Redeployment(39)

“Okay,” he said. “I’m gonna sit on this and think it over.”

It was more than I had any right to hope for.





? ? ?


The next week, while meeting with Sheikh Umer about the beekeeping project, I saw three children, two of them in uniforms. One gray, one blue. Perfect.

“Holy shit!” I said. “Professor, tell him I need to get a photograph with those children.”

Much explaining later, along with the understanding that I now owed a favor, I had one extremely confused child wearing a baseball helmet and another with a glove on his hand. I also had one highly irritated translator.

“I hate you more than I have ever hated you right now,” the Professor said, rubbing his glasses hard enough that I thought they might break.

“Why do you even work for us?” I said.

“Forty. Dollars. A day.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “You’re risking your life for us.”

He sized me up for a second. “There was hope at the beginning,” he said. His face softened a bit. “Even without hope, you must try.”

I smiled. Eventually, he smiled back.

After another bout of more or less patient explanations, we had the children lined up right, the one crouched like a pitcher and the other standing as if at bat. I saw a woman hurrying toward us out of the corner of my eye, but Sheikh Umer cut her off and began speaking to her in Arabic.

“Tell him to swing,” I said.

The kid swung as though he were using the bat to beat someone to death, lifting it overhead and bringing it brutally down. I wanted to send that shot to G.G., but instead I showed the kid how to swing correctly and went back to taking photos. The timing was difficult, but after about twenty swings I got it perfect, the bat blurry, the batter’s face pure concentration, and a look of worry from the catcher, as if the batter had just connected with a pitch. I turned the camera’s display around and showed the picture to the Professor and the kids.

“Look at that,” I said.

The Professor nodded. “There you are,” he said. “Success.”





IN VIETNAM THEY HAD WHORES




My dad only told me about Vietnam when I was going over to Iraq. He sat me down in the den and he took out a bottle of Jim Beam and a few cans of Bud and started drinking. He’d take long pulls of the whiskey and small sips of the beer, and in between sips he’d tell me things. The sweatbox humidity in the summers, the jungle rot in the monsoons, the uselessness of the M16 in any season. And then, when he was really drunk, he told me about the whores.

I guess at first the command organized monthly trips to town, but it didn’t last because everybody’d get too crazy. Once the trips stopped, the brothels moved in next to base and Marines would either bust through the wire at night or invite girls in as “local national guests” during the day. Those girls, he said, you’d treat more like girlfriends, which made it better.

By his second tour, he said, the whole thing was a pretty smooth machine and there was a wide range of services, even different brothels for white and black Marines. If a girl who worked in a white brothel ever got found out servicing a black man, she’d wind up dead or at least beat till she couldn’t work anymore. He didn’t agree with that, but it happened, and he said it amazed him, to think you could just do that to somebody.

Then he told me about one place where they had dancers and a stage where the girls would do this trick to make a little extra money. Customers would put a stack of quarters on the bar. Then the girls would squat down over the stack, drop their vag on top of it, and pick up as many quarters as they could. That was the thing at that bar.

Dad was pretty well gone at this point, but he didn’t stop knocking them back, pulling on the whiskey and taking those small sips of beer. He looked so old, deep wrinkles running down his face and little gray spots on his hands.

“I had this friend,” he said, and one time this friend goes to that bar and drinks, all night, not talking to anybody. And he takes out a stack of quarters and puts it on the bar, and then he hunches over with his arms around it so no one can see, and he takes out his lighter and holds the flame on those quarters till they’re branding iron hot. Then he calls over a girl. “Just any girl,” said my dad, “my friend, he didn’t care which.” My dad took another pull of the whiskey. “It smelled like sizzling steak,” he said.