As he spoke he put his hand back in the register. Mal reached under his elbow and slammed the drawer on his fingers. He squealed. The drawer began to slide open again on its own, but before he could get his mashed fingers out, Mal slammed it once more. He lifted one foot off the floor and did a comic little jig.
"Ohfuckgoddamyouuglydyke," he said.
"Hey," said Bill Rodier, coming toward the bar. He carried a trash barrel in one hand. "Hey."
She let Petty get his hand out of the drawer. He stumbled clumsily away from her, struck the bar with his hip, and wheeled to face her, clutching the mauled hand to his chest.
"You crazy bitch. I think you broke my fingers."
"Jesus, Mal," Bill said, looking over the bar at Petty's hand. His fat fingers had a purple line of bruise across them. Bill turned his questioning gaze back her way. "I don't know what the hell John said, but you can't do that to people."
"You'd be surprised what you can do to people," she told him.
Outside it was drizzling and cold. She was all the way to her car before she felt a weight in one hand, and realized she was still clutching the envelope full of cash.
Mai held it in her hand, against the inside of her thigh, the whole drive back. She didn't put on the radio, just drove, and listened to the rain tapping on the glass. She had been in the desert for two years and she had seen it rain just twice, although there was often a moist fog in the morning, a mist that smelled of eggs, of brimstone.
When she enlisted, she had hoped for war. She did not see the point of joining if you were not going to get to fight. The risk to her life did not trouble her. It was an incentive. You received a two-hundred-dollar-a-month bonus for every month you spent in the combat zone, and a part of her had relished that her own life was valued so cheap. Mal would not have expected more.
But it did not occur to her, when she first learned she was going to Iraq, that they paid you that money for more than just the risk to your own life. It wasn't just a question of what could happen to you, but also a matter of what you might be asked to do to others. For her two hundred dollar bonus, she had left naked and bound men in stress positions for hours, and told a nineteen-year-old girl that she would be gang-raped if she did not supply information about her boyfriend. Two hundred dollars a month was what it cost to make a torturer out of her. She felt now that she had been crazy there, that the Vivarin, the ephedra, the lack of sleep, the constant scream-and-thump of the mortars, had made her into someone who was mentally ill, a bad dream version of herself. Then Mal felt the weight of the envelope against her thigh, Glen Kardon's payoff, and remembered taking his ring, and it came to her that she was having herself on, pretending she had been someone different in Iraq. Who she had been then and who she was now were the same person. She had taken the prison home with her. She lived in it still.
Mal let herself in the house, soaked and cold, holding the envelope. She found herself standing in front of the kitchen counter with Glen's money. She could sell him back his own ring for five hundred dollars, if she wanted, and it was more than she would get from any pawnshop. She had done worse, for less cash. She stuck her hand down the drain, felt along the wet smoothness of the trap, until her fingertips found the ring.
Mal hooked her ring finger through it, pulled her hand back out. She turned her wrist this way and that, considering how the ring looked on her crooked, blunt finger. With this I do thee wed. She didn't know what she'd do with Glen Kardon's five hundred dollars if she swapped it for his ring. It wasn't money she needed. She didn't need his ring either. She couldn't say what it was she needed, but the idea of it was close, a word on the tip of her tongue, maddeningly out of reach.
She made her way to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and let the steam gather while she undressed. Slipping off her black blouse, she noticed she still had the envelope in one hand, Glen's ring on the finger of the other. She tossed the money next to the bathroom sink, left the ring on.
She glanced at the ring sometimes while she was in the shower. She tried to imagine being married to Glen Kardon, pictured him stretched out on her father's bed in boxers and a T-shirt, waiting for her to come out of the bathroom, his stomach aflutter with the anticipation of some late night, connubial action. She snorted at the thought. It was as absurd as trying to imagine what her life would've been like if she had become an astronaut.
The washer and dryer were in the bathroom with her. She dug through the Maytag until she found her Curt Schilling T-Shirt and a fresh pair of Hanes. She slipped back into the darkened bedroom, towelling her hair, and glanced at herself in the dresser mirror, only she couldn't see her face, because a white sheet of paper had been stuck into the top of the frame, and it covered the place where her face belonged. A black thumbprint had been inked in the centre. Around the edges of the sheet of paper, she could see reflected in the mirror a man stretched out on the bed, just as she had pictured Glen Kardon stretched out and waiting for her, only in her head Glen hadn't been wearing grey-and-black fatigues.
She lunged to her side, going for the kitchen door. But Carmody was already moving, launching himself at her, driving his boot into her right knee. The leg twisted in a way it wasn't meant to go, and she felt her ACL pop behind her knee. Carmody was right behind her by then and he got a handful of her hair. As she went down, he drove her forward and smashed her head into the side of the dresser.
A black spoke of pain lanced down into her skull, a nail-gun fired straight into the brain. She was down and flailing and he kicked her in the head. That lick didn't hurt so much, but took the life out of her, as if she were no more than an appliance, and he had jerked the power cord out of the wall.
When he rolled her onto her stomach and twisted her arms behind her back, she had no strength in her to resist. He had the heavy-duty plastic ties, the flexicuffs they used on the prisoners in Iraq sometimes. He sat on her ass and squeezed her ankles together and put the flexicuffs on them too, tightening until it hurt, and then some. Black flashes were still firing behind her eyes, but the fireworks were smaller, and exploding less frequently now. She was coming back to herself, slowly. Breathe. Wait.
When her vision cleared she found Carmody sitting above her, on the edge of her father's bed. He had lost weight and he hadn't any to lose. His eyes peeked out, too bright at the bottom of deep hollows, moonlight reflected in the water at the bottom of a long well. In his lap was a bag, like an old-fashioned doctor's case, the leather pebbled and handsome.
"I observed you while you were running this morning," he began, without preamble. Using the word observed, like he would in a report on enemy troop movements. "Who were you signalling when you were up on the hill?"
"Carmody," Mal said. "What are you talking about, Carmody? What is this?"
"You're staying in shape. You're still a soldier. I tried to follow you, but you outran me on the hill this morning. When you were on the crest, I saw you flashing a light. Two long flashes, one short, two long. You signalled someone. Tell me who."
At first she didn't know what he was talking about; then she did. Her canteen. Her canteen had flashed in the sunlight when she tipped it up to drink. She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, he lowered himself to one knee beside her. Carmody unbuckled his bag and dumped the contents onto the floor. He had a collection of tools: a pair of heavy-duty shears, a taser, a hammer, a hacksaw, a portable vice. Mixed in with the tools were five or six human thumbs.
Some of the thumbs were thick and blunt and male, and some were white and slender and female, and some were too shrivelled and darkened with rot to provide much of any clues about the person they had belonged to. Each thumb ended in a lump of bone and sinew. The inside of the bag had a smell, a sickly-sweet, almost floral stink of corruption.