I went through a pretty shitty break-up before I deployed, and since this is the insofar only complete short story I have regarding my experience I figured it'd be the first one I post. I have a handful of other stories, from other sources (and a handful of others from yours truly), but all require some serious editing before I put them up here.
I think this gives a pretty good example of what I'm looking for when I say a story is a story. Nothing happens here. But it happened to me - and that's why it's here. The shittier parts of my time across the pond really had less to do with the smell of blood that facing this conversation on a weekly basis.
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I think this gives a pretty good example of what I'm looking for when I say a story is a story. Nothing happens here. But it happened to me - and that's why it's here. The shittier parts of my time across the pond really had less to do with the smell of blood that facing this conversation on a weekly basis.
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“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.
