Andrew Ervin - Extraordinary Renditions

Someone had used a cinder block to prop open a back door. A dozen cigarette butts lay crushed on the ground. Brutus slipped inside and, as planned, found Magda in an otherwise unoccupied meeting room.

She was maybe a decade older than him but didn’t show it, and she spoke half a dozen languages. Her father was Hungarian, and although Magda grew up in America and went to Yale, Brutus thought of her as Hungarian. She was real cool, not as materialistic as most of the women he knew back home, even though he got the impression she was pretty well-off. She worked as a translator or a consultant or something like that. It was classified. She was also gorgeous, with the kind of smile that made army life and the rest of the world disappear.

It was said that after Attila the Hun conquered all of Central and Eastern Europe he rounded up the most beautiful women in his empire and set up his personal harem in what would later become Hungary. That was why Hungarian girls were so hot and why they differed so much in appearance. On the cleaning crews alone, Brutus saw girls with olive, Latin features, girls with Viking-blonde hair and blue eyes, and even girls with round faces and Asian-looking eyes. Magda had black curly hair and ruby lips. She was also five times smarter than anyone he had ever met.

He closed the door tight by jamming a wooden chair under the handle. She spilled all over him. Magda took off her clothes and underneath she had on her usual G-string panties, which he didn’t bother to remove. She obviously worked out, because she was strong for a woman and not at all averse to fighting back here and there. She had a nasty streak in her. They played rough. Brutus wondered if she had ever zapped an Arab with a cattle prod. She wore this expensive perfume she had had specially made in Dubai and as she rubbed against him, it rose from her skin. It smelled like fresh leather that had been treated with rose water and licorice. It drove him crazy.

After, as they got dressed, someone rapped at the door. “Halló?” a voice called out. It belonged to the head of the cleaning crew, a round old troll who, much to the amusement of the girls in her command, barked at Brutus in Hungarian whenever she saw him.

“Egy pillanat!” Magda told her.

Brutus gave the troll ten bucks to keep her quiet. That was a ton of money to some old lady making maybe two hundred dollars a month, and he didn’t have anything to spend it on anyway, except fast food and those bullshit Tom Clancy novels. Magda kissed him and went back to work. Before he left, he waited a few minutes to catch his breath and to allow any passersby to disappear.

He decided to put off rattrap duty and return to his room, Magda’s perfume still clinging to his body. Sparky was out. The image Sullivan had showed him remained burned onto his brain, like spots after staring at the sun. Brutus felt like he had been fucked up the ass. It was the fifth of March. Ten days until whatever Sullivan had planned. That didn’t give Brutus a ton of time to get his shit together.

Brutus put on some Public Enemy and yanked open his closet door. He threw all his clothes onto the bed, then pulled open the drawers of his dresser and dumped the contents onto the pile. Taking a pair of nail scissors from his desk, he poked it through the heart of a brand-new shirt that the Mambo had sent him for Christmas. Cutting a crude circle through the breast, he ripped the Polo insignia out and dropped the rough swatch of cloth onto the floor. Picking up the next shirt, he did the same thing. He repeated the process with every article of clothing he owned, tearing out all the corporate symbols, insignias, and logos. They were the trademarks of the white devil, of Satan himself. One after another, he stripped the tags off the pockets of his Levi’s and cut the swooshes out of his socks, until a stack of capitalist-propaganda cotton lay at his feet like broken shackles. He would have loved nothing more than to rip the U.S. ARMY patches off his uniforms, but he couldn’t go there. Not yet.

Next, he carefully refolded his T-shirts and socks, and replaced his dress shirts and pants in the closet. He picked up the discarded patches and put them in a manila envelope, like the one on Sullivan’s desk. He addressed it to his sister and included a note on a three-by-five card: “Please use these to make me a quilt.”

He put the card in the envelope, but before sealing it pulled it out again. He erased “quilt” and wrote “flag” instead. It would take ten days to get to her.

4.

Sparky was listening to a Hungarian pop station that played terrible American eighties music interspersed with heavily orchestrated Hungarian headbanger ballads while surfing the net for porn on a signed-out laptop. He lifted his chin in hello and turned the screen to face Brutus, who leaned over his roommate’s shoulder to see an image of two heavily tattooed men dressed up like pizza delivery boys penetrating different ends of the same surgically augmented woman. The elaborate set looked like the living room of a mansion, with a roaring fireplace and a bearskin rug. She was lying on her stomach on a glass coffee table and still had on her high heels. Two thick art books had been kicked to the floor. Brutus couldn’t make out the titles. Sparky, who had a way with words, said, “Looks like fun, doesn’t it?”

The image reminded Brutus of the photo on Sullivan’s desk. “What do you bother with that shit for? Big pretty man like you, I bet you get more tang than Buzz Aldrin.”

“Everyone says you’re the one tagging that Magda bitch. Every guy in camp’s been trying to get in her pants.”

Brutus shrugged. “I can neither confirm nor deny those charges. Besides, what’s a punk like you care about a hottie like Magda anyway?”

“Fuck you.”

“Good comeback.”

“O.K., fuck you, Shakespeare.”

Even Brutus had to laugh — but he didn’t care for the allusion. What if Sparky was in on the blackmail? Unlikely, but not impossible. Sullivan was not the kind of man to leave a roommate assignment to chance. Brutus couldn’t trust anybody.

He removed his hat, coat, and boots, then he turned the heater down a notch and finally sat. His feet were killing him. Commotion filled the hallway outside. Someone was barking like a dog. He flipped on his desk lamp, which provided a nasty, halogen glow. He opened his journal, a hardbound art-school sketchbook Joan had given him as a going-away gift. The edges were painted a shiny biblical gold, and Brutus had titled it “The Myth of Syphilis” in neat block letters on the flyleaf. He filled one page every day even when he had nothing new to say. He kept the book in his underwear drawer. Sparky knew of its existence, which meant that everyone knew of its existence, but there was nothing Brutus could do about that. As a general rule, he tried to limit his worries to those things he could control. There weren’t many in the army.

He stood again and pulled a half-liter bottle of Dreher from the little dorm fridge they shared. The P.X. sold American beer, but Brutus would have his whole life left to drink that shit when he got home, and at least the Hungarian stuff had some flavor to it. The cold, uncarpeted floor stung his feet. Back at his desk, he tried to clear his head, think things through. The beer brought a flush to his cheeks.

One week — that was how much time he had. Sullivan was probably running smack or something up from the Croatian coast. Brutus knew from personal experience about the Croats’ well-earned reputation for producing high-quality pharmaceuticals. It must have been something about the weather down there. Magda had gotten her hands on some serious, not-to-be-fucked-with shit. The Adriatic kind bud was as good as the best bubonic chronic that ever crossed through Philly. Brutus grew up smoking weed the way redneck kids grew up slurping Mountain Dew. His old man knew every reggae band that came through town, and they would come around to see him. He used to jam with some of those guys back in Kingston, but sold his bass when he got married and moved to the States. Brutus would get up on Sunday morning and Bunny or Toots or someone would be sitting on the front porch rolling a fatty. The Mambo would be irate about it all day. Every Sunday she would make a huge pot of curried goat to last the week, and most of the time the old man and his friends would kill it before it got dark. She wasn’t crazy about having all that weed around either, and that may have been part of the reason she kicked the old man out. Brutus currently had half an ounce stashed in a sock, but there was no way he could light up with Sparky in the room. Maybe he was getting paranoid, like Joan always said, but he was already in enough trouble.