Curt Colbert - Seattle Noir

“Híjole , man, that cop is mad!” he had said gleefully.

Danny wondered where his cell phone had gone. The last he remembered was Catfish Corner.

“Get up!” the policeman shouted again.

“Okay, I’m getting up now,” said Danny as he began to rise. “I’m going to get up.”

The policeman fired three shots into him.

“Shut the fuck up!” the cop shouted. “Shut the fuck up!”

Dying had seemed easy in Iraq-people did it every day. And when people were not dying in front of you, your buddies, the cooks, the officers, or the civilians who brought in supplies, they were telling you stories about people dying. About how they died, how long it took them, and what it looked like afterwards. Who killed them, or who might have killed them.

There was no death with dignity, only death. Danny spent most of his free time pretending he was someplace else. He plugged his iPod into his head, turned on some tunes, and tried to think about Aimee and the kid they were expecting early next year. Would it be a boy or a girl? It was too soon to tell, but when he went home on leave, they would visit the doctor, and maybe have an ultrasound done. Danny was ready to think about a little life-a little life after Iraq, if that was possible.

The next thing that woke Danny was sirens. A lot of them.

I ain’t dead yet, he thought. A collar was clamped around his neck, and he was rolled onto a stretcher. “Hustle! Hustle! Hustle!” yelled a woman. “I need an IV here, as soon as he’s in!”

Some more jostling, then a sharp pain in his arm.

“Go!” screamed another voice.

The ambulance, because he must be in an ambulance, started up, the siren more muted from inside, and they flew. It reminded him of the cab to the airport in Iraq, but with fewer potholes. He wondered if Chucho was okay.

Danny wakes in a bright, noisy room. People keep leaning over him and yelling in his face.

“I’m not deaf, you know,” he finally says.

“Oh good, he’s conscious. We thought we were losing you there,” a male voice barks at Danny. “Just keep talking to us.”

Danny is in a curtained-off area, and he can hear people near him yelling. Triage.

“Uh, what do you want me to say?”

A bright light is shined in one eye, then the other. “No concussion. Let’s give him some fluids… Are you in pain?” the man asks in that voice you use for the deaf, elderly, and foreign born. Danny recognizes it as the way he spoke to the Iraqis, as though it would somehow bridge the gap between his English and their understanding.

Danny has to think about this. “Actually, I’m kind of numb on one side.”

“Not good,” says the man.

Danny decides to pretend this man is a doctor.

“Can you feel this?… This?” The doctor pricks him with a pencil tip from his shoulder down his right side.

“It’s my arm. I can’t feel my arm,” says Danny. Damn, he thinks. Back from Iraq just in time to die in Harborview. The room grows dark again.

Danny could say “stop” and “open” in Arabic. And, of course, “Insha Allah” -If God wills it. Sometimes, when he listened to the Iraqi men talking and smoking, he could hear them say to each other simply, “Insha… insha…” a sort of running refrain, an affirmation of hope, with a strong note of fatalism.

Danny had gotten used to stepping in front of speeding vehicles. Iraqi drivers seemed to have two speeds-stop and go flat out-so he, taking their fatalistic attitude, assumed the drivers of speeding trucks would stomp on their brakes before hitting him at the base checkpoint where he was usually stationed. If not, his fellow MPs would open fire. It was that simple.

This habit of driving as fast as possible was soon picked up by the Americans. It started when you got out of air transport and on the road. Since the highway between the airport and the capital was mined, and also without cover, you felt as vulnerable as an ant as soon as you hit the ground. The drivers stepped on it and went at a suicidal speed, swerving away from suspicious objects and people, even if it meant driving directly into the path of oncoming traffic. But the trucks and cars coming the other way were doing the same thing.

Danny becomes aware of a shooting pain down his left side. It jolts him from sleep, or wherever he has been. He remembers the doctor poking him along that side, and feeling nothing. The pain jolts him again. Is this good? Pain is probably better than nothing at all-it means he’s still alive.

“Danny? Danny?” It’s his sister Sirena’s voice.

He feels a cool hand on his right arm, then against his cheek. He opens his eyes, then shuts them again quickly against the glare.

“Can you hear me?” she asks. Then a note of her old, mischievous self, his little sister: “Are you in there, Danny?”

He opens his eyes again, sees her silhouette against the window before shutting them again. It is raining outside. Good. This means he’s not in Iraq. Where is he, then? He remembers the car chase. The police.

“Chucho… happened to Chucho?”

“My cousin Chucho? He’s fine. Don’t worry about him. Only you were hurt.” Sirena leans over him.

He can feel her breath on his face, and tries again to open his eyes, fluttering his lids briefly. “What?” he says.

“Do you remember what happened?”

“Yeah. Somebody shot me.”

“A cop shot you. For nothing. Someone taped it, and it’s been all over the news.”

Danny grunts.

Sirena pats his hand. “Are you thirsty?” Without waiting for a reply, she reaches for a glass and places a straw to his lips.

Danny realizes he’s in a neck brace. He opens his lips and sucks.

“Is my neck broken?”

“No. I don’t know why you’re in that thing. Maybe we can get them to take it off soon.”

Danny can see a nurses’ station, more bright lights.

Sirena looks up at the clock. “Aimee will be here pretty soon, as soon as she drops off the kids.”

Soon. Soon. Soon. Her words echo in his head.

“Soon,” he says, then closes his eyes.

At Sarge’s urging, Danny tried driving the truck. After grinding the gears around the compound for a while, he got the hang of it. It was loud and hot inside. It was a hundred degrees outside. He had never learned how to drive a stick shift back home. His cousins in L.A., when he e-mailed them, teased him, told him he was finally a real man.

Danny met Aimee when he was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Her friend was dating another reservist and the four of them went out one night. The other couple broke up after about two months, but Danny kept seeing Aimee, simply knowing that he felt better when he was around her. This must be love, he thought.

At twenty-five, Danny was one of the last in his family-of the cousins-to marry, except for his little sister. The relatives blamed it on their college educations.

“Gotta get ’em while you’re young,” said Freddy, a sleeping baby balanced on his thick forearm. “Gotta get ’em while you still have hair!”

At twenty-nine, working fifty hours a week in a detailing shop, Freddy already looked old to Danny. Danny had gotten his degree in industrial design and was starting to pay back his debt to Uncle Sam. Aimee was a Cajun girl, not the sort anyone thought Danny would fall for, with wild red hair and a husky voice. She ordered up a plate of garlic shrimp and a mug of beer for each of them, and taught Danny the fine art of peeling shrimp. Then she taught him how to two-step to a zydeco band. It might have been the way she placed her boots on the sawdust and shrimp shell-covered floor of the nameless crab shack where they danced. It might have been the way she placed her hands on his chest during a slow number and took the wings of his collar between her fingertips before looking up into his eyes. But probably it was the way she double-clutched her pickup truck without ever glancing at the gear shift that won Danny’s heart.