The Fearsome Particles (13 page)

Did Kyle eat the yogurt?

That was just my mornings, okay? So from that, maybe you can figure out what my lunches and dinners were like, and the expectations around my school marks, and my career choices, and my driving habits, and my sleeping patterns, and my clothing decisions, and my friends. And maybe it won’t seem quite so weird that I’d prefer spending a year in a dry-as-dirt, hot-as-hell military camp in Afghanistan surrounded by uncleared minefields and angry private militias to living in a luxury five-bedroom home on a street lined with big trees and
SUV
s.

I
t was a few weeks before I saw Legg again. I figured that was because our shifts were different –
COF-AP
employees worked pretty normal hours but soldiers were on duty for twelve hours at a stretch, so lunch and dinner times didn’t always match up. I looked for him, though, a few times while I was standing in line, getting my plate loaded up with rosemary-roasted chicken thighs or steak and potato pie or ground-beef burritos topped with Monterey Jack cheese (they had fish and pasta most nights too, and they served curries for the Kurds and the Turkish units that came through). A few nights, when the junior ranks’ mess opened up after seven, I looked for him among the soldiers
shooting pool or playing “Call of Duty” on the communal PlayStation. But he’d never be there and sometimes these guys would ask me if I wanted to join in one of the games they were playing. I guess because it looked as if I was waiting or hoping for something. It always surprised me, when they asked, and I always said no. And then I’d just end up sitting at the end of a couch for a while, staring up at the blue and gold Afghan rugs that somebody had wired to the roof of the tent. The designs were so intricate, there was lots to look at. (It didn’t seem so loserish at the time.)

Then came this one day when I’d had to spend pretty much my entire shift draining and flushing the whole treatment system – including the five-thousand-gallon holding tank – because one of the senior officers thought he’d caught a faint whiff of gasoline in the water he’d gotten from a tap. Which wasn’t possible; it was likely just an old Iltis vehicle with a fuel leak driving by, but that didn’t matter. After that shift I really felt like I deserved a beer (we were allowed two a night, although there was some talk of shutting even that down like they did in Kandahar, out of respect for the Muslims) so I walked into the mess and headed straight for the makeshift bar at the back and found myself standing in line right behind Legg. I could tell who it was from his dense brush of hair and the slope of his shoulders under his T-shirt. And the way he was griping.

“Fuck me! Fuckin’ wogs.”

He spun away from the counter empty-handed and began to push past me. I had to kind of wave my hand in his face.

“Hey, uh, hi.”

He stopped and stared at me like he didn’t know who I was.

“It’s me, from … remember? Kyle, from the –”

“Oh, yeah.” His glare cooled off and he shifted his head back as if he needed to get a better look. “Yeah, right, I remember. Water guy. Howsa hand?” He was half grinning and I couldn’t tell if it was because he was glad to see me or because he thought I was a joke. There was a loud clack and a shout from the pool table on the far side of the tent, and other soldiers and a few
COF-AP
types were pushing past Legg to get to and from the bar. He seemed ready to move on.

“Good,” I said, holding up my palm. “Your eye looks okay.”

Legg blinked. He seemed to be thinking. “Oh, yeah, fuck. I was done with that shit the next day. Hey, you gonna be needing both of those?” He thudded a finger against the laminated punch card hanging by a chain around my neck. Two punches on the day’s date and you were done drinking for the night.

I hesitated and looked down at my chest. It was strictly against the code of conduct to let someone else use your drink allowance.

“I dunno,” I said. “I guess.”

“No, see” – Legg ran a thick finger under his nose and then pointed off – “I gave my buddy over there one of mine because he lost his card, right? Fuckin’ asshole. And this piss-head” – he waved a hand in the direction of the bartender – “I tried telling him but he won’t listen to fuckin’ reason. So whaddaya say?” He grinned. “You’re prob’ly a water man anyway, right?”

I sort of shrugged. “Sure, okay.”

“Thanks, man.” Legg pounded me on the back. “Hey, if you want you can play some cards with us later.”

At the counter I asked for two beers. The bartenders rotated from night to night between a thin guy about my age who might have been Kurdish and a bored older woman with dyed black hair. Tonight it was the young guy.

“You want two?” he said with a frown, looking from me to a space over my shoulder.

“Yeah,” I said, “just ’cause, you know, so I don’t have to come back.” I waved my arm back and forth to indicate what a big hassle that would be.

The bartender hesitated for another second, then leaned forward with a shiny hole punch in his hand, plucked up my card and snipped twice. A minute later, when he set the two tall cans on the counter, he looked into my eyes. “These for you, yes?”

“Yeah!” I smiled, easing the cans away. “Of course.”

When I turned from the bar one of the maintenance guys from my tent (at the time I wasn’t sure whether his name was Joe or Joel) came up to me with this freaked-out grin on his face.

“Hey, do you know that guy, that corporal?” Joe/Joel was one of the ball-hockey players, a bit older and bigger than me. He’d never bothered talking to me before and now he had this look like he was trying to figure out if he had to take me more seriously.

“You mean Legg?” I had to shout over the Stones music coming from the far end of the tent, and this guy leaned in as if he didn’t want anybody else to hear.

“Is that his name?”

“Well, Leggado. Why?”

“He’s one of the D&S guys, right?”

I nodded.

“Do you know what they’re doing?” Joe/Joel scratched the side of his neck furiously. “I don’t know if it’s true. But some guys are saying that you can, like, rent one of the watch towers on the wall from them for a couple of hours.”

“Yeah?” I said. “What for?”

Joe/Joel looked at me as if I was missing some important features on my face. “To be with a girl.”

“Oh.”

In the briefings, they’d more or less spelled out that hooking up in the camp was a firing offence. If there was a girl you really liked, maybe you could touch elbows in the dinner line. By accident. That’s what they said.

“Do you think you could ask him for me?”

I looked down at the beers in my hand, and then back. “I don’t really know him that well.”

As I walked away, I could tell Joe/Joel was mentally scratching me off his list of significant people.

T
here were about three dozen bodies in the tent, so it took a minute to locate Legg. I found him seated at a table in the corner with four other soldiers, including a pretty female master corporal with a head of mousey curls. When I got there Legg shot an arm out.

“Hey, there’s my new best bud. Grab a seat!” He kicked out a chair at the end of the table.

As soon as I set the beers down, Legg grabbed both and slid them away. “Two! Even better; Tanner here was gonna ask you but now he don’t have to.” By Tanner, Legg seemed to mean a
big, moon-faced warrant officer with his foot propped on a chair and his forearm on the master corporal’s shoulder. Legg started to slide the second beer over to him across the plastic tabletop and Tanner leaned in for it before I could remember how to speak.

Then suddenly Legg swept the can out of Tanner’s reach.

“Fuck off, you! This is my buddy’s beer.” Legg grinned at me and slid the beer back. “Just kidding, eh?” He turned on Tanner again. “You woulda too, wouldn’ ya! Huh? Just take his fuckin’ drink without askin’!”

Tanner shrugged, helpless. “You were handing me a beer. Am I supposed to say no?”

“No fuckin’ manners!” shouted Legg. “You’re a disgrace!” He leaned back toward me, his jaw hanging loose and playful. “Don’t mind him, eh? It’s Kyle, right? Yeah, you gotta watch this one. All these assholes, really. ’Cept Zini. She’s pristine.” He raised his voice. “Right, Zini?”

Zini, the master corporal, was talking to a sergeant across from her. Now she stopped and showed us a resolutely peaceful face. “Are you causing trouble again?”

B
y the end of the beer I’d found out why I hadn’t seen Legg around for a while: he was being disciplined. On a Friday, two days after his ambulance visit, he’d been on Op Shield duty as one of the armed soldiers assigned to protect a group from
CIMIC
(Civil-Military Cooperation) who were out looking at possible project sites around Balakhet, things they could help fix up as a way to improve relations with the locals. At the eastern
edge of town, near one of the community wells, they looked at a bombed-out school that needed a roof. And there were a lot of Afghan men gathered around, which always made the military guys edgy because crowds could turn hostile pretty fast. So Legg was supposed to stick to the
CIMIC
group and stay alert.

Instead, he’d dropped back, because he’d noticed that all these people were actually spectators watching a strange event – a bunch of bearded men running across an open field, fighting with bright coloured kites. Legg said they were “goodprans” but Zini corrected him;
gudiparan
they were called. The object seemed to be for a man flying a kite to cut his opponent’s string before his own could be cut and his kite was sent flying off into the distance. The strings, Legg noticed, glittered in the sun.

“Ground-up glass,” he explained, jumpy like a kid who’d just found money in the street. “They smash up Coke bottles and shit. They grind ’em till they’re almost like sugar. Then they gum up the strings with some kind of sticky paste and roll them in the glass to make ’em sharp.”

“It’s called glue,” said Tanner.

“Huh?”

“That sticky paste is some kind of flour glue.”

“Yeah, whatever you fuckin’ – like you know shit about it.”

Tanner smirked as he lifted his glass. “I know enough not to go watching it when I’m on guard duty.”

Legg rose up and swung his arm as if to hit Tanner in the side of the head, but making the big man flinch seemed satisfaction enough. He sat back down and leaned in toward me.

“A lot of ’em wear gloves, right? ’Cause these glass strings’ll cut you up. But this one Pashto fucker didn’t. Guy’s all decked
out in his baggy pants and shirt, he’s got his beard down to here, right? His head’s wrapped up, he could be like fifty, who knows? So I’m watchin’ what he’s doin’, and he holds out his hand for me to see, and it’s all scarred like it’s been ripped up a hundred or maybe a thousand times. He’s been playing this game his whole life, so this hand’s like almost solid scar.” Legg was holding his own hand out and staring at it. “But thing is there was still blood all through here.” He traced with a finger where he’d seen the blood, where the little shards of glass had found a way into the skin.

“Guess he was equa-mouse,” I said.

Legg knocked a forearm against my shoulder. “You got that fuckin’ right.” He stared at his hand, closed it and opened it as if imagining it covered with scars. “Yeah, I’d like to see all that again. They bet money on it too, you know; I’d like to get a piece of that.” He played with the tab on his beer can, apparently lost in visions of fighting kites. “Anyways,” he said, pulling out of it, “one of the
CIMIC
motherfuckers reported me for dereliction and they put me on fuckin’ gate duty for two weeks.”

“Is that bad?”

“Ha!” Legg swelled up with glee. He shouted at Tanner. “Tanner! Hey fuckhead! Guy wants to know if gate duty’s bad.”

Tanner made a moon face of contempt that could’ve been a comment on my cluelessness regarding gate duty, or on the misery of gate duty itself.

“Gate duty?” Legg said to me. “Fuckin’ boring as shit. Twelve hours of this.” He dropped his hands to his sides and stared ahead zombie-like with his tongue lolling out. “They made me eat rations, too. You ever eat rations?”

“Uh, no.”

“Don’t bother. Then at nights I had to do kitchen prep. Which was okay because it’s the only way I got any decent fuckin’ food.”

Legg snickered at me and I snickered back. And in that perfect second I decided I should get up and leave. I should just say goodbye and go back to my tent before I said or did something stupid and ruined everything. I was about to push my chair back when I looked up and saw Joe/Joel.

He was slowly angling up to the table the way you see dogs figuring out their path to a squirrel. He glanced over at me, then grabbed a free chair and pulled it to a space across from Legg, and as he sat down I could feel my stomach going sour.

“You’re a D&S guy, right?”

Legg was slouched back in his chair fiddling with his beer can and he frowned across the table at this guy.

Joe/Joel glanced around nervously at Tanner and the others in conversation, then leaned in toward Legg. “I was wondering”

– he dropped his voice to a whisper – “who do I talk to about getting one of the watch towers for a couple of hours?”

“Hey!” Tanner turned back to Legg. “I just put it together

– it’s ’cause of you the mashed potatoes were shit this week.”

“What’re you talkin’ about?”

“You were on prep, and the potatoes were all lumps.”

“Yeah,” grumbled Legg. “And you don’t wanna know what those lumps were, either!”

The table laughed and Joe/Joel seemed to think he hadn’t been heard. He tilted his head to try and get Legg’s attention. “I’m serious,” he said. “Who is it I’m supposed to talk to?” He
pressed his chest into the edge of the table trying to get closer. “There’s this girl in the –”

“Who the fuck are you anyway?” Legg was squinting at him, his mouth bunched up with distaste. Joe/Joel started to glance toward me and I shot my eyes down at the table.

“Aren’t you in D&S?”

“So?”

“So I heard you guys could, you know, arrange for some privacy.”

“Somebody’s feedin’ you shit.” Legg waved him away with his beer can.