The kid was almost all the way in, almost gone.
Jeremy’s finger did not move. God help me, he thought, and he wanted to weep.
Those IEDs. Those IEDs were cruel bastards, and the people who put them together and the kids who brought them backpacks full of American tragedy should not be allowed to live.
The kid stopped. He was backing out. A strap on his backpack had been caught by a piece of exposed pipe. He reached up to free himself, and that was when Jeremy sent the bullet.
“They don’t know, they don’t know,” Jeremy says to Grandmother America. “What that’s like. They don’t know. They don’t want to know.”
“What…what is like?” she asks, because he has voiced none of this.
He draws a long, sad breath, and he tells his captive that he would like for her to go into the bathroom. He would like for her to get on her knees in the bathtub, because the plan has changed. The new plan, he tells her, is that he will have to hit her on the back of the head with his gun, and then he will leave her and go away. He says all this with the gleam of sweat on his brow, and he has begun to fidget with the safety.
She goes, stumbling along in front of him, her hair in her face. On the way, Jeremy gently takes her handbag from her and lets it drop to the blue-covered floor in the unfinished hall. She is sobbing, but not very loud. “I’ll try not to hurt you,” he tells her. “I’m a good guy, really I am. I’m just…you know…in a little trouble.”
In the bathtub, when she is on her knees in the cream-colored tub with her back to him, she gasps, “I’m going to be sick,” and then she shivers and heaves and throws up. “Please,” she says, as she struggles for whatever dignity and hope she can hold onto. “Please, please, please.”
A shadow moves across the mirror. Gunny is standing behind Jeremy; Jeremy sees the reflection, beside his own.
Jeremy aims the gun at the back of Grandmother America’s head. When Jeremy retracts and releases the slide to cock the pistol, feeding the first round into the chamber, Grandmother America suddenly turns toward him with hot rage in her eyes, as if she is condemning him for telling such a lie. The bullet he fires digs a smoking groove across the side of her jaw. She does not scream so much as make a catlike mewling, but she is no meek pussy; in the next instant she comes up out of the tub with a bitter snarl and tries to claw her way past him and out of her death chamber. He shoots her again, somewhere in the midsection, but she keeps going, a desperate woman leaking out her life and trying to get to her sister’s.
Jeremy shoots her a third time, in the back in the hallway on the blue-tarp floor lah de dah de dah la boom. She is made of strong stuff, because though she nearly collapses against the wall she still keeps going, and he thinks of himself back at his apartment in Temple, staggering along a hallway between life and death.
Oh, how far we have come.
In the front room, she goes for the door. She is making a high whining sound now, not unlike air escaping a tire at several punctured places. She falls upon the bright blue before she gets there, and yet amazingly—and there are some hardcore members of the Green Machine who could learn from this lady—she continues to crawl and reach and wheeze.
At last, so very close to the door yet so very far from who she was an hour ago, Grandmother America flops over on her back and looks up with hateful reproach at Jeremy, who puts a bullet between her eyes.
This is one big mess, Gunny tells him from the gory hallway.
Jeremy realizes he did not finish his story. He did not tell her that when the bullet was sent, it hit the kid in the side of the neck and the kid had slithered into the hole in the building and out of sight. And that he and Chris had to go through those streets, turkey-peeking over every wall and around every corner, and raghead men and raghead women were gawking at them and screaming like they were from another world. Then right in front of that hole was one of the kid’s blue sandals, a bright blue, a happy blue, unforgettable. Lots of blood, too. And going in after that kid, they’d found his other blue shoe on the broken concrete. And him too, lying curled up. His orange Fanta cap was still on his head and he hadn’t yet left this life, and over in the corner was—would you believe this, lady?—a fucking goat tethered to an iron bar, and a water bowl next to it. And—get this, now—the kid is crying, and bleeding from the mouth and the neck, and somebody—a woman—at the entrance really starts wailing, and Chris says Man, we’ve got to get our asses out. So, an order being an order and because I am the prince of my profession, I shoot the kid in the head and take his cap, and then we haul ass out but you know the woman, his mother it must be, is silent now, just staring at us as we go past, and she is holding that fucking blue sandal against her cheek like it was the perfect rose of Araby. See what you missed, lady?
And then…and then…at the base we get flash-blasted by that captain we don’t know. Done in the middle of the night, in a secure place where nobody else can hear. He roars at us, Did anybody tell you to take out any secondary targets?
Secondary targets? Oh… I know what he means. The goat. He’s pissed because after I killed a kid who had gone to feed and water his pet goat, I shot the goat in the head since there was no civilian Christian In Action standing around for me to kill. See, I figure…and I’ve thought about this a long time, I’ve had a lot of time to think…that the whole shitbag was about the goat. A feud between families, maybe, or between tribes. Was information about IEDs passed along because I killed a kid who stole another kid’s goat? Or did I kill the kid who stole back the goat that some kid stole from him? Did I do somebody’s dirty work for them to exchange for info on the IEDs, and I brought back the cap to prove it?
“I don’t know, lady,” Jeremy says to the body on the floor. “They don’t tell you everything over there. They just say some things are fate.”
He sighs deeply. He’s going to miss having someone to talk to. But there’s always Gunny.
In the bathroom, Jeremy looks at himself in the mirror and sees the bones and muscles of his face moving beneath the flesh. A lump comes up on his right cheek and subsides; another rises, squirming, on his forehead. A third bulges up alongside his left eye, and it appears his jaw is trying to break loose from its hinges.
Gunny was right, he thinks. I’m not ready yet for Mexico. Before I get there, I have to—
Shut their mouths, Gunny says from behind him. Somehow, they know. That video speaks volumes, Jeremy, and all it can do is hurt you and the good soldiers who carry out their jobs. Now here is the thing…they have to be silenced, because they’re doing something that is going to hurt so many, many other people. They don’t even know what they’re doing. That amateur today had his chance. But you…you are the professional, Jeremy. You have a car now. It’s time to get packed, and get serious.
Jeremy agrees. He will leave the pickup in the garage, right where it is. How long will it be before anybody finds it? How about…a month of Sundays?
Time to get serious. If they played at Stone Church, they might be going on to their next date. The list he wrote down from their website said The Casbah in San Diego, tomorrow night. If not there, then the Cobra Club in Hollywood on Saturday night. He figures he ought to go through Grandmother America’s handbag, check it out for cash. It would be for a very patriotic cause.
Yeah.
Time to get real serious.
Jeremy’s face has stopped moving, for now. He is himself again. He almost sobs, almost lets out a wail that would’ve echoed in this little bathroom and scared him enough to keep him sweating and sleepless every night for the rest of his life, but the feeling of dark despair soon passes. He forces it to pass, because a person can’t live with that kind of feeling inside him. She was collateral damage. She’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happened. A casualty of the mission, no big whoop. You just put your head down and keep going. And one thing he knows is that after he’s completed this mission he’ll be doing the good guy work against the druglords of Mexico and saving thousands of lives, so it all evens out. It is called fate.