NOTE: DogCanyon will publish this short story serially, in four parts.
To read Part 1, click here.
To read Part 2, click here.
To read Part 3, click here.
Just a few weeks later and we were out on the streets of Baghdad in the Humvee and I hadn’t been sleeping much. 81 mm mortar fire kept us up at night. I could hear the nighttime barrages of 122 mm Katyusha rockets, too, and the 107 mm Chinese rockets going off in clusters of three to twelve. Not sleeping was making me jumpy, sure.
We pull up in the Humvee and crawl out. Jones, Bridges and a couple of the others secure both sides of the street with razor wire and the kids inside the wired off patch come running towards us and I’m sweating like a pig in my battle dress uniform and I already feel a little sick that the kids are going to start tearing into each other and I know I can’t stop it. It shouldn’t bother me so much but I just don’t have the stomach for it right then. They’re just children after all and it’s terrible to see.
For some reason I think about that little banty rooster who fucking terrorized the big rooster by the sheer fact of believing that he could. I want the little kids to know about that, to have that kind of will to fight back against something that should be more powerful than they are, but it’s not like I can talk to them about it.
I start handing out candy from my sack, lollypops with bubblegum in the middle, little packets of starburst and hard candies. Caramels. Peppermints. All of it made sticky and a little soft by the terrible heat. The little kids push and shove to get near me, their mouths opening and closing like baby birds. “I love you mister,” they say and I wonder where Turner’s right arm is. Was it cremated or embalmed. Was it rotting away underground somewhere. Was he learning to write left-handed.
As soon as the first bunch of kids had candy, a new bunch moved in demanding it and the ones with candy fell under attack by the bullying ones. I tried not to see it, I tried to move on, but I felt a little lightheaded; even when I looked away I could hear the cries and the sound of fists smacking into flesh and I noticed the sky overhead was a sharp blue. We were out of candy and when the kids really realized it, they fell away into their pummeling groups.
more at the jump…
I was walking towards the Humvee, Jones at my side and I don’t know why, but I turned to look over my shoulder. I saw it then, a big boy holding a little girl with longish hair by the arm. She was hanging onto a lollypop for dear life; she wasn’t about to let go. She wore a pink soccer shirt that had turned ragged a long time ago.
The boy had a brick raised up, ready to smash down on her head. He was ready to bash her skull in, not for religion, or principle, but just because he wanted what she held in her hand. Hey, I yelled and I lifted my M-4, too close to use my sights. Everything froze then, the girl looking at me, her eyes dark as wells, the boy looking at me, too; and I knew right then if he hit her in the head with that brick I’d shoot him dead.
Then I heard the engine and saw the car blaze through the razor wire, plowing into the group of kids. The explosion lifted me off of my feet and I hit the ground.
In the moment I was blacked out, I could see it all with slow motion precision, like the voiceover in a movie who knows the movie’s outcome, every character’s fate.
The left front wheel of the car traveled to a rooftop three blocks west and two blocks north; the right front wheel, still on the hub, went halfway through a 2-foot thick adobe wall 80 meters to the east. The other parts of the auto were randomly displaced over twenty city blocks. The driver’s body atomized and scattered over a 300 meter by 80 meter wide area, all but his head, which traveled 150 meters straight up in the air, coming back down to the blast site just as I came to.
What I saw first were parts of children everywhere, limbs and clothes, bits of flesh and blood; then, as I pulled myself to my hands and knees, the engine block at the bottom of a three foot deep crater, which was rapidly filling with blood, sewage from the ruptured line, and upwelling Tigris river water from the canal a block away. And sure enough, there was the driver’s head, lying eerily on the crater’s edge, the black eyes open, the hair begging for a comb. The houses alongside us had caved in and people came flying out, running through the smoke and the bodies, searching for their children. One woman stood on the edge of it all, wailing like it was her job to mourn for the lot of us.
People were outraged. How could anyone target children, innocents? That’s what they wanted to know. Monsters, they said. They blamed us for creating the target. We were following orders, though, that’s all.
I’m home now. Been home a few months.
In another few they could send me back again, probably will.
I don’t read the papers; I can’t seem to concentrate on them, but in the afternoons I listen to news on the radio. Couple times a week I meet this guy Dave at the VA for a beer. He was a med tech over there in a military hospital. He worked in the operating rooms, saw all sorts of gnarly shit. He says ever since he came back home to the States, he’s been obsessed with keeping his feet clean. Scrubs them twice a day, he’s religious about it. Says guys on patrol came in all blown to pieces. They hadn’t showered in a week sometimes. Anytime Dave smells stinky feet-–boom-–he’s back there in the emergency room watching amputations and guys getting defibbed and all of it.
Me, I try to stay away from peppermint. Can’t stand the taste of anything sweet.
I talked to Turner the other day. He’s back home living with his mom. He’s got Velcro shoes, he said, so that’s one thing he can manage himself. Said he couldn’t stand having to ask his own mother to tie his goddamn shoes. His wife threw him out. He didn’t say why, but I can guess–I know how I am at home now.
I said I’ll fly up to visit him someday soon, said we could throw some bones. I can almost hear the dominoes clicking on the table, the peppermint clicking against Turner’s white teeth, Turner talking shit. Diggety diggety diggety bone diggety, he’ll say, his right shirtsleeve pinned up so it don’t hang down flapping.
Acknowledgments: Thanks to Mr. Brooklyn, Snake and the other veterans who helped me with this story. And a very special thanks and much respect to Michael.
my heart hurts. thank you Mary, you are very gifted.