I had stared at her for a few seconds, then told her I had a fiancée.
“Oh. I’m sorry. It’s just that, well.”
It’s just that everybody was fucking in the latrines. Port-o-lets labeled in Arabic whose plastic shells would rock and creak, whose sloshy reservoirs sounded like bathtub waves throughout the night. Just that we’d been stuffed inside a corrugated metal hangar outside Riyadh, were sweating, scared and unwashed, confined to ordered rows of olive-colored canvas cots and duffel bags. That Scud missiles traversed the night sky and the moon hung sideways. Half a million Iraqi troops were poised for the Mother of All Battles.
In-processing, in-country, at last. We had stared at each other for days. We had picked out the weaklings and placed bets against them. (Evie was the safest of the casualty bets.) We cleaned, then recleaned our carbines. Oiling the barrels, breaking down sight assemblies. They had known better than to issue us ammunition.
It’s just that when not an activated reservist, Evie M. bar-backed at Game Day, a strip mall sports bar in north Tuscaloosa. There, her twenty-year-old body was losing to the free potato skins. Her nights were defined by Misty cigarettes, dead kegs, and tip-outs. And she was okay with this, there, between walls covered in Crimson Tide jerseys and plastic NASCAR flags. In Riyadh, at in-processing, she was scared beyond panic, shaking, wanting only to be groped in the community toilet. Many had felt the same.
WHEN by-the-book Sergeant Motes was sent home for being too old and sclerotic, Tetley Teabag and I became the de facto Supply and Armory leaders. Benefits included our very own tent, just Teabag and me. We bartered goods with other squads, companies, camps, armies, whomever. Extra boots got us a large, in-tent ice cooler; surplus cammies were good for foam mattresses; tent poles meant a radio, and so forth. We were sultans.
Tetley Teabag was a late-twenties rural Alabama high school graduate, desperate to be seen as a hardass. He had the mustache, buzz cut and accent, but was squat and soft and round. He also had the toe.
The Tetley Toe. Stateside, just before deployment, Tetley had thrust a posthole digger at the big toe of his left foot. This earned him an odd reattachment and a relentless wound. The medics made Tetley limp around on a so-called Chinese jump boot: an oversized medical shoe constructed of royal-blue canvas and white Velcro straps. The roughnecks harassed him for this, as did the officers, and the women.
But forget the boot. The thing about him was that he NEVER went to the showers. Night after night he shut the tent flaps and wiped himself clean with a wet rag. He called it a “bitch bath.” In the dim orange lamplight, he’d turn his puppy-fat back to me and use this propane-powered camp stove to heat water in a tin basin. (By this point I was taking two-three-four cold showers a day. They kept drilling us for an attack that never came. The sand was everywhere. My lungs wheezed and my breath stank with it.) (This was also after Charlotte had stopped writing me.) As finale to Tetley’s cleansing, he would wrap a Tetley tea bag around his blackened appendage. His grandmother sent boxes of them, instructing him that a woman’s remedy was the only medicine a man could trust.
On guard duty one night I realized I’d forgotten my gas mask, and had to come back to the tent. Tetley was naked and bitch-bathing, and though he curled up when I cut through the entry flap, I saw what might be described as a mole or a nub, protruding from the thick beard between his legs.
I did not care that Tetley had the penis of an infant. Conversely, he seemed relieved to be uncloseted, because the next night, during a violent sandstorm, he confessed to me that he was a virgin. Said he was worried about dying unfulfilled.
“Mundleson is lonely,” I yelled. We had to scream over the wind. We lay on our cots with our goggles on and our mouths covered by government-issue scarves. Rubbers were unrolled over our gun barrels to keep the sand out. It was no use looking at each other because you couldn’t see anything.
“What?”
“I bet Evie’d be your girlfriend,” I shouted again.
“Screw that, man.” He called her pug-ugly, which was unfair, and which failed to trump that he could not expose himself in theater. No two ways about it: the only way Tetley could both keep his small penis a secret and lure a willing partner was to get home alive and marry some Christian.
AFTER the nonmenstruating woman was sent away, only two black girls remained. Back home they went to the U of A. One of them, PFC Davis, had screwed this cheeseball Joe Minetti in the toilet back at Riyadh. So there was that, and somehow that had become attractive.
This, too, was after Charlotte stopped writing.
PFC Davis was inspiring. Curvy and defiant and laughing, always sharp. One morning, the XO ordered the two women and I to burn the latrine waste. He didn’t say as much, but I figured this was my punishment for hiding in the showers. The black chicks did not have to figure anything. Our company was made up of Alabama rednecks and Spec 4 Janettes, so they knew they’d just been born wrong.
We yanked large metal tubs from beneath seat-holes in the plywood toilets, and burned what was inside. The tubs, having been half filled with diesel the week before, were brim-high with turd and Tampax, vomit and ejaculate and toilet paper. And we lit all that on fire, and then walked from tub to tub, hour after hour, taking in putrid black smoke.
Diesel burns slow and won’t explode when you light it. Nor will it penetrate the surface of the sewage. So you use a two-by-four to stir the char, to expose the flame to the sludge below.
Scorching shit in the desert. You get used to it. After a few hours, the three of us flirted around the feces. The sky was beige and gray. The sliver of landscape we saw over the compound berm was as barren as the moon.
“Y’all don’t date black girls in y’alls fraternity?” Davis asked.
“Probably not,” I said. “But I’m not against it.”
“You sayin’ you have dated a black girl?”
“Well, no. But I’ve thought about it.”
“I bet you have.” She laughed, then coughed.
She and I both knew a liaison would follow. She had overnight guard duty, alone, at the far corner of the berm. She said she needed company. I needed company.
Diesel will now and again race like gasoline. This happened as I was stirring a tub: a flame shot straight up the two-by-four, which I flung out of panic. It hit PFC Davis across the chest, smearing on her desert camo blouse.
“What tha hell was that, you?” she yelled.
“Sorry, sorry. Fire just jumped.”
“You out of your goddamn mind?” She wiped her hands on me, then peeled off her soiled blouse and wiped that on me too. She was not wearing her required t-shirt and her breasts bulged from the top of her olive-green bra.
“Reaction,” I said. “I—”
“What kinda man throws a flaming sticka shit at a woman?”
Both women cursed me and left for other fires. Though I tried to apologize several times, and soon bartered them both to the Frogs, neither spoke to me again.
This, in slow motion: the soiled board, twirling like a helicopter blade, aflame.
I strung up a large piece of cardboard across the tent wall behind my cot. I pinned photos on it of women I’d slept with, or whose pictures with me indicated that I might’ve. Drunken hugs at fraternity parties, suggestive poses, kisses on my cheek. These weren’t the only photos I brought to combat. But after word got out that I’d spent a week on suicide watch in the medical tent, it became vital that I not be seen as a weak-ass, a Tetley.