War of the Encyclopaedists (25 page)

29

The platoon slowly rotated over to the night shift. In the beginning of December, they pulled their thermal underclothes from the bottoms of their duffels. The seasons were turning.

The e-mail from Urritia in Landstuhl suggested that he was healing up nicely. But the rest of the platoon was losing it around the edges as the constant trickling of stress carved new and aberrant patterns into their personalities like underground streams in a limestone cave.

Thomas had purchased a Maglite flashlight with which he nearly caved in the head of a drunk local who had staggered up the exit lane after midnight. Montauk let Thomas keep it after he promised to use it only when legitimately necessary.

Not long after, Olaf told Montauk the disturbing news that Staff Sergeant Arroyo, the 3rd Squad leader, was hiding in the bunker the entire time that 3rd Squad was on Routine Search; he wanted Montauk to consider replacing Arroyo as squad leader unless he turned over a new leaf quickly.

The one good change was that Jackson seemed to have gained more respect for Montauk, especially when he saw him disciplining Fields for unnecessarily roughing up a driver at Priority Search. It meant that Jackson's attitude toward Montauk had climbed from negative up to about zero.

The Intelligence Summary that came every morning at 0700 via Humvee from Warhorse had become increasingly shrill and alarm
ist:
Possible VBIED at CP11 between 1300–1700 02DEC04. LN sources indicate coordinated attack mixing VBIED with SAF. BOLO for a silver BMW sedan.
A note that translated to mean Montauk's checkpoint might be targeted by a suicide car bomber between one p.m. and five p.m. on December 2nd, and that there might be some kind of coordinated small arms (AK-47) assault, and to Be On the Look-Out for a silver BMW sedan, which they'd have to add to the BOLO list of more than fifteen specific vehicles, most of which were common Baghdadi cars. Montauk gained new insight into why the warnings of a possible Al-Qaeda hijacking were ignored before September 11—it was just one warning in a daily mail call of dire warnings, the defense against which would consume the daily affairs of federal and state governments to the exclusion of almost anything else. The vast majority of possible CP11 attacks never materialized, and the attacks that did were never predicted accurately enough to make the intel useful, or to convincingly tie the attack to the intel warning. Even when scary intel was right, it was right only accidentally.

The daily INTSUM farce jaded Montauk on the entire idea of Army Intelligence cracking the code of the insurgency, if there was such a thing as the insurgency apart from disparate, raggy groups of pissed-off, nihilistic locals and imported religious freaks. The insurgency in Baghdad consisted of random, ineffectual violence directed against everyone or no one. Montauk just didn't get it, and the constant false alarms dropped off by other baby-faced lieutenants at 0700, which referred to Anti-Iraqi Forces (AIF) and Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), convinced him that the folks at Intel didn't get it, either, and perhaps didn't get that they didn't get it, a far more disturbing possibility. Some version of Rumsfeld's “unknown unknowns.”

So when the daily INTSUM predicting SAF attacks against CP11 turned out to be onto something, Montauk thought of it as a lucky shot in the dark rather than confirmation that Army Intel knew what they were doing. The first potshots came from an apartment building across Karada Dahil and smacked into a T-wall right next to an Iraqi National Guardsman who opened up with a burst of his own before Sergeant Jackson ran over and screamed in his ear to knock it off. They didn't have enough troops to make a recon by fire worth it, so Mon
tauk had CP11 halt search ops and hunker down until the QRF from Warhorse rolled into the neighborhood to poke around. That often felt like the most useful thing they could do: sit and wait, call in the distance and direction of random gunfire, fish bodies out of the Tigris, and cajole the Baghdad cops into hauling them off.

The last body that had washed up on the riverbank stank so bad that Montauk's vest seemed contaminated after the checkpoint shift, as if an aerosol particulate of putrid torture victim had somehow wafted up from the paunchy gas station clerk's corpse and embedded itself into the Kevlar weave, which then seemed to exude a subtle miasma of death. He didn't realize what a foul and angry mood he was in until getting on the phone with Mani and hearing her talk about joining a War Is Terrorism art event run by some thirtysomething Ralph ­Nadery douchebag whom she seemed to want to fuck.

“It's just anti-war, Mickey. I mean, I'm anti-war, too, especially with you over there.”

“It's not ‘just anti-war,' it's a stupid fallacy. War is not terrorism. Terrorism does not equal war. They are two distinct, like, things in a broader category of types of violence. But they're not the same, that's fucking stupid, and people should read a goddamn book.”

“Okay, fine, do you want me to not do it, then?”

“What's wrong with ‘War Is Bad'? Wouldn't that get across the—whatever passes for ideas for these people? It would even be pretty much correct: war is bad. But if it's referring to what I'm doing over here, which it probably is, they're wrong again. There's no war here, we're just peacekeepers in a really shitty neighborhood. We're like the Detroit PD in
RoboCop
or something.”

“Mickey—”

“This guy probably thinks in some vague way that we're actually fighting a war, which is equal to terrorism, and so if we just stop the quote-unquote war, which I guess means sending me and my guys home, that everyone here will realize what they knew all along but were blinded to by the hegemony or the false-consciousness narratives that racialized and quote-unquote othered them or something, and that if we would just go home and use our upper receivers as one-­hitters or daffodil holders and
give peace a chance,
well then, the violence would
stop and there could be a happy independent Iraqi republic. You know, we dragged a guy out of the river today with his fucking
eyes
poked out. He had his
eyes poked out.
Fuck this War Is Terrorism guy. He just wants to sleep with you.”

Montauk took a breath. No response. “Hey. Mani?”

She wasn't there. He hoped she'd hung up long ago.

• • •

A week later, he was rattling around the troop compartment of a Bradley on the IED-rich road to the airport, on the lip of a fourteen-day midtour leave. Some platoons got leave early in their deployments. Some late. He'd be home for Christmas. He should have felt lucky. He pictured himself showering with fancy soaps in his parents' guest bathroom, walking the streets of Boston without a rifle slung across his chest, Mani at his side. It didn't seem right. There was something off about it, like a house made of candy in the middle of a dark forest.

FESTIVUS

30

Hal's grandfather Francis had purchased the
White Center Weekly
from his wife's ailing father in 1959. He and his partner, Charles Halifax, then acquired the
West Seattle Star
three years later. The following year they founded the
Queen Anne Chronicle,
the third paper of their growing company. Over the next few decades, Puget News & Publishing expanded, founding
The
Ballard Review,
The
Bainbridge Tribune,
The
Des Moines Reporter
,
and
The Federal Way Herald,
all community papers in tabloid format with circulations between five and nine thousand. Francis and Charles became moderately wealthy.

The whole family grew up working for the papers. Hal's father, Henry, and his uncle Theodore got jobs mopping and melting slugs from the day's Linotype, ladling impurities to the slag pile, letting the molten lead harden into ingots that would be set the next morning in the Linotype machine, where the typesetter would stamp out the columns, lock them in the galley, ink them in the proof press. Their sister, Carol, was a prodigy photographer—by the age of twelve, she was taking excellent shots for the papers.

Puget News & Publishing became a local empire, but by the year 2000, they were competing with Craigslist and community blogs. By 2004, after extensive downscaling and staff cuts, the company was on its last legs, but Francis Corderoy refused to let it die. And though Henry was running things now, Francis still drove to the office a few times a week and interrupted the course of business with superfluous questions.

Henry was already under a lot of stress, but the holidays were more difficult because he and his siblings—who disagreed about how and if to keep the papers running—could not avoid each other so easily as they did the rest of the year. On top of that, their mother, Maryanne, had emphysema and probably wouldn't make it through another Christmas. And last month Francis had fallen and fractured his hip—he had gotten out of the hospital just last week. Thus, the family Christmas party at Grandpa Frank's was more tense than usual.

But for Hal, it was especially bad. The flight back to Seattle had jet-lagged him, but worse, he was stone-sober. After that lonely Thanksgiving, he'd made a resolution: no more booze until he felt happy, a real organic happy. It was a temporary fix, but a necessary one—a tourniquet. And so he plodded through his final classes, blew off his final papers, and didn't do much of anything in wintry Boston. He thought he saw Mani once, walking into an art-supply store, but he had done dozens of double takes at skinny, black-haired girls in the last few months, as if a part of his brain were permanently on the lookout for those indicators, a process that would necessarily yield a staggering number of false positives. Without alcohol, he came to view himself more and more as a computer, his habits as background programs he had difficulty uninstalling. By the time he was in Seattle, after nearly three weeks without booze, his body had adjusted—he no longer felt those cravings set in at about six o'clock—but that didn't mean his adult social skills, which he'd developed through alcoholic consumption, were up to the task of navigating the family Christmas party.

They arrived at five-thirty, an hour late. Aside from Grandpa Frank and Grandma Maryanne, there was Frank's sister, Corderoy's great-aunt Jane (Crazy Jane, who'd been in the sanitarium), Uncle Ted and his wife, and their two daughters, Emma and Samantha, who were a few years older than Corderoy. Emma was married, with a three-year-old and another on the way. Samantha had brought her boyfriend, a guy with dreadlocks whose arms were sleeved in tattoos. With Cor­deroy, his brother, and his parents, that made more than a dozen people, and his aunt Carol and her husband had yet to arrive.

After a quick battery of hugs and hellos, Corderoy's father asked him to open up a few bottles of wine.

Crazy Jane approached Corderoy as he uncorked a zinfandel. Her frizzled white hair was pulled back by a headband. Thin wire-frame glasses sat crooked on her nose. As he poured her a plastic cup of wine, she said, “How are you, big guy? You been enjoying your time, all this freedom you have now, spoiling yourself?”

“I'm in school,” Corderoy said, baffled. “I have to read a book a week.”

“Sounds like retirement. Think they'll give me a degree?” She made the motion of elbowing him in the ribs but didn't actually touch him. “So, you read books for a few years. Then what?”

“I don't know. Be a professor?”

“Hah. My husband was a history professor. Not a career I'd wish on anybody. I feel sorry for your future wife.” Crazy Jane laughed. Cor­deroy tried to laugh with her, but she stopped as soon as he joined in. “Where's your girlfriend, then?”

“Between girlfriends at the moment.”

“And I'm between husbands.”

Corderoy glanced around the room and realized that he and Crazy Jane, who was at least eighty years old, were the only single people here.

“No harm in not having a lady on your arm.”

“You should have been a poet,” Corderoy said.

“You should try this wine,” Crazy Jane said. “You'll like it. It's fruity—intensely fruity.”

What the fuck. How had he ever gotten through a conversation with this woman? Alcohol. He'd either been young enough to simply run off and play, or he'd blurred out her crazy with a strong buzz. “No thanks,” he said.

Just as she was about to continue, Corderoy saw his cousin approach. As she gave Aunt Jane a hug, Corderoy sidled away. He saw his brother and his brother's girlfriend sitting alone near the Christmas tree. Katie always looked so chipper, and not in a false way; she seemed to have a genuine faith in the goodness of the world. Right now Corderoy resented her for it. He could feel his own willed smile sloughing off his face as he approached.

“You doing all right, bro?” Max asked. He was wearing a tight V-neck T-shirt that showed off his pecs and biceps. While Hal had
been reading comic books and playing video games, Max had taken to athletics, following in their mother's footsteps. She had played fast-pitch softball at the University of Puget Sound, where she'd earned a degree in physical therapy. According to his father, who'd profiled her for the papers early on, her windmill pitch whipped that softball through the strike zone faster than he could throw overhand. She was lithe and tall, more Artemis than Aphrodite, and Corderoy had always felt that she was more proud of Max, who had become the athlete she wished Hal had been.

Though Max would never outstrip Hal in height, by the age of twelve, he was already stronger than his older brother. He spent his high school years on the mat, in the gym, and at the sort of parties Hal had never been invited to, with beer, girls, marijuana. He'd gone off to Oklahoma State on a wrestling scholarship.

“I could use a drink,” Corderoy said.

“What are you having?” Max said, standing up.

“Nah, I'm trying to cut back.”

“Wrong night.”

“Tell me about it.”

“We could leave and go see
Blade: Trinity,
” Max said.

“No, we can't, actually. Besides,
Blade II
was worse than
Blade
. How could
Blade III
be anything but worse than
Blade II
?”

“Shut up,” Max said. “
Blade II
was awesome.”

“It had a shitty plot and even worse dialogue,” Corderoy said.

“You're doing it wrong,” said Katie. “
Blade
movies aren't meant to be analyzed.”

“I'm critical,” Corderoy said. “Can't help that.”

“You can be critical,” Katie said. “You just have to take things for what they are. If you have high-art expectations for everything, you'll be disappointed all the time.”

“Great. I should just expect life to be shitty. Then when it is shitty, I'll be happy!”

“Damn, bro. Grad school's making you a pessimist.” Max was holding a half-empty beer that he hadn't sipped since they'd been talking. “I'm gonna get some food,” he said, and he and Katie walked off.

Corderoy turned to find Aunt Carol and her husband, Darren.
They'd just arrived. Aunt Carol leaned in and gave him a big, overly long hug. This was one of her good nights. She was always slightly manic.

“Have you missed your favorite aunt?” she said on a rising note. After the usual pleasantries and life-update questions, Carol leaned back and Uncle Darren took over. Corderoy liked Darren. His father said he had “a twelve-cylinder mind”—but Darren was depressive. He'd gone to Yale Law, but he didn't practice. Together, he and Aunt Carol made one bipolar person.

“How are you doing,” Darren said. “You look a little down.”

God. Was it that obvious? “Jet lag,” Corderoy said.

“We got something for you,” he said. Aunt Carol withdrew a ­holiday-wrapped book-shaped object from her bag and handed it to him.

Corderoy unwrapped it. It was Alfred Lansing's
Endurance,
the true story of Ernest Shackleton's doomed expedition to cross Antarctica.

“One of my favorite books,” Uncle Darren said. “Inspiring stuff.”

Corderoy thanked Aunt Carol and Uncle Darren and made his way over to the red leather easy chair where Grandpa Frank sat.

“This place is jumping,” Grandpa Frank said in his shaky voice as Corderoy bent down. His eyes could never keep still; they darted around the vicinity of Corderoy's face.

“Heard you had a big storm out here,” Corderoy said.

“Poke your head outside,” Grandpa Frank said.

Corderoy got up and went to the back door. His grandpa's house was on Puget Sound, and there had been a large deck with a glass-walled windbreak sitting on short pilings above the rocky beach. It wasn't there. Corderoy returned and knelt again. “The deck's gone,” he said.

His grandpa didn't say anything.

“I can't believe it,” Corderoy said.

Grandpa Frank nodded slowly. “Fifteen-foot waves. Twenty-five-foot logs. Pounded the piss out of it.”

“You gonna rebuild it?”

“The state has a law now. Trying to eliminate bulkheads. Because of the sand lance. Looks like a small eel, but it's really a kind of fish. It needs waterfront vegetation to nest.”

Corderoy watched Grandpa Frank's eyes roam about the room. They were so wet.

“The salmon eat the little suckers. That's what drives everything. It's all a charity for the Indians.”

“The Indians?”

“I don't know how long we're going to live here anyway. I'm ninety and she's eighty-six.” Corderoy looked over at his grandmother, sitting in the easy chair to the left. His cousin Samantha was talking to her. And she was stepping on the oxygen tube that ran back into the bedroom where the tank was. Corderoy was about to say something, but Samantha moved her foot. “I'm fine except for the lack of balance,” Grandpa Frank said. “Lucky at my age not to have any aches or pains to speak of. I love this house. Such a good spot.”

“It is a great house,” Corderoy said. He stood up, but Grandpa Frank wasn't done with him.

“Are you satisfied with the progress you're making?” As he'd gotten older, Grandpa Frank had become increasingly sentimental and direct; talking to him was like being interrogated by a Hallmark card.

“Guess so,” Corderoy said.

“What's your ultimate goal?”

Fear, murder, respect, beer, honies, and sex
. Grandpa Frank wouldn't get a
Big Pun
reference. “Happiness?”

Grandpa Frank laughed. “You already got that. Has there ever been a time you weren't?”

“Guess not,” Corderoy lied. He tried to smile. “Can I get you anything, Grandpa?”

“I'll have what you're having.”

“Just soda tonight.”

“Not drinking, aye. That's good. My older brother, Will Jr., died of drink. So did my best friend, Charlie. Your namesake.”

By the time Corderoy returned with a soda for his grandfather, his mom had taken center stage. Her softball days were over, but she'd never lost her competitive spirit, and at family gatherings, she could be counted on, without fail, to initiate party games. In her fierce attempt at victory, she would often leave the room in a sour mood. It even happened with the annual white-elephant gift exchange. This year only
one person had brought a gift. So in lieu of the exchange, she instigated a round of singing. Susan's singing voice was quite good: years in the church choir. She began with “Silent Night,” and Grandma Maryanne was delighted. She joined in, wheezing out the words. Corderoy wasn't much for singing, so he mouthed the words under his breath, letting his mother and his aunts and uncles carry the song. Afterward, his mother struck up “It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” and then “Frosty the Snowman.”

Aunt Carol began circulating, whispering manically to everyone that Grandma was fading, that the party had to be over. In five minutes. Corderoy looked at his grandmother. She did look tired, but that didn't mean Aunt Carol wasn't overreacting. No one seemed willing to pay the drama cost of disagreeing with her.

The car ride home was awkward and silent; Corderoy was crammed in the backseat with Max and Katie. But as soon as they dropped Katie off at her house, Henry and Susan broke the tension.

“Why'd you have to do that?” Henry asked her.

“What?”

“The singing. It wore Mom out.”

“She loved it. I've never seen her happier.”

“For the first song. But you had to keep going. You had to outdo everyone.”

“That is just, just—”

“Mom, Dad,” Corderoy said. “Chill out.”

“We're fine, honey,” his mother said. Corderoy looked to Max. He was stoic. A defense mechanism for these quarrels. “Are you okay, Hal?” his dad asked. They were nearing home.