The afternoon bloomed desert reds and desert golds. We waited at the front gate of the outpost for the two brothers to collect their blood money. They were late.
“Arabs,” Snoop said, spitting out sunflower seed shells onto the dirt path, his voice filling the sticky May air. “Not like the Sudanese, Lieutenant Jack. We are a timely people. And consider-ate. Arabs make jokes about clocks not following time. Not even funny jokes.”
The soldiers tasked to wait with us agreed with our young terp; it was my crew, two on the ground, one in the Humvee’s turret behind a limp machine gun. They all looked as hot and bored as I felt, our body armor and helmets like shackles fixing us to the ground. We need to build that sentry shack, I thought, if not for safety, then for some goddamn shade. Without it, we had no choice but to wait in the open, blast walls behind us, fat sun above, the little town of Ashuriyah to our front.
“Chill, guys,” I said, beads of dirty sweat running under my helmet and down my face. “Their cousin got shot for driving down the road. Funeral probably ran long, that’s all.”
“We didn’t kill him,” Alphabet said from the turret. He took a swig of bottled water before continuing. “First platoon did, trigger-happy cowboys. Who do they think they are, the SEALs?” Then he burped, loud and proud, wronged as only a young soldier pulling someone else’s duty can be.
I agreed with him, but couldn’t let him know that. So I told him to make himself useful and scan the two-story apartment buildings across the dirt road to our south. He grabbed the binos and stood on his tiptoes, his wide, blocky frame limiting his mobility.
“Empty and abandoned, sir,” he said. “Like always. Staff Sergeant Chambers says the guards on the roof should scan those buildings, not us. He says we couldn’t do anything from here even if we needed to.”
I seethed. Escaping Chambers was impossible, like his shadow had been stapled to my heels. “I don’t care what Sergeant Chambers told you,” I eventually said. “I’m the platoon leader. Not him.”
Another forty minutes passed in slow drips of sun. We killed time with great precision, skipping rocks and telling stories of home. Stories of girls, stories of late nights and foggy mornings, stories exaggerated and stories seared into outright lies. The desert heat bleached everything, including the minds and memories of its occupiers. Alphabet once drank a fifth of whiskey in an hour. Dominguez lost his virginity to a friend’s aunt. Hog had cliff-dived into the Arkansas River from fifty feet up. Snoop knew a girl in Baghdad’s Little Sudan neighborhood who said he had the biggest dick in all of Mesopotamia, and who was he to question her?
“Got any good stories, sir?” Hog asked.
“Hmm.” I stroked my bare chin and considered. The frat boy in me wanted to participate. But the officer in me demanded I tread carefully. “Didn’t party much in high school,” I said. “But in college, I went to class in a SpongeBob bathrobe for a semester.”
I patted my slung rifle for effect. The soldiers laughed. The younger guys liked hearing stories about college. It gave them something to look forward to after this, even the ones who knew they would never use their GI Bill funds.
The soldiers started talking about the platoon roast slated for that evening, before our night patrol—a rare scheduling blip, with no one on guard duty or out of the wire. One of the cooks had traded with a local storekeeper for a goat. I reminded them that I’d been invited, so any General Order No. 1 violations would have to be furtive. I laughed to let them know they could, too.
The sound of a car motor droned through the still, coming closer and echoing off the blast walls. My chest seized up, and my muscles went taut. I wasn’t the only one: like figures in a diorama, we took our places, poised and alert.
We were what we pretended to be.
As the ranking enlisted man, Dominguez took the lead, walking through a maze of razor wire set across the dirt to impede car bombs. Hog followed, moving with more self-consciousness but less care. Alphabet rotated his turret from side to side, like a swivel, to remind the approaching car he was up there and so was the machine gun. I assumed my place behind the last strand of wire, shoulders cocked, back straight, head rigid, visualizing how the imperial officers of the past had stood when they bought peace for their country in strange lands far from home.
The car pulled up to the checkpoint, its driver idling the engine. Dominguez instructed both the driver and the passenger to get out. It was a blue sedan, similar in make to the one shot up by first platoon. The Iraqi brothers stood to the side, where Hog patted them down and then searched in and under the car. After the driver opened the trunk, Dominguez shouted a strident “All clear!” The soldiers and Iraqis began walking around the wire strands, and I went to the back of the Humvee for a black canvas backpack filled with stacks of hundred-dollar American bills, twenty-five hundred in total.
We called it condolence funds. They called it fasil. Blood money seemed most apt, though Captain Vrettos had freaked when I’d called it that the previous night. “That’s cynical,” he’d said. “We can’t afford to be cynical right now.” I’d wanted to argue that the army’s distortion of language was far more cynical—“military-age male,” for example, militarized any Iraqi with a penis between the ages twelve and sixty, whether a harmless shepherd or a zombie Zarqawi—but one look at the commander had suggested he wasn’t interested in philosophical debate. For such a slender man, he could be quite intimidating; there was something feral about his unkempt hair and ever-thinning eyebrows. So I’d just said “Yes, sir” and left it alone.
We converged in front of the Humvee. I’d expected the brothers to arrive in traditional man-dresses because of the funeral, but both wore the uniform of the urban young man on the prowl: tight dress shirts open at the collar, pressed slacks, narrow pointed leather shoes that shined like sunspots. Both wore long, tidy mustaches and smelled of ginger; the one I presumed to be older had rolled up his sleeves to display a heavy gold watch, while the younger one kept thumbing prayer beads in the palm of his hand.
“Salaam Aleichem,” I said, raising my right hand to my heart and cupping it.
The older Iraqi stared at me with hard, angry eyes, two black stones rolling across a flat berm of a face. Snoop chewed his lip while Dominguez waved the soldiers back to their positions at the gate. I looked past the brothers and up at the sun and reminded myself that I was the one with the gun.
It was the younger Iraqi who ended the standoff. “Salaam,” he said, curtly.
I turned to him and spoke. “Snoop, tell these guys the money is all here. They can count it out on the hood of the Humvee. One will need to sign a contract stating receipt.” Snoop nodded and started translating before I interrupted him. “They can’t keep the backpack. Battalion needs it.”
Snoop nodded again, pursing his lips and tapping his foot in the manner of a professional athlete feigning deference to a referee. I waited out their conversation, watching a large roach the color of sand shimmy across the ground. Then I remembered that Iraq didn’t have roaches, and even if it did, they didn’t have two claws and a raised trident for a tail. I took a step back while Snoop tried to smash the scorpion with his boot. It escaped under the tire of the Humvee.
“Fuck,” Snoop said. “A shaytan.”
I shivered in the heat. Getting blown into gut soup by a roadside bomb? I’d reconciled myself to that possibility. An unseen sniper’s bullet eating my little eternity like a goat eats a can? I’d never know the difference. But the chance of a silent assassin in hard-shelled bug form lying in wait under my pillow or in one of my boots had proven a recurring panic. The things didn’t even bleed. I looked back up at the Iraqis. The older brother was glowering, all flat-topped aggression, while the younger brother fiddled with a dead tooth in his mouth, eyes still hunting for the scorpion. Then the older one grabbed the contract from Snoop and signed it on his brother’s back. While he did this, I noticed his signing hand had the pinky nail grown out. It gleamed in the light. He shoved the sheet of paper at me and barked at Snoop.
“He say . . . well, I not tell you. But their cousin was no ali baba, he say. He worked the date groves by the canal.”
“And the part you didn’t translate?”
Snoop sighed. “ ‘To the eyes of Hell.’ An Iraqi slur.”
I nodded and stuck my hands in my pockets. My feet ached. So did my right collarbone, that old bane of a wound. An exoskeleton of sweat had formed under my body armor and uniform. No amount of water would end the drought in my throat. My men had already been out here for too many hours and wouldn’t be relieved until this was over. In theory, I wanted to empathize with these men who’d lost a loved one to an ignorant, violent occupation they called the Collapse. In theory, I found the exchange of blood money by any name, in any culture, to be abhorrent. In theory, my memories of their dead cousin’s sundered intestines and his wailing mother meant something more than just still-shot photographs soaked in gore. In theory, in an air-conditioned classroom I’d once sat in with great clarity and wrath, I would grasp and grapple for a solution that bridged this vast divide, because it was the right thing to do, because right things to do were worth grasping and grappling for, and not just in air-conditioned classrooms.
In practice, though, things were different. They just were.
“Insha’Allah,” I said, back straight, shoulders cocked. I folded up the contract and stuck it into a cargo pocket. Then I walked to the outpost, leaving any regrets at the gate, discarded waste for strangers to take away in the dead of night.
At the entrance, I cleared my rifle and stuck my muzzle into the tin barrel, jerking the trigger with a quick squeeze. Click. No negligent discharge for me. The heat stayed at the door, a loyal ghoul that would await my return.
The foyer was cool and bracing. The air was tinted orange and filled with dust—no door could keep out the desert sand. Trudging up the stairs to the living quarters, I looked up at the fresco covering the wall. I blew a kiss at the Mother Hajj and told Pedo bin Laden to leave the children alone. Both stared back, unsmiling.
• • •
I needed to nap before our night patrol. The soldiers wanted to raid a house, but battalion intel had no houses to raid. Instead we were to escort the engineers as they filled potholes along the highway to the east. The field-grade officers referred to counterinsurgency as “a thinking man’s war,” which appealed to the left coast elitist in me, but deep down, I wondered how thoughtful using money as a weapon really was. It could get complicated, certainly, and messy, like downstairs at the gate. But thoughtful?
At a metal rack upstairs, in the hallway, I stripped away the apparatuses of war and hung them on hooks one at a time. There was a ritual to donning armor, deliberate and purposeful, like the warriors of old dressing for battle, but taking it off always seemed an exercise in frenzy. The helmet came off first, my scalp gasping for air; then the slung rifle; the knee pads that were really extra-large elbow pads because my matchstick legs couldn’t hold real knee pads; the elbow pads that were in fact elbow pads; then the vest that held our extra rifle magazines and Jolly Ranchers. I ripped apart a set of Velcro straps at my sternum and lifted the body armor up and over my shoulders, a turtle escaping its shell, and set it on the tile floor. I’d shed sixty pounds of gear in ten or so seconds. Once I bent over and loosened the laces of my boots, I felt human again.
Our boxy, windowless room smelled of dirty mop water. Along the near wall, at the foot of the bunk I’d once shared with our old platoon sergeant, our new platoon sergeant was rifling through a cardboard box of books.
“The hell, Sergeant Chambers,” I said. “Those are my things.”
There was no response, so I repeated myself.
This time he looked over with slate-gray eyes and smiled. Bits of dark brown snuff covered his teeth. His tan, sweat-stained undershirt was tucked in, and flip-flops peeked out from the bottom of his uniform pants. He usually napped through the late afternoon.
“Lawrence of Arabia, sir?” he said, lifting a faded, dog-eared copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom I’d ordered online months earlier. “Self-aggrandizing bullshit. You should’ve gotten the abridged version. Saved yourself some time.”
We were alone. He always managed to fill a room with his presence, each slight movement a little tremor of possibility. I’d never noticed it before, but his hands, large and ragged, shot out of his forearms rather than tapering in from them, like he didn’t have wrists. I walked over to the box and pulled out another book, squaring my shoulders. Built like a piano, he had more than a few pounds on me, but I held a sizable height and reach advantage, if things came to that.
A puncher’s chance, my brother would’ve said. A fool’s hope, my mom would’ve replied.
“What about Che?” I asked, holding up a copy of Guerrilla Warfare. Its thinness flapped in the fan’s wind. “Viva la Revolución?”
He snorted. “We offed that fuckstick in the Bolivian jungle. La Revolución no viva,” he said.
These books were the only possessions in Iraq that I cared about. I wanted to tell him to stop challenging my authority all the damn time, not to mention stay out of my personal effects. But the moment necessitated restraint. He was the new platoon sergeant. I needed to work with him, at least until I could figure out a way to link him to the alleged kill team. A thinking man’s war, indeed. I exhaled through gritted teeth, slow and sure, and smiled.
“It wasn’t technically ‘us,’ ” I said. “But true enough.”
He set down the Lawrence book and walked across to his own bunk, six hollow-eyed skulls on the underside of his right arm swaying like voodoo on a string. After putting a large wad of dip into his mouth, he kneeled on the ground and pulled an olive-green trunk out from under his bed. After unlocking it, he reached in and grabbed a thick paperback.
“Want to read about insurgencies?” he said, tossing it to me. “Don’t read their own mythologies. It’s all propaganda. Read that,” he said, pointing to the book I’d caught. “That’s how an empire deals with the barbarians.”
“Huh.” It was Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul. “Didn’t know you were such a reader. But Caesar didn’t write propaganda? ’Course he did.”
He snorted again and slurred through the dip nestled in his cheeks. “Try this one, too,” he said, throwing The Confessions of Saint Augustine in my direction. “If you’re into that sort of thing.”
He locked the trunk and slammed it back underneath his bunk. I pretended to study the back cover of his second book recommendation. I’d read it before. Parts of it, anyhow.
“Tell me, Lieutenant.” I put down the book to find Chambers a foot away from me, looking up with those damn gray eyes. His chest rose and fell in slow breaths like hills, and he smelled of wet tobacco. “What do you think we’re doing here?”
I studied a crack in the Sheetrock of the rear wall. “Making a fucked-up situation less fucked-up, I guess,” I said. “You were over here when civil war seemed inevitable. The Surge pushed everyone back from the brink. We need to maintain that.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his head tilting, wanting more—of what, I didn’t know. “What about you?”
He forced a choked laugh. Then he blinked, finally. “I’m a simple cog in the machine. Just a door kicker lucky to have his high school diploma. Don’t get paid to think.”
“Well.”
He started walking back to his bunk, but then turned around. “One more thing. We got to change the platoon name. Hotspur? That shit is amateur hour. We need something hard.”
“I like Hotspur,” I said. “It’s got panache.”
“Panache.”
“Yep.” I realized I’d been leaning back into my bunk’s frame, arms crossed, copping the posture of a street hustler. I decided to be firm. “The name stays as long as I’m the platoon leader.”
Chambers shrugged. “No worries. I’ll be here for years after you leave. For three, four platoon leaders. It’s all about the endgame. Don’t they teach that at officer school?”
I grunted and told him I’d see him at the roast later. Unable to find sanctuary in my own room, I spent the next hour in a part of the outpost I was rather unfamiliar with: the small gym across from the terps’ room. Dumbbells didn’t provide answers, but they did provide purpose.
• • •
I walked outside to the back patio. Night was near, the mating call of beetles just shrill enough to rise above the nearby generators that powered the outpost. Four wood picnic tables sat on a concrete slab, each squad assigned a table, forty men in sweat-starched uniforms ready to eat. I saw Chambers at one of the far tables, so I took a seat at the nearest one, next to Doc Cork.
“Welcome to family dinner, sir,” Hog said, across from us. “Smell that meat? I heard it’s ’cause one of the cooks is old friends with Sergeant Chambers. Celebrating his promotion.”
I turned to watch the goat rotate over the burn pit. It was plump, moving in slow revolutions, like a clock without a minute hand. Two joes stood at each end of the goat, turning it with a steel rod held up by stakes. Burn pits were used for all sorts of refuse, from classified documents to used batteries, but it seemed suitable for roasting local cuisine, too. Cotton candy smoke billowed from the pit, drifting west.
After waiting for the soldiers to cycle through the food line, I grabbed a plastic tray and heaped mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and deviled eggs onto it, skipping the salad bowl. One of the cooks put chunks of tender, pink goat meat on my plate. It smelled of heavy pepper. In theory, I detested the military-industrial complex that made things like fresh deviled eggs in the desert possible. It was wasteful. It was excessive. It further separated us from the townspeople we’d been charged with protecting. That was all true. In practice, though, indulgence filled stomachs, and included ice cream for dessert.
The goat proved too chewy. Most of the soldiers around me ate with abandon, though, like some unseen, angry parent would emerge to punish them if they didn’t clean their plates. I ate slower, stopping when I got full, pushing around what remained on the plate so it looked like I’d eaten more than I had. My stomach had always been a bit of a princess. I washed the meal down with a cold can of Rip It, flat fruit punch with a special jolt that’d keep me awake for the night patrol.
As I ate, I listened to the soldiers argue about whom they’d rather have sex with, Jessica Alba circa 2006 or Shakira circa 2008. I declared myself team Alba. Doc Cork said both of them were too skinny, he needed a woman with some meat on her, a thick ass, too, which sent the table into hysterics. Each of the tables hummed with similar banter; we rarely got together as an entire platoon anymore, and never at the outpost. Once dinner ended, I stood up on the bench and clapped my hands.
“Hotspur!” I said. “Settle down. Want to say it’s great to be together in the same place since . . . well, Kuwait. Two more things: third and fourth squad, we still have that engineer escort tonight. Also, join me in recognizing our new platoon sergeant. Congratulations, Staff Sergeant Chambers. We’re all looking forward to working with you in your new position.”
After the applause faded out, the men began chanting, “Speech! Speech!” Chambers grinned, tucking his overbite behind his lower teeth, and waited them out. A dim sky now hung over us, with only red lens flashlights and the blaze from the pit illuminating the area. Someone tended to the fire with lighter fluid, swelling the flames wide and red. Chambers moved in front of the pit to speak. Because of the slight incline of the hill, and the way the flames danced shadows up and down his silhouette, he seemed a pastor delivering a dark sermon. The pealing cadence in his voice reinforced it. Wayward souls, these soldiers were, but not beyond his redemption. Not yet.
“I want to tell you all a story. A war story,” he said. “Listen to it. Learn from it. The best soldier—the best man—I ever knew was a noncom named Elijah Rios. We deployed here together, a couple years ago. He was bona fide, a real warrior. I owe everything to him. He saved my life.”
His eyes moved from man to man in slow consideration.
“Before we left, we thought we were steel. But even those of us who’d deployed before didn’t know what hard was. Not yet. Our platoon sergeant, he had an idea. Kept saying it wouldn’t be like the Invasion, or Afghanistan. That the war had changed, evolved. Kept calling us youngbloods, to try and get us focused. We thought it was a big joke. Ha fucking ha.
“He was right, though. Things were raw. Got hit every day. Daisy-chain IEDs. Snipers. Even a female suicide bomber once. This was before the generals bought off the insurgency. Before the sheiks turned on al-Qaeda. It was everyone against everyone, and everyone against us.
“Got intel one night that an al-Qaeda group had moved into a Shi’a neighborhood, going around and executing people. Trying to get everyone to vacate so Sunnis could move in. Didn’t think much of it, was happening all over Iraq, on both sides. Just another mission, we thought.
“Didn’t know the exact house they were in, just the block. So we sent the whole company. Set an inner cordon, outer cordon, whole nine yards. But anyone worth a fuck wanted to be kicking down doors, going house to house. That’s where I was. That’s where Elijah was.
“First eight or nine houses were all dry holes. Tenth house, everything went to shit. First room, we found a guy loading an RPG behind a couch. We shot him in the face, but then all his buddies knew we were there.
“That fatal funnel in doorways you hear about when you learn how to clear rooms? No fucking joke. Took three squads for that one house. Eight enemy spread across five rooms. Eight.
“Killed them all.
“Three wounded, one dead on our side.
“Should’ve just blown the house up with a tank round, but higher wouldn’t clear it. Collateral damage, they said. So it was up to us. The grunts. The trigger pullers. The goddamn infantrymen. That’s why we’re here, gentlemen. To do what no one else can. What no one else will.
“Somehow, some way, we pushed our way upstairs. Couldn’t make sense of anything, everything was too dark or too bright in the night vision. A grenade went off, couldn’t hear, neither.
“Three of us stacked outside one of the last rooms and reloaded. There was no door, and we could hear a voice on the other side, fucking with us. Say what you will about al-Qaeda, but they weren’t cowards. Not the real ones.
“I went in first and saw a flash of light, of movement, in a corner. So I turned that way. I shot twice, and glass exploded everywhere, falling to the ground. Shots came from behind at the same time. All I could think was, Fuck. I’d been had.
“The bastard had set up a mirror so I’d go that way, chasing his reflection. He had a clean shot at the back of my skull. If the guy behind me hadn’t recognized that, I’d be dead. If the guy behind me hadn’t pulled his trigger faster than hajj pulled his, I’d be dead.
“That guy was Elijah.
“I didn’t know what to say. I think I sputtered out thanks or some shit. He just looked at me and nodded. ‘I got you, youngblood,’ he said. ‘I got you.’ ”
I no longer heard the beetles or the generators, and neither did anyone else. My right leg twitched and twitched and I swallowed loud, looking around to see if anyone had heard me. Chambers continued.
“Elijah had a philosophy he lived by. De Oppresso Liber. Anyone hear that before?”
Even if someone had, no one spoke.
“Means ‘Liberate the Oppressed.’ It’s the motto of the Green Berets. Elijah planned on joining them after our tour. He didn’t just say it, either. Had it tattooed on his chest. He fucking meant it. He fucking lived it.”
Someone in the shadows shouted, “Preach,” which was echoed a few times. Chambers pressed on.
“Some of the squad leaders and team leaders here know what I’m talking about. They saw it, too. Humvees swallowed in fire, bodies liquefied by metal and heat, all because of a wrong turn or a gunner not spotting a wire fast enough.”
The sound of helicopters, attack birds, moving from Camp Independence sliced through the night. Rather than let them interrupt his benediction, Chambers raised his hands, palms up, and absorbed them into it, the rotors his very own monk chants. It all seemed quite natural, somehow. It really did.
“Hear that?” he shouted over the WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH of the blades. “Savage. That’s what this is all about. Staying alert. Staying ready. Staying vigilant. They’re gonna get some before they get got.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes as the birds flew south, toward Baghdad. His head drooped down. Seconds passed in a shrouded hush. Then one of the joes up front quietly asked what’d happened to Rios.
Chambers opened his eyes and smiled. His voice lowered, and I couldn’t tell if he was betraying the quiet sort of rage that lingers within men after something vital, something matchless, breaks inside, or just faking the same.
“Dead,” Chambers said. “Because he didn’t stay vigilant. Even he—I’m telling this story to show it can happen to anyone if you let down your guard, even for a moment. Don’t think that because the war seems over that it is. Right now, out there, men are plotting to kill you. To kill your friends. And like those birds, the only way we make sure that don’t happen is to get some before they do. You hear me, Hotspur?”
“Hooah!” the platoon grunted in unison.
“I said, ‘You fucking hear me?’ ”
“Hooah!” They were louder this time. Fiercer, too. I wasn’t sure if he was done. Part of me hoped so.
Part of me didn’t.
Something blossomed out of the dark near the pit. It crawled under the firelight, then down the hill, capturing Chambers’ attention. He raised his boot and then thought otherwise.
“Get a cup,” he said. “One of the large ones.”
It was a camel spider. I’d seen them before—at a distance, though, not like this. Yellow with brown fur, it was thick like a cigarette pack. It kept poking its front pincers and gaping angry jaws at us as we passed around the cup. Some sort of insect blood, probably beetle, was splattered across its mouth like a child’s art project.
“Men,” Chambers said from the other side of the fire. “Heard some of you caught a scorpion at the front gate. True?”
I was about to answer that we’d just missed it when a voice beside me spoke. “Roger, Sergeant. Mean little fucker.” It was Alphabet.
“He upstairs?”
Alphabet nodded.
“Bring him down,” Chambers continued. “What better way to end the night than a prizefight?”
As Alphabet went inside, I sought out the gate guards from earlier. I found Hog first. He explained that after I’d left, the scorpion had reappeared from under the Humvee.
“One of the Iraqi brothers grabbed it,” Hog said. “By the tail. Then we put it in a jar.”
They set up a ring next to the bonfire, a cardboard box with its bottom pushed open. They dumped the camel spider in first, and it poked the walls of its new prison, all four corners and two square feet of it. Testosterone bogged the air, and red flashlights flitted over the ring like police sirens. I looked around and didn’t see jaded boredom anymore but something else.
I wondered if I should stop the fight. I decided not to. I wondered if I should leave the fight. I didn’t.
“No need to be queasy.” Chambers spoke to me from across the ring. A red light shined up from a wristless fist onto his face. “Your man Lawrence did this. It’s a proud tradition.”
“All good.” I grinned. “Who you got?”
“Scorpion,” he said. He must’ve smelled the stink of easy money on me. “You thinking spider?”
“Everyone knows the scorpion always wins. I’m not that green.”
He winked. “Guess not. How long you think the spider will last, then? I’m in a betting mood.”
The soldiers crowded around us, shouting suggestions, picking sides. I studied the two combatants. The camel spider was at least twice as big as the scorpion. Besides, I reasoned, it’d take time for the scorpion’s venom to seep into the spider’s bloodstream, or whatever circulatory system spiders have.
“Two minutes,” I said.
“I’ll take the under,” Chambers replied. “How’s a hundred bones sound?”
I nodded. I had faith in the big ugly.
Most of the soldiers did not. I looked around and, intentional or not, nearly all of them had slid over to Chambers’ side of the ring—and the scorpion’s. Through the firelight, I spotted a friendly face.
“Et tu, medicine man?” I said.
“Sorry,” Doc Cork said. “Like you said. Everyone knows the scorpion wins.”
I nodded again and felt a hand on my shoulder. “We’re with you, sir.” I turned around and found Alphabet standing behind me, heavy Slavic gaze holding steady, with Hog next to him. “What’s two minutes?”
Then he burped loud and proud, reeking of digested goat. I’d never loved another man more.
Dropped from its jar, the scorpion landed on its feet, and the camel spider went straight at it, jaws wide, fangs bared. Under a spotlight of red incandescence, the camel spider trying to pierce the scorpion’s exoskeleton with its pincers, the scorpion bobbing and weaving to keep clear of the spider’s bloody furnace of a mouth. The smaller creature was soon boxed into a corner, maintaining leverage due to a jagged pebble. I needed the spider to stop being so aggressive, but asking an arachnid to go guerrilla and outlast its opponent rather than murder it as soon as possible seemed pointless, so I just shook my fist and howled. Similar sounds emanated from around the ring. The camel spider sank its front pincers into the top of the scorpion’s shell and began pulling it into its jaws, a long, slow death march. I howled again, something resembling the word “yes” rising from the wilds of my chest. The camel spider began gnawing on the scorpion’s head. The arthropod held off ingestion by ramming its claws against the bulk of the spider and shoving, a sort of dark arts horizontal push-up. Then it raised its trident. My eyes snapped wide as the tail moved back and forth, to and fro. The spider stopped chewing, hypnotized. Like a black lightning bolt, the scorpion plunged its stinger down into the camel spider, straight through a bulbous eye. A horrifying rattle followed, something like a leaking balloon, and the camel spider collapsed on its belly, pincers out.
“Time?” someone asked.
“Eighty seconds,” Doc Cork said, reading from the digital green of his wristwatch. “Team Scorpion wins.”
I bellowed bitterly as Chambers and most of the platoon cheered and crowed.
“See, men,” Chambers said. “That’s what happens when you hesitate. A motherfucking stinger comes for your brain. Don’t be that camel spider. Be the scorpion.”
The scorpion freed itself from the dead spider’s jaws and took a victory lap around the dirt ring, claws raised. I accepted Alphabet’s offer of a cigarette, even though I didn’t smoke. Chambers asked if I could pay him next time we made a run to Camp Independence, and I said yes. Then he used two cups to collect the scorpion and started walking to the perimeter gate. The soldiers protested, saying they wanted their prizefighter for future bouts.
“Keep a scorpion as a pet?” Chambers yelled behind him. “Do I look crazy?”
He tossed the scorpion, cup and all, over the gate and into the desert. Some of the men kept grumbling, but it’d been done. There was nothing left to do but search for a new contender, if they cared to.
I lingered at the burn pit for an hour. Soldiers drifted into the outpost two or three at a time, calling each other youngbloods, telling one another to “be the scorpion.” Only Alphabet remained. Perhaps sensing my mood, he stayed quiet. I coughed my way through the first cigarette and then asked for another. As I watched the fire smolder into loose petals of ash, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d just lost something important, something that mattered, even if it was just a pretense of that something.
I pulled an assault glove from a cargo pocket and picked up the spider from the ring, holding it in front of me. A thick, green jelly oozed from the hole in its eye.
“It thought it was tougher than it was,” Alphabet said, walking close to study the carcass himself. “Tricked us into thinking that, too.”
I tossed the camel spider into the burn pit.
The desert seemed still, placid. I spat onto the ground and tried to sound ironic.
“Insha’Allah,” I said.
“Yeah,” Alphabet said. “Something like that.”