As planned, Paige meets me at the West End harbor on Saturday afternoon. I stand off to the side while she examines every inch of Sentimental Journey. She doesn’t laugh out loud, as I feared she would at first sight of the wreck, but she stops short of encouraging me.
“I do love these old boats, though,” she offers. “New boats don’t have these lines, with the flying sterns and the low freeboard. Beautiful. But you should know that there’s a reason. She won’t be as fast or stable as a modern design.”
“I’ve read all about that.”
“Says the guy who’s never been on a sailboat.” Then a thought furrows her brow, and the pitch of her voice shoots up as she quips, “You know what?”
I follow her from the moldy scrabble of the municipal harbor, down the freshly scrubbed piers of Southern Yacht Club, to a blue-hulled Catalina named Smile.
“Dad used to be a real Beach Boys fan,” she explains.
“Did they have a falling out?”
“No. I mean he was . . . He passed a few years ago.” Before I can apologize or offer my condolences, she adds, “Smile isn’t as well kept as it used to be. So don’t take this as an example of how to keep yours when she’s finished.”
I take the hint and leave the subject of her father alone.
Paige tells me to sit still in a corner of the cockpit and not to touch anything. She hustles around the boat setting sail, with one word explanations for each activity like “Halyard,” “Mainsheet,” “Traveler,” and “Tricky.”
The late afternoon is overcast and cold, and the lake is gray and uninviting. We’re the only boat leaving harbor. The rollers hit us as the bow rounds the navigation light at the head of the rock jetty, and the boat begins to pitch.
“You’re not sailing, yet,” Paige remarks over the noise of the exhaust. “That’s just waves. Just so you know. We’re still on the engine.”
Huddled against the cold, with my chin in my chest and my hands in my coat pockets, I mumble, “Thanks for the tip.”
I must look hurt, or simply wretched, because her eyebrows come together in an expression of guilt, and she offers me an olive branch.
“Here. Go up to the mast. When I tell you to start pulling that rope, the halyard, really put your back into it. It’ll be heavy.”
I nod in acknowledgment and step gingerly from the cockpit, one hand always on the boat.
“Now,” she says, cutting the motor, “heave.”
I pull down hard on the rope and hear the mainsail slugs squeal reluctantly through the dry groove in the mast. She wasn’t kidding about the boat being outside its maintenance window. But the challenge grows on me, and five pulls later the mainsail is up. I cleat the halyard with a knot I know to be wildly wrong and make my way aft into the cockpit.
As I take my seat, Paige pulls the tiller toward her. The sail fills and stiffens as the bow comes around. Smile heels abruptly to one side and gathers headway. Paige helms us into the deep trough of a whitecap. The pit of my stomach delights when we break the crest. I close my eyes and don’t even bother with the fine sprays of brackish lake water pelting my face. Somehow, in my dreams, I’ve imagined this motion perfectly.
When I open my eyes and look up, Paige is grinning at me in a way that I don’t recognize. She’s released something, pulled some cotter pin that’s held the muscles of her cheeks taut against the bone.
“You love this, don’t you?” She beams.
“I do.”
After about an hour, Paige lets me take the helm. The vibration of the wooden tiller against my palm sets my heart racing. We make laps up and down the lakefront, two hundred meters from shore. She talks constantly, explaining the exact purpose of every winch, line, and cheat. She walks me through the steps for executing efficient tacks and jibes.
When I turn too steeply into a jibe, she admonishes me with a smile to “Steer small. Seriously.”
I give the rudder a sudden pull.
“Asshole. Steer small. You almost threw me overboard that time.”
At dusk, I help her lower the sails and set the anchor.
We watch the moonrise. Pressed up against me for warmth, under a moldy blanket she retrieves from belowdecks, Paige tells me about a friend with a covered dockyard space I can probably lease on the cheap and use to work on Sentimental Journey. I take hold of her face and interrupt her midsentence with a kiss. Her body goes limp, and I exhale with complete deliverance as she kisses me back.
When nothing we do, no means of physical proximity we can conjure, will keep us warm, we go belowdecks. Eventually, reluctantly, we fall asleep.
In the morning, after motoring back into harbor and working to secure Smile at her moorings, I promise to meet her at Molly’s on Thursday night for drinks with classmates.
“They have a special on High Life,” she says. “Only a dollar.”
“Just paper, right?” I say, spooling the bowline with newly acquired craft in my wrists.
Paige doesn’t answer. She doesn’t laugh. She puts on a serious, nurturing face as she waits for me on the pier. Showing me she’s ready to hear more. More of that story about the burning money. More about the old man and his hay. More of anything else I’d like to tell her. She’s ready to listen.
From nowhere, a terror rises inside me. The thought of responsibly drinking beers in public pushes me near to panic. I imagine standing next to her and smiling, our classmates asking me questions, and I yearn for the smallest, darkest room in the city where I can hide until I’m sure she’s forgotten me. I fight it as we walk through the parking lot, back to our separate cars. But something has soured in me. I’m polite, kissing her good-bye as sincerely as I can, but I’m sure Paige notices it, too.
I sleepwalk through Sunday, and I go back to work on Monday morning. Stall isn’t as friendly as he was on Friday afternoon, and he doesn’t put up any fight when I tell him I’ll be working on Sullivan’s analytics all day. He feigns disappointment when I tell him I won’t have time to grab lunch, like he’d wanted to cancel it himself but hadn’t known how.
I leave Stall’s office and shuffle down the hallway, to my cubicle in its windowless corner. The stack of research assignments sets me at ease. This much work is a gift, a reason to hide for the entire day, focus on these quiet tasks and not speak a word to anyone.
This much work might last into Thursday night, giving me a reason to break my promise to Paige. This much work might even follow me home from the office. When my mother sends me an e-mail asking why I never answer my phone, I can claim with a clear conscience that I’ve been too busy.
I sit at my desk, triaging Sullivan’s research assignments, and try to convince myself that she’ll expect me to stand her up. It won’t surprise her, I tell myself, fighting the urge to smash my cell phone so I won’t have to see her confused messages as the hours slip away on Thursday night.
I miss the phone center. The unreachability of it all. The line of people waiting to call home. The scratchy connection. The rough smell of industrial cleaner. All the good reasons to get off the phone whenever you needed it.
On my birthday, not long after Marceau died, I went to the phone center before evening chow. The guest worker, a skinny kid with shoulder-length, black hair, handed me an index card with a number on it. He gestured to the waiting area before settling back into his chair to watch a Philippine soap opera on his laptop.
I sat down and waited my turn to call home, sizing up the middle-aged national guardsman in my booth. I tried to judge from the look of him how long I’d have to wait. Skinny and hunched over in his Army uniform, he had gray hair and deep wrinkles in his face. He’d grown frail while other men his age had grown fat. I recognized him from his job at the chow hall, where he sat on a stool and made sure Marines washed their hands. That was his whole job. It was always strange seeing a forty-year-old private. It was strange having the National Guard here, at all.
I watched him arrange five calling cards on the desk and dial four times before he found a card that worked. When someone in America picked up, he leaned forward and spat, “Put the money back in the account.” Blood boiled into his face, filling his wrinkles from the bottom up. “Put the money back in the account so I have something to live on when I get home.”
He noticed me watching, and I looked away so as not to embarrass him.
“Put the money back in the account. Put the money back in the account. Put the money back in the account.” Louder each time. Then this woman in America, whoever she was, went on the offensive. The guardsman reeled back in his chair and attempted to stifle her onslaught with a crisp “Sarah. Sarah. Sarah.”
I looked over again, and the guardsman had the phone held away from his ear as she screamed. He closed his eyes, peaceful for a moment, then gave up. He slammed the handset down on the receiver, grabbed his rifle, and shuffled past me. No one in the tent seemed to notice or care.
I went to the empty desk, sat down, and pulled a calling card from my breast pocket. This gift from my sister, one thousand minutes, was sent with a demand that I call my parents at least once a week. I never managed that, but I made the effort on my birthday, at least.
I dialed and checked my watch while the line rang. I could never remember the time difference, Iraq to Alabama.
My mother answered before I finished the math, “Donovan residence.”
“Hi, Mom. It’s Pete.
“Oh—Pete!”
“I’m sorry, forgot to check. What time is it there?”
“Oh, it’s about nine in the morning. A lovely one, too. So glad to hear from you! Happy birthday! Are you having a happy birthday?”
“I am. Thank you.”
“Would you like to speak to your father, just right quick?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Lemme run fetch him, then.”
I heard her go out on the back porch and call his name. The screen door slammed, and I made a mental picture of the white trim and the black mesh. A green world beyond it. A cool breeze, birds, and insects buzzing in the pine trees. The screen door creaked open, a bootheel hit the kitchen floor, and I heard my mother say, “It’s Pete. It’s his birthday.”
He picked up the phone. “Son?”
“Hello, Dad.”
“Happy birthday.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You do anything to celebrate, over there? A cake, or something like?”
“No, sir. Just another day, really.” Marceau’s memorial service had been the day before. I didn’t tell him. “What are you doing today?”
“Oh, not much. Working out in the yard. Trying to keep the kudzu vines from gobbling up the pine trees.”
“How’s that going?”
“Well, it’s not exactly a fair fight, if you know what I mean. That kudzu just keeps coming.” He sighed. “So, how are you? Doing good?”
“Yes, sir. Doing fine”
“Doing a good job? Working hard?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well that’s the most important thing. That’s a happy birthday, right there.”
“Yes, sir.”
“All right, then. Take care of yourself. Got to go work. Here’s your mother.” He handed the phone to her and I heard him cough on his way out the back door. Into the green. Into the breeze.
My mother didn’t speak until the screen door bounced shut. “Do you need anything? Can we send you something?”
“No, ma’am. I’m about fine. On my way to grab dinner, actually. People waiting in line for the phone, too. So I should go.”
“All right, then. Happy birthday, darling.” She added in a soft voice, “Your father is worried sick, most days, you know.”
“I know.”
“And he can’t wait for you to come home.”
“I know.”
“Love you. Be safe.”
“Love you, too.”
I hung up the phone, stood, and returned the index card at the counter as I pushed my way through the tent flap. The wind pelted my face with sand. Hot as a hair dryer, even at night. I walked across the tarmac, through rows of tents and plywood huts. I passed the gym and the store. I walked over to the mailbox and dropped in two letters. One to Marceau’s father, the other one to his mother. Different addresses in different states.
“Your fiduciary responsibility,” Major Leighton had called it. “You are required by law and custom to send his parents a letter. Anything else is at your discretion.”
I walked across the unlit patch of hard dirt between the old tarmac and the chow hall while, on the flight line, the casualty-evacuation alarm wailed. In the few minutes it took me to reach the chow hall, two helicopters had made it airborne. They banked hard in the direction of Ramadi, low and fast. I tried to remember the tasking order for the night, and if the company had any convoys out near Ramadi.
I cleared my pistol at the entrance to the chow hall by pointing it into the clearing barrel and pulling the slide back to make sure it didn’t have a round in the chamber. Every weapon was cleared before it entered the chow hall. I cleared my pistol twice while two national guardsmen watched. I put the weapon back on safe and holstered.
I moved through the chow line with my tray, and a guest worker from Bangladesh piled my plate high with mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak. Cobb and the other lieutenants sat at their usual table on the far side of the tent. I counted them. All there. No one from our company out near Ramadi, everyone safe.
A lieutenant I didn’t recognize sat with them. A tall guy with broad shoulders and a carbine draped over his back—an infantry officer, from the look of him, and not working out of Taqaddum. The lieutenants at Taqaddum never carried rifles around the base. We locked our rifles in the operations center when we came in from the road and walked around with pistols, only.
I scanned the chow hall for another place to sit, an empty table where I could eat alone without looking like I’d meant to. Doc Pleasant and Dodge sat together, away from the rest of the platoon. Pleasant’s dinner sat untouched in front of him, and I noticed for the first time how he’d lost weight, how his uniform hung loose on his shoulders. Dodge pointed at Doc’s plate with a fork and began to take from it, perhaps thinking a foreign fork might encourage Doc to eat something. It worked. Doc brushed Dodge away with feigned aggravation and grudgingly took a bite.
I spotted Zahn and Gomez sequestered in a far corner, staring at their trays and attacking their dinners. They spoke in short bursts, nodding while they arranged the chow on their plates for maximum efficiency of consumption. It seemed like they were building the scene together, with purpose and shared understanding. It reinforced an image, for the junior Marines in the platoon, of a sergeant and her senior corporal, too busy, too focused on the work of war, to taste their food.
Under the table, I noticed their feet. She tapped the toe of his boot with her own and slowly pulled her foot away. He returned the gesture, all while they stared at their trays. I pretended not to notice and took the long way around to the lieutenants’ table.
I sat down across from the new guy, the infantry lieutenant with the carbine, as the table burst into laughter.
Cobb held court. “I’m serious! They had the thing in a box under one of the cots.”
“No fucking way, man.” Wong, the Bulk Fuel Platoon commander, shook his head and tore open a dinner roll. “Hey. What’s up, Donovan. You gotta hear this. Cobb—start again, man.”
Cobb nodded to me. “Hey, Pete. Real quick, this is Brian Jagrschein.” Cobb pointed to the infantry officer. “A buddy of mine from Quantico. Brian’s with Charlie Three-Nine out in Ramadi.”
I reached across the table, shook his hand, and said, “Pete Donovan. Nice to meet you. What brings you out this way?”
“Prisoner transfer. All wrapped up. Just letting my guys get some good chow before we head back.” He made eye contact as he spoke, and I liked him immediately.
A female helicopter pilot sat on his right. I recognized her, and the call sign Moonbeam embossed on her flight-suit patch. She flew casualty-evacuation missions. She had a good reputation. A professional.
“Anyways, where was I?” Cobb recovered his thought. “Oh, right. So my platoon finds this scorpion down by the lake and they put it in an ammo can. They sneak it back into the company area and put it in a cardboard box. They throw some dirt in there, a few bits of shrub, and decide to keep it. It sort of becomes the platoon mascot . . .”
Just then, Moonbeam’s radio, sitting on the table next to her tray, squawked to life. A garbled voice said something about clearing the landing zone at the hospital. Three casualties, urgent surgical, two minutes out and prepped for rapid transfer. She put a finger in her ear to block out Cobb’s story as he pressed on.
“Then they go out and catch a bunch of camel spiders to fight the scorpion. Oh, and they name him, Fred. Right? Fred, the Egyptian death stalker. World’s deadliest scorpion. I’m not kidding.”
“Who is it?” Jagrschein whispered to Moonbeam as she strained to hear the radio traffic. “Which unit?”
She put the radio back on the table and turned the volume way down. She shook her head, not to say that she didn’t know, but that it wasn’t the time to ask.
“What those dumb-asses didn’t know? Camel spiders are the natural prey of the Egyptian death stalker scorpion. So, I mean, it’s not much of a fight, is it? More like a feeding. They drop in these big camel spiders and Fred the Scorpion just kills them in about five seconds and eats them whole. So, they’re feeding this fucker, right? Constantly. And he’s getting bigger. A lot bigger.”
Jagrschein noticed me looking at my mashed potatoes, doing my best to ignore Cobb’s story, and decided to chat me up. Maybe he wanted to keep his mind off the helicopter on its way to the hospital with those Marines. Maybe his Marines.
“So, Pete, you do outpost construction like Cobb over there?”
“No. I have the road-repair platoon. We fill potholes. Craters and stuff.”
“Ever filled a crater in Ramadi?”
“Not yet. Fallujah, mostly. Habbaniyah and points north.”
On the other side of the table, Wong stepped into Cobb’s scorpion story. “Yeah, but tell them how you found it,” he said eagerly. “Tell them how you walked in on them while they were feeding it.”
Cobb smiled over at Wong. “Right! Thanks for reminding me. So, I go into the platoon’s barracks to see if the corporals have their guys ready to roll in the morning, and I find the whole gang huddled around that cardboard box, cheering . . .”
Moonbeam’s radio squawked again and she got up from the table, left her tray, and walked out in a hurry.
“. . . and I’m like, ‘The fuck is this? Do you know how deadly that scorpion is? Ever heard of neurotoxins?’ Seriously, one sting and you’re doing the funky chicken, foaming at the mouth. And here’s the kicker: the nearest antivenom stocks are in fucking Germany . . .”
Jagrschein’s eyes tracked Moonbeam as she left the chow hall, and he seemed to be debating whether to leave, too.
“So, Brian,” I said, trying to distract him, “you operate out of Hurricane Point?”
He brought his eyes back to me. “That’s right.”
“Security patrols? Quick-reaction force?”
“Yeah. Well, sort of. I mean, we have our own mission, my platoon. Special tasking.”
“Dude, did you lose your shit when you caught them?” Wong laughed hard.
Cobb shrugged. “No, I kept my cool. They stopped cheering when they saw me, though. That’s for goddamn sure. I didn’t say a word. I just walked out and went to see Gunny . . .”
“What kind of special tasking?” I asked Jagrschein. “Checkpoints? High-value targets?”
“Nah, nothing like that. We take the governor of Anbar Province to work every morning. Pick him up at his house, fight him into Government Center in the morning, and fight him home in the afternoon.”
“Fight?”
“Yeah. It’s a running gunfight. Every morning. Every afternoon.”
“. . . and I tell Gunny, ‘Get that fucking scorpion out of this barracks. Kill it, release it, I don’t care . . .’”
“Then why do it?” I asked. “Why not just tell him to bed down at Government Center?”
Jagrschein shrugged. “To keep up appearances, I guess. We do it at the same time every day. We change up the route a little bit, but otherwise it’s a toe-to-toe fight. Whole city knows when he’s coming and going. Brave guy, I’ll give him that. He’s the tenth governor in two years. The other nine were all assassinated.”
“. . . but Gunny tells me, ‘Sir, we can’t do that. They’re attached to Fred the Scorpion. He’s like a pet. We kill him, it’ll crush morale . . .’”
“Whose choice is that?” I asked. “Going home every night? His choice? The regimental commander’s?”
“His, I think. If someone was just telling him to do it, I’m sure he would’ve refused a long time ago. The Government Center offices? They’re up high, so the bad guys have direct line of sight on the building from anywhere in the neighborhood. We put a flak and Kevlar on him, right over his coat and tie, and we drag him up the steps as fast as we can. Under fire, every time. It’s a real bitch. All the spent brass on the steps? We’re always slipping on the fuckers, trying to return fire.”
“. . . so we reach a compromise. I tell Gunny, ‘Look, drown the little fucker in diesel to preserve his body, and we’ll pack the corpse in epoxy. All right? Make a paperweight out of him, or something . . .’”
“We do foot patrols around Government Center during the day, just to keep the bad guys on their heels a little bit. Push them back enough so we can get out the gate in the afternoon without getting pounded by RPGs. Try to keep them from lining all the routes with IEDs. And those foot patrols, man? It’s the real deal. We do the whole patrol route at a dead sprint. Fire coming from everywhere.”
“. . . then, after three days floating around in the diesel, the Marines reach in with pliers and pick him up by his tail. They’re about to drop him in the epoxy, and the fucker comes back to life! He wiggles out of the pliers and hits the ground running. Fred, the indestructible petro-scorpion! So, you know, somewhere on this base is the biggest scorpion in the whole world, and he’s impervious to our weapons.”
“That whole city. Ramadi,” Jagrschein said, “it’s ready to explode.”
“. . . Anyway, that’s my scorpion story.” Cobb looked up from his Salisbury steak, finding his table had drifted. Half the lieutenants were now listening to Jagrschein.
But Wong held true. “That’s fucking hilarious, Cobb. You should write that down.”
“Sorry for holding you up,” I said to Jagrschein. “You probably want to go check on that dust-off bird.”
“Yeah, I should do that.”
He stood to leave. So did I.
“Nice talking to you, Pete,” he said. “Look for me at Hurricane Point, if you make it out that way.”
He turned for the door. I still had food on my plate, but I didn’t care to sit back down and listen to Cobb and Wong. I didn’t want to follow Jagrschein out either and have him thinking he had to keep talking to me. So I walked over to the dessert table with my tray and hunted around the slices of cake until I saw Jagrschein leave. Then I left, too.
I took a shortcut back to the company area, deciding to climb the berm and spend some time looking down at the river. I scrambled my way to the top and sat just as the full moon cleared the buildings behind me. The light painted the river and the flooded fields and shimmered in the exhaust of every generator in Habbaniyah.
I had a strange notion that I shouldn’t let my birthday pass without at least a token commemoration. Not because I thought I’d earned it. It was more to do with the envelopes I’d dropped in the mailbox earlier. The pointless, empty words to Marceau’s parents. I thought about the first leadership principle: Know yourself and seek improvement. Real OCS idiocy.
Then, as I searched for a place to start knowing myself, the barracks door creaked open below me, and someone muttered as he climbed the berm. I sat still as the climber slipped, planted a knee in the dirt, and cursed, “Fuck.”
I recognized the voice—Dodge—but stayed quiet until he made it to the top and installed himself a few meters away from me with a book in his hands.
“Dodge?”
He flinched. “Mulasim? Fuck. You frightened me.”
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to.”
“How long have you been sitting here, Mulasim?”
“Not long. A few minutes? You know you’re not supposed to come up here, right?”
“Yes, I do know this.” He smiled. “Are you aware of this?”
I smiled back. “Special occasion.”
“Indeed?”
“It’s my birthday.”
“Well, then, happy birthday, Mulasim.” He put the book under his leg, mimed applause.
“How do you say ‘happy birthday’ in Arabic?”
“Eid meelad sa’eed.”
“I like that,” I lied worthlessly. “I’ll try to remember.” We sat quietly for a moment and I sensed him wishing I’d leave. Suddenly not wanting to be alone, I forced him to keep talking to me. “What’s with that book, anyway? Always meaning to ask you.”
“This?” He pulled the book out from under his leg. “It is just something I study. Something I like.”
“Can I see it?”
He hesitated. Then shrugged and extended the book my way. “Certainly.”
I held the tattered title page up to the moonlight and read the faded words. “Huck Finn? Really?”
“Of course.” Dodge kept his hand out, wanting the book back.
I flipped through the pages, thick with handwritten notes in both Arabic and English. “You really read this? I mean, this is hard for a lot of Americans.”
“Of course. As I have said, I study it.” He closed his hand a few times, growing more insistent, so I returned the book to him.
“Where did you learn to speak English? Been meaning to ask you that, too.”
“School.”
“College?”
He cringed. “I am told not to discuss that.”
“Oh, that’s right. Sorry.” We sat quietly again until I found something else to talk about, some other reason to keep him there. “You and Doc Pleasant seem to get on well. I’m happy to see it.”
“Yes?”
“Sure. You’re both new to the platoon, still. And you know—good to have a buddy.”
“Do you think so, Mulasim?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“Because I have observed you somewhat, and you appear to have no friends at all.” He waited for a moment for my reaction, then pressed on regardless. “Today is your birthday? And you come here alone?”
“True enough.” I laughed. “I do have friends. Just . . . not around here.”
“Not around here.” Dodge nodded knowingly. “Yes. To have friends in this place is quite problematic.”
I looked over at him, examining his face in the moonlight. His features, loose and easy with the platoon, here in the dark struck me as pitiless. He seemed to almost scowl, eyes fixed on the river.
“I’m not sure about all that.” To show him that I wasn’t clueless, I added, “Look, I know you can’t be happy about . . . us. You know. Being here. But I hope we can be friends, anyway.” What a jackass thing to say, I thought.
“Do you truly believe that I am upset about that, Mulasim? About the fate of Saddam?”
“What, then? Why can’t we be friends?” I smiled and scooted over to nudge him, trying to keep it light.
“Because when you have friends, you have people.”
“Sure. But that’s a good thing, right?”
Dodge shook his head. “You misunderstand. People have enemies. Other people. People with a reason to cut off your head. All it takes is the one friend. Like you. If I am your friend, then all Americans are my people, and everyone else is my enemy. If I have friendship with a Kurd, then the Kurds are my people and I must fight the Sunni and the Shia.” He waved the back of his hand at the river. “You cannot have friends, here. You cannot have people.” Then he added with a sigh, “Only family.”
I waited a moment before speaking. “You have family, Dodge?”
He sighed. “I have a father and a brother. That is all.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good, then.”
“What of you, Mulasim? Do you have a family?”
I rubbed my hands together and nodded. “Sure. Sure. I have parents. A mom and a dad. They still live together. Still married.” It occurred to me that this detail about my parents’ intact marriage, always so essential when talking to Americans my age, might not be relatable to Dodge. My thoughts flashed back to the two envelopes. Marceau’s mom and dad and their different addresses.
“My parents, they’re teachers,” I added. “My mom teaches French and my dad is the high school principal. He coaches the football team, too. American football, I mean. Not soccer.”
“Brothers or sisters, as well?”
“One sister.”
“Is she attractive?” Dodge asked with a smirk. “This might give me a reason to be your friend, if you are still so concerned.”
“I suppose so.” I laughed. “She’s older than me. Of course, she’s married. Pregnant with her first child, actually.”
“You will be Uncle Mulasim soon, then?”
“Just Pete. Uncle Pete.”
“Mulasim Uncle Pete.”
“Even better. Leave it there. Unnecessary Uncle Pete. Nice.”
We sat quietly again, for a full minute with nothing left to talk about.
Finally I said, “You know, anytime you need to go see your family, let me know. We can get you an escort.”
“Thank you. Shukran. But that would not be possible.”
“Don’t want to see your father? Your brother?”
“I fear they do not want to see me.” Dodge smiled.
“I doubt that.”
“You should believe me, Mulasim.”
“All right, then. I’ll take your word for it.” I left it at that. I stood to leave. A good leader would let Dodge have the view. “Have a good night, then, Dodge.” I dusted off my trousers. “Good talk.”
“Eid meelad sa’eed.”
I turned and began plunge-stepping in the loose dirt, sliding down the berm.
“Go and telephone your parents, Mulasim,” Dodge called down to me.
“I hear that a lot.”
“You must. Or else they will be disappointed.” I saw him pull out his book.
I remember having a thought, just then. Something I wanted to share with Dodge on my birthday, but impossible at that distance.
It’s us, I thought. We’ll be disappointed. We’ll remember this war as the last time we were disappointed by our parents.
I kept it to myself, letting him read in the moonlight.