Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Mason was telling about Captain Goldsworthy’s outrage when his orders were reversed. In Badra, Major Harvey Fathers had spent a night organizing checkpoints and patrols and Captain Goldsworthy and his Alpha Platoon had run Checkpoint Eight One, Mason in the compartment of the pig, feeling like a child in grown-ups’ clothing under the heavy flak jacket and the oversized, chin-strapped battle helmet. At 0400 they had killed the driver and blown up his truck. The captain had reported the kill, and Major Fathers had instructed them to patrol to the north for two hours at a leisurely pace, then descend at high speed back to the Eight One checkpoint and see if their departure had lulled some bombers, posing as religious pilgrims, into trying to cross over.

At 0530 new signals came in from the major. Division had instructed Battalion to instruct Fox that priorities were reversed. Standing outside their vehicles they listened to Captain Goldsworthy say, “The situation is now officially a clusterfuck. You will not be looking to capture or kill. We will interrogate all incoming personnel. Those that we have no choice except to deem true pilgrims, we will respect their faith and permit them to cross over from Iran”—he said it Eye -ran—“in the hope that the message will go out that U.S. guys are good guys. We will permit the pilgrims to find whatever it is they are looking for. Salvation, I believe. Salvation is all right, and they are welcome to try and find it. You will not fire unless you are fired upon or deem yourselves in peril. In which case, you will kill with efficiency. You will try to check with me on any peril factor. But you will stay smart and therefore live Marines. And he fucking well had better not be putting any salty language in my mouth when he writes his tale of Alpha’s derring-do.”

At that point, watched by the platoon, Mason stowed his notebook away. The captain consulted his own notebook and then he pulled down on the hem of his flak jacket as Mason had seen him do a couple of dozen times a day. He made himself remember the gesture to record when he could.

“All right,” the captain said. “We will carry out the mission. No questions? No answers? Let’s get back to the goat rodeo.”

Rosenthal, now named Spode, said, “My friend, you enjoy the colorful captain, and he is doubtless a brave man and a bold leader. Goat rodeo: colorful American vernacular. With the occasional fucking this or that. Of course: American. But what you should be remembering is the real importance of that particular moment. In two or three years from now, and probably less, you will think of the goats and the fucking and our chance encounter, yours and mine.” He poured more Pilsner. “You will know, because I am lecturing you about it, that the captain’s address marks the moment when the cancer cells began to grow. And not only inside of the goats. This is the gospel according to Rosenthal, commercial traveler, you ran into him in the Getrunken Pferdchen saloon in Frankfurt in the benign, well-ordered German republic. You’ll remember, yes? That they brought the money in, those so-called pilgrims your patrols suddenly permitted to cross. They purchased the information and assistance and of course the weapons that will punch the bloody holes in your soldiers, who will be pinned in place in Iraq, dead Hussein or live Hussein, for a decade. This is minimum, I’m talking about. Boys will grow up expecting that part of their young manhood must be wasted in Iraq. They will become sullen and probably brutal, like our children serving in Palestine in what is finally an occupation, not a war. Those pilgrims from Iran who your President forgot to fight, they assembled the resistance cells, they organized the terrorists. And Iran”—he made a show of pulling back his sleeve to check his watch—“Iran as of this moment has won your little off-the-cuff war.”

Thinking of the bottles of Czech beer they drank, and of all the water that Alpha Platoon consumed under orders to hydrate themselves, Mason knew that he would have to dare the dog and get to the bathroom.

“Murphy,” he said, “I give up.”

The dog’s tail banged on the bedroom floor as if a dedicated child were slamming a hunk of hawser rope down, again and again.

The house remained silent. Murphy banged another volley, and Ada, from her upstairs bedroom, called, “Oh, Murphy, you goofy boy.” The squat Labrador froze and then, with his nails scrabbling on the slippery floor, he ran out of the bedroom, past the bathroom down the hall, and then up the steps as Mason walked into the shower. He turned his face to receive the warm water in his open mouth. After the early days with Alpha of Fox, when matériel convoys bypassed them in order to get to Baghdad and north of it and there wasn’t enough water for showers, when the heat swung between 125 and 135 Fahrenheit, he had vowed never to be ungrateful for water, whether it came in the form of ocean, thunderstorm, or droplets from a leaky pipe. He still felt the grit that had caked the inside of his lips and that sat on his teeth no matter how often he drank to rinse it off.

He had forced himself to make entries in his journal as Alpha fought, patrolled, and bounced between contradictory directives from Battalion. He’d written paragraphs to later be stitched onto what narratives he could generate on his word processor. And he had managed to file several stories, one dictated over a military phone in Badra to an intern at the magazine who patted his every word into a word processor, making him feel as important as one of the real war correspondents. This was the material that he and Ada Shields were turning into a book, she assured him. “It’s all here,” she said several times a day. “You wrote it. This is just one of those wine racks or bookcases or children’s toys you order from a catalogue. ‘Some Assembly Required’? I’m the Some-Assembly person. Though I do not know boo about the children’s toys part of it.”

She was taller than he, very slender, very pale, a little stoop-shouldered, and long of arm and leg. She wore scuffed brown penny loafers over bare feet and usually denim shorts and a work shirt. Twenty times a day, for three days, she had opened the barrette that held her thick, dark hair behind her neck and gathered handfuls to fasten again. The intimacy — the bareness of the back of her bent neck, the opportunity to stare at her unseen because she closed her eyes to fix her hair — had compelled him and embarrassed him. And he had wakened this morning to think not only of the heat, the sand, the eye of the torn, burnt truck driver, and the lunatic eyes of the dog, but also of the tall, slouching editor who read herself to sleep at night by going over what he had said to himself in the intimacies of fright, discomfort, and even despair during six weeks of Operation Enduring Freedom.

They sat now in her breakfast room in the old house that smelled of mildew and salt and resin. A few lobstermen worked their traps farther out, but the gulls had given up on them, stalking instead the broad, flat granite sheets between the back of the house and the sea, while crows made the noises of argument in the evergreens around them. Mason had heard a half of the phone call while he was drying himself after his shower. He hadn’t been able to discern her words, but he had listened to her tones, which began sulkily enough and quickly declined into bitter single syllables.

While they chewed English muffins in silence, Ada stood to bring more coffee to the table and, pouring, announced, “I believe that I am starting to smoke again. Would you like to file any objections?”

“It sounds like you’d slug me if I did.”

“I might.”

“No, then, I think. No objections.”