Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

“Oh.” I forced another cough. “My bad. Go ahead.”

“I’d seen him from a window, coming to meet my father. He was already famous by then. And when the American trucks went through town, calling out a number for the people to call and tell them where al-Qaeda was, I thought, ‘I could call and speak to an American.’ That was exciting to me then. So I called the number and said I’d only speak to him.”

“I thought you two met in your father’s sitting room.”

She laughed curtly. “No Iraqi would allow that. Especially not my father. We talked on cell phones. First about information. Later about other things. Then he started coming to my music lessons, paying the instructor for his silence.”

Goddamn Alia, I thought, and her bullshit story. She’d made me look stupid.

“And Rios, I mean Elijah, he taught you English?”

She nodded. “I’d studied some before. But it’s because of him that I’m good at it. He spoke Arabic, though his dialect was bad. So we learned from each other.”

The air in the room felt humid, and I felt clumsy and jealous all at once. I pointed outside, changing the topic.

“Your boy, how was he…” I pointed to my own earlobe and drew an imaginary line down my neck. “Hurt.”

She bit into a cracker and shrugged. “Sky bomb,” she said. “We were lucky.”

I stared at a carpet stain between my feet. The soldiers called her eldest Scowls, which only made him scowl more. Now I knew why. Ahmed also had sharper features and paler skin than his clever-faced younger brother, something I thought about a lot. Too much, probably.

I’d spent a lot of time fantasizing about how Rana and Shaba had fallen in love, using Alia’s version of events as a template. I knew every scene, every line of that desert ballad by heart. Sometimes I was there, observing silently in a corner. Other times I became a participant, toasting to their eternal love with the dead sheik. Sometimes I even replaced Rios, and it was Jack Porter who held hands with a moony young woman in her father’s courtyard. Still other times, I didn’t replace Rios so much as I became him, speaking fluent Arabic and darkly brooding over the future of my new country. But it hadn’t happened that way. None of it had. It’d happened on the phone.

“What’s your dream?” Rana asked suddenly, bringing me back to her hut.

“Huh.” It wasn’t that I’d never chewed over the question. It was that where I came from, a person wasn’t supposed to have just one answer. “Seek greatness, I guess.” Then I smirked, hoping that got me out of the question.

“What does that mean?” Her response wasn’t implicating, just confused. “I meant what do you want? From life?”

“Depends on the day, really.” I didn’t want to talk about myself anymore, mostly because her question had caught me off guard. “What about you?”

“It’s better if I show you,” she said. She moved to the bedroom, where the family shared a large cotton mattress. She returned a minute later, a faint reverence in her steps. She held something to her chest and pressed it into my hands. The smell of swamp blossoms filled my nostrils, and goose bumps shot up my arms, beneath my sleeves.

It was a postcard. An old one, with worn edges and deep creases. A drawing of a city on the beach covered the front, a coral-blue sky and palm trees nestled up against a long row of Gothic buildings. Flipping it, I saw that the back was covered in faded Arabic script.

“Naples?” I asked, looking back up. I’d no idea where the postcard was from. “Havana?”

“Beirut,” she said, the last syllable a feather off her tongue. It was only then, listening to her talk about a trip her parents had taken to Lebanon years before, that I realized she was younger than I was. Despite everything she’d been through, despite everything she’d seen, she was still younger.

In America, I thought, she’d be in college.

A furious knocking filled the stillness. I looked at Rana in a panic. An army officer alone with an Arab woman, let alone a married one living in seclusion, couldn’t be explained away.

I hadn’t even done anything wrong.

“It’s for you,” she said.

The walls of my throat closed up as I rose and took three steps to the front door. It wasn’t anyone important, though. Just Batule, in all his oafish, mouth-breathing charm.

“Sir!” he said. “It’s Captain Vrettos. Just radioed and said we got to roll to the big mosque!” Loose words dribbled from him like saliva. “Dead Tooth, at the top. Firefight with the IAs. And we need to get over there. Like, now.”

He ran back to the vehicles before I could respond. I grabbed my helmet and rifle and went to follow.

A soft, determined hand stopped me as I stepped into gray mist. I turned around.

“You remind me of him,” she said, squeezing my palm. “Be careful.”

Rifle in one hand, helmet in the other, I ran on air to the waiting Stryker.

The minaret seemed so far away. A little cream-colored dome crested the spiraling stone tower, a dark-age Ottoman relic. The afternoon had turned dim and chilly. I rubbed my arms. An oval of American soldiers and Iraqi jundi s ringed the base of the tower, watching the black flag of al-Qaeda flap rowdily from the small walkway near the top.

Dead Tooth was somewhere up there. The squad of jundi s that’d chased him here said three other insurgents were with him, as well as the mosque’s mullah and a long black tube that maybe was a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Or maybe not. It was hard to tell.

Baritone Arabic blared from a megaphone on the other side of the oval. It was Saif, demanding the insurgents let the mullah go. He’d arrived before us, and shortly after Chambers and his half of the platoon. Captain Vrettos and a group of headquarters soldiers arrived last, bringing the sum of Coalition forces attempting to wait out a petulant, cornered teenager to fifty-five.

I leaned against the front of our Stryker and sucked down warm water from my CamelBak, watching the sun fall. The adrenaline jolt I’d gotten from Rana’s words — and hand squeeze — had waned. I wondered if I could find a warm can of Rip It in the back of the vehicle. During the onslaught of puberty, I’d stay in my room for hours after a fight with my parents or Will. This was sort of the same thing, albeit with a kidnapped holy man and the potential for geopolitical disaster.

“Sir!” Dominguez shouted from the gunner’s turret. “Commander wants you at his vehicle. Leaders’ powwow.”

I flashed him a thumbs-up and then walked counterclockwise around the ring of armored vehicles, helmet cocked back, thumbs tucked under the chest plate, and rifle dangling from its sling, thinking about Rana and her kids. They seemed so alone. And sad.

“Hey, gaucho, pick up the goddamn pace. Waiting on you.”

“Sorry, sir.” Captain Vrettos sat on the edge of a lowered Stryker ramp. His eyes were red and cheeks wan. “Didn’t realize.”

The commander sighed and shook his head, voice slurring past the tobacco nestled deep in his cheeks. He resembled a pufferfish whenever he chewed, the effect heightened because of his build, a Pez dispenser head on a pull-string body. I kept my head low and stood between Chambers and Saif.

“Ideas?” Captain Vrettos began. “If we don’t solve this in the next thirty minutes, the division commander’s coming from Camp Independence to personally fire us all.”

“Can’t blow up a mosque,” First Sergeant said.

“Need to blow up the terrorists,” Chambers followed.

“Blow up?” Saif asked, a lot of shock and a little awe in his question. “How?”

“I’ve done this before,” Chambers said. “In oh-four, Sadr pulled the same shit in Najaf. He stayed in a shrine for three fucking weeks, surrounded, and still got away. Learned that lesson. We need to get them now, before the generals show. Then it’ll be too late.”