The Big Kahuna (Fox and O'Hare #6)(74)

I stepped into the bathroom and sat in the tub as it filled with water, nudging the lever handle toward the hottest setting with my foot. Being asked about the war meant having to remember it, and to remember the war was to relive it. It was one thing when the memories were involuntary, like that time I walked into a gas station in Riverside and caught a whiff of perfume on the clerk that took me so immediately to a crowded market square in Anbar that I nearly doubled over from the sensation, but to recall memories willfully was another thing entirely. The door creaked open and Nora stepped inside the bathroom and knelt by the side of the tub. She ran her finger on my tattoo, the scar on my side, the scratches she herself had left during our lovemaking. My body bore signs that I knew she wanted to decipher and piece together into a story, but it would always be an incomplete story. To tell her the whole of it was to risk her judgment, and I already judged myself every day. “Are you coming to bed?” she asked.

“In a minute,” I said, avoiding her eyes.

After she stepped out of the bathroom, I stayed in the tub. Maybe I should stop thinking of my time in the war as a story and tell it to her the way I remembered it late at night when I couldn’t sleep, in fragments, sometimes in order and sometimes out of order, stopping in places where the remembering got too close to the reliving. By now the bathwater had grown uncomfortably cold and I shivered as I dried myself. In the dark of the bedroom, I found her sitting on the bed, already dressed in the blue shirt and linen skirt she’d worn for dinner at the Italian restaurant we went to in Palm Springs. “You’re leaving?” I asked.

“I figured you wanted to be alone,” she said, slipping her feet into her shoes. She reached for her watch on the bedside table and stood up. The clasp clicked in the silence. “It’s getting late, anyway.”

“Don’t go,” I said, crossing the room toward her in the sliver of light. “Please. Stay.”

I was naked and cold, and she looked at me for a moment before taking her shoes off and lying back on the bed. I nestled against her, draping my arm across her hip and tucking my knees against hers, soaking up the warmth of her. When I spoke, my voice was barely above a whisper. A month into our second tour, Sergeant Fletcher received some information about the whereabouts of a sniper who’d killed one of our guys and wounded four, a shooter so skilled that we were all speculating he must have been trained in the Iraqi military. The target was supposed to be hiding in an apartment building on the eastern side of Ramadi, and we rolled out at zero four hundred, when the neighborhood was shrouded in darkness and the air still cool. The first to dismount was Perez, whom we nicknamed Chewie because of his red hair and mustache, then the rest of us followed. We’d gone maybe nine or ten yards when Perez got blown up. All we could find of him later was a leg that landed on the hood of our Humvee, and his intestines hanging from a tree. The sergeant had us collect what we could into a bag, which would be shipped to Perez’s family in Texas for the funeral.

A couple of days later, Sergeant Fletcher took us to see the informant who’d told him about the sniper’s hiding place. His name was Badawi, a former clerk at the Ministry of Interior. He had a nice house, with blue trim on the windows and an addition above the kitchen that he was still building. There was a whiff of burned bread in the hallway—that was the smell I could still smell in my dreams—and the only people inside were Badawi’s wife and children. Aside from making tea when we came to visit, the wife had never spoken to any of us. When Fletcher asked where her husband was, she said she didn’t know, that he hadn’t come home the night before. She was in a green housedress with a geometric pattern, and her hair was in a kerchief tied at the nape of her neck. Her kids sat on the floor, playing cards, the presence of Marines no longer a novelty to them, yet she could barely disguise her contempt for us. Her eyes were full of blame. Each question Fletcher asked, she answered with a clipped yes or no.

“Maybe she can’t say anything in front of the kids,” Fletcher said. He took her into the back room, and Fierro and I stayed behind, keeping an eye on the children. The game they played was unfamiliar to me, and I tried to figure out the rules by watching them. Not ten minutes later, the terp came out, walking past us to the front door.

“We done here?” Fierro asked.

“No, but the sergeant doesn’t need me. That woman speaks English.”

Fierro and I looked at each other, stunned. In the six months we’d been coming to this house to visit the informant, his wife had never given any indication that she understood us. Now I wondered what we might have said in her presence, whether it had any intelligence value, whether it might have been used against us. And there were other comments, too, comments about her, obscene things we were confident our English concealed. From the back room came the sound of a chair being dragged against the floor. “Sergeant?” I asked. But there was no answer: Fletcher had turned off his headset.

I went down the hallway, keeping the kids in my line of vision. Even with the sound of the nature documentary that was showing on television, I heard the pop clearly. I reached for the door, but it flew open and Fletcher came out, his body filling the frame. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“She tried to reach for my sidearm.”

Behind him, the woman lay on the floor, a bullet hole through her cheek, choking on her own blood. I walked into the room, yet her eyes didn’t track me, they were fixed on a spot in the ceiling. A minute later, she stopped moving. We mounted up and left, but all the way back to camp I ran through the sequence of events that had started with the killing of Perez and ended with the killing of Badawi’s wife. The story, or what I could make of it, had an arc that my instinct told me was wrong and, once we were alone in the barracks, I tried to ask Fierro about it.