Knife (9780698185623) (3 page)

Hagan spat some part of himself on the floor. “I bet a guy'd have to shit in the sink right now, huh?”

“Probably,” Shaw said.

Hagan nodded and then looked at Shaw like he smelled something out of place. “Where the hell are Cooke and Mass?”

•   •   •

C
ooke had his kit, ruck, and hop bag lined up immaculately in front of his locker. He still hadn't been in the bay since Hagan and Shaw arrived, but Dalonna said he saw him messing with his weapon in the arms room after he got back from the bathroom.

Cooke always seemed to be messing with his weapon. He had a dry sense of humor, was hard to understand or get to know, and unnerved people in general. He was dependable, a natural, and probably some kind of redneck genius. He didn't talk a whole lot, but when he did he had a way of being heard without ever raising his voice. The team watched
Jeopardy!
every day in their bay on a little analog TV they had wired up and Cooke always won even though he claimed to have never graduated from high school and Shaw was the one with a college degree. Cooke was from the red-rock brambles of far West Texas, beyond Odessa and Pecos and civilization in general. He could run forever and bench twice his weight despite the standing myth in the squadron that no one ever saw him in a weight room. He also had a habit of lying about his family life.

During their first few months together, Shaw and Cooke were shooting partners on the range one day and Shaw asked Cooke about his family. “My dad liked his whiskey,” Cooke said, spitting on the dirt. “He liked beating us with electrical cords, too.” Shaw didn't remember his response to that, conversation killer as it was, but remembered sending a mag downrange and that they didn't have a whole lot of in-depth discussions about Cooke's family after that. Later on, Shaw found out Cooke had told Hagan his father was an angel preacher who never raised a hand to anyone but the blacks. The team confronted Cooke about it and he had a good laugh and told them his real father went to Vietnam and the jungle swallowed him for good. Cooke said he was adopted by lesbian nuns from Sacramento. The men never found out about his real home life so they just stopped asking. Shaw had seen long scars on Cooke's lower back, though—thin and red and knotted like a worn-out rope—so Shaw figured he lied about his past so he didn't have to relive it. Shaw could give him that. Cooke would take over the team if anything happened to Shaw.

Hagan pulled his footstool next to Shaw and offered his tin. “They were huge, man.”

He sounded sad, was looking at his feet like he had spilled something on his boots. He looked like a puppy after a shaming.

“The tits? I know, Hog.”

Shaw grabbed a bite from Hagan's tin and settled it into the groove he had going at the time. Upper jaw, left side. They had to rotate their sweet spots or the gums would start to blister and thin,
Get all cancerous and shit,
an older operator had warned Shaw years ago. He worked the upper left to rest his lowers.

Chewing and dipping was an art form. No one smoked because of the cherry tip that'd get them blown away and the smoke signals that'd do the same, so their jaws were always packed to the brim. Every man had his own sweet spots and preferences. Long cut, fine cut, leafs or plugs. They dipped or chewed because they were bored and because it calmed them and sometimes just because they needed something to focus on to keep from focusing on everything else. Shaw was a long-leafer but accepted a dip whenever offered. Refusing a man's tin was almost an insult. Teams sat in circles in their bays like Hagan and Shaw the whole pit over, drooling or otherwise spitting straight streams of juice into empty bottles. It was an operator's version of a peace-pipe ritual. Guys who had given it up or never chewed or dipped to begin with even had a habit of keeping gum where the tobacco would've gone. It must have felt right to them. Hagan wasn't picky. He liked his tobacco like he liked his women. Whatever's available.

“I think I love her, Shaw.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“What's her name?”

Hagan looked like he was giving it a thought for a second, and then smiled, shrugged. “Hell, I don't know. Claire, or Meredith. I think I called her Mere and Claire at different times last night. Man, she was hot.”

“Did she get pissed when you called her the wrong name?”

“I don't remember.”

“So you love Mere or Claire?”

Hagan laughed. “Probably not, I guess.” Then he crossed his foot over his thigh and looked up at the ceiling, let out a slow breath. “This'll be the one, man. I'm not coming back. I know it.”

Hagan was a bruiser, brawler, and womanizer but a softy underneath it all. He talked about dying all the time. He would admit to being scared with no reservations or second thoughts and then switch gears immediately and talk about something else: tits, a drum set, something that was growing on his nuts. One time he told Shaw he dreamed his own death the night before.
It was
a real bloody mess,
he'd said. Then he brightened and asked if Shaw knew anything about neurons and glial cells.
Not a lot, Hog,
Shaw told him. Hagan shrugged and turned away, and Shaw looked up the definitions later.

Shaw packed the dip together with his tongue and swallowed the stray flecks.

“No, it won't, Hog.”

Hagan looked at him and raised his eyebrows. Then he shook his head. “Huge, man.” He whispered it over and over, quietly, until he trailed off and was silent. “Huge.”

Huge.

•   •   •

T
he wind was blowing through the open doors leading outside the pit as they made their way to the arms room to get their weapons. The burnt leaves and crops added a harsh bite to the air and it smelled like football and sunny fall weekends. Sweatshirt cookouts.

The arms room was a lead-and-metal paradise. Racked full from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, black metal and camo-painted weapons from pistols and snub-nosed little babies to full-sized scopers sat in metal crates, muzzles pointed to the ground. Suppressors and ammo crates sat stacked neatly in boxes like toiletries in a drugstore. The men could shoot whatever they felt like, whenever they felt like it. They shot every day and had classes and hands-on training with different historical and present-day weapons every few weeks, even though they would see the majority of them only as display pieces in museums. Gun nuts could get hard-ons daily and everyone could master new instruments to add to their steel symphony repertoires. They'd been messing with the German MP40 for the last few weeks and were getting a kick out of it. Some of the guys even had their grandfathers stop by to shoot what the Nazis had thrown at them in France and the Fatherland, and everyone enjoyed themselves like real Greatest Generation cowboys. Shaw held the MP40 in his hands and admired its sides as if the black metal would tell him something worth remembering. When he pulled the trigger he wondered if his grandpa was ever shot at with the weapon. It was likely, but he couldn't ask him.

Operators grabbed their weapons, racked them to make sure they were cleared, and slung them over their shoulders or fit their hands around the grips and stocks. They'd massage the ribs and divots lovingly, as if checking a newborn for deformities. Each weapon was sure to be the cleanest part of its owner. A man might let his beard grow scraggly, give up toothbrushing and showering for good, but his weapon would be clean at all times. Always. Men not yet fathers, or never to be, would find their babies in the metal molds of the weapons they carried. The men knew when their cough didn't sound right and what to do to fix it. They cleaned and pampered them, never let them out of their sight, and worried about them constantly.

Shaw and Hagan found Cooke sitting rigid in a corner of the gun room with his weapon disassembled in front of him. Cooke was slim but coiled with muscle, like a steel snake. He obsessed over his weapon, cleaned it more in a single day than he ate. He also mixed his dip with a little bit of gun oil, so there was that, too. Hagan tried it once and threw up. Cooke looked up at them and smiled. His hands were stained black with gun oil and he assembled his bolt without looking down at his hands.

“Boys.”

“It's clean, Cooke,” Hagan said. “Always is.”

Shaw grabbed his snub-nosed shorty, racked and cleared it, and looped the black sling over his shoulder and around his neck. Hagan did the same and they left the room.

“Save you a seat,” Hagan said over his shoulder, and Cooke gave a nod.

•   •   •

T
he ride to the blacked-out airfield took less than ten minutes. Gravel hit the undersides of the bus and the sweet southern air flowed through the open windows and wrapped around the men's faces. As the buses wound their way through the pines and red hills, Shaw's world slowed. Voices registered and carried through the cabin but in indecipherable sentences. The tones, pitches, and meanings lost in the rumbling of the bus. His hands tingled, so he wrapped them around his weapon. The grooves, dips, and metal ridges were familiar. Comforting.

Massey leaned in to Shaw.

“I'm on pill duty. Need extra?”

He was the second son to a Guatemalan mother and a white corn farmer from southern Illinois, and people laughed when they heard his name, thinking Martinez or Valdez would be more apt. Massey looked distinctly exotic, especially with a beard, but had a white man's name and couldn't speak a lick of Spanish. He was organized, and had a sweet tooth and an admirable knack for fitting in. He started conversations with strangers in supermarkets or gas stations and didn't walk so much as glide or saunter. He had friends everywhere. Everybody liked him. Even high-value targets would seek him out on objectives, probably trying to catch a sympathetic eye from a look-alike captor.

“I'll take a few,” Shaw said.

Massey gave him four packets, eight pills total. Shaw could've probably killed himself if he took them all together.

“Save me a seat by the shitter, huh?”

Shaw told him he would.

Approaching the airfield, the guys were talking either too much or not at all. The lit cabins of the four C-17s that were waiting for the operators and their gear were the only lights visible on the airfield. There was no parade or receiving line bidding them adieu or good luck, and it would be the same when they came home. Most of their families didn't even know they were leaving. They left in anonymity and returned the same way, if not in boxes. If guys had the chance to let their wives know they'd be gone, the women wouldn't be able to tell their kids where Daddy had gone to because they often didn't know themselves. He was just gone, sometimes for good. They hoped he'd come back. The buses downshifted in groans and hissed to a halt. Men grumbled awake from short sleeps, stretched and yawned to wake themselves. Shaw shook Hagan's shoulder.

“Let's go, Hog.”

Sprawled over the seat across the aisle in a jumbled heap, Hagan had fallen asleep. He snored and drooled, and true to form, he woke up and wiped some spit and snot off his shoulder and onto the back of the seat to his front. He smiled and shouldered his pack, sprang to his feet, and ran off the bus. The clean air was ruined by the harsh diesel spitting from the buses and the aviation fuel splattered all over the runway. It smelled like oil changes and greasy kitchens. Shaw's beard danced in the wind on his way to the lowered ramp of one of the C-17s, and Massey took his place opposite Slausen, beside the entrance of the bird. The two medics stood across from each other, handing out Ambien to the operators as they loaded onto the plane.

Slausen was missing one of his front teeth and had a problem taking in stray cats. The men joked that Slausen's heart would take them in but his brain would forget he was gone most of the year. The cats would tear his place to shit, clawing one another to death for food. The guys made sure to come with him when he got back home from hops to see his reaction. He'd walk into his place after months of being gone and say,
Again? Goddamn,
all thick in his mountain-man accent. As if the concept of starvation and neglect shouldn't apply to his animals. He told bar girls he was a hockey player and liked to give his cats milk—when they were alive—by shooting it from the gap of his missing tooth. One night he was attached to a four-man perimeter team stationed outside the objective while two teams cleared the inside of the home. The first team breached the doorway and cleared the first floor without finding anything more than a wife and her two young children asleep on the kitchen floor. When the second team hit the stairs leading up to the second level, the perimeter team saw someone open a window above them and drop a grenade, then tumble out the window after it. The explosion blew an arm off one of their guys, so Slausen slapped on a tourniquet, but not before Slausen leveled his weapon and put two in the head of the guy who had just come tumbling out the window. One of the wounded guys said Slausen hit the guy while he was in the air, and the other claimed it was after the landing. Either way, the window jumper had an eight in his forehead. Two holes with a shared middle. Slausen finished bandaging the wounded man, then flicked away an apple slice–sized piece of shrapnel smoldering in his calf. Squadron lore was that he was smiling and brushed it off like some crumbs he'd spilled on his pants. Smiling during the ordeal or not, Slausen was still missing half the calf of his right leg. It wasn't hard to imagine him grinning without that front tooth while his flesh burned and blistered. He was an animal.

“For your zzzz's, you goofy bastard,” Slausen said, tossing a bag of Ambien at Shaw's chest. He winked. “Save me a seat by the shitter?” Shaw told him he would, and then Slausen gestured behind himself with his eyes wide. Shitter seats were prime spots. Foot traffic and fumes were better than navigating over sleeping team members sprawled out on the floor. Step on some groggy or drugged-out buddy's balls, stomach, or head on the way to the john and the aggressor would have his own knocked around some.