Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

“Think I just want to stay here, sir,” I said. “But thank you.”

He laughed and explained that he’d meant after we redeployed. I took down his contact info.

Other than a long afternoon spent patching the security hole in the outpost Haitham had found before the firefight, the war went back to normal. The headaches lingered, something Doc Cork attributed to too many Rip Its and too little sleep. Each evening around dusk, our company’s leadership gathered, the only time I saw Captain Vrettos anymore. And every morning around dawn, I met my platoon’s night patrol as they filed into the outpost, scorpions on their shoulders, fatigue on their faces.

“Everything good?” I always asked Chambers.

Everything always was.

We settled into a strange sort of routine, the kind that demanded our time yet nothing of our attention. I began thinking that maybe we could really ride out the rest of the deployment and make it home all right. A few days later, I began believing it.

Then Snoop said the cleaning woman needed to speak with us.

Lying in bed, hands wrapped behind my head, I sighed and paused the DVD player on my lap. Among other things, my patience for counterinsurgency and its endless meetings had wilted in the summer heat.

“Fuck that noise,” I said. It was late morning and we were alone in my room. “I don’t care about Shaba anymore. Or sheiks, or their daughters. It’s all bullshit, a myth for stupid people.”

When I tried to go back to my show, Snoop shook the bed frame. “Yo!” he said. “She say she has information on Haitham.”

Higher’s need to capture Haitham had become a parody of itself. It’s all they asked about, all they cared about. Captain Vrettos did his best to shield us from the Big Man’s furies, though he’d taken to calling their meetings “Death by Colonel.”

“Haitham,” I said, pressing pause again.

“Haitham,” Snoop repeated. He still didn’t believe the town drunk was capable of being a terrorist mastermind. I put on my uniform top and boots, and we walked downstairs into a council office. Alia waited in the dark, already seated, the room smelling of honeysuckle and kerosene.

I flipped the light switch and we took a seat across from her in white plastic chairs. She had her hands crossed in her lap and her eyes on the ground.

“Sing me a song,” I said. “And make it good.”

Alia looked up at Snoop, confused.

“Damn it,” I said, this time in English. None of the locals could ever wade through my Arabic, despite my being able to understand them.

“You found Shaba?” she asked. She’d varied her usual outfit with a gray head scarf and eye shadow the color of dirty ice. I nodded, proud of what we’d accomplished, no longer bothered by how it’d come about. She asked where his bones were.

“Texas,” Snoop said. “With his family.”

She bowed her head and mumbled something I didn’t understand.

“Iraqi curse,” Snoop said. “She’s upset the body went to America.”

I asked why. She raised her head and explained she’d hoped he’d be buried in Ashuriyah so she could pay her respects. I considered asking Snoop why she thought that would’ve happened, but remembered we’d ended our last meeting suspecting her of understanding English.

“Haitham,” I said, trying not to sound irritated. I reached into a cargo pocket, pulled out a twenty-dollar bill, and set it on the table. “Where is he?”

She pulled the money to her. “He walks around the far southeast of town,” she said. “Where the tribal leaders used to live, before the Collapse. I saw him there two days ago, standing at the gates of Sheik Ahmed’s abandoned estate.”

“Hmm.” I pictured the map imagery of southeast Ashuriyah, then its wide, dusty streets, its sandstone mansions with balconies. It wouldn’t have been where I’d hide out.

“Bullshit,” Snoop said. I turned toward him. He was rubbing the top of his head with both hands. “Think about this, LT. Would a terror men leader walk around the middle of the day? He’s not the Cleric. Someone wants us to think he is.”

I turned back toward Alia, her face dropping again to the floor. She’s being forthright, I thought. Nothing like the last meeting. Old questions forged within.

“ Sig-ue mi ej-emp-lo ,” I said to Snoop slowly, telling him to follow my lead. I recalled Dominguez teaching our terp conversational Spanish at some point, though my own was worse than my Arabic. “ Comprende?”

“ Sí ,” he whispered.

“Tell her we know Haitham is the Cleric,” I said. “And that we appreciate this information.”

Snoop translated.

“But my friend here, Snoop. He’s more skeptical. He thinks it’s stupid to believe someone who’s lied to us. He thinks you must be telling more lies.”

“I’m no liar!” Alia waited for Snoop’s translation, but barely. “Haitham’s a bad man. You must find him.”

“Alia.” I shook my head. “Maybe that’s true, maybe not. But why should I believe someone who forgot to mention she’d worked for Sheik Ahmed?”

Her lips pursed tight.

“A lie, which is half a truth, is ever the blackest of lies.” Tennyson might’ve been too much, but I didn’t care. “You worked for Ahmed, and guess what? So did Haitham! And now you’re here, telling us he’s hanging around the dead man’s house. What a coincidence.”

“Haitham never lied to us,” Snoop added, first in English, then in Arabic.

She rolled in her chair like an angry ball. Long, hot seconds passed. “You must get him,” she finally said. I could barely hear her. “He’s there. I swear by the shrine.”

I reached into my cargo pocket and threw down five ten-dollar bills. “All yours. But the truth. All of it. If not, you’ll never work in this outpost again.”

She pushed the money away and tipped her head, eyeing me and Snoop with open disdain. “The people are wrong,” she said, her Arabic like darts. “You’re nothing like Shaba.”

“I know,” I said, biting my bottom lip. “I’m not dead.”

“Though Allah will never forgive me,” she said, “I’m no traitor like Haitham.”

Behind fierce chestnut eyes, her long, elegant fingers gripping the table, this was the story she told us:

“It was the winter of the Baghdad snow. Sheik Ahmed invited the Horse soldiers to visit, like he always did with new Americans. It was always the same talk about power, about electricity, about peace. Just talk.

“The Horse soldiers came at dusk. There were three of them, and a translator. A captain, a lieutenant, and a sergeant.

“Yes, the first two were named Tisdale and Grant. They were like every other American officer, white with pink faces. But the sergeant was different. Even before he became Shaba, we knew that.

“He was small. And brown. And quiet.

“I watched the meeting from the hallway, behind a curtain. The sheik’s daughter was with me. Yes, Rana.

“The first hour, the meeting was normal. Lots of promises, lots of jokes about women. Then Shaba looked at the sheik and asked about the rumors of his al-Qaeda son, in Arabic. Everyone became quiet. None of us had ever met an American who spoke our language so well.

“The sheik asked how he knew about Karim.

“ ‘By listening,’ Shaba said, pointing to Ashuriyah. ‘They say the father wants peace. Then they say the son wants war.’

“The sheik said the rumors were true. We hadn’t seen Karim for months, though, not since his father ordered him to leave his house for dishonoring the tribe.

“What was Karim like? Like his father. Prideful. He’d grown up believing he would be an important man. Before the Invasion, he studied engineering in Baghdad, which brought honor to the tribe. But after their mother died of chest cancer, Karim became angry with everyone, and with the world.