And the clouds fracture into full torrent and flood, and the slop flows all around us. The slop like the slop in the desert in the void. The exhaust in the slop with the body oil and must as we rutted to our death through the gale in the desert. Only now, only here, the glass shards and bourbon vapors shove into mud as we slog away exhausted, and back to the car. Pebble hail plinks the metal roof like bamboo wind chimes; I crank the engine and then murder that accelerator, squealing out of the cemetery and over a nameless county road. . whip-skid it through a four-way stop sign. . and T-bone the side of a Chevy C-10 pickup with a worn metal camper over the bed.
Steam and furrowed metal, semen tang and pocked chrome; the droning, AM-drizzle of Conway Twitty’s “I’ve Already Loved You in My Mind” from the truck cab; the driver, his head against the steering wheel, unshaven, his bulbous face all bloody but he’s okay, I believe, from the register of disbelief in his algae-green eyes as I stumble by, staggering to the covered truck bed, towards the sounds of panic and foreign shushes.
Hail on metal. Mud-slug feet. Cold air in my open fly, I find six Mexicans jammed inside the camper — five women and a baby — smacked up and shivering and not a spackle of English, right there, in faded Wrestlethon t-shirts and Goodwill jeans, in ridiculous pain, praying to desiccate, invoking some resurrection of dust — instead of metal leaking sky-soaked, hand-muffled baby wails. Refugees now, they came so close to the end of some epic, or perhaps to the beginning of another, but got consumed by deluge in rust-truck Kentucky.
Surely, at least the baby’s gonna be okay.
Maybe.
I think.
Laura died of the Black Plague, remember.
Hers
THEY FLEW US to the front in the belly of a loud C-130. We sat in cargo nets attached to the walls, bobbing in turbulence like babies in bouncer seats, too low to see out the windows. We landed in a gulf of dust and were jammed into trucks and taken to the compound, a small collection of tents inside a head-high berm of sand. A rocky desert horizon surrounded. We were ordered to calm down but stay sharp. Drink water.
Take chemical pills. Rumor was the pills were untested on humans, yet every morning we stood at parade rest, on the Iraqi border, in saggy, ill-fitting chemical suits, chewing the pills on command. It had been raining for days, so everything was soaked and beige and barren and slopped. (They had not briefed us on this wet climate. They had briefed us that Iraqis use American tanks and planes — we’d supplied them, after all — so the only way to discern the enemy was if he was firing on you.) The chem gear felt like a fatsuit as you lumbered around the compound, your boots sucked into the mud. A-10 Warthogs and F-whatever jets ripped the sky, unleashing their arsenal a few seconds north. Concussions from missile strikes buckled your knees, and shook you awake at night. Breathing meant wondering about sarin or VX asphyxia. A primary concern was whether your gas mask was truly airtight, or whether the atropine needle would break off in your femur when the time came to self-inject.
Take pills. Drink water.
Atropine: often fused with opiates, used to quell the death rattle.
After a week, one woman refused. She said her body was messing up because of the pills. Actually, she said “fucking up.” She was African-American, late twenties, with short straightened hair. Thin legs but huge torso. She was ornery, and said fuck that because the pills were fucking her up.
Fine. She would die by Scud missile. They told us she was crazy, and told her, “Suit yourself.” Another loud black chick with fat breasts and fried hair. I imagined her cruising the mall back in Tuscaloosa, talking loud, dragging a baby boy by his arm.
She refused the pills. A couple of weeks later she had to go to the medical tent. She wasn’t pregnant — they knew that much. But her period had disappeared; she wouldn’t bleed, and nobody could tell her why. The medical tent shipped her down to the battalion hospital, which shipped her down to the main hospital in Riyadh, which shipped her back up to camp to pack. “Mother fuck,” she said. “All I wanted in this life was to serve, then to get home and start me a family. Now I can’t even have no babies.”
More tests were required. They sent her home. We never heard anything else.
SPEC 4 Janette cried about her kid. You went to the motor pool to requisition a truck, ducked in the tent and saw the photo taped to her field desk: a tiny girl, towheaded, in a miniature Mississippi State cheerleader uniform. Don’t ask if they’d taken her to the stadium on game day, or Janette would tear up and tell you about Colleen having fallen asleep during the Egg Bowl! She talked and cried while sitting near you at chow. Raised her voice to nobody at all about COLLEEN’S TURTLE DIED OH MAN WHY AM I NOT HOME? She missed her daughter while you ate breakfast, having just come off of guard duty. For hours you’d sat alone in a hutch at the edge of the compound, in the dark, facing the void through a slot between sandbags, your rifle aimed, your mind confabulating structures from the blackness. (Republican Guard advance or geometric patterns, the mind must see something.) You tried to forget that you’d traded your entire month’s furlough for a ride in the back of a transport truck, breathing diesel exhaust and eating dehydrated pork, in order to wait in line for hours, to use a pay phone. . to get your fiancée’s answering machine.
And missiles burst. And the rains passed and the mud turned back to sand and windstorms engulfed everything for days, filling your boots, your eyes, your lungs, covering you in rashes. And Spec 4 Janette yapped and sobbed over her daughter, Colleen.
In our twelve-man tent, talk cycled about Janette’s tight workout body. One night, PFC Lomes tells everyone that during overnight guard duty he left his post to go smoke in the motor pool tent, and found Sergeant Cross pumping her. Says it just like this: “Sergeant Cross was pumping her, man. She had that good-hurt look on her face. Like, she was bent over her field desk, gripping the corners!” While telling us this he throws his hips like Sergeant Cross, grapples the air.
After lights-out, in the break between jet screams our tent was alive with fists rubbing against nylon sleeping bags. Everyone coming in silence.
CAMP was so small that Evie Mundleson and I saw each other every day. Yet she no longer spoke to me. Back in Riyadh, during in-processing, she had asked if I wanted to come with her. Had arched her eyebrows, and used the word latrine. By this point the females were no longer allowed makeup, so Evie’s cheeks were a drama of settled red pocks. Her dye-blond hair had no benefit of product.