“Please, she gave me two others, and I got one from my mom and my aunt, too. Trust me, every Tejano in the Army has a stash.”
Chatty hollered out, “Joe, why don’t you kiss him and get it over with?”
Joe laughed. “Jefe, you just jealous I didn’t give you one.”
“The hell I am!”
Mike smiled. “He’s jealous.”
“I know.” Joe winked.
“Thanks, Joe. Good night.” Mike tucked the milagro in the pocket of his ACU jacket with the crucifix and the Emily photo, picked up the packet of mail, and made his way to the back of the tent. Supply boxes had been stacked to form a makeshift wall between Joe’s office and their sleeping area, which consisted of two cots placed end-to-end against the tent wall.
Chatty lay in his cot, with his night-vision goggles on his watchcap, which was pulled over his eyes. “I’m not jealous.”
“Are too.” Mike stretched out on his rack, putting his mail on his chest. It struck him that this was their first night without Phil and Oldstein, but the glasses and iPod were still under Joe’s table, so they were under the same roof, after all.
“This truly sucks, does it not?”
“Yes, it does.” Mike didn’t have to ask Chatty what he meant. He stared at the ceiling, which billowed in the wind. Six inches of snow had fallen, and they’d had to brush off the top so the tent wouldn’t collapse.
“Here’s my problem, Bonehead. I find what’s transpired completely unacceptable, yet it keeps happening. One unacceptable event after another. It’s a slippery slope, my addle-pated friend, and before you know it, you’re accepting the unacceptable.”
Mike smiled, not because it was funny, but because it was true. “Which is, in itself, unacceptable.”
“Ha! You’re not so dumb after all. And if things weren’t bad enough, our porn cache burned up. War is hell.”
Mike groaned, not ready for gallows humor. “Too soon, Chatty.”
“I can’t sleep,” Chatty said, after a minute, and Mike picked up his mail, set aside the bills, and opened up his podiatric journal.
“Would you like me to read you a bedtime story?”
“Does it involve women kissing? I love those stories at bedtime.”
“No.” Mike opened his podiatric journal. “It involves the consequences of pediatric obesity on the foot-and-ankle complex.”
“Read on, it will put me to sleep.”
“Once upon a time, there were ten obese children and ten children of average weight, and they were recruited for a cross-sectional research study.” Mike paraphrased the abstract of the article. “Anthropometric parameters were measured to evaluate active ankle dorsiflexion, arch height—”
“Enough. Tell me a story where the pizza boy comes in and meets the two girls and they start kissing.”
Mike set the magazine down, moved aside the household bills, and flipped through his junk mail. “All I have is a class reunion reminder, a Valpak, and a discount card from a guy who wants to plow my driveway.” He stopped at an unfamiliar envelope that wasn’t junk mail, with a return address from the Coroner’s Office of Chester County, Pennsylvania.
“Come on, tell me a story. Start with the pizza. What kind of pizza do they get? I like mushroom.”
Mike couldn’t speak. The envelope must contain Chloe’s autopsy report and toxicology screen, which would show the alcohol levels in her system.
“I also like pepperoni. Can’t you just taste a pepperoni pizza right now? Real New York pizza. Thin crust with gooey mozzarella and that yellow cornmeal on the bottom.”
“Jefe!” Joe hollered from the office area. “Please stop talking about pizza! Noise discipline!”
Chatty called back, “Your problem is that you think MREs are food!”
Joe yelled out, “I’m responsible for your nutrition! I keep my family well fed!”
Chatty yelled back, “Then get me a New York pizza! Bonehead, you ever have John’s, in the Village? Or Bleeker’s?”
“No.” Mike got up stiffly, folding the autopsy report in with the other mail. “I have to go to the bathroom. Be right back.”
Chatty rolled his watchcap up, so he could see. “Scholl’s, it’s twenty degrees out there. You can’t hold it in?”
“Nah.” Mike stuck the mail under his arm.
Chapter Thirty-three
Mike sat on one of the supply boxes in the freezing latrine, stuck his high-intensity flashlight between his teeth, and opened the envelope. The report was four pages, and it read at the top, Office of the Chester County Coroner. There was a grid with the coroner’s and his assistant’s name, and the box was checked Full Autopsy Performed, with the date and exact hour. Under the name, it read Chloe Voulette, and it had her date of birth, age, race, and sex, as well as Body Identified By, and in that blank was filled in Danielle Voulette Ridgeway. The case number was #2013–770.
Mike read the first few lines:
The autopsy is begun at 8:16 p.m. on December 15. The body was presented in a black body bag. The subject was wearing a blue cotton sweater and jeans. Jewelry included two smooth-textured gold hoop pierced earrings, one-inch diameter, one in each ear, one gold watch on left wrist, and one gold and diamond engagement and wedding ring.
Mike read on, to the section under General Appearance:
The body is that of a well-developed, well-nourished, adult white female who appears to be the stated age of 32 years. Body height is 66 inches. Body weight is 129 pounds. Rigor mortis is generalized to late. Livor mortis is anterior. The body is cold to the touch. Artifacts of decomposition are absent and evidence of medical and postmortem care is absent. There is obvious evidence of a single knife wound to the left forearm.
Mike wasn’t sure if he could go on, but he wanted to know the alcohol content of her blood. He skimmed the report, concerning identification, then the other parts of the external examination, including head and neck, trunk, and extremities. There was a section on injuries, which described the length and depth of the wound, and below that was a section on internal examination, which began:
Internally, there is almost no blood present in the heart and great vessels and tissues, due to exsanguination from the wound.
Mike skipped ahead to the internal examination section, which described the Head–Central Nervous System, Skeletal System, Respiratory System, Throat Structures, as “unremarkable.” He knew it was a term of art, but nothing about Chloe was unremarkable, to him. The internal examination continued with the Cardiovascular System, Gastrointestinal System, Urinary System, and at the bottom, the Female Genital System. It killed Mike to think that anyone, even a doctor, was intruding on Chloe’s privacy in such an intimate way. Still, he read the paragraph:
Female Genital System: The structures are within normal limits. There is no evidence of recent sexual activity. Examination of the pelvic area indicates that the subject was pregnant at the time of death. The uterine walls reveal swelling and mucosa consistent with healthy pregnancy. The fetus was approximately four (4) weeks gestation. Fetuses under twenty (20) weeks gestation are not considered viable and therefore the fetus was not autopsied.
Mike felt stunned. He must’ve read it wrong. That was impossible. He shined the flashlight on the report and read it again; Examination of the pelvic area indicates that the subject was pregnant at the time of death. He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to react. It wasn’t possible. There had to be some mistake. He flipped back to the first page of the report, to double-check that this was Chloe’s autopsy. The coroner could’ve confused her with somebody else, but the first page was clearly marked and her case number was at the top of the page. The coroner could have been wrong about her being pregnant, maybe she had some kind of uterine tumor or cyst that he had mistaken for a fetus.
Mike tore through the rest of the report, reading to see if there was any other mention of a pregnancy, but there wasn’t. There was no toxicology report either, and under Toxicology, it stated, cryptically
: “blood, bile, urine, ocular fluid, nasal swabs.” He understood that to mean that those fluids had been taken, but that the report would follow later, so he didn’t have any answers about the vodka. But that didn’t seem important anymore. Nothing seemed important anymore.
Mike sat in the freezing latrine, lost in the fog of his own breath. It didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be. Chloe had been faithful to him. They were in love. He rubbed his eyes, then his face. He told himself that this wasn’t happening, that it couldn’t be happening. He wanted to scream but the others would hear him, unless they thought it was a monkey, howling. Maybe the howling at night wasn’t monkeys at all, but men trapped in war, ceaseless, brutal, and far from home.
Mike felt tears come to his eyes. He couldn’t stop them and didn’t try. Everything he loved and believed in was gone. He could barely deal with losing Chloe, and now he had lost the knowledge that she loved him and was true to him. He dropped the papers and the flashlight, then doubled over and wept from the depth of his very soul.
Chapter Thirty-four
Almost a full year later, Mike could not get past the fact that Chloe had gotten pregnant by another man. He didn’t tell Chatty or anybody else, and the knowledge changed him, inside. He stopped saying his homemade prayer, though he couldn’t bring himself to throw away the crucifix Chloe had given him. He kept it in his Velcro pocket with the Emily picture and the milagro, and lately, found himself patting his pocket like a nervous tic, to make sure they were safe.
His stomach bothered him, and his weight dropped. He couldn’t sleep for wondering who Chloe’s lover was, when the affair started, when it ended, where they did it, when they did it, how they did it. He went online at base and tried to get into her Gmail, but it was password-protected. He’d even emailed Google at Decedent’s Accounts to see if they’d let him into her account, but they wouldn’t unless he sent them a death certificate and jumped through a bunch of other hoops, too difficult to do from Afghanistan. Still, he did his job and didn’t lose a single soldier, not even The First Woman Soldier After Chloe Died And Got Pregnant. The only person who could make him laugh was Chatty, but he’d changed, too. He became El Jefe again, but he never wore his new Batman cape, and he told Mike something that struck him as weird, but true:
Scholl’s, this war’s no fun anymore.
The 556th was on its way to a new posting, a brigade to the north in the mountains, and Mike was crammed in the backseat of the Humvee, on a night too frigid to be warmed even by the body heat from Chatty, Joe, and the driver, Dermot. The engine noise filled his ears and the vibration rattled his teeth as the Humvee traveled along the dirt road behind the others, spaced the standard-operating-procedure distance apart, because if one Humvee ran over an IED, the others wouldn’t be affected.
Mike patted his jacket pocket and fought the impulse to take out Emily’s picture. He felt more distant from her than ever, and in their Skype sessions, when Emily sat in Danielle’s lap, it was like a TV show. And then there was the time she’d called Danielle “Mommy.”
She calls you Mommy? Mike had asked.
I think it’s easier to say than Danielle, and when we go to Mommy & Me classes, I want her to feel like the other kids.
Sure, right. Mike wondered how he’d feel the day that Emily called Bob Daddy.
Mike sat in the back next to Chatty, who was looking out the tiny window with his night-vision goggles. On any other night, he’d be stargazing, but he was scanning the terrain for the Taliban. It was mountainous, with dips, goat trails, and wadi to hide in, and holly oaks to use for cover. Everybody startled when they bumped over a rock, but nobody said anything. They were all thinking the same thing and the engine was too noisy, anyway.
Mike’s gut tensed. He knew Chatty worried about him, tacitly accepting the responsibility for his renewing his contract, which had the effect of making him turn more inward, because he kept his regrets about renewing to himself. Still he and Chatty were forever joined, like parents in a family that had lost a child, linked by shared grief.
Mike felt the Humvee slow its speed, as the ones ahead of them stopped. They were guarded forward and rear by up-armored Humvees, with turret gunners on top, and the Humvee behind theirs contained two new general trauma surgeons they’d finally gotten, Pat Freznick from Chino, California, and Peter Sullivan from Dallas, who was in his early fifties. Sullivan was typical of the end-stage wave of older docs who left successful practices to serve, and MEDCOM needed them so desperately that it age-waived them, even if they couldn’t make the fitness qualifications. Chatty teased Sullivan about it all the time, nicknaming him Gramps.
Gramps, it’s a war, not a retirement village.
Mike looked out the window, but it was all black outside, a void in the middle of nowhere. He didn’t know if the upcoming operation, Operation Rattlesnake, would be a success, and if it was, whether it would matter. Their old brigade had become infected with a nihilism, and the soldiers groused more about the Fobbits stationed at FOB Kandahar, or POGs, Persons Other Than Grunts, or worse, REMFs, which stood for Rear Echelon MFers. Mike had heard that the GMOs, or general medical officers, were prescribing more anti-depressants and sleep meds than ever before, and he had no reason to believe that the new brigade would be any happier.
BAM! Suddenly an earsplitting explosion rocked the Humvee. A blinding white flash went off. The front of the five-ton vehicle flew into the air and crashed to the ground with an earthshaking jolt.
Mike whipped wildly around in his shoulder harness. He fought terror to think. They’d hit an IED. It scored a direct hit under their front bumper. Rock and earth thundered onto the Humvee roof. The windows exploded. Hot shrapnel and glass flew everywhere. Mike screamed but couldn’t hear himself. Chatty slumped in his seat, his window cracked.
“Chatty!” Mike unlatched his harness and reached for Chatty. The Humvee engine burst into flames. Black smoke flooded the interior. Joe and Dermot became frantic shadows trying to get out of the vehicle. Flames licked under the dashboard, superheating Mike’s face, searing his lungs. He gasped for breath. They’d burn alive if they didn’t get out.
“Joe, Joe, you okay?” Mike couldn’t hear it if they replied. He unlatched Chatty and grabbed him by his jacket but his head flopped over. Flames erupted on the hood of the car, flooding the interior with light and heat.
Mike reached across Chatty to grab the door handle. He wrenched it down but it jammed. He lifted his leg and kicked the door open. The sudden blast of cold air made the smoke thicker, billowing everywhere.
Mike coughed, his lungs choked. He climbed over Chatty, grabbed him by the jacket, and yanked him from the Humvee. He dragged him through the snow, struggling with his weight. Horrific orange flames lit up the black night. Mike saw Joe and Dermot trapped in the burning Humvee. The doors on older models jammed, so buttons had been installed, to be pulled open from the outside.
Mike left Chatty by the side of the road and dashed back to the Humvee. Heat seared Mike’s face and smoke filled his lungs. He kicked the button on the door. It flew open.
Joe fell out coughing and hacking, engulfed by heat and smoke.
“Hurry, go!” Mike yanked him out of the way, and Dermot scrambled from the Humvee, coughing and spitting. Suddenly all hell broke loose.
Pop pop pop! A barrage of gunfire echoed, loud enough to burst through Mike’s ringing ears. He spun around, reeling in a cloud of smoke. Red muzzles flashed from both sides of the road.
Dermot, Mike, and Joe threw themselves on the frozen ground. Dermot and Joe fired back, and Mike drew his weapon for the first time ever, then saw Chatty lying unconscious in the snow, exposed to enemy fire.
“Cover me!” Mike raced over to Chatty in a crouch and threw his body on top of him. He kept firing, his head down, his small caliber weapon a peashooter compared with the AK-47s. He felt the sizzle of their big bullets flying past him, their percussive waves rippling through the air.
Joe and Dermot returned fire. The brigad
e fought back, the gunners blasted their massive .50 caliber weapons, wheeling right and left in turrets, lighting up the night. Behind them, flames from the Humvee shot into the sky. Smoke billowed heavenward. Finally the Taliban stopped shooting, but the brigade didn’t let up, laying down suppressive fire.
Mike had emptied his gun and so had Joe, but both men remained prone, their heads down. Every sense stayed on alert. Adrenaline flooded their systems. Their hearts pounded against the inside of their body armor. In minutes, the firing ceased. Soldiers chased the fleeing Taliban or raced to grab fire extinguishers from their Humvees.
Joe looked over, eyes wide under his helmet. His face was blackened with smoke, and his head was silhouetted against the orangey fire. He was saying something, his lips were moving, but Mike couldn’t hear a word.
“Go see if there’s any casualties!” Mike told him, still adrenalized. “I’ll see about Chatty!”
Joe scrambled to his feet, and Mike rolled off Chatty, felt his neck for his pulse, and felt his heart lift when he found it blessedly strong. “Chatty!”
Chatty struggled to sit up.
“You okay? You feel okay?” Mike scanned Chatty’s body but there was no evidence of injury, though a concussion was always possible. “Chatty, who’s the president?”
Chatty’s lips were moving, and he wrenched off his goggles, leaving whitish rings on his sooty face. His eyes went wide with disbelief when he saw the fire.
“You missed the fight!” Mike laughed, finally understanding the rush of combat. He couldn’t hear a thing, but he was so happy they all had lived that he couldn’t stop talking. “We made it! I shot my gun like a big boy!”
Chatty was saying something, but Mike rose unsteadily, his thoughts racing to the others.
“Chatty, we have to get back to the Humvees! We need to see if there’s wounded!”
Chatty grabbed him, reached for the medical pack at his belt, and flipped open the Velcro pouch. He was saying something, looking down, so Mike looked down, too, but didn’t understand what he was seeing. It must have been a trick of the light, from the fire. Something was lying in the snow, in the dark.