Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

Saif raised a bushy eyebrow. “Shaba.”

He set down his saucer and pushed himself up once more, his knees cracking. He went to the trunk in the corner, looking over his shoulder as he unlocked it, as if to ensure that I wasn’t memorizing the combination.

Everyone’s so goddamn paranoid around here, I thought.

He sifted through his trunk, stacking folders of passports and driver’s licenses in the corner. Confiscated from detainees, he said. He pulled out an envelope of photographs, flipping through them before raising one into the air.

He handed the photo over. An American soldier’s plate carrier, a thinner, lighter version of our body armor, was covered in blood and dirt and set against a house wall. Much of the photo was a void of black, and the time stamp read, APRIL 5, 2006, 4:25 A.M. The nametape was missing, but the rank was not: the barbed chevrons of a staff sergeant pierced through the dark.

“My police mentor gave me that, when the army assigned me back here,” Saif said. “Said I needed to remember what Ashuriyah really was.”

“The hell?” I asked, shaking the photograph as if an answer would fall out of it.

“Let me remember.” He sighed, returning the piles of evidence to his trunk. “The older I get, the more my mind turns into that of a Marsh Arab.”

Yes, of course he’d heard the legend of Shaba. Shaba was the man who could travel by shadows at night to kill terrorists but handed out money in the day to the townspeople. His mentor had been on duty the night Shaba disappeared and had taken the photograph I now held. After a long firefight near the stone arch, they’d rushed to the scene, finding only the bloody plate carrier and shell casings. Hundreds and hundreds of shell casings, Saif said, his mentor had always stressed that. They looked for Shaba for many months but never found him.

He’d first learned of Shaba at the sheik’s funeral. The townspeople couldn’t shut up about him. No one knew what had happened, not exactly, but there were theories.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Just crazy gossip,” Saif said. “Some said Jaish al-Mahdi killed him because he’d joined al-Qaeda. Others said the opposite. He was out there by himself that night, that’s certain. No one knew why, not even the Americans. So strange.”

As for the sheik, he’d had many relatives, but his wife had been dead for years, and there was only one living child, a daughter. And no one had seen her for some time. Not until the funeral.

A jewel, Saif said. Even from afar, even covered in her mourning burqa. She’d caused a minor scandal by refusing to wear a face cover, opting instead for a translucent veil. But she didn’t seem bothered by the reactions it provoked. She walked, Saif said, like royalty, snubbing everyone she passed on the street, looking down on everyone else even when they were on level ground. She’d come to Ashuriyah with her husband and two little boys. The townspeople said the youngest looked so much like his father, but the eldest had a different appearance, Iraqi coloring with no Iraqi features.

Some of the townspeople said an American soldier had raped the shiek’s daughter during the sectarian wars. Others said the dead sheik had promised her to an Anbar doctor. Still others said she’d been taken as a wife by al-Qaeda, and when her husband was killed by the Americans, she’d gone to prison and given birth there.

But most people, Saif said, simply didn’t want to talk about it. They hushed the others and told them to respect the memory of the sheik. It was funny, he said, even though he’d returned to Ashuriyah many months before, he hadn’t thought about these names and people for years.

“They are the past,” Saif said. “It is the future I’m interested in.”

“The daughter?” I asked, trying to contain my interest behind a swig of chai. “She alive?”

He shrugged. “Ask the cleaning woman. She used to be one of Sheik Ahmed’s servants.”

My mind reeled. Had Alia meant to mislead me? Had I asked the wrong questions? Had she been conspiring with Chambers this entire time? She’d said that Shaba had “died like anyone else in Iraq. By the gun.” What exactly had that meant? It seemed like the more I learned, the less I understood.

“What troubles you, Loo-tenant Porter?” Saif asked.

There was no more chai in my glass to drink, so I sucked on what remained of the sugar cube. I wanted to tell him everything, how everything was troubling me, the past, the present, and the future. But I kept down my half-drawn story of love, war, and consequence. I looked back at Saif. He’d resumed sitting on his knees. He was a thick, sweaty, balding man with brown skin from here. I was a thin, sweaty baby face with white skin from there. He was still a them. I was still an us. No amount of chai could change that.

“Nothing,” I said. “Think I could hang on to this for a while?”

His eyes followed the photograph in my hand. He seemed to be in deliberation with himself, though I couldn’t tell why.

“A gift,” he said with a tight smile. “We are partners now.”

I nodded and handed him my glass and saucer. After a handshake and arm clasp, I left the room, stealing a glimpse of him locking his trunk behind me. Later I pulled out my own trunk and stuck the photograph into the Lawrence of Arabia book with the sworn statements. It seemed the thing to do with a bloody vest.

Dawn found me on the back patio listening to the call of the muezzin, waiting for Alia.

Rise, rise and offer the Fajr prayer to Allah , the muezzin called. I pulled out a cigarette and lit up, holding smoke in my chest as long as I could, exhaling slowly.

I hadn’t slept. Because of Saif. Or Alia. Or Marissa, who’d finally written back with three paragraphs about a life I no longer understood. Or because Alphabet was less clear in my memory with every new day. Or because of Grant. Or Dead Tooth. Or Chambers, who, other than detesting me and possibly being a bloodthirsty murderer of innocents, had kept the platoon together during the previous month like a goddamn professional. Or because I’d returned from my chat with Saif to find Ibrahim waiting to tell me that the Muslim jokes had started in our platoon, and could I make the soldiers stop? Or because of Rios’ bloody vest. Or because I still needed to call my mom, who wanted to hear my voice so much she was pretending to be fine. Or because of the clerics, both the one who’d killed Alphabet and the one whose spirit watched over Ashuriyah from the stone arch.

A burning oil refinery far in the west licked the horizon, its orange flame hovering like a torch. Slightly nearer, a sea-green minaret lacquered in grime shot up out of Sumerian dust. It was mounted with speakers that carried the call to prayer throughout the Shi’a slums. There were rumors that during the sectarian wars it carried calls to battle instead. Calls to battle the heretic Sunnis. Calls to battle the foreign infidels. Calls to kill and calls to die and calls to martyr.

When Will and I were kids, we’d hated going to church. We’d preferred talking to God on our own terms. And as children of a half-Catholic, half-Presbyterian divorce, we were able to. Catholicism provided pomp and ceremony, which had its place, but the Presbyterians promised access, and who didn’t have something to yell into the ear of God?

Will always had plenty to say. He didn’t think I could hear him at night, when he cried and prayed underneath his pillow, but I could. The wall between our rooms wasn’t that thick. He’d burned with righteousness his entire life, something that didn’t go over too well in high school, not with teachers, coaches, or girls. He’d had it tougher than I did growing up, something I never gave him credit for, because acknowledging it would only have made it worse. I’d always managed to fit in, even when I wanted to be different.