Andrew Ervin - Extraordinary Renditions

He returned the next day, let himself in again, and finally caught up with her. She looked great, her hair down at her shoulders instead of all tied up in knots and loops, like it usually was. She didn’t have any makeup on and it was the first time Brutus had ever gotten a look at her full, natural splendor. She had bright eyes that floated like lily pads when they looked at him. No perfume this time either, which he found strange.

The bosses must have been up her ass because she couldn’t get away.” Not a good time,” she said. “Let’s catch up later.” She didn’t want to be seen talking with him. She worked for a private civilian contractor, though, so it wasn’t like they could throw her in the stockade.

“That’s cool, but here,” he said, and handed Magda an envelope with her name on it. Inside was another envelope addressed to his sister. She slipped it into her pocket without opening it and kissed him on the lips.

“See you tomorrow?” she wanted to know.

“Yeah, tomorrow’s good.”

She kissed him again, a half second longer, and headed off in the direction of Sullivan’s office. Brutus returned to his room to prepare for afternoon rattrap duty, which meant cracking open a Dreher and rolling up a blunt.

Work was more tedious than difficult, and he had trouble concentrating. Still too much to do before the fifteenth. Afterwards, he took a shower and tried to empty his thoughts of his responsibilities and duties. He wrote a letter to the Mambo about nothing in particular. She could get the details from Joan. He told her that he loved her and would be home soon. Then he lay down to read from the Fanon book, and to get some rest. By the time sleep came, he had agreed to let events take him wherever they wanted to. He would follow whatever path presented itself. This was his life; he could feel it.

He awoke refreshed and ate a large, flavorless breakfast. It was the fourteenth. He didn’t need to be on duty until 16:00, so he went to check on Magda. As fate would have it — or luck, for that matter, which to Brutus looked like fate in a cheap wig and bad shoes — she was thrilled to see him. She was heavily made-up again, much to his disappointment, but that didn’t detract from her beauty. She kissed him hard, and he tasted the oily surface of her tongue in his mouth, got the first whiff of her perfume. She agreed to sneak off with him.

In the best-case scenario, he would only be off the base for a day. Two at the most. Magda never needed to know he was gone. He didn’t want to get her mixed up in whatever Sullivan was playing at.

The worst-case scenario was something Brutus tried to put out of his mind.

He followed Magda to a conference room just a few doors down from Sullivan’s office. She clearly knew her way around. A meeting had recently broken up probably, or the generals were taking a break from planning how to kill more people: their files and half-empty coffee cups were strewn everywhere. Overflowing manila folders covered the long conference table with briefings, some of which must have been highly classified. They could come back any second, and the possibility of getting busted either didn’t occur to Magda or it excited her even more. What would they do if they caught him? It didn’t matter anymore. White dry-erase boards covered two whole walls with crudely illustrated maps of the Balkans. The national boundaries had been drawn and redrawn in several places on both maps, each time with a different colored marker. On the table, a laptop remained on. The screensaver read I’D RATHER BE FUCKING YOUR MOTHER in scrolling text.

Brutus didn’t bother to lock the door. There was nothing left to lose anymore. He pushed the computer aside, lifted Magda onto the edge of the table, and pulled up her skirt. She had on a pair of sexy see-through panties, like she had been waiting for him. Her perfume billowed off of her neck and chest — it was enough to make him want to spend the rest of his life writing love songs for her. She grabbed him closer, rubbing up against him and breathing in his ear until he couldn’t hear anything else. He knew someone was about to fly through the door any minute and wondered if Magda would yell rape just to save her own job. But he didn’t stop. Papers fell to the floor in piles. She kicked at the maps on the whiteboards, further blurring the Serbia-Bosnia border. When she stopped huffing and the blood no longer pounded in his head, Brutus noticed that a shortwave radio on a bookshelf had been playing the entire time. Magda recomposed herself, getting dressed and fixing her hair in the reflection of the laptop’s screen while Armed Forces Radio bleated the current number-one song, a bastardization of Billie’s “Strange Fruit,” to which someone had added a gaudy drum-and-bass rhythm.

Brutus zipped up, then sat in a cushy office chair at the head of the table and pulled Magda to him again.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I need to get back.”

He didn’t release her. A part of him was in love with Magda. When the time came, maybe he would invite her to visit him in Philly. But that was too far down the road to even contemplate. And imagine what Elvin would say when Brutus showed up around the block with a rich white woman on his arm. He could already hear the abuse he would get.

Before she could wiggle away, he handed her a small bundle of letters he needed mailed. Three of them contained the whole truth and were addressed to media outlets and a congresswoman in Philly, and a fourth was made out to Sullivan care of the base. The last one contained the anonymous photocopied enlargement of his penis. Brutus smacked Magda on the backside and let her go.

6.

The pigs rarely enforced lights-out so Brutus kept his desk lamp on. Sparky grumbled about it but was too much of a chickenshit to say anything; he was clearly Sullivan’s stooge, if not his outright bitch. Brutus watched the clock. He would need some rest, but there was no goddamn way he would be able to sleep. The phone was going to ring or the door would open just wide enough for some corrupt M.P. to shine a flashlight in his eyes. He stayed in bed reading.

Midnight came and went: it became the ides of March.

The clock hands crawled toward morning. Brutus no longer cared what happened so long as it happened soon. Now. Every so often he felt like he might have fallen asleep for a minute or two. The clock stared back at him.

At least he was a step ahead of Sullivan, and he took some small satisfaction from that. He had purchased a prepaid phone card from the P.X. and called ahead to the Vienna Hilton to book a room under his own name. He left a map of that city in his desk, where Sparky was certain to sniff it out. Sullivan’s people would look for him in Austria, which just might provide enough diversion to buy some extra time if he needed to haul ass out of the country to Slovakia, or even to Serbia. Getting over the border would be difficult without his passport, but not impossible. All G.I.s at Taszár were required to surrender their papers to their commanding officers upon arriving, which was just as good as having a leash around the neck that reached all the way to Hungary’s borders, but not a step further, like the dog in the cartoons.

Brutus hid thin bundles of twenty-, fifty-, and one-hundred-dollar bills in the lining of his jacket and wrapped two changes of clothes — one military, one civilian — in separate plastic bags. The civvies had those holes cut out of them, making them a little more conspicuous, but he didn’t care. It would be better than wearing the trademarked signs of the devil. Might as well wear chains like his homies back home enslaving themselves in collars of thick gold bling.

If returning to Taszár didn’t turn out to be an option, he might very well end up either in jail or with a dog tag around his toe. He didn’t spend the time contemplating which would be worse. If he had to, he could beep Elvin and some people back home and get them to call Channel 6 Action News. All the info they’d need was in the letters Magda mailed, so he just needed to stay alive and out of jail long enough to get some backup.