Brendan DuBois - Dead of Night

I felt like warning Miriam that advice from my father usually had some sort of price tag attached to it, but I let it slide. Miriam said, ‘All right. Advice I can take.’

My father looked at us both. ‘Don’t stay in the States. Go somewhere else.’

I said, ‘All right. Advice taken.’

A smile from the old guy. ‘Fair enough.’ He glanced at his watch, said, ‘Time’s not waiting. There’s a chartered flight leaving for Toronto in the hour. Sure you can’t come?’

‘Positive,’ I said.

‘A pity.’ My father got up, leaned over and gave Miriam a peck on her cheek. Then he held out his hand. I gave it a firm shake and he said, ‘Write more, Samuel, won’t you?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Good. You two take care, and remember what I said. Get out of the States.’

He walked away, past the long line of aid people and soldiers and doctors still waiting for breakfast. Then he was gone.

Miriam said, ‘He’s certainly something, Samuel.’

‘That he is,’ I said. ‘That he is.’

When I brought the dirty dishes up to the washing station, there was a woman standing there, scraping a dirty plate viciously with a knife. I looked, and then looked again. Karen Tilley.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Karen, how are you?’

She looked up at me from her chore, her red hair unwashed and a tangled mess. ‘I’m breathing, I guess. How the hell are you?’

‘I’m doing all right, considering—’

Karen tossed the plate into a gray plastic bin filled with other dishes, making a loud rattling noise. ‘Hell, I think you’re doing just fine, pal, just fucking fine. You’re standing here, breathing and living and everything seems to be working right. You’re not dead, shot and left behind—shot dead for the crime of being in this hellhole and trying to help people.’

I put the tray of dirty dishes down gingerly, started cleaning them as well. ‘I’m sorry about Sanjay, Karen.’

She snorted. ‘Spare me your fake sympathy.’

‘Nothing fake about it. Sanjay… I can’t believe what he did there, toward the end.’

‘Bullshit,’ she said, now tossing the silverware into a bucket half-filled with greasy water. ‘I know what you all thought about me and Sanjay. Slutty American woman, spreading her legs for a little exotic flesh from the Far East.’

‘Not true. You and he were professionals. I didn’t care what you did in your tents at night. And I know what he did when the shooting took place, that he thought I was coming back and he—’

It was as if Karen wasn’t listening to a single word I had said, as if this talk had been prepared for days. She said, ‘Well, the hell with all of you. Sanjay and me, we had something special, something romantic, something to call our own out there, and it’s gone. Thanks to you.’

I froze, a dirty oatmeal bowl in my hand. ‘Me?’

‘Of course you, you moron,’ she said, wiping her hands on her sweater. ‘I know exactly what happened, how you had to be Mr Helpful, Mr Goodie-Two-Shoes, Mr I’m-So-Sweet. You had to get up that morning and make some hot water so that your girlfriend and Charlie and Jean-Paul and Peter would all look up to you, would think, hey, this kid’s worth it. A little hot coffee to score points. Right?’

‘No, I was just boiling the water to—’

‘Asshole,’ Karen said, stretching out the two-syllable word. ‘If you hadn’t gone out like that, to play Boy Scout, we would have skipped breakfast. I know we would. But we had to wait for you to come back, so there we were, sitting out in the open, dumb and hungry, waiting for you. We waited, Sammy, boy did we wait, and you know what happened next, right?’

‘I managed to warn you, by—’

‘And if you hadn’t gone out, there wouldn’t have been anything to warn us about, right? No hot water, no breakfast, just a quick pack-up and we’re gone. Well, congratulations, Sammy, you got to do a good deed and you got a good man killed in the process. Fuck you very much.’

Karen turned and stalked away, and I just stood there. I suppose a hero in a movie or a made-for-television film would have gone after her to plead his case, to try to explain further, but I was tired. Miriam was back there, waiting for me.

And, after all, I was no hero.

Not at all.

I didn’t feel like talking any more about Karen or Sanjay or anything to do with that day, so I found Miriam and we went outside to a small hillside park near the hospital complex. It was sunny, there was no wind, and it felt more like a pleasant late September day than a late October one. We sat on a picnic table and held hands, and we looked down to the parking lot crowded with APCs, military trucks and a number of ambulances. On a wide lawn on the far side of the parking lot was a small tent city, with some banners flying. I picked out the Red Cross, the UN and one flag that looked German. Wire fencing and guard posts enclosed the parking lot, and there was the steady drone of engines at work.

Miriam leaned against me and said, ‘Did you ever come here, to the United States, before the troubles?’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Plenty of times.’

‘What for?’ she asked. ‘Tourism? To do stories for your newspaper?’

‘The truth?’

‘Of course, the truth.’

I looked into her eyes. ‘It sounds silly, but this is the truth: I used to go to the States like most Canadians did. For the shopping.’

‘Shopping?’ Miriam sounded incredulous.

‘Sure, shopping. The prices were reasonable and you didn’t have the incredible taxes we Canucks have to put up with to pay for a creaky national healthcare system.’

She put her arm round my shoulders. ‘I always wanted to come here, you know. Had a chance once, as a high-school student, but I got sick and couldn’t make it. And when I did eventually come here, well, it was during a very unhappy time. Right after the Security Council resolution authorizing the intervention. I had often dreamed of coming here to the States as a tourist. It never occurred to me that I would be coming here to look for mass graves. Not in my wildest nightmares.’

Or looking for evidence of the people behind the attacks. That was extra—God, was that extra.

Miriam looked around at the scenery, squeezed my shoulder. ‘Such a big, prosperous and unhappy land. I saw a magazine illustration, last year, before the bombings. It showed a county-by-county breakdown of how the vote for President went. A big divide, with lots of hate, mistrust and bad feelings on both sides. And nobody had the will, the vision, to bridge that gap.’

I put a hand on her leg, gave it a squeeze. Below us some vehicles were moving around by the main entrance to the hospital parking lot. I said, ‘We had the same problem for a while, too. Rural versus urban, the west coast versus the maritimes, the Quebecois versus everybody else. Lucky for us, we managed to muddle through.’

‘Mmm,’ she murmured. ‘Muddle through. I like the sound of that. Tell me, Samuel, what do you think will happen here next?’

I was thinking of what to say when the noise level started to increase. Now there were soldiers down there, coming out of some of the tents. Then came the distant sound of approaching helicopters. I shifted and put my own arm around Miriam.

‘Something’s going on, isn’t it?’ she said simply.

‘Yes.’

‘A guess?’

‘I have no idea.’

She broke free from my grasp. ‘Then come along. I want to know what’s happening.’

I got up from the picnic table and followed Miriam down to the large parking lot, though I really wanted to grab her and take her back to my room. I didn’t like the sudden burst of noise and activity but my old reporter’s curiosity was being tickled. Something was indeed going on.