Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

He wasn’t surprised that he thought he could feel the greasy grit of sand on his fingertips and in the corners of his eyes, over his teeth. He wanted to get to the bathroom and drink from the tap to wash his sandy mouth out, but the dog farted and winked in the brightening room, so he played dead. He thought, of course, about the dead Marines and the dead hajis, as the live Marines called them, and the one Iranian, a bearded man in Western clothes, driving north and west over the Iranian border in a white Toyota long-bed truck into Checkpoint Eight One, established and commanded by Captain Jerome Goldsworthy with whose Alpha Platoon, five light armored reconnaissance vehicles, Mason traveled as journalistic baggage because Major Harvey Fathers, commanding Fox Company, had told Goldsworthy to carry him along for the sake of public relations.

Captain Goldsworthy was a slight, slender man who struck Mason as being made entirely of hard leather. His South Carolina accent was musical, Mason wrote in his notes, and he never raised his voice, even if he swore with conviction. He never chided Mason or complained about having him in tow. In fact, he never addressed him. He referred to Mason exclusively as he or him , as when, standing before Mason, looking sourly at his Orvis-catalogue traveler’s vest and L. L. Bean khakis, he told one of the rifleman scouts to make certain he knew how to fasten the rear scout compartment hatches of the captain’s vehicle when they needed to swing the turret cannon to the rear. Mason rode in that small scout compartment with three Marine infantry, sweating and sucking warm water from plastic bottles and banging against the walls. “Make sure he stays inside the pig until you know for certain we’re in a safe environment,” the captain told his scouts.

Now, before dawn, at Checkpoint Eight One, Goldsworthy had opened his turret hatch and positioned the vehicles, establishing his firing lanes. Mason heard the hatch go up forward of the turret just after a short, thick PFC, William Pontelecorvo, from Rahway, New Jersey, had pushed their hatches, behind the turret, up and out. About a half an hour later, they heard the driver of the truck gear down, either because he meant to, or to feign stopping. It was apparently a feint, because he began to go up through the gears, gathering speed, and they pinned him with the lights.

The captain said, “This is irksome.”

Mason heard the driver say, “Sir.”

In his soft, low voice, the captain said, “There’s a cure for irksome.” He said, “Button the forward hatch.” He said, “Gunner. Battle sight. Truck in the open.”

The gunner called back, “Identified.”

Pontelecorvo said, “He armed with the HE.”

The captain gently said, “Fire.”

“On the way, sir,” the gunner said.

The 25mm turret cannon fired three times. Mason was deafened at once. Pontelecorvo must have been right about the high explosive shells, Mason thought, because although their hatches faced away from the action, he saw the air of the nighttime desert go whiter than their lights had made it, and then he saw bright fragments, blown vertically, raining down around them. He heard voices as if from a distance, and he couldn’t hear the fragments strike the ground. When Pontelecorvo permitted him to leave the vehicle, Mason stood with some of the platoon a few dozen yards from the burning truck. The Marines edged closer, he noted, and then closer, as if to prove that they were unafraid of secondary explosions. Then they moved even closer, flinching from the heat but needing the risk, and he joined them because he was afraid to stay behind and seem to be afraid. What was left of the driver lay partway between the truck and the Marines: some beard on some of the cooked face with one wide eye in it, strips of burned gristle, a section of clean, white rib cage, the halved corpse sprinkled with powdered windshield glass that caught their lights and reminded Mason — he faced away from the Marines to write it shakily in his notebook — of ice droplets in the air on a very cold night in St. Paul.

As he thought of the roasted, torn face and its eye, Mason thought of Murphy’s ecstatic glare. He remembered the sand in their mouths, and how the night winds carried grit to them as it filled the hairy nostrils of what was left of the driver. Mason raised his fingers to rub at his gums, as if he were still there, watching the corpse’s nose fill up. The dog slammed his tail and Mason set his arms down, trying to breathe like someone asleep.

The lobster boats were coming in, some with small outboard motors and some on throbbing, big diesels. He had seen them over the last several days as they drove at a buoy, the lobsterman somehow knowing, out of all those hundreds of bright, bobbing markers, which were his. Then, alongside, he cut his engine and while the boat wallowed on the tide he hauled his trap by hand or by machine, withdrew a lobster if he found one, baited with the chum that drew the prowling gulls to circle the boats, dropped the trap overboard, and took off full-bore for the next nearby buoy. Some of the boats broadcast ship-to-shore CB chatter, while most of them played country music on their radios, nasal complaints about death and passion and diminished prospects.

The cooperatives made money by shipping the lobsters downstate to the resort restaurants and into Boston and New York. The lobstermen, after they bought fuel and paid for repairs, made little profit, he imagined. And he suspected that it was all they knew to do. He wondered if they depended on federal food subsidies during the winter if they couldn’t find work repairing vacation houses or salting roads for the highway department. He wondered how many silent, angry children, how many battered wives, that life produced. He wanted Ada Shields, his editor, to tell him about this coast, about saltwater fogs and who ran the lighthouses and how you knew which pound to buy the lobsters from and what the lobstermen’s families ate — frozen Salisbury steak, he’d have bet, and artificial gravy on packaged mashed potatoes, all of it washed down with pop poured from plastic two-liter jugs. He knew himself to be a freelance hack with a need to dodge steady work and the habit of asking questions in order to deflect attention from himself. Ada’s purpose, which he was coming to regret, was to prod him into studying the self he had tried to omit from what, together, they were working on. She had inherited the house from her parents, and it was where she hid out, she said. According to her assistant, Mason ought to be flattered to be invited for a working week. He knew, as he played dead for Ada’s ardent dog, that he wanted their conversations to be local and not about his time with Alpha Platoon because then, he thought, he might not lie under the winking stare of Murphy, unable to sleep because he was selling out, as if by the pound, the Marines live and dead with whom he had patrolled the southeastern deserts of Iraq in order to compile the book he’d once believed it was important to write.

It had begun well enough. The first chapter opened with a character called Mason, who was mostly not him — a vehicle, as he thought, for conveying the strategies of the old men who made this war, and the courage of the young ones taking fire for them — who was on his way, after his time over there, back to the States. This Mason sat in a dark, icy Frankfurt bar, drinking too much and therefore talking too much to Leon Rosenthal, an Israeli businessman who was, of course, not in business. Mason didn’t know whether he was a civilian, but he was certainly in some aspect of intelligence. It could have been as high-powered as vetting for assassinations — he was that secret, and that rock-hard confident — or he might have conducted random harvests of raw data from big-mouthed sources, Mason thought, like himself. Rosenthal was a small, muscular man with gold-rimmed glasses that rode over big, dark, angry eyes under a high forehead. He wore a blue blazer with three horn buttons that he kept fastened over an open-necked shirt. He sat straight on his barstool as if a child at school. Mason had recited some of his adventures although he was embarrassed, even as he spoke, because he believed that the little man knew more than enough about wars on his own. In the book, uncleverly exchanging one brand of dinnerware for another, he called the little man Spode.