Whitney Terrell - The Good Lieutenant

Hands thrust him into the back of Faisal’s sedan. Cigarette butts littered the floor carpet, along with a dried-out slice of tomato, bread crumbs, the golden balls of foil from the upper wrapper of a cigarette pack, the pull tops of Mirinda cans. This must have been where his friend had been living when he wasn’t on the American base. The front door jolted open, hard enough to sway the chassis, and then Faisal himself was thrust into the passenger seat hard enough that his elbows struck the parking brake. Ayad thought he’d been shot: that must have explained why, as he was humped over the glove compartment, he kept his arms curled up tight and pressed against his chest, moving only in a series of tiny upper-body jerks, as if clasping a wound. Only now, as Faisal squirmed around to face his friend, his forearms pressed together against the seat back, as if begging, did Ayad notice that his wrists were bound in clear plastic.

A fat man in a head scarf piled in behind the wheel and they drove, at Faisal’s direction, through the side yard of his house, the sedan in the lead this time and the pickups — one of which had a mounted gun — trailing. Their tires had bungled through his mother’s orchids and rose garden, which occupied a delicately terraced and espaliered space just to the north of the driveway. They clipped a bleached lawn chair that Ayad’s mother had modified, cutting off the legs, so that she could sit in it to do her weeding. They tore through the sandy badminton court, where Ayad had scheduled many an intense match with Faisal, the sagging net looming up in their headlights, then vanishing, as if no more substantial than a cobweb. At the back gate, the fat man cut Faisal’s bonds and, eyes glinting in the dash lights, Faisal reached back to tug on Ayad’s sleeve. Ayad assumed he’d turned to say goodbye. What else was there to say? Both of them had failed. Neither of their strategies had worked. And yet, as they examined each other, closely and intimately, in a way that Faisal had refused to do the previous day, his friend blew a jet of air out between his lips, buffeting his overhang of rakish black hair. Then his tongue poked into one cheek, distending it, and he tilted his head as if to say: Minor setback here. No worries! And Ayad found himself staring at a familiar picture in his hand.

He recognized it immediately as the dry well. Or what he and Faisal always called the dry well, anyway, since nobody knew for sure what it had been.

Clearly Faisal had told the men about it. As they waded out into the grain, the hooded fat man who was tramping along with them, gun strapped across his back, kept flapping the picture of the well in front of Ayad’s face, then gesturing to Faisal, as if asking whether his friend was lying. Ayad ignored him. He could have also ignored the search, played dumb, led them wrong. He was furious with his friend for bringing the takfiri to his property, for violating his neutrality. Furious with him for being stupid enough to try to work with them in the first place. On the other hand, there had been his friend’s expression in the sedan: not carelessness, exactly, but defiance, cunning; his old assurance, the thing that he had taught Ayad, that in the end, together, they would always imagine a way to escape. That was the technology of the spaceship. So he did look. He stopped; he folded up the darkness as if it were a hinged panel that he could, with his mind, like a magician, push away. And there was the daylight of his father’s wheat field in midsummer. And there was Faisal in the straw hat that he’d affected back then, both of them in shorts, knees whitened from dust, walking out to play at the well. They were not supposed to. The well’s depth was unknown; for years a board had been placed over it to keep fieldworkers from falling in, but it was otherwise unmarked, protected only by the maze created by the thigh-high wheat. Still Ayad had always been able to find it. He had not known how, specifically, back then. He’d done it by some navigational device that he didn’t fully understand, lining things up according to the ragged pattern of the field’s distant tree line, the single big palm to the west, wandering along while Faisal did imitations, bugging out his eyes or sucking his cheeks like Rambo and pretending to shoot himself in the foot. The imitations were pantomime-only. Then Ayad would drop to his knees and shift the board away, the crickets sounding around them, the grasshoppers whirring up with the sound of bicycle clackers, and the well’s mouth would be revealed … and now, in the darkness of the wheat field, the lightless sedan following, here they were again. Could Faisal remember the same things? It was impossible to tell. Faisal’s magically pliable features were all blank, shut down, as if he wore a clear plastic shell over his face. When Ayad thought that they’d reached the well, he plucked Faisal’s elbow and his friend turned and gave him one last bug-eyed grimace: I am afraid, but also, I am aware, quite frightening.

The opening was found fifteen yards away. It appeared surprisingly small when Ayad was dragged to look at it, a tiny black crease, hay-strewn, barely large enough to stick a hand in, but a circle of machine gun butts enlarged it. What now? Ayad waited, flinching, for a bullet. Instead, the men gathered at the trunk of the sedan, and then returned with the white glow of headlights worming about their knees. The body drooped between the man who held its feet and the man who’d hooked his forearms through its armpits. A third handed Faisal his flashlight and obscenely tried to support the corpse’s ass. They pivoted, shuffling through the dust. He saw camouflage. A blond American boot sole. And then they squatted and laid the body out, like a limp roll of sod, and tossed an M4 rifle atop the corpse’s chest and freckled face. Ayad grabbed the flashlight from Faisal: a boy, perhaps, really a child, too young to have such a long, heavy body. By then, Faisal had caught him and snatched the light away. With no further ceremony, answering to commands that Ayad could not hear, the three men lifted the body and, holding it upside down, headfirst — that part, when he would be forced to review it later, seemed the most obscene — shoved him down, face first, into the earth. Pounding around the edges of the hole, they forced his shoulders through, his body armor, his belt. One man grabbed his legs around the knees and furiously leaned down, like a plunger, and then all at once the body disappeared entirely.

They all stood for a moment, watching the dust rise from the opening. Then Faisal tucked the flashlight under his arm and scribbled something on a pad, tore off the sheet, and handed it to Ayad as if presenting him with a receipt.

This is my gift , it read. Keep it hidden and your family will be safe.

“We gonna fuck before or after I kick your ass?” Fowler said, her thighs wrapped around Pulowski’s sparrow-thin ribs, her breasts brushing the back of his stubbly head as they finished a round of GoldenEye while spooning in her bed. Fowler had never been a gamer back at Fort Riley, or even before. Maybe a little Madden at parties as an excuse to drink. But here in Iraq, with no parties in sight, it was calming to spend an hour as James Bond, swiveling and swooping her Aston Martin through a pine forest with a decisiveness that had escaped her in reality — particularly after a twelve-hour shift emplacing concrete T-walls in the northern section of their camp.

Or at least it had been calming until Pulowski had started hassling her about the Muthanna bombing, two weeks back. And had informed her, just this morning, that he was going on leave in a couple weeks. “I thought we just covered before,” he said.