“Phone Call”
by A. MacInnis
My flak jacket thuds to the
ground, and I lay it over my webbing and day-bag. I own this piece of
wall. I stack my dump-pouch, knee-pads, shooting gloves, ballistic
eye-wear and sheamagh
and
the rest of my Fighting Order up against it. My helmet lies upside down in the sand and I drop a
water-bottle into it like a stone, finally laying my weapon against
the side of the building and stepping away. Kandahar's oven heat is
still leaving the ground, even at this ungodly hour of the night, and
my body is slippery with sweat. Dress and deportment is for assholes
this far outside the wire so I'm wearing sneakers, a tan t-shirt with
the sleeves gouged open to ventilate my torso, and an unbloused pair
of salt-stained combat pants.
I make use of a bench around
the table and light up a smoke. My two hours are up and I watch Chan
scuttle slowly up the ladder leading to our observation-post, his kit
rattling around him and his brown skin all but disappearing against
the night sky. I just kind of sit there and work spit around my
mouth, ticking off the remaining cigarettes in my pack, making with
every procrastination I can think of. The night is quiet, except for
the sporadic popping-open of para-flares a few klicks away. They fall
like cinders; their light doesn't reach our COP1.
I sit a little longer while my
gut does a bunch of fluttery bullshit and finally I push myself up,
strolling over to the CP2,
feeling my way around the walls. I quietly fight the wooden door
open, splitting the pitch blackness of the school-grounds and
sandbags wide open with electric light, and half-sorta step in.
Butler is slumped in the computer chair, Major League Infidel
ball-cap pulled forward, one leg up on the desk and watching a movie
on his laptop with a headphone in one ear and the other monitoring
the Company Means.
“What's up, what's up,” he
mutters, lifting his cap to poke at his shaved, sunburned scalp.
“You're lookin at it –
where's the Sat-Phone at?”
“Tim's got it, should be
back any minute.”
Fuck,
I think.
“Mm,” I say. Something
inside me slouches like it was in the waiting room of a medical ward.
“Anythin' going on?”
“Aaaah... ,” he says,
tilting his head back as if to knock his thoughts into his throat.
“Nuuuthin, really. Zulu-Two-Two-Bravo’s out doin’ an OP just
off Lake Effect, watching for IED3-teams.”
Butler is from Windsor – it's in his face, manners, and voice;
thick and decidedly street.
“Maybe they'll blow someone
away.”
“Fuck I hope so.” He rocks
his fist. “Tock, tock, tock!”
“Long as Cole isn't
gunning,”
Butler laughs. “Oh,
man,”
“...guy's got the killer
instincts of Kermit the Frog...”
“Haha, shit, man.”
The radio cracks to life. “Two
this is Zulu-Two-Two-Bravo, Radio-Check, Over.”
“Two,
Loud-And-Clear, Over.”
“Two-Two-Bravo,
Rodger.”
Butler lights up a Marley Red.
We both kind of chill in the heat and let the radio chatter on, like
background noise. I don't have many words to spare; I'm saving up the
ones I have left. I'm about to need them big.
After enough time has oozed
by, Tim comes back, stepping into the CP. Tim is a squat,
Phillipines-Asiatic whose body is practically trapezoidal with
muscle. The uncomfortable, fat heat comes in with him, hanging around
his tattooed shoulders like a cloud. “Thanks, man. Sup, Andy.”
“Get that phone off ya?”
“Yeah man.”
“You just get off shift?”
“Yeah me 'n' Bilous were at
the Burn Pit.”
“Cool, cool.”
“Smoke?”
“Yeah man let's hack.” We
do and the three of us hang in the CP, bartering small-talk back and
forth about nothing, chipping off small pieces of what we want to say
without breaking off anything significant - that way boys do,
understanding nothing and everything.
Finally I've exhaled most of
what I have left to say and tell them “I have to make that call,”
and me and Tim do a great job of not meeting eyes when he nods. The
Sat-Phone's a lot heavier in my fingers than it probably was in his
and I step out into the arid, moonless night until I can't even see
my own feet. I feel my way along the sandbag walls to the mortar pit
and hunker down in the talcum dust, taking my time making myself
comfortable and taking my time taking out a cigarette and lighter and
breathing in the night air. The heat makes the wind taste like the
inside of a sauna, even at this hour.
I pull out the antennae and
cock it at about 45 degrees, and punch in a series of numbers and
pound keys long enough to be an algorithm. I flub it twice, frowning,
before managing to plug in the Alberta cell-phone number I have
memorized in the tips of my fingers. There's a long-distance
background silence to the dial-tone as I let it ring. I get
disconnected. I punch in the numbers and wait. Finally the line picks up and
I hear a soft voice that pulls my face in two directions until even
in the darkness my expression is as featureless as the desert around
me.
“Hello?”
“Hey.”
“Hey? Oh, hey.”
I screw my mouth into shapes
to talk but everything I say seems to catch on sharp, broken things
somewhere inside on the way out. Hot and cold wires unfurl in my
stomach until I feel them in my fingertips. I chew the insides of my
mouth just to make words.
“What are you up to?”
“I’m taking a walk.”
“That’s nice. How’s
Calgary?”
“It’s okay. Looking for a
job. Lola hates it.”
“Heh, well, Lola’s a cranky
bitch anyway.”
“Yeah, well, she’s a
Siamese I guess.”
“True. I miss her anyway.”
“Yeah.”
I pluck the Marley from my lips
and stab it out into one of the many holes punched through and chewed
up into the ring of sandbags shouldering our mortar pit. I hate the
taste of American cigarettes - like the tobacco is cut and toasted
with sawdust. Their best reminds me of the zip-frozen bags of chug
smokes you can buy off reservations with a handshake. I take my time
twisting out the smouldering tip and burying it with my finger.
“What’s new?”
“I dunno. I put my resume in
at a coffee shop.”
“Another one?”
“Still trying.”
“Well, keep at it... it’ll
work out.”
“I know.”
“Did you get any of my
letters?”
“Nope.”
I run the tip of my tongue over
an incisor and then back to the wet crevasse beside a thick molar.
“No? I sent like... five... it’s been two months. Not one?”
“Nope.”
“I tried to call you this
morning - well, last night for you, I guess.”
“Yeah, I saw. I didn’t know
you’d be able to call this much.”
“Me either, it’s ah, kinda
crazy, I guess - I’m busy, but, you know, I make time.”
“That’s cool. Was that jar
of cherries from you?”
In the darkness my smile goes
on forever in a stunted kind of way, like sunshine trapped in a jar.
“Yeah I did... I hope you liked them.”
“Yeah they’re my favourite
kind.”
“I had them sent from a farm
in B. C.”
“That was really nice.”
Something inside me arches, and
bristles, and those broken things show their edges. “Who’s that?”
“Oh, that’s just Tyler.
He’s a friend. He’s walking with me.”
“Ah.” I sink my hand into
the dirt and squeeze at a fistful of sand.
“I don’t like walking alone
here.”
“I wish I could walk with
you.”
I wait for words and squeeze
harder. My eyes are wide-open, like a muskrat’s, and the moonless
black is taking on a grey pin-pricky quality as my night-vision
starts to kick in. I can see the trickles of sand squeezing out from
between my fingers like grey smoke. “I miss you.”
“Me, too. How are you, are
you doing okay?” I squeeze harder. How am I doing. My chest goes
hard and tight like an apple-core and pulls the moisture from my
throat. I can hear her words but can’t see her face. I try to find
her face and see tracers skipping into the fields around our wire,
like stones across flat water. I think of the thick, rubbery hot
garbage-bag texture of body-bags in the sun and the heat sucking
words from my mouth and moisture from my flesh until even my tears
come out as spit.
I think of the effortless slide
of my hands across her milky-white flesh and the shape her breasts
take when she lies on her back, like ripe pieces of fruit caught in
the moonlight, and of all those sounds I get her to make with my hand
between her thighs, and of watching her bite her bottom lip and the
smell of her hair and her sex all over my fingers. I think of another
man's hands scrape across that flesh and pull my lips back from my
gums and hate my own twisted arousal and let my thoughts stick and
bleed inside my skull.
I’m... looking into a kid’s
face through an aiming-post and feeling real weight in the tip of my
finger. I’m doing... sand churned into red mud and saturated with
that sticky, copper stink. I think of a wet chunk of meat and bone
and hair coming off the back of his head like turf and a weight
lifting off my heart to leave a dark footprint, like turning over
flat rocks in the backyard. Questions without answers and weight in
that fucking finger. I’m doing... watching him run away, with empty
hands. I think of him face-down, anyway. Both ways I show teeth. My
days are looking at things and seeing only hard edges. I open my
mouth and close my throat.
“Sure.”
The word is small as a pebble
and leaves small ripples.
I brush off my hands.
“Well, I should go,” She
says. “It’s a little rude.” Rude.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll talk to you when I
talk to you?”
“Yeah, I’ll call.”
“Good night - or good
morning?”
“Yeah. Ah, I love you.”
“Yeah. Me, too.” Yeah.
I wait for the click and then
put the phone down. Loudspeakers: from Nakhonay, and then Kalachay
and Naros and all across the Panjwaii, the call to prayer comes in
sing-song, “Allah-ackbars”,
rise and fall. Allaaaaah... The sky is dark. Like I said, there’s
no moon, and the stars reflect nothing.
3
Improvised Explosive Device
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