The room smelled of rot. I couldn’t determine the source, couldn’t parse it from the other odors—the rain outside, the bouquet of wildflowers in the corner, the foul stink of angry men in sweat-starched uniforms and man-dresses. Still, after another breath, there was no mistaking it. There was rot somewhere.
Twelve of us had gathered in Fat Mukhtar’s sliver of a meeting room. The attendance of the Big Man, Captain Vrettos, and an Iraqi Army major meant I didn’t have to speak; the presence of the mukhtar and a host of other tribal leaders meant I still needed to listen.
“The sheiks demand fasil for all the dead but Azhar,” Snoop said. His voice cracked with angst. “They will not budge from this. They say all the others in the mosque were innocents.”
There’d been drama even before we’d arrived. At the outpost, the Big Man took one look at Snoop’s ski mask and plastic rifle and said our entire company lacked discipline. Captain Vrettos had tried to explain the complexities involved, to no avail. Snoop had saved his job by taking off the mask and setting down the plastic rifle. Time would tell if he’d traded it for his life.
Pallid Arabic brought me back to the meeting. Fat Mukhtar rose from the rug like a false idol, joints cracking, knees popping, the cement wall behind him bracing his back. Once he finished unfurling, he pointed to the far wall. The watercolors of American rivers and forests still hung there, but the mukhtar’s index finger wagged above them, at three portraits. His finger moved from frame to frame, tracing invisible lines.
“He wants the American officers to look,” Snoop translated. “Those are the men who ruled here before. The one on the left was his great-grandfather, who worked with the Ottomans.” The size of a paperback cover, the hot wax painting displayed a young man with a long, broad nose and a little chin. Soft curls bounced across his head, and his eyes were like two brown suns. “The man in the middle, with the beard? He was the mukhtar’s grandfather. He worked with the British to overthrow the Ottomans.” This man was middle-aged, the black-and-white photograph capturing an august face and rigid body, clenched fists dangling from arms tucked neatly into a dishdasha. Had he met T. E. Lawrence, I wondered, perhaps on the famous march to Damascus? “The third man? His father, who worked to bring down the last king of Iraq.” Larger than the others, and slightly crooked, this color photograph presented a man more like the heir, round and mustached, dressed in olive fatigues and holding a large-caliber revolver. He possessed a physical poetry his son lacked, a sort of grace fixed in the photograph.
Have those always been there? I thought. Or did Fat Mukhtar bring them out for today? That felt likely, though I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps I hadn’t noticed them before.
“The mukhtar says he works with Americans now,” Snoop continued. “Americans who will leave, as the Ottomans and British left.”
Captain Vrettos loosed a soft whistle. The Big Man made a feeble attempt to explain why we were different. He mentioned clearing, holding, and building. My eyes moved from dead face to dead face to dead face. I tended to think that those who came before were worthier, more distinguished. At first glance, the same held true for these Iraqi tribal leaders. But Fat Mukhtar’s great-grandfather, he of the biblical eyes, also had pouty lips. And his grandfather’s mouth hung open, like a fool’s. And his father—he must’ve posed with the gun for show, as tightly as he gripped it. I remembered Lawrence had been stationed in the outpost of Cairo only because his superiors had deemed him a goof and a nuisance. I belong here as much as anyone, I thought. Because at least I have the goddamn dignity to question being here to begin with.
“Lieutenant Porter.” It was the Big Man. “Update us on your Muslim soldier.”
The fatwas were old news, so none of the Iraqis acted surprised. The Big Man seemed to want them to be. Every time I bumped into Ibrahim at Camp Independence he looked more despondent than the last, but he never whined or complained. He just said “One day closer” over and over again, until I left him alone.
“We have nothing to do with that,” Fat Mukhtar said, slumping against the wall and sliding down it, resuming his seat. “That’s the Cleric.”
“Not possible,” the Big Man said, his fingers stubby rocks aimed at the mukhtar’s head. “Lieutenant Porter’s platoon got him last month. What was his name again?”
“Haitham,” I said, staring at a triangle of light from the window’s reflection that’d gathered between my legs. His black-and-white mug shot was wedged into my Lawrence book along with every other document I didn’t know what to do with. “His name was Haitham.”
“And it was you who led us to him.” Captain Vrettos spoke now, his voice charged with a voltage I didn’t recognize. Recent events had amplified the pressure on him from higher, though the Big Man had supposedly refused to fire him when pushed to by the generals. I looked at Captain Vrettos and clucked my tongue to try to calm him, but his red-faced exhaustion had eyes only for the mukhtar. “You fed the Rangers that information. So, with Haitham dead, just who the hell is dictating the fatwas?” The volts surged. “Someone here knows the fucking answer to that.”
The room turned helter-skelter. Tribal leaders shouted at one another and at us, fingers wagging, fists shaking; the Big Man yelled at Captain Vrettos, who yelled right back, saying he was sick of ignoring the obvious. I pulled my knees tight to my chest and watched the triangle of light dance between my legs. I wondered what Rana was doing. Probably hanging laundry to dry, or demanding Karim lie down for his afternoon nap. She’d said her husband would be home all week. She’d have called otherwise.
I looked up at the portraits of the dead men and sighed. We said we wanted peace. What we really wanted was calm, something else altogether. They said they wanted peace, too. What they really wanted was power, which maybe wasn’t something else altogether. After we’d destroyed their mosque, it was tough to argue otherwise.
One of the tribal leaders, a younger guy I’d met at Abu Mohammed’s wake, started shouting, “Nina leven, fasil! Nina leven, fasil! Boosh! Boosh! Boosh!” I winced. Captain Vrettos flipped him off with both hands, which made the Iraqi yell louder.
Through all the noise, I smelled decay again. I watched a man with a large lip sore and a salt-and-pepper beard emerge from the corner to shush the other Iraqis. The stench seemed to be coming from his sandaled feet, his toenails little gnarled knives poking out at the world. Wearing a gray dishdasha and a red-and-white checkered turban, thick wrinkles splayed across his forehead, sagging in the middle. Yousef’s eyes studied the spaces between the men in the room, one a deep hazel, the other the cloudy brown of cataracts. I realized where I’d seen him before, even before the patrol through the sandstorm. He’d been the man demanding fasil at the car accident in the spring. I wanted to ask why a falafel man had been invited to this meeting, but stayed quiet.
“This isn’t the time for blame.” Snoop translated for Yousef with taut exactitude, as if he were afraid to neglect even a syllable. “We’ve all lost friends, American and Iraqi. While it seems wise to keep the American Muslim away, we must remember the death sentence was also placed on brave Iraqi soldiers.” The IA major nodded vigorously. “And we must remember the neighborhoods of Ashuriyah are being covered with lists of targets stuck to telephone poles. Sunni and Shi’a. Not all are just threats.”
While Yousef continued, I watched the faces of the other men in the room. Wasta isn’t a thing to pursue, I thought, or even possess. It’s not just power. Yousef knows this, and that’s why he has it. Despite the Sahwa contract, despite the luxury sedans, despite all the bombast and circumstance, the mukhtar didn’t. One glance his way showed he knew it, too.
Yousef was still speaking when Fat Mukhtar interrupted. At first the older man tried to speak over him, but when the mukhtar continued, he stopped and turned his head toward the ceiling, exasperated. Fat Mukhtar then stood up again to shout down his opponent. An argument ensued, one voice restrained and firm, the other wild as a roller coaster. The rest of us sat in awkward silence, watching while pretending not to.
“They argue about who’s in charge,” Snoop said slowly. “Fat Mukhtar say this is his house. The falafel man tells him to calm down, this is not the time.”
Fat Mukhtar spat on the ground toward Yousef’s feet and wiped his palms together like he was cleaning his hands. He said something to all the room with his arms spread wide and turned to Snoop and me, jerking his head to the door. Then he stormed out, slamming the door behind him.
Snoop’s voice returned to a robotic pitch. “The mukhtar say he’s the only one who can stop the terror men,” he said. “Then he tell LT Jack and me to go outside with him, since everyone else here just wastes time.”
“Go,” the Big Man said. “Settle him down, we need him here.” I stood, and Snoop began to do the same. “We need the terp.” Anticipating a protest, the Big Man waved me outside. “Be creative, Lieutenant. Put that liberal arts degree to use.”
I scooped up my helmet, slung my rifle, and walked out into a chalky sun.
• • •
The mukhtar stood in his driveway rubbing the hood of a black Mercedes. He watched me approach through the reflection of the tinted windshield.
“No Snoop,” I said. “Bosses. Mudirs.”
After sneering at the house, he burped and pointed at the fleet of Land Rovers and Mercedeses in his flagstone driveway. Then he pointed back to himself with his thumb, the digit disappearing into a pit of white cloth.
“Bayti. Mine,” he said, the English word like a pepper shaker in his mouth.
He gestured to follow him down the driveway. We walked under a canopy of palm trees, most of them sagging from overwatering. Some of the rolls of carpet that covered his lawns had bunches in them, little green tufts that belonged on a miniature golf course. The estate overlooked the Villages from a ridge wedged between hills. Below us, irrigation ditches zigzagged through hamlets with gridded care, a network of blue forcing structure upon dusty bedlam. In the far north, the sluggish waters of the canal gleamed, partially cloaked by the fruit groves. To the south was nothing but desert and dried-out ravines, and to the west—to the west Rana lay in wait, an exile in her own land.
“Mine,” Fat Mukhtar said, spreading his arms wide to encompass everything from the canal to the villas behind us. “Mine.”
We approached a group of Sahwa and jundis gathered near a woodshed the mukhtar used as an arms room. Across the gravel road, four Strykers sat like sleepy ogres, the tops of headquarters soldiers poking out from the hatches. I considered forcing some of them to interact with their Iraqi counterparts, but decided not to. How had Shaba put it in his love letter to Rana? “They are here to survive and endure, not to change.”
I exchanged shaku makus and knuckles with the Iraqis on duty. One of the khaki browns shied away, turning his back. It didn’t take me long to figure out why: Azhar’s brother wanted nothing to do with an accord. He kept his thin shoulders straight and cocked and tossed the shiny rifle in his hands from palm to palm.
“Salaam,” I said to him. There was no reply. He remained facing away, northward. I looked at Fat Mukhtar and arched an eyebrow. He shrugged.
“Mine,” Fat Mukhtar said, referring to the Sahwa guards. Then he patted the laser sights attached to the jundis’ rifles. It’d taken some wrangling, but the supply guys at Camp Independence had come through. I’d honored the deal with Saif, though he would never know it.
“Mine,” he said again, pointing to my chest.
“Yours,” I corrected.
He shook his head and grabbed a laser sight with one meaty hand and my shoulder with the other. “Mine,” he said.
I closed my eyes and sighed.
As I opened my eyes, ready to convince Fat Mukhtar to go back to the meeting, I saw a familiar shape peek from behind the corner of the squatty woodshed. I pushed past the mukhtar’s arm and stepped over a strand of razor wire. Around the corner huddled a sullen teenager, more stick figure than man.
“The fuck?” The Barbie Kid lifted his good eye to me, his unibrow a dark question mark of its own. He still wore pink sweatpants, but his shirt was an oversized khaki top, like the Sahwa wore. New sneakers covered his feet, white socks rising up his calves like garden snakes. He remained huddled, even when Fat Mukhtar waddled up and clapped at him.
“Sahwa,” Fat Mukhtar said. “Jadid.”
Through broken Arabic and broken-er English, Fat Mukhtar conveyed that he’d hired the youth after the death of Haitham. They’d been family, he reminded me. It was the right thing to do.
I hadn’t seen the Barbie Kid since we’d hit the small roadside bomb west of Ashuriyah. I’d wondered many times if he’d been a lookout for that attack. Now I knew whom he’d have called—not that it could be proven. I asked where his weapon was.
“Hah!” A dam of laughter broke in Fat Mukhtar’s throat. He acted out shots hitting all around a target and then said, “No bueno!” since the last thing we needed was a third language. Under the dim of the shed, the Barbie Kid watched on in fury.
Fat Mukhtar clapped again, barking instructions. This time the Barbie Kid stood, walked into the shed, and picked up a broom and dustpan from the ground. The mukhtar nodded toward his house and I followed, certain I’d just found another piece to the puzzle that was Iraq, but bemused as to where to place it.
The mukhtar moved quickly for a man his size, his steps sturdy and pronounced. I matched his strides, figuring him ready to return to the meeting. But we walked past the rusty door to the front room, instead heading into a courtyard that bisected his four eggshell villas. More artificial grass greened the lawn, a small red gazebo marking the center. Three women sat in the gazebo, their colorful abayas a rainbow against the dull sky. They were laughing and folding laundry, watching a group of children jump on a trampoline in the yard. The toucan Sinbad croaked nearby, its heavy keel bill scrounging the bottom of its cage for seeds. I found no sign of the mukhtar’s imaginary Syrian bear. The thin wife, dressed in purple, noticed us first, hushing her companions and pointing to their husband and me. They all donned face veils and bowed their heads. Meanwhile, the children had lost all interest in their jumping and ran to us.
There were six of them, the eldest a girl of about ten, the youngest a little mukhtar clone I guessed to be Karim’s age, my mind drifting westward once more.
“Mine,” I said, slapping Fat Mukhtar on the shoulder, ruffling the closest boy’s hair. I put my hands out and let them play with the hard plastic that lined the knuckles of my gloves, though the eldest rolled her eyes at this.
Fat Mukhtar beamed proud and stroked his goatee. “Mine,” he said. He started quizzing his children on their studies; I picked out words like “math” and “spelling” from the conversation, but the rest blurred by. Then he clapped his hands, the children scattered, and he waved me on. I pointed back to the front house, but he shook his head. The wives remained motionless and silent in the gazebo, one of them still midfold with her husband’s tracksuit. As we passed, Sinbad hopped across the birdcage and stuck out its bill. The mukhtar stroked it, but when I tried to do the same, it snapped at my finger and flapped its wings. I cursed and said I was glad its wings were clipped. Fat Mukhtar just laughed.
We continued to one of the rear villas. He opened a large metal door and held it open, gesturing for me to walk in first. The inside of the room was drab and dank. I felt Fat Mukhtar’s grin more than I saw it, the left side of his mouth curving higher than his left. Images of beheaded soldiers and journalists came over me like a hood, bodies without heads, heads without bodies.
I couldn’t even remember the list of things that American soldiers were supposed to recite under torture. Name. Rank. Social Security number? Why the hell would al-Qaeda care about my Social Security number? I walked into the room.
I held my breath and remained in the near corner while Fat Mukhtar followed, my ears hunting the shadows. He closed the door, a slice of gray light under the frame the only illumination in the room. He shuffled along a wall searching for something, bent over at the waist. I heard the pop of a prong entering a socket. Arcade neon blinked to life, revealing a blocky game meant for a mall.
“Big Buck Hunter?” I tried to embrace the moment as I took in the toy shotguns and virtual deer running across the arcade screen, but couldn’t. “Why do you have this?”
Fat Mukhtar answered with another “Mine.” I was familiar with the game from drunken bar nights in college, but how a machine had ended up in rural Iraq seemed too absurd even to try to comprehend. Fat Mukhtar grabbed the green shotgun and tapped its barrel against the screen.
“Ali babas,” he said, calling attention to the antlered bucks. Then he tapped at a group of does. “No ali babas.”
I flashed a thumbs-up to signal my understanding. The room smelled of sour mildew; the worn couch in the back and mini fridge filled with wine coolers suggested the mukhtar spent a lot of time here. I turned back to the machine, where Fat Mukhtar was setting up a match for two players. The level read ALASKA. He nodded to the orange shotgun, and I replaced my real gun with a fake one. High-definition cartoon Kodiak wilderness washed over our faces.
The sight was off, shooting half an inch high, but I adjusted during the first round, killing two bucks. Fat Mukhtar doed-out right away, which eliminated him from the round. He leaned into the screen with his gun, holding it under an armpit rather than squaring it into his shoulder. He watched me finish the round. I was up two hundred points.
“Surf’s up,” I said with a wink. Fat Mukhtar grunted, but I saw the mischievous curve of his mouth return.
The second round regressed to the mean. I hit a doe early when it dashed in front of a buck drinking from a snowy stream. Fat Mukhtar proceeded to hit all six bucks in the round, culminating with a head shot in the far distance. He seized the lead, laughing deeply, jowl wobbling.
The fucker had rope-a-doped me, I thought, something the third round confirmed when he killed five bucks to my one. He knew the board like it was kin, displaying foreknowledge of open shots and an accuracy he’d concealed at first. He’d wanted to watch me shoot to learn my strengths and weaknesses. Whereas I was reacting to the game, he anticipated it. There was a counterinsurgency lesson in this somewhere, but I had neither the time nor the patience to figure it out. The war didn’t matter anymore. Wiping the grin off the mukhtar’s fat face did.
Down a breezy 1,100 points, I had two rounds to redeem myself. I knew I couldn’t win fairly, he was too good, too aware of what was to come. While the game loaded the next board, I asked myself what would vex him the most.
I smirked at my own genius.
The screen instructed us to GET READY. I turned to Fat Mukhtar and smacked him on the ass, shouting incoherently and cupping a saggy cheek a beat longer than necessary.
He cursed and dropped his gun. I had free rein of the board, a frost-ridden forest where I had to contend with trees and does alike. By the time the mukhtar had regained his weapon, I was pumping the kill shot into my sixth hide. I was now 120 points away from the lead.
Fat Mukhtar’s face quivered with anger, and he started to walk into me, belly first, until I raised a peace sign and pointed to the screen. He rearranged the green shotgun under his armpit in a salvo of Arabic vulgarities. As we waited for the sixth round, blocky letters of GET READY formed on the screen. We crouched in the wait, his feet parallel like he was at the O.K. Corral, mine staggered and clenched as I’d been taught in training.
The board began. A doe stood alone in a field, eating grass.
“Sheika,” Fat Mukhtar said. Then he chanted. “Ra-na. Sheik-a. Ra-na.”
He knew. Somehow, some way, he knew. It didn’t bother me, though, or rattle me. It infuriated me, and as soon as the first antler pierced the edge of the screen, I started pumping out shots with abandon. “Mukhtar, ali baba!” I yelled as the first buck went down in a glow of orange, awarding me the kill. “Mukhtar!” In the back, under a large pine: a twinkle of dark brown. I deemed it worth the risk, and got bonus points for the distance. “Azhar!” A buck bounded down a hillside in the center of the screen, and we saw it in chorus. He shot it in the neck, and it didn’t go down. I shot it in the chest, and it did. “Motherfucking Cleric!”
A quick glance to the top of the screen showed that I’d pulled ahead by 350 points. One last buck zigzagged across the screen, a muscular devil that dodged bullets and does with aplomb. He needed to kill it to regain the lead. I needed to kill it to keep that from happening. Our toy shotguns crossed as the buck reached the center of the screen. It wouldn’t go down, as if our bullets were passing through a phantom. Fat Mukhtar howled murder, so I did, too. The screen turned red.
The ghost buck had slipped away, or so it appeared. We’d never know, because we’d each shot a doe, ending the round and ending the game. No one received points for the last buck.
I’d won.
He threw down his gun and then pointed to the screen, asking for a rematch. I shook my head. It was time for a victorious retreat.
I picked up my real rifle. “You say Rana,” I said, jolted blood still pumping. “I say Haitham. I say Fat Mukhtar is ali baba. I say Fat Mukhtar kill—Fat Mukhtar keel Haitham.”
He inhaled sharply, then bent over to pick up the toy gun he’d tossed. Standing back up, he ran a hand through his black thatch of curls and narrowed his eyes. “No,” he said, pointing at me. “Haitham mine.”
We’d been through a lot together, the mukhtar and me. And kept even more from each other. I was thinking about how easy it would be to shoot him in his own den when someone banged on the door twice. There was a blast of raw light.
“There you are.” It was Captain Vrettos. “Meeting’s over. Time to roll.”
I followed my commander outside without a word.
After the war found him and turned him into a martyr, I often wondered what thoughts flitted through Fat Mukhtar’s mind as we walked out of his courtyard that day. There must’ve been many.
In the Stryker, Captain Vrettos said that we’d relented and agreed to pay fasil for all the mosque dead but Azhar. Lose a battle to win the war, he said.
“That Yousef guy is something else,” he continued. “Wish he was more active in the community. It would have been good to work with a man like that.”