Matt Gallagher - Youngblood

“We gonna call the bomb squad?” Dominguez asked.

And sit here for three hours waiting for them? I thought. But I said, “No. Pull up parallel to that bitch, recon by fire, and we’ll keep going.”

They didn’t like it, but did as ordered. They were good soldiers.

Dominguez’s machine gun ripped into the milk crate. The heat of the red blast washed over me as I watched from the hatch, understanding that at this moment, for this person, I’d be willing to do anything.

We kept driving west. The outpost radioed to ask if we’d heard an explosion in our area. I ignored it. They stopped trying to reach us after the third call. The song of passing desert replaced the crackle of their faraway voices, chapped earth always, chapped earth forever, a hymn of holy yellow poison.

We turned onto the thin silt road. A blue Bongo truck sat in front of the nearest house with a drip pan underneath it. I’d never seen the Bongo truck before and looked at it as if it were a lumpy testicle. It didn’t belong. There was a stiff wind that smelled of oil and animal shit. A man was standing alone at the square garden. Doc Cork, Snoop, and I dismounted. Washington and some others joined from another vehicle. Everyone looked ready for a fight, up on the balls of their feet, shoulders cocked, rifles at the low-ready. I locked and loaded, too, the bolt chambering a round with an anvil’s grace.

The man didn’t turn as we approached, keeping his head bowed at the garden. He wore a button-down stained with paint and harem pants that danced in the wind like flags.

“Stay back, sir,” Washington said. “He could have a suicide vest.” We stopped ten feet short of the man, fanning out. Snoop shouted through the wind. The man turned around, keeping his hands deep in his pockets.

Stupid tears streaked Malek’s face. His beard was patchy, with gaps along the jawbone. He put his hands in the air.

Doc Cork patted him down while Washington kept his rifle casually situated on Malek’s gut.

“He’s clear,” Washington said.

Snoop waved the Iraqi man up to us. He moved slow and without care. He was no taller than Rana and had the short, trunky arms of someone who worked with his hands. He wiped his face and nose with his shirtsleeve and spoke to Snoop.

“He asks why we interrupt him on his day of grieving,” Snoop translated. “His wife has taken his children and left him forever.”

“Get him to explain, Snoop. Make it seem like we don’t know anything.”

As Snoop and Malek spoke, I studied Rana’s husband. He had thin lips and a forehead much too long for his face. There was a moony quality to him that I couldn’t place, an uncertainty in his speech. In a different time and place, I’d have commiserated with him. I reminded myself that he’d hit her, and hit her because of me. No, I thought. This man is your enemy.

Snoop’s voice bit with a cold neutrality. He said that Malek didn’t know much, just that he’d returned home this morning to find his wife and sons gone, and their belongings, too. She hadn’t even left a note.

“He’s fucking lying.” I grabbed Malek by the collar, twisting my knuckles into the pressure points under his chin. “What did you do to them? The fuck did you do?”

His black, stupid eyes were welling up again. I tossed him to the dirt and had the soldiers follow me into their hut. Malek remained on the ground.

The home was abandoned. The structure still stood, but everything that made it Rana’s — the blankets, the wood baskets, the coloring books we’d brought the boys — had all been gutted from it, leaving a fish skeleton of two rooms. Even the Persian carpets were gone. We checked the bedroom. The family’s mattress and the two plastic chairs sat undisturbed, as well as a basket filled with Malek’s clothes.

As the soldiers searched the other huts, Snoop and I walked back to the garden, where Malek had found his feet. Snoop asked if I had any questions for him, and when I shook my head because everything seemed fuzzy and distant, he asked his own.

After a minute of dark thoughts, I interrupted. “The hell are you guys talking about?”

“Gardening,” Snoop said. “These are his plants. He made it for Rana to try to make her happy.”

I laughed, loud and brittle, and started moving away. I heard more Arabic behind me, and then Snoop called out. Malek wanted to know my name. I turned around.

“Me?” I smiled big, one of all-American-boy charm and fluoride shine. “My name is Elijah Rios.”

Snoop didn’t need to translate. Malek’s face started trembling, not side to side like a person would from anger, but up and down, like a guillotined doll. Then he began barking, at first low and hoarse, then higher and shriller, removing a shoe and flinging it at me, missing widely. I kept my cocky smile plastered across my face and patted my rifle. Snoop took a few steps away from Malek, but the Iraqi made no move to follow. He just kept barking, and then threw his other shoe at the garden. We returned to the Strykers.

The other huts were as empty as ever. We boomeranged back east to Ashuriyah. As I looked back from my hatch through the kicked-up brown dust, Malek was still standing there, woofing, a wounded animal bleeding to death in its garden.

The stone arch hadn’t moved. Things moved through it and around it, but it remained firm. It was now the meridian hour, and Yousef was at Yousef’s. I didn’t wait for the shop boys to leave before I reached across the glass case and grabbed the old man and asked very calmly and very politely just where the fuck Rana and her boys were.

Halitosis blew all across my face, but I held fast. One hazel eye and one cloudy brown eye avoided my stare.

Snoop gasped. “LT? He say he has no idea. He pretends he doesn’t know Rana. He pretends he doesn’t know us.”

The barrel of my Glock found the inside of the old man’s mouth. Tink, tink, tink , I probed like a fisherman with a tackle, counting one eel molar, two eel molar, three eel molar. I kept going in a symmetrical pattern and flipped the safety trigger to semiauto when Yousef raised his index finger. I removed the pistol from his mouth.

He spoke in short, clipped sentences. Before he finished, Snoop leaned across the glass case to grab Yousef himself. He started choking him, and Yousef gagged. I pulled the two men apart.

“He’s a lying coward!” Snoop was indignant. “He say that he has no idea about any sheika or any smuggling, he’s just an old blind man who sells falafels. He doesn’t care if you put a gun in his mouth again and pull the trigger, because death means nothing to him. I’m going to murder him, LT. I must. For honor.”

I raised my pistol again and put it under Yousef’s nose. In my palm, the steel felt like jelly. “I got this.” One of the shop boys started whimpering. I thought it appropriate that Saif’s weapon would kill Yousef, considering this was their country and all. “Any last words, my man?”

Yousef flashed his mouthful of small teeth. “The majnooni was wrong about you,” he said, his English smooth as sky.

I concentrated on an ache in my feet until most of the anger waned.

“You’re the Cleric,” I said. “Always have been. And you ordered the hit on the mukhtar .”

“Maybe,” Yousef said, his good eye still watching my finger on the trigger of the pistol. “Or maybe there isn’t a Cleric. Maybe there never was. Tough to say.”

That was as close to a confession as I’d get, I knew. I also knew that whatever chance she had left, whatever chance they had left, might depend on me still. If they weren’t already headless in a ditch somewhere.

I lowered the Glock.

“Dead,” Yousef said. He knew I wouldn’t shoot him now. “You both.”