I'd Walk with My Friends If I Could Find Them (2 page)

“Giants.”

“You like Barry Bonds? 'Cause he's a prick. Probably got nuts the size of gnats.”

“Hit three-forty-something, forty-five homers. He'll beat it this year. You'd take him in a heartbeat.”

“Shit. Yankees don't need him. Don't make a hat big enough for his planet-sized 'roid head.”

“Oh, damn,” Wintric says. “Yankees fan.”

“Maybe that's what we're giving these kids—some nice, fatten-you-up steroids,” Torres says and rips another rubbing-alcohol pad from its wrapper. “Creating a superrace of Afghanis that can hit a baseball a mile.”

“Torres, you dumbass, have some compassion,” Big Dax says while tending to a girl with a goiter. She stares at him as he tries to wave her on.

“You're done,” he says.

She doesn't move.

“Done. Go. Now.”

She blinks twice.

“Go.”

“She wants candy,” the interpreter says.

“No candy,” Big Dax says. He joins his right thumb and index finger, brings them to his open mouth, and shakes his head.

“No. Candy. No. Candy.”

The girl stands still. The goiter bulges from the side of her neck, the flesh brushing her deltoid.

“No. Candy.” He nods at the interpreter. “Translate, please.”

“She understands you.”

Big Dax grabs the girl beneath her arms, lifts her, turns her away from him, and sets her on the ground. He places his huge hands on her lower back and pushes her just enough so she takes her first step away.

“Come on now,” Torres says, “where's the compassion for the greedy one?”

“They have nothing to do with us being here.”

“You don't know that. These kids could have plenty to do with this,” Torres says.

“Don't piss me off, Torres.”

“Doesn't take much strength to dig a foot down, put something in the hole, cover it up. Bet some of these arms have done some digging.”

Wintric sees Big Dax's left boot tap the ground.

“Fight your urge to be a little bitch,” Big Dax says.

“We got staying-alive problems,” says Torres. “So you're right, I'm a bitch. Guess I'm a scared bitch that wants to live.” Someone off by the goats laughs. “I don't want the fucking dirt road exploding on our way back.”

“Don't listen to him, Ellis. The road's fine. And Torres, don't talk shit about these kids. You know the life expectancy of these dudes?” Big Dax asks, straightening his six-foot, eight-inch body. He pauses, and Torres scratches his neck. “Low thirties.”

“I must've checked the Doctors Without Borders block instead of the U.S. Army,” Torres says. “My mistake.”

“If it was your kids in line here, you'd think different. If it was your kids that wouldn't see thirty-one . . .”

“These aren't my kids.”

Stretching his arms above his head, Armando Torres examines the diminishing line of children. Not a single child appears nourished, and as he touches their arms and hair and holds their hands and the anger inside him, he thinks of his two daughters. His mind goes to Camila, his oldest and the prettier one, who refuses to eat anything unless she has a dollop of crunchy peanut butter on her plate. Four years old and tearless at his base sendoff. He was proud of her strength, but now he fears the indifferent expression she wore as he walked away.

Torres used to sing the ABCs to his girls every night while he tucked them in, and the tune comes to him now, in this gorge. It calms him. After a while he leaves out the letters and hums.

Wintric says, “You know any Metallica?”

Torres ignores him and continues to hum. He considers the minuscule amount his daughters are growing each day, how Camila will be old enough to play catch when he returns, how they might want to tuck themselves in.

“Incubus? Deftones?”

After delivering the shots, the men wait around with some of the now antibodied kids and a collection of Afghan amputees. The wind has picked up, and the injured glance up every now and again, waiting for their limbs to fall from the cloudy sky. The C-130 is late.

“Jim Abbott had one arm,” Big Dax says as the men sit and pick at the ground.

“Who?” Wintric asks.

“He had an arm,” Torres says. “Was missing a hand.”

“Threw a no-hitter,” Big Dax says. “For the Yankees.”

“Did he use?”

“Why would you use if you have one arm?”

“One hand,” says Torres.

“Jesus, Torres, who cares if it's an arm or a hand?”

“It's a big difference.”

“He didn't use,” says Big Dax. “Not like your boy Bonds.”

“They'll never prove it,” says Wintric.

“Look at a photo of him with the Pirates side by side with one of him on the Giants,” says Big Dax. “I'm a Jersey-educated man and I can tell the difference. It's not broccoli.”

“Your Yankees signed Giambi,” says Torres.

“Yep. And he's sure as shit dirty. You see, that's how it's done. Just admit the worst and move on. What's jacked up is that everyone on the West Coast wants to believe. No one trusts their eyes.”

Nearby an old man unfurls a red-and-brown rug as the children gather around and join the limbless adults in prayer, their voices echoing off the valley walls.

“They know not what they say,” Torres says. Wintric guesses he means the children, repeating the chant they've heard since birth, but maybe he directs the jab at the entire group, kneeling and bowing and rising in unison.

“And they'll kill that one before too long,” Big Dax says, nodding at a young man, maybe sixteen, standing and running his fingers through his dark hair as the others pray. “‘Motherfucking infidel' is what the rest are thinking. They seem like they're praying, but they're begging for that dude to be hit by lightning.”

“He's not praying,” Wintric says.

“Holy shit, Ellis,” Big Dax says. “You're a genius.”

“But.”

“Think about it, brother,” says Torres.

“But the dude is . . . local.”

“Do you know there's someone, right now, playing the trombone in Afghanistan?” says Torres.

“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”

“There's an Afghan right now, in this country, looking at porn,” says Torres. “Someone planting a bomb, reading Hemingway. Someone building a bridge, listening to Celine Dion, getting off, not praying.”

“Yep.”

“Don't let it surprise you,” Torres says.

“Fine,” Wintric says.

“Not everyone wants to kill us,” Torres says.

“Seems like they do.”

“You haven't been here long enough to say that. You haven't done shit. You're a baby.”

“I'm in this valley,” Wintric says.

“You're a kid.”

“I'm here like you are.”

“You heard of the saying ‘Be polite, but have a plan to kill everyone you meet'?”

“No.”

“Too bad,” Torres says. “It's some Marine shit, but it's perfect.”

“Yep.”

“There are a ton of people praying that we all die,” Torres says. “Enough to keep us sharp.”

But Wintric has stopped listening. He eyes the young man combing his hair with his fingers as the others rise and bow, rise and bow, not twenty feet from him. The move is something Wintric performed a thousand times before his enlistment, and he raises his right hand and rubs the stubble on his shaved head, still sensing the phantom weight of his once-long hair. Wintric wants to know what the young man is thinking, wants to ask him how he can just stand there, doing nothing. Is he afraid? Bored? Something else? The young man scratches his crotch and the atmosphere of wonder lessens. Still, Wintric wants to rise and walk over to him, but he fights the impulse and stares at the grass between his knees. He digs a clump up and inspects the individual blades.

Wintric isn't yet aware that Torres's comment will stay with him: occasionally, in the future, when he witnesses something out of the ordinary—in this country or his own—he will think,
Someone's playing a trombone.

At last a C-130 lumbers overhead, drops a flagged transmitter, then circles back. High above, a parachute opens. Two crates full of prosthetic arms and legs float down to them. Torres recalls watching Air Force Academy cadets drift under blue parachutes, then he wonders out loud if the Afghans think Allah is a C-130 pilot, or the plane itself.

“Rain down the healing,” Torres says.

Big Dax says it's all about personal will and raises his thick arms to the sky.

“Do they thank Allah for our bombs?” he asks.

Wintric stays quiet. He stares at the crease between his forearm and biceps, then fingers the skin there. At Fort Carson he saw soldiers with new carbon legs and arms, men and women, usually silent and alone, rubbing on their bodies, their stumps. He peers over and studies the armorless Humvee they will ride back to base. The hulking vehicle seems invincible, but he's seen videos of convoy ambushes: the dark cloud, pressure shock, and heavy Humvees slamming back to earth as mangled coffins.

Wintric already longs for his 1985 Ford Bronco. He installed a six-inch lift, a tow kit, and oversized, gnarly mud tires. The tire-tread hum on the highway drove Kristen mad, but he would take her mudding, or farther still into the forest to fool around. Sometimes he'd take his revolver and throw lead at squirrels, paper plates, or posters of basketball players he used to hang in his room.

But here, deployed half a world away, his back-slung rifle has the safety on, and he doesn't know when he'll need to summon his shooting skill. He considers the menacing but helpless Humvee and hopes that when they're done today, the dirt road will just be a dirt road.

Once the replacement body parts are sorted by limb, the three men help fit everyone. Most of the arms are too long or the wrong shade of skin, but the limbless smile, cry, hug the soldiers. After everyone has been fitted, a few artificial legs are left over, so the Americans send the confused villagers home with extras.

Before dark the soldiers climb into the Humvees, confirm emergency plans, coordinate with the other vehicles in their convoy, and start the engines. As they drive away, Big Dax rolls his window down and gives a thumbs-up to the newly limbed as they limp away, grappling with plastic legs piled high.

“Vote for us,” he yells.

A month and a half later, late on a hot July morning, red and yellow kites fly above Kabul. They veer and shake. One darts off, away, descending toward the roofs.

On a street corner, Big Dax, Torres, and Wintric scan the foot and auto traffic and swap stories. Smells of chai and lamb mix with exhaust from gridlocked vehicles. Wiping the sweat from his face an hour into their four-hour patrol, Torres oversells a harrowing skiing experience at Breckenridge. Someone whistles to their right before a car bomb explodes, the pressure fire blowing the men back.

Torres vomits on his boots and Wintric is knocked unconscious, then comes to with Big Dax cursing and dumping water onto his face before running off.

Bodies and flames, shit and screams litter the street. Dazed people run and stumble away.

Torres picks a scrap of metal out of his biceps, then reaches down to drag a silent girl away, and with his rescue yank the girl's shoulder detaches, the surrounding skin separates, and her thin arm slides from her body.

A man runs in to help and Big Dax almost shoots. A bearded man in white linen snaps photos, steps over slithering bodies. He covers a charred corpse's genitals with a blue cloth before clicking away at the carcass. He kicks the corpse before hurrying away.

Wintric tries to yell to him, but nothing comes out, and Wintric goes to walk, but nothing happens, and he feels wet inside and sees in waves. He screams but hears nothing, now aware that he is somehow trapped within his body.

Smoke and sky, someone firing a rifle into the air, then Big Dax, running nearby, waving at Wintric, saying something, nodding, thumbs up, then reaching far down, lifting him up.

Ambulances arrive in the dissipating smoke, then leave. People with various flags on their uniforms fill out paperwork, take photos, then depart. Afghan men and women shriek in the streets, then go, and workers tend to the debris that covers a once-busy intersection.

That evening, as Wintric dozes off in the corner, cleaned up save a smattering of dried blood spotting his throat, Torres listens to the calls to prayer. Torres's limbs and mind ache, and he sifts through the day's events. He touches the bandage on his arm and ponders the size and shape of the future scar. He monitors his fingers and wills them to stop trembling, but they refuse. Emotion pools within him and he finds himself on his knees, hoping to tap into some communal source of faith and belief. He tries to focus, but soon his mind drifts to the millions of people praying against him and his country. He pictures a vast field, an enormous crowd of white-robed men and women bowing in unison, the haunting force and beauty of mass synchronization.

Torres thinks of how he has taught his daughters to pray and what to pray for: safety, food, recovery. His younger daughter, Mia, is old enough now to speak a simple offering. Torres's wife sent an e-mail with the words Mia recited every night, said she always finished with “Thank you.” Torres envisions his wife, Anna, and Mia at the side of her bed, kneeling, with their elbows on the
Finding Nemo
comforter. Anna said they were working on “Amen,” but she thought that “Thank you” was just as good. For the first time Torres considers the purpose of “Amen,” and after whispering the word three times realizes he has no idea what it means. He considers waking Wintric, but he won't know, so he says the word one more time as the melody from the minarets filters through the window. In Afghanistan everything he knows about the world has a different name and, worse, he doesn't know the meanings of the English words he uses for salvation.