Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

“Mine,” Fat Mukhtar said, spreading his arms wide to encompass everything from the canal to the villas behind us. “Mine.”

We approached a group of Sahwa and jundi s gathered near a woodshed the mukhtar used as an arms room. Across the gravel road, four Strykers sat like sleepy ogres, the tops of headquarters soldiers poking out from the hatches. I considered forcing some of them to interact with their Iraqi counterparts, but decided not to. How had Shaba put it in his love letter to Rana? “They are here to survive and endure, not to change.”

I exchanged shaku maku s and knuckles with the Iraqis on duty. One of the khaki browns shied away, turning his back. It didn’t take me long to figure out why: Azhar’s brother wanted nothing to do with an accord. He kept his thin shoulders straight and cocked and tossed the shiny rifle in his hands from palm to palm.

“Salaam,” I said to him. There was no reply. He remained facing away, northward. I looked at Fat Mukhtar and arched an eyebrow. He shrugged.

“Mine,” Fat Mukhtar said, referring to the Sahwa guards. Then he patted the laser sights attached to the jundi s’ rifles. It’d taken some wrangling, but the supply guys at Camp Independence had come through. I’d honored the deal with Saif, though he would never know it.

“Mine,” he said again, pointing to my chest.

“Yours,” I corrected.

He shook his head and grabbed a laser sight with one meaty hand and my shoulder with the other. “Mine,” he said.

I closed my eyes and sighed.

As I opened my eyes, ready to convince Fat Mukhtar to go back to the meeting, I saw a familiar shape peek from behind the corner of the squatty woodshed. I pushed past the mukhtar ’s arm and stepped over a strand of razor wire. Around the corner huddled a sullen teenager, more stick figure than man.

“The fuck?” The Barbie Kid lifted his good eye to me, his unibrow a dark question mark of its own. He still wore pink sweatpants, but his shirt was an oversized khaki top, like the Sahwa wore. New sneakers covered his feet, white socks rising up his calves like garden snakes. He remained huddled, even when Fat Mukhtar waddled up and clapped at him.

“Sahwa,” Fat Mukhtar said. “Jadid.”

Through broken Arabic and broken-er English, Fat Mukhtar conveyed that he’d hired the youth after the death of Haitham. They’d been family, he reminded me. It was the right thing to do.

I hadn’t seen the Barbie Kid since we’d hit the small roadside bomb west of Ashuriyah. I’d wondered many times if he’d been a lookout for that attack. Now I knew whom he’d have called — not that it could be proven. I asked where his weapon was.

“Hah!” A dam of laughter broke in Fat Mukhtar’s throat. He acted out shots hitting all around a target and then said, “ No bueno!” since the last thing we needed was a third language. Under the dim of the shed, the Barbie Kid watched on in fury.

Fat Mukhtar clapped again, barking instructions. This time the Barbie Kid stood, walked into the shed, and picked up a broom and dustpan from the ground. The mukhtar nodded toward his house and I followed, certain I’d just found another piece to the puzzle that was Iraq, but bemused as to where to place it.

The mukhtar moved quickly for a man his size, his steps sturdy and pronounced. I matched his strides, figuring him ready to return to the meeting. But we walked past the rusty door to the front room, instead heading into a courtyard that bisected his four eggshell villas. More artificial grass greened the lawn, a small red gazebo marking the center. Three women sat in the gazebo, their colorful abaya s a rainbow against the dull sky. They were laughing and folding laundry, watching a group of children jump on a trampoline in the yard. The toucan Sinbad croaked nearby, its heavy keel bill scrounging the bottom of its cage for seeds. I found no sign of the mukhtar ’s imaginary Syrian bear. The thin wife, dressed in purple, noticed us first, hushing her companions and pointing to their husband and me. They all donned face veils and bowed their heads. Meanwhile, the children had lost all interest in their jumping and ran to us.

There were six of them, the eldest a girl of about ten, the youngest a little mukhtar clone I guessed to be Karim’s age, my mind drifting westward once more.

“Mine,” I said, slapping Fat Mukhtar on the shoulder, ruffling the closest boy’s hair. I put my hands out and let them play with the hard plastic that lined the knuckles of my gloves, though the eldest rolled her eyes at this.

Fat Mukhtar beamed proud and stroked his goatee. “Mine,” he said. He started quizzing his children on their studies; I picked out words like “math” and “spelling” from the conversation, but the rest blurred by. Then he clapped his hands, the children scattered, and he waved me on. I pointed back to the front house, but he shook his head. The wives remained motionless and silent in the gazebo, one of them still midfold with her husband’s tracksuit. As we passed, Sinbad hopped across the birdcage and stuck out its bill. The mukhtar stroked it, but when I tried to do the same, it snapped at my finger and flapped its wings. I cursed and said I was glad its wings were clipped. Fat Mukhtar just laughed.

We continued to one of the rear villas. He opened a large metal door and held it open, gesturing for me to walk in first. The inside of the room was drab and dank. I felt Fat Mukhtar’s grin more than I saw it, the left side of his mouth curving higher than his left. Images of beheaded soldiers and journalists came over me like a hood, bodies without heads, heads without bodies.

I couldn’t even remember the list of things that American soldiers were supposed to recite under torture. Name. Rank. Social Security number? Why the hell would al-Qaeda care about my Social Security number? I walked into the room.

I held my breath and remained in the near corner while Fat Mukhtar followed, my ears hunting the shadows. He closed the door, a slice of gray light under the frame the only illumination in the room. He shuffled along a wall searching for something, bent over at the waist. I heard the pop of a prong entering a socket. Arcade neon blinked to life, revealing a blocky game meant for a mall.

“Big Buck Hunter?” I tried to embrace the moment as I took in the toy shotguns and virtual deer running across the arcade screen, but couldn’t. “Why do you have this?”

Fat Mukhtar answered with another “Mine.” I was familiar with the game from drunken bar nights in college, but how a machine had ended up in rural Iraq seemed too absurd even to try to comprehend. Fat Mukhtar grabbed the green shotgun and tapped its barrel against the screen.

“Ali babas,” he said, calling attention to the antlered bucks. Then he tapped at a group of does. “No ali babas.”

I flashed a thumbs-up to signal my understanding. The room smelled of sour mildew; the worn couch in the back and mini fridge filled with wine coolers suggested the mukhtar spent a lot of time here. I turned back to the machine, where Fat Mukhtar was setting up a match for two players. The level read ALASKA. He nodded to the orange shotgun, and I replaced my real gun with a fake one. High-definition cartoon Kodiak wilderness washed over our faces.

The sight was off, shooting half an inch high, but I adjusted during the first round, killing two bucks. Fat Mukhtar doed-out right away, which eliminated him from the round. He leaned into the screen with his gun, holding it under an armpit rather than squaring it into his shoulder. He watched me finish the round. I was up two hundred points.

“Surf’s up,” I said with a wink. Fat Mukhtar grunted, but I saw the mischievous curve of his mouth return.