Busted Flush

“He won’t.”

  “I want to be damn sure of that.”

  “How did you know about this place?”

  “My mother took a month one summer to look for Roman influence in the Orkneys. We crawled all over the islands, and found this abandoned farm.”

  The smile is back. It’s very warm and genuine. “But no Romans.” “No Romans.”

  The hot water won’t last long, so I stand in the chipped and stained clawfooted tub, hand resting against the wall, and let the water sluice through my hair and down my back. The tightness is back in my chest, as if I’m filled with tears fighting to escape. It’s just because I’m so tired. That’s all it is. I should head to London. Report. Wait for dawn and check on Siraj.

  The water is starting to cool. I soap up and rinse. The handles squeak as I spin them to turn off the water. The rings on the cheap plastic shower curtain rattle like chattering teeth on the rail as I pull it back. Suddenly the door to the bathroom flies open and Niobe and Drake rush in. She has one hand between his shoulders. The other is pressed against his forehead. He has a pudgy hand clasped desperately over his mouth.

  I’m naked, and acutely aware of my deformed genitalia. She looks at me and her eyes widen. Once again rage is coursing along every nerve. I lunge forward and grab the frayed towel.

  They reach the toilet and Drake folds up like an origami figure. The smell of vomit tinged with stew and chocolate pudding fills the steam-filled room. I feel my own gut heaving in sympathy. I’m frantically trying to wrap the towel around my waist.

  Niobe holds out an imperious hand. “Wet a washcloth with cold water,” she orders. I don’t act immediately. I’m getting the sheltering towel in place and tucked. “Would you get me a damn cloth!”

  This time I obey. It’s a tiny room, and my back is against the wall as I try to shuffle out. I watch as she wipes Drake’s face, and murmurs to him soothingly. I remember just such nights, but it’s my father’s warm baritone I hear. Drake is crying. I don’t think it’s just because he’s puked. I leave them.

  I should be sleeping. Instead I’m standing at the edge of the ocean, smoking. The waves hiss and giggle on the rock and sand shore, and the sound of the rising and falling water is like the breathing of a great beast. I want to walk into it and let the waves close over my head.

  I have that writhing feeling in the belly when you feel like you’ve said or done the wrong thing with someone you want to please. Why did the little bastard have to get sick right then? Why couldn’t it have happened five minutes later. I should have put the towel right by the tub. Dried myself in the tub.

  Carried on the night wind, the squeak of the sagging front door seems like a scream. I listen to her footsteps. Oh, crap, she’s joining me.

  “You didn’t have to be embarrassed. I’ve seen a few penises.” I don’t answer and the silence yawns between us. “Is that what the wild card did to you?” she asks.

  Anger shakes me. “No. That’s what a genetic fluke did to me.”

  Nervous, she gathers her thick, bristly tail into her arms and cradles it. “Isn’t it the same thing?” she asks.

  “Somehow it seems more cruel.” I cough to clear the harshness from my voice.

  “At least your deformity is hidden.” And she drops the tail as if horrified to find herself holding it.

  “I’m not sure that helps all that much. I can’t tell you the number of times my classmates jumped me and pulled down my pants and underwear for a firsthand look. Children are such little animals.” I see her blanch at that. “I’m sorry. You obviously don’t feel that way.”

  “Children are a blessing.”

  “That’s what my father says.”

  “But not you.”

  I should just walk away from this uncomfortable conversation, but I find myself answering. “A little side effect of this cosmic joke is that I’m sterile,” I lightly add. “The noble line of Matthews dies with me.”

  She doesn’t realize I’m joking. “And your father blames you for that?”

  “Oh, Christ, no, he doesn’t give a damn about all that. He just would have liked to have grandkids.” I take a long drag on the cigarette and release the smoke in a sharp exhalation.

  The tips of her fingers are cool as she quickly touches my wrist. “But you feel guilty.” And I realize it’s true.

  A flick of the fingers sends the butt soaring away over the water trailing red sparks.

  “When did you find out? That you couldn’t . . .” Her voice trails away.

  “When I was twelve. My teenage years should have been fantastic—stick with me, baby. All the fun and none of the risk. But it didn’t work out that way.”

  “Why?”

  “Christ, woman, are you dense? You saw me. I’m grotesque.”

  She reaches back, feeling along the length of her tail. “Do you know how I ended up at BICC?”

  I shake my head.

  “I was twenty-two when I learned this isn’t just a tail,” she said. “As if things hadn’t been bad enough already.” She looks up at me, challenging me to engage. I decide to go along.

  “And what, exactly, does that mean?”

  “My parents never had any interest in raising a joker. I was, um, embarrassing to them. They distanced themselves from me as much as they could. They called me their niece, said they’d taken me in after my own parents died.”

  “Charming. They must live in a world where image is more important than anything else.”

  She seems startled at my words. She nods slowly. “I had no idea I was an ace until it just sorta happened.” Her eyes have gone dark, and her expression is bleak. “I thought he liked me, but he just wanted sex. And it happened almost instantly.”

  “What?”

  “The eggs. It hurt so badly, I thought I was dying. I thought God was punishing me. That this was what happened to wretched little whores.”

  “I hear a quote in that.” I find I’m suddenly fascinated, and furious at whoever would have said such a thing to a frightened teenager.

  “My father.” The words are spoken so quietly that I have to lean in to hear her.

  She draws in a deep, shaky breath and forges ahead: “But the eggs hatched, and suddenly, I had kids. They were so wonderful. They bounced and laughed and flew around the house. They infuriated my parents and terrorized the help, but I didn’t care, because they were my children and I loved them so intensely. And they loved me, too.” Her voice is fierce, passionate. “I was simply delirious with joy. Until they died.” The three words seem to hang in the air. “When my children died, my heart was crushed. My joy extinguished. I took it badly. I hurt myself.”

  Her tone is so dispassionate that I know she is holding back a storm of emotion. I don’t know why I’m hearing this story, but I know I want to hear it all. I speak very softly as if I’m dealing with a frightened foal. “What did you do?”

  “I tried to cut my tail off. I’ve never felt pain like that. It surged up my spine and erupted in my skull like magma. I passed out.” She gets a crooked little smile. “It’s funny. I’ve been in therapy for years and I just remembered this. As the floor was coming up to meet my face, I noticed the way my blood ran in little rivulets between the tiles, toward the bathtub. My last thought was how upset my parents would be when they learned their remodeled bathroom had an uneven floor.”

  I look down at the bumpy ridge where none of the bristly hair grew. “I presume they shipped you off shortly after that.”

  She nods. “And then they had the bathroom redone.”

  We stand in silence listening to the ocean’s soft murmurs.

  “Can Drake control himself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m going to take you to meet a truly decent man.”

  “I think you’re pretty decent.”

  “You’d be mistaken.”

  Dirge in a Major Key:

  Part II

  S. L. Farrell
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  THE CHINOOK WAS LOUD, crowded, and uncomfortable. Underneath them, lit only by starlight, sandy, low hills crawled toward the horizon and more hills emerged to replace them, until finally the sun rose to color the world red and then yellow. Rusty was in the chopper with him, along with four dozen UN troops and their officers, Lieutenant Bedeau among them. They wore flak jackets and helmets and carried live ammunition in their weapons, but there had still been no real resistance—not at Kuwait International, not at any of the places that Michael had been to in the endless parade of days and nights.

  Michael had lost count of time. All the places in the Ar-Rumaylah field in southern Iraq were starting to look the same, blurring in his memory. The employees of each facility had packed up and left, leaving papers and half-eaten snacks on their desks. In each place, the wind wailed mournfully as it blew dun-colored sand between the buildings. The army of the Caliphate was an eternal no-show.

  The other teams—Kate with Lohengrin in the Al-Burqan field in Kuwait; Tinker on the Az-Zuluf platforms out in the Gulf—reported the same: no resistance. The wellheads, the pumping stations, the pipelines, the refineries: they’d all been abandoned. Michael, Rusty, and their blue helmets would stay a day or two or three until UN contractors and support troops were sent in from HQ at Kuwait International, and then they’d be on to the next place.

  The ease of the operation was a relief to everyone, Michael no less than the others. He’d not been looking forward to another battle in some godforsaken locale, especially when the enemy carried a special hatred for him.

  He glanced out the window nearest him. The radio headset squawked with terse updates. DB kept tapping on the flak jacket that covered his chest, but the dull sound it returned gave him no comfort. Easy or not, the whole operation still felt wrong. Everything was too easy. Michael was sweating, and it wasn’t the heat. He slipped one of his hands under his flak jacket and rubbed at the bruise on his chest, the fading remnant of the sniper attack at Kuwait International.

  They hate you for what you did in Egypt. . . . The people of the Caliphate, they don’t like you very much. . . .

  “Wellheads, one minute.” The warning came from his headset. Around him, soldiers checked gear and readied themselves: their group was French, as were the bulk of the UN ground forces, armed with stubby FAMAS G2 assault rifles. The Chinook tilted, then dipped with nauseating suddenness as the rotors wailed. Michael caught a glimpse of the towers of derricks, several buildings, and a trio of huge storage tanks for the crude oil, but then dust and sand rose in a dense, choking cloud, blocking sight of the landscape, and he felt the shudder as the wheels touched ground.

  The rear door yawned; a squad of blue helmets jumped out, ducking their heads against the rotor wash and running across the sand with weapons ready. Alongside him, Rusty coughed in the gritty air. “Cripes,” he muttered. More troops tumbled out. Michael checked the two M-16s he carried—still leaving his upper set of hands free—and lurched to his feet. “Let’s go,” he said to Rusty.

  “Why don’cha stay behind me, fella?” Rusty suggested. “Just in case.” Michael thought that an excellent idea.

  They lumbered down the ramp and onto the sand at a jog.

  Their Chinook had landed alongside the administration building for the facility—Lieutenant Bedeau was leading the first set of blue helmets, and had already kicked open the doors of the building and gone in. As with all the wellheads they’d taken, there didn’t seem to be anyone around: no cars in the parking lots, no one near the storage tanks or near the oil derricks set in a mile-long arc just to the east, no one moving in the village five hundred or so yards away to the west near the main road. The pipeline-linked refinery a half mile to the south looked equally deserted. The Tigre choppers hovered overhead menacingly, loud in the sunlight, but their guns were silent.

  Maybe, he thought, maybe Jayewardene and Fortune were going to get what they’d hoped. He rubbed the bruise under his Kevlar again and crouched behind Rusty, scanning the rooftops and half expecting to feel the kick of a slug against his jacket.

  “We’re secure here,” he heard Bedeau say in his headset in French-accented English. “Aucun problème.” The relief in the man’s voice was palpable. Someone laughed nearby; he saw the closest soldiers let the tips of their weapons drop slightly.

  These assignments were already becoming routine. They were beginning to expect it to be easy. That worried Michael more than anything.

  “Nobody home again,” Rusty said. In the midst of the pipes and derricks, he looked like a piece of old equipment that had decided to become ambulatory. “Good deal.”

  They swept the facility closely and made certain that the employees had indeed abandoned the place, that there were no soldiers of the Caliphate or snipers hidden about, and that the facility hadn’t been either sabotaged or booby-trapped. Rusty had been given the task of using the metal detector on the grounds, with two demolition experts a careful dozen steps behind him, checking any hits he found. He grinned at Michael with the earphones stretching dangerously around his orange-red head. “I found lots of pieces of old pipe, and a whole buncha coins.” He held out a large palm, and Michael saw several silver and bronze-colored coins there, adorned with Arabic lettering. “Souvenir, fella?”

  Michael took one. He brushed the sand from it and stuck it in his pocket.

  A few hours later, Michael, Lieutenant Bedeau, and a six-member squad of blue helmets trudged out to a small village along the narrow paved road passing the complex, while Rusty and the others continued to sweep for mines and booby traps. The village was a collection of small houses huddled together in the sand with a few stores and a petrol station. All the houses looked the same: prefab, cheap company housing. The veiled faces of women watched them from behind shuttered windows as they approached.

  There were children—a dozen or more, their ages seeming to range from maybe seven to perhaps fourteen—playing soccer between the houses. Usually, no matter where he went, the strangeness of Michael’s spidery figure would bring them running and chattering toward him, but these only stopped their game and stared as they approached before melting away into the bright shadows between the buildings. “. . . Djinn . . .” He heard the word in the midst of the stream of whispered Arabic, and it gave him a chill. He began to watch the windows of the houses carefully, half expecting the muzzle of a rifle to appear. The children vanished, the soccer ball abandoned on the sand. The village seemed preternaturally quiet; it made the small hairs stand up on Michael’s arms. His lowest set of hands clutched the single M-16 he was holding tighter, his finger sliding close to the trigger.

  It’s all kids, women, and old men here, he reminded himself, but that gave him little comfort. Any of them could just as easily press a trigger.

  Lieutenant Bedeau, in addition to English, also spoke Arabic. He called out a greeting, his voice sounding terribly small. For several seconds there was no response at all, and Bedeau shrugged at Michael. “We’ll go building to building looking for weapons,” Michael began, but then a door creaked on rusty hinges and an elderly man stepped out from one of the houses. His thobe—the standard white robelike garment of the region—swayed as he moved, revealing a stick-thin body underneath. They tensed, all of them: had the man made a wrong gesture, he would not have lived to take another breath. But the grizzled elder kept his hands carefully in sight as he spoke to Bedeau in a burst of rapid-fire, gap-toothed Arabic. Bedeau nodded; they exchanged a few brief sentences.

  “This one’s name is Dabir,” the lieutenant said. “He says that all the men—the workers—are gone. His son was one of them. Big trucks from Baghdad came here three days ago and took them away. The wives, a few old men like him, the children; they were told more trucks would come for them, but none have. There’s no one here right now but the elderly, the women, and the children.” Dabir said something else, pointing at Michael. Bedeau grimaced and hesitated before translating. “He said that you and the other one are abominations in the
face of Allah, that you must leave so the men can come back.”

  “Well, that’s nice,” Michael said. “Rusty will be happy to hear that. Tell our friend Dabir that we don’t think the men will be coming back at all, that tomorrow or the next day more of our people will be coming to work here. Tell him that we’ll talk to Prince Siraj and try to make sure that the trucks show up to pick them up to take them to wherever their men went.”

  As Michael spoke, he saw movement behind the old man; a boy, probably no more than ten or eleven. The child crept out to stand next to the old man, who put an arm protectively around him as he listened to Bedeau’s translation, scowling. The boy said something in response—again, Michael thought he heard the word “Djinn” in the torrent—and Bedeau’s face colored.

  “This is Dabir’s grandson Raaqim. He’s . . . not exactly happy with the news,” Bedeau told Michael. “The rest, it’s not worth translating.”

  “Yeah, I kinda gathered that.” Raaqim was staring at Michael, scowling like Dabir with his arms crossed defiantly in front of him. “Tell the old man we’re sorry, but that is the way of things. It is the will of the Caliph and Prince Siraj.”

  Bedeau shrugged. He translated, and Dabir’s scowl deepened. With a middle hand, Michael dug in his pocket for the old coin Rusty had given him. He crouched down in front of Raaqim, the muzzle of his weapon pointed down at the sand, and held out the coin. “Here,” he said. “You can have this.”

  The boy stared; the old man watched without saying anything. “Go on,” Michael said when the kid didn’t move or respond. “It’s yours.”

  Raaqim unfolded his arms. He stared at Michael, his gaze roaming up and down his long, muscular body, staring at the several arms, at the snarl of tattoos decorating his skin, at the sextuplet of tympanic rings covering his chest and abdomen. His eyes widened. He looked at the coin.

  With a violent lurch of his head, he spat in Michael’s face.