Youngblood (16 page)

“
Habibi!
Surf's up!”

Pressed against the Iraqi's mass in a hug, I felt his man boobs pushed against my chest plate. He pecked both cheeks, and I air-mouthed reciprocation. He wore a loud powder-blue tracksuit instead of a man-dress, and his thatch of curls was stuffed under a checkered headdress of red and white. Aviator sunglasses and white sneakers completed the outfit.

“The hell?” I whispered to Snoop, who was getting the same treatment. “We're
habibi
s now?”

“He's showing off, yo,” Snoop said, now released from the tribal leader's embrace. “Wants people to know he's close with an American officer.”

“
Wasta
.” I winked.

“Wasta.”

Fat Mukhtar then tried to shadowbox with me, but stopped when I stood there and rubbed my helmet rather than play along. He was checking on his men, he said, as the Sunni leaders rotated responsibility for posting Sahwa on the Strip. What luck it was to bump into each other like this!

It was the first time we'd seen each other since the deaths of Alphabet and Ortiz. He expressed his condolences and assured me that his men were looking for the sniper. In a dark tone, he whispered something to Snoop, who asked him to repeat it with an air of disbelief.

“He say the sniper is a new terror man called ‘the Cleric.' ”

“Huh? The guy from the arch?”

“Not him. That cleric has been dead many years. The
mukhtar
is not sure if the Cleric is a real holy man, but that's the name he goes by.”

The topic of conversation reminded me I should move around while in the open; between the trailing radioman and lengthy discussion, I was prime sniper bait. Now pacing, I thanked the
mukhtar
for the information and, in broken Arabic, explained that we wanted to know about Dead Tooth. He answered so furiously I was unable to understand, turning to Snoop for help.

It was true, he told us, Dead Tooth had been hanging around the Sunni Strip. But his own family had chased him away because he refused to recognize the authority of the
fasil
.

“Law is everything,” Fat Mukhtar said. “And
fasil
is the ground of our law.”

He advised us to look for Dead Tooth in the south of Ashuriyah, where the poorer Sunnis lived. “Or among the Rejectionists,” he said. “Shi'as will hide anyone for moneys.”

“Speaking of,” Snoop said, “he asks about the next Sahwa payment.”

Two teenage Sahwa guards in khaki on the far side of the vehicle began chanting
“Fuluus! Fuluus!”
until Fat Mukhtar yelled at them to turn back around. It was rather terrible theater, though I appreciated the effort.

“We'll call soon,” I said. “Only a couple weeks more.”

Fat Mukhtar tucked his neck into his chest, jowl pushing out, a sinkhole of excess skin. An odd way to express displeasure, I thought. He knew that Sahwa paydays were scheduled by the commander, at least until the Iraqi government took them over.

Something occurred to me. “You still want to be paid first, right?” I asked him. I let Snoop translate but didn't wait for an answer. “Azhar's family lives on the Strip? Take us there.”

We walked a quarter of a mile to a two-story house with white trim and a balcony. Fat Mukhtar banged on the courtyard door while I
waved over a fireteam. The storm had weakened, though the wind still proved too much for Snoop, who was now using his plastic rifle as a cane. A Sahwa guard who'd followed us pointed to the plastic rifle and laughed. Snoop barked back in Arabic. The guard pounded his chest twice before returning to the checkpoint. Snoop mumbled to himself and spat on the ground where the guard had stood.

Chambers emerged from the cloud of orange dust with Dominguez, Hog, and Ibrahim in tow. Though I wanted nothing more than to be rid of our platoon sergeant, I'd learned that including him in decisions minimized blowback. Chambers took in the balcony and sneered. “Comes from money. Interesting.”

“Think we'll find anything?” Ibrahim asked.

“Nope,” Chambers said. “But he's been here. Hard for rich kids to get away from Momma's tit.”

We all laughed, even Dominguez.

“Almost forgot.” I pointed to the
jundi
s, who'd huddled together under a nearby cypress tree. “Bring them, too.”

Without a word, Dominguez walked over to the Iraqi soldiers, shaking the nearest one by the collar, and gestured for them to follow him. They did, though the one whose collar had been violated spoke with ire to Dominguez's back.

While Dominguez took the soldiers and
jundi
s into the house to search cabinets and upturn mattresses, Chambers, Snoop, and I met with the family and Fat Mukhtar in the courtyard. It made for a crowded space, and I kept having to push a fern out of my face to make eye contact with anyone. A man with cracked skin and a gray worm for a mustache glared at me while his wife, covered in an
abaya
, yelled at Snoop and wagged a finger in his face. Chambers stepped to the side to play with two girls and their Barbies, which were Arab in appearance and had various face veils as accessories. Then the woman turned her finger toward me. Even though the top of her head barely cleared my sternum, I took a step back and used the fern as a shield.

“We're being gentle!” I told Snoop, rifle slung, hands raised. A
sniper on the Strip was hypothetical. This lady was not. I took off my lenses, helmet, and gloves and tried to look as boyish as possible. “Tell her that.”

My charms had little effect. She kept yelling, and her husband kept glaring. Fat Mukhtar tried yelling back, which just angered her more.

“Azhar!” I said, trying another approach. “Azzzz-harrrr.”

That flipped a switch. She bowed her head and spoke to Snoop. I strained to understand, but quickly gave up.

“What news do you bring of their son?” he translated.

Neither of us had much to share. The husband confirmed what Fat Mukhtar had said about their disowning Dead Tooth, though that decision seemed to be a source of marital tension. I asked about the older brother, and he said he was at his Sahwa post. He asked if Azhar was to be killed. I said capturing their son alive was our goal, so if they knew anything at all, it'd be wise to tell us. They said nothing. I asked how their dead cousin's mother was doing, remembering her wails and pleas. They said she was grieving, but Insha'Allah, she would find peace soon. The husband asked if we'd stay for chai after the search. Ibrahim appeared in the doorway, ducking under the frame. He asked me to follow him inside.

“Wait until you see this,” he said.

We walked through a living room covered in sleeping mats and blankets; during the summer, Iraqis sleep in large, airy rooms or on the roof. A ceiling fan spun creakily from above. Over a kitchen of stainless steel, a staircase rose, angling into wooden beams that held the balcony. Upstairs, there was a small bureau in the hallway. Next to it hung a religious streamer, green with a yellow rim. On the bureau was a picture frame. I picked it up. Two Iraqi boys smiled for the camera, dirt field and palm trees behind them. They both had long faces and mop-tops, their resemblance to one another uncanny, arms draped around each other's shoulders to show they were good brothers. They wore matching jerseys, and the elder held a soccer ball. The younger stuck out his bottom row of teeth like a mule to show off a
recently displaced tooth: Dead Tooth when he'd been Baby Tooth. I set down the photo and followed Ibrahim into a corner room that smelled of ammonia.

One step in, a smirking Dominguez handed me a placard. A crease ran down its center like a fault line. “A
jundi
found it,” he said. “Folded up in the family Koran.”

Opening it, I was greeted by an oversized face of an imam frothing orders. The artist had even added the spit coming from his mouth, which was a nice touch. The imam wore a white
dishdasha
and a black headband, and his chin fell off the image in a cascade of beard. Behind him, toy men in masks held rockets and guns, facing an unseen, encroaching enemy. A hollow sun marked the top of the placard, jagged Arabic slicing through it.

Back downstairs, Snoop explained that the face belonged to a Wahhabi, the most radical of Sunnis, who called on true Muslims to destroy Shi'a and American dogs alike.

“It doesn't say al-Qaeda on this,” Snoop said, holding it up. “But it's theirs.”

The family swore they'd no idea where the placard had come from. One of the little girls started crying when she saw it, and the husband insisted it must've been Azhar's. Without any way to disprove that, I left them the outpost's phone number, saying to call if they heard from their son and wanted him to live.

I put my helmet back on, then my gloves, then my lenses. As we turned to leave the courtyard, Dead Tooth's mother spoke, to no one and everyone at once. After a long silence, Snoop translated. “She say this is our fault,” he said. “Azhar was a good boy before the Collapse.”

•  •  •

We walked back into the simoom. I watched a dust cyclone of plastic bags whip around a pair of soldiers, who poked at it with their rifles. As we moved west down the Strip, I asked Fat Mukhtar why the family had been so hostile.

He shrugged and adjusted his headdress in the wind, a world-weary blueberry in a tracksuit.

“It's not easy seeing your country occupied by foreigners,” Snoop translated. “The
mukhtar
has a good point.”

I wanted to ask Fat Mukhtar about Shaba again, or if he knew anything about civilian murders in the past, but Chambers was only steps behind. The two men hadn't seemed to recognize each other, or have any interest in each other, for that matter. One had seen plenty of brawny American sergeants before, while the other had met plenty of outlandish Arab chieftains.

“Tell me how this ends,” I muttered.

No one else knew, either.

Fat Mukhtar stopped at a tin shack. It bore the message
YOUSEF'S: BEST FALAFEL IN ALL IRAK
! in English on a doorway sign, a gift from some previous American unit. At Fat Mukhtar's suggestion, we ordered a late lunch. A young shop boy ran into the shack to deliver our order. While we waited, the
mukhtar
told us he was getting a bear from Syria for his zoo.

I laughed. “A bear in the Middle East? Sure.”

“He say it's true, LT. The Syrian brown bear. A cousin of your grizzly.”

I pulled out my pad and made a note to google this later, to prove Fat Mukhtar wrong. Bears didn't come from Syria. They needed trees.

The sense of being observed returned. I looked around. Inside the falafel shop, behind a thick screen door, stood an old man with crossed arms. I recognized him, but couldn't place from where, and that bothered me. I didn't forget people. I waved, long and wide. He waved back.

“Yousef,” Fat Mukhtar said through Snoop. “Just a falafel man, but a good falafel man. Many morals.”

A group of children delivered the falafels to our patrol. Soldiers and
jundi
s strewn across the Sunni Strip greeted the children with pats on the head and shiny coins as tips. My falafel was handed over by a girl in a purple head scarf who had black gemstones for eyes and a gaping
red void for a nose. I looked closer and realized it was actually two red voids, one for each missing nostril. Burns covered much of her upper body. The skin on her arms was like paper, and when she cupped her hands to ask for a tip, I could see the bones in her fingers flexing. I pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and folded it into her tiny palms. Her smile burned through us all.

I swallowed away the lump in my throat while Fat Mukhtar bit his bottom lip. Only Snoop found words. “Allah protect her,” he said. “If you're up there, fuckclown, You protect her.”

I wasn't really hungry anymore, but forced myself to eat. The falafel tasted like desert—dry dough, chickpea, and tangy yogurt, all soaked in cucumber juice and olive oil. Fat Mukhtar said we should try Yousef's lamb, too, but through chewed food I said we needed to go.

“One more thing, LT,” Snoop said, listening to Fat Mukhtar. “He asks about Haitham. He say they are old friends, and the
mukhtar
has a gift for him.”

Before I could respond, another voice spoke behind us.

“Why do you talk to that guy so much? He's just a damn drunk. Always has been.” It was Chambers. I didn't know how to answer either of them, so I did the most outrageous thing possible. I told the truth.

“We don't know,” I said. “We don't know where Haitham is.”

•  •  •

The patrol pushed south into Shi'a territory. The muezzin escorted us there, the afternoon prayer chanting gloomily at our backs. I had too much to think about, so I didn't think about any of it. The simoom found renewed life, blowing us kisses of hot sand and flying trash. I grabbed the hand mic from Batule's back and told the outpost we were heading in. As I hooked the mic back to the radio, the day ruptured in gunfire.

“Contact to the rear!”

I ran that way with Batule and Snoop on my heels, passing bodies in the prone behind whatever cover they could find, eyes and rifles out.
At the tail of our staggered column, in front of an appliance store, I found Chambers standing over a body, bent slightly at the waist, legs on each side of the torso, a cage fighter about to finish off a dazed opponent. His rifle was slung.

“What happened?” I asked, trying to limit my panting. Washington and two
jundi
s were there, too, all on one knee. Washington took a long, slow drink from his CamelBak tube. Hog stood to the side, his squished face bewildered, holding his rifle like it had soiled itself.

“Barbie Kid,” Washington said, pointing to the mass underneath Chambers.

“Sergeant,” I said. He didn't respond, and I noticed the dull shine of a
sai
dagger in his right hand. “Sergeant Chambers.”