,” she said calmly. “Bounced around a bit after that.”
“You ever feel guilty?”
“About what?”
“That guys like me and more’n a few gals like you went and wasted the best years of our lives in that sorry misadventure while y’all blew each other in dorm rooms and your parents got a supply-side tax cut?”
“I don’t know. How guilty do you feel that you came home, and there’s some Iraqi kid who got incinerated by American-brand white phosphorous?”
She couldn’t read his face, but something dark passed across it. He carried a great misery inside, and he couldn’t do a remotely satisfactory job of hiding it.
Shane picked up the saltshaker, cupped it in her palm. “What?” she asked.
“Nothing.” He rolled his tongue around the inside of his cheek. “Small world that you and I ever met.”
“So small, it makes you understand the difference that can be made if you go about it the right way.”
“Color me skeptical. Alls I ever think is how the guys who died in Baghdad or Kandahar had all the sweet-berry luck. Didn’t have to come home and sit with a stinking pile of shit in themselves. They got the hero’s parade.”
She sighed. “Don’t talk like that.”
He waited for a second, like he was trying to decide. “Like what? That dying can be lucky?”
“No, man. You can wish you were dead all you want. But don’t pretend there’s anything heroic about it. All the bumper stickers and parades and ‘thank a veteran for your freedom’ bullshit—all the pedestalizing. All the movies. All that isn’t for you guys who went. It’s for the next time. How else do you get children in Oklahoma City or Fallujah to kill people they’ve never met? Convince them they’ll be heroes.”
Murdock ran his finger around the wet rim of the coffee mug and stared glumly at the snow. He looked far away, like he was no longer listening.
