Andrew Kaplan: Homeland: Saul’s Game

Gunner Brody had been celebrating the six-­week anniversary of his unemployment benefit checks running out after he got his pink slip from the steel mill. (“They promised me I’d have a job no matter what,” he roared to his best friend, one hundred-­proof Old Grand-­Dad. “I got the Silver Star. What’d they ever do, those jerk-­offs? They promised me!”) Before he’d passed out, he’d used Sibeal for a punching bag, telling her if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with the little jarhead shit, he wouldn’t be in this stupid fix.

And Nick finally couldn’t take any more. He grabbed his Little League bat from the closet and, coming from behind, swung it at his father, hitting him across the shoulder. Gunner Brody staggered, howling in pain. He turned around and rushed Nick, kicking him in the groin, followed by an elbow jab to the face and a leg takedown.

“Hit your father, you little maggot!” he screamed. “Hit an officer, you little jarhead prick! I’ll teach you!” Banging Brody’s head by his hair against the floor, again and again.

“Gunner, stop it! You’ll kill him! Stop! You’ll kill him. Your own son!” his mother screamed. “Marion, they’ll put you in prison. Is that what you want? For the love of God, stop. Sweet Mary, Mother of God, stop!”

“You don’t get it, you little maggot,” Gunner Brody said, leaning close and whispering in Nick’s ear as he lay there on the floor, helpless, utterly beaten. “When I hit her, she likes it.”

Later that night, something told him to wake up. Wincing, he tiptoed on bare feet to the kitchen, where he found Gunner Brody dead drunk asleep, the loaded .45 and the cleaning kit on the table in front of him, and for more than nine minutes, as he later told Jessica, he stood there in his underwear, holding the gun with both hands less than three inches from Gunner Brody’s head, trying to get up the guts to squeeze the trigger.

“Because I hate him enough,” he told Jessica years later, the two of them walking together after class, walking down Center Street, in a quiet tree-­lined neighborhood once you got away from the high school. “I don’t hate anybody in the whole world like I hate that son of a bitch. I want him dead. It’s the only way out for my mom and me. I came close, Jess. I started to squeeze the trigger. I swear to God. My hand was shaking and I squeezed. Another fraction of an ounce of pressure and it would have gone off. Only I couldn’t do it. And I don’t know why!” he screamed, running down the street as hard as he could toward the river, Jessica running after him, yelling, “Brody, wait! Wait!”

A block or two later, he just stopped, standing on the sidewalk outside somebody’s house. A real house with a lawn and white columns like it had been plunked down there from a different world, but he wouldn’t look at her.

“I’m a coward,” he said, knowing it was true. He should have pulled the trigger. A chance like that wouldn’t come again.

“It’s because you’re a good person, Brody. Because you didn’t want to ruin your life. You were only twelve. A kid,” she said, holding him close.

She took his hand and they walked down toward the tree-­lined path beside the Lehigh River. He loved that she thought he was good, but he knew it wasn’t true.

What was true were the nine minutes.

But Afsal Hamid, that al-­Qaeda piece of shit, he knew, Brody thought, lying there, his hands tied, head covered with the hood in the back of the SUV. Dizzy from the ride and being hit, for a moment it was as if he had lost all sense of reality because he heard a distant sound of helicopters, and for one crazy second, he could’ve sworn they sounded like U.S. Black Hawks. But that was impossible.

He must be hallucinating, Brody thought inside his hood in the SUV. He tried to think. They’re on the move. Why? Had to get out of Dodge. Must be a long trip, though. It seemed like it was taking forever.

He froze. They were talking about him.

“What about the American, Afsal?”

“Shut up, brother.”

“He’s a Muslim. He prays with us.”

“Your mother! He’s an American. A Chris­tian crusader. He only pretends to be a Muslim.”

“Why’d we keep him so long?”

“He has his reasons,” Afsal said, and Brody knew they meant Abu Nazir. “He always has his reasons.”

Now he understood. Afsal meant what he said. This time they were going to kill him. So why did they take him with them?

Because they didn’t want to leave the body behind. Not with his red hair and pale white skin and Made in America face. Might raise too many questions. Better to bury the body out in the desert where it would never be found. Like Tom Walker. His Marine Corps buddy, his scout sniper teammate. Oh God, Tom. I didn’t mean it. At first, they just said, “Hit him!” Hit him again. And again. And again. Crying as he did it, shouting, “I’m sorry, Tom. I’m sorry. Jesus. Help me, Jesus.” Until his hands felt like they were broken and he couldn’t hit anymore and Tom Walker was dead.

Now finally, they were going to kill him too, Brody thought, lying there in the back of the SUV. Something else he learned on that ride, along with the endless bumping and heat and smell of gasoline. You can doze off, even in your last few precious hours on earth. Because he only woke up when they stopped moving. His last thought as he heard them open the back of the SUV was: I’m sorry, Jess. I tried. Six years a prisoner of war. I really tried.

“Get out!” Afsal barked.

Hands grabbed him and Brody stumbled out. He fell to his knees and they lifted him up and pulled off his hood. He was blinded by the light and had to squint to see.

It was no longer night. The SUV had pulled about two hundred yards off a concrete road through a sandy desert. The convoy was gone; their SUV the only vehicle in sight.

Afsal pushed Brody to his knees and took out his pistol.

“Now we finish. Finally,” he said.

“Can I say the shahadah?” Brody said, looking up. The desert was utterly empty. The early-­morning sun was just rising over a distant dune, turning the sand and everything to gold, even the faces of the men who were about to kill him. O Allah, this world is so beautiful, he thought.

“Let him. It is required,” Daleel said as Afsal stepped behind Brody and pointed the pistol at the back of his head.

“Ash-­hadu an laa ilaaha illallah.” I bear witness there is no God but Allah. “Wa ash-­hadu anna Muhammadan rasulullah,” Brody said. I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.

He braced for the shot, his eyes open, aching to see the beauty of the sunrise till the last instant.

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