David Shafer: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Though there were other things that kept her up at night also. The subtropical heat, the mouse-size cockroaches, the regretful thoughts about Rich. And how much regret are you allowed when you’re the one who did the dumping? And the loneliness. Sometimes — often — her day was a screen, a phone, a couple of merchants, and three meals by herself. That wore thin.

A man was coming toward her. One of Zeya’s underlings, but not the one who had deposited her in the infernal waiting room. She recognized this guy from an earlier fruitless wait; he’d brought her a Coke once. She did not stand up but tried to look unbothered as he approached.

“Follow me, please,” he said. It was five degrees cooler outside the little room, and that relief slipped down her collar and into the humid biome beneath her shirt. Leila could hardly wait. By the end of the day, she would have the crates de-palletized, inventoried, and stacked in the storeroom she’d rented beneath her office. She was having an effect; she was causing things to happen. Huzzah!

She tried to tamp down her excitement. Not until you see it. Not until you touch it. And was there something troubling in the way this lackey was walking through the little corridors of the big building? Some slump in his shoulders?

Shit. He didn’t want to get where they were going. He was actually slowing down.

And then her worry bloomed into certainty. Somehow she knew. That huzzah had been premature. Of course the colonel had screwed her again; of course her shipment had not arrived or would not be released. The hot wait was just a two-hour insult, and she was an idiot for sitting through it. What the fuck? She was trying to help this place, and she had a way to be of help.

They entered a room and passed a klatch of officers taking tea at a plastic table, and Leila could feel their eyes on her. At every door, there was a boy with a rifle, sweating under a helmet. The menace was present in everything here; it was like walking by a man holding a stick, the man silent, the stick raised above his head.

They arrived at the underling’s desk, and he indicated a chair where Leila should sit. She didn’t sit. “My boxes aren’t here, are they?” she asked the lackey in Burmese. She didn’t know the word for “shipment.”

He turned around, shook his head minutely, failed to meet her clamped gaze. Yeah, he hated this. “You will sign?” he said in English, pushing toward Leila a sheaf of papers. She’d seen those before. She’d signed them already.

She picked up the papers on the desk. Oh, fuck it. If they weren’t going to release her shipment this time, she was going to make trouble.

Leila leaned in to the man’s desk. She was too small to loom over anything, but she could lean in. In English, and too loudly, and in her best imitation of importance, she said, “I am an officer of an agency recognized by the UN”—a meaningless statement, but it had officer and agency and UN in it. “You cannot prevent me from taking custody of my shipment.” She actually stamped her foot.

The underling blanched and receded. At the far end of the room, the klatch quit stirring its tea.

Then Leila said very quietly, in Burmese, “I know this is not your fault. I will leave you. But tell me where Zeya is now. He is the one I need to speak to.”

Leila worked alone; she had to be both good cop and bad cop.

The man squinted at her. She often got that squint when she used Burmese; her accent was probably pretty bad. But then his eyes widened and softened, and she thought that he was going to take this deal.

In a quick and quiet utterance, in a mix of two languages, he said to Leila, “It is day three. He is with the bird people on day three.”

The Burmese numbered their days of the week. He meant Tuesday. But what the fuck were bird people?

Sticking to Burmese, Leila said, “How do I get my boxes? Why does Zeya make it so hard for me?”

And the underling, in English, and looking sorry to report it, said, “Lady, they do not want you here. Maybe, if you pay the taxes, and you do not bring in too much, you will get your boxes. But I think they do not want you here no way.”

Leila refused to return to the city with the Ministry Department driver who had brought her to the airport. She thought if she could make her way to the passenger terminal, she could find a taxi. That terminal was half a mile away; she’d noted the distance when they drove in. So she stomped out of the hangar and walked back the way she’d been driven. It was not a road for walkers; it was a dusty hummock with ditches on both sides, the ditches trickling with sewage and trash. Her shoes were all wrong now; they made her gait scuffly and her progress dusty. Still, she was free of all those clownish apparatchiks.

Well, not free, exactly; a teenage soldier in baggy pants and an M1 rifle followed fifty paces behind her. But sulkily; more kid brother than armed goon.

The paper-bag-armor blouse was brutal. She thought of unbuttoning, but then reconsidered. She was alone except for the boy soldier at her back. She’d gone this long without getting raped, and it was her daily, specific intention to keep it that way.

She looked back to check on the boy soldier, and her eye caught something behind him: a small plane was landing. But it was a snazzy white jet, Leila noticed, not a Burmese military aircraft or one of Air Mandalay’s goofy French turboprops. The jet came to rest in the middle of the tarmac. Then three big SUVs emerged from the hangar in which Leila had just wasted two hours; they zipped toward the jet in tight formation, like cockroaches racing across a kitchen floor. Two men — soldiers — got out of each vehicle, and each pair received a metal crate that was lowered by winch from the rear door of the jet. The crates went into the SUVs, two men lifting each crate. A set of stairs sprouted from the front of the aircraft, and three passengers — male, was about all Leila could determine — briskly descended and got in the back of the lead SUV. Then all the vehicles sped off, and before they’d even disappeared around the corner of a distant building, the little jet had turned its nose and was taxiing to a takeoff. The whole operation took less than three minutes — the most efficient maneuver Leila had ever seen in this country. Those crates were probably full of Johnnie Walker and porn on VHS, headed to a general top-heavy with medals. Meanwhile, her medical supplies were rotting in lockup. Leila was pierced by that mix of anger and sorrow that can make a person give up on a thing. What outright bullshit, she thought.

At the passenger terminal, Leila made directly for the taxi queue. But coming from the wrong direction, she snuck up on the taximen, who were lounging in the shade of the tall, mimosa-looking trees; they roused themselves to semi-alertness for her. How did they keep their shirts so white? she wondered. The men here wore brilliant shirts and long, faded sarongs — lungis, they were called in Burma, big-knotted in the front so that each man seemed to be wearing a sort of codpiece. She briefly hoped that Aung-Hla would be waiting with the other airport men. But, no, Leila didn’t know any of these guys.

It was from a similar shade-lounging posse that Leila had chosen Aung-Hla, months ago, when she’d started traveling out of Mandalay on Helping Hand business. For the first of their many trips together, he had kept some distance from her. He answered her questions briefly and mostly declined when she asked would he like a Coke or a sandwich when they stopped for food, preferring to spend his time checking the fluids under the hood of his white Toyota. Or he would wipe down the worn-soft vinyl upholstery and whisk-broom the carpets. She had never ridden in a car so well cared for. Aung-Hla’s car was similar to the one that Leila’s mom and dad had driven when she was a girl. But theirs had been beige and ragged and sticky with melted things. Was it a Tercel? In the back of Aung-Hla’s taxi, she was put in mind of her girlhood ride, the slope of the shoulders of the bucket seats ahead of her, the nearness of the central hump, the frequency of the vinyl piping, and that smell of — what? Tracked-in sand? Low-voltage electrical current? Thin carpet on hot metal?