Purple Heart Page 4

  He slipped the picture out of the Ziploc bag and held it gingerly by the tips of his fingers. At night, before they went out on house-to-house searches, he’d take the picture out and spend the last few minutes before they left looking at Caroline twirling her hair, pretending he was in the bleachers watching her. He could practically feel the snap in the fall air, hear the shrill call of the referee’s whistle, feel the lump in his jacket pocket where he’d hidden a can of Budweiser.

  But now she seemed more like someone in one of those celebrity magazines. Her face was familiar—the way Jennifer Aniston or Britney Spears was familiar—in the way that makes you feel like you know the person, even though all you really know is their picture. He put the picture back in the Ziploc bag and slipped it under his pillow.

  He opened the yearbook and flipped idly through the pages. He scanned the pictures of the debate team, the Honor Society, the Chemistry Club, and wondered what those kids were doing right now. Go get Saddam, one kid had written. Remember the Alamo, said another.

  As he turned the page, a piece of paper fluttered onto the bed. It was a child’s drawing of a battle. The guns—M16s and M4s—were precisely drawn, even though they were nearly as big as the soldiers. A Black Hawk UH-60 hovered overhead—complete with Hellfire antitank missiles mounted on the sides. Its guns spit out a shower of bullets—drawn as a hundred tiny pencil hash marks arching across on the paper. At the bottom it was signed in wobbly English letters: Ali.

  The last time he’d seen Ali was when they were patrolling the market near the al-Hikma Mosque. Charlene had caught him trying to steal a blue plastic tarp off the back of their Humvee.

  “Skittles,” he said, batting his eyes at Charlene. “Please.”

  Ali had become a bit of a pest. He’d started out begging for food, but lately, he seemed to miraculously appear whenever they were in his sector, hanging around, getting underfoot, begging for batteries, old magazines, empty soda cans—anything he could sell. Charlene had shooed him away, then turned to Matt. “We’re really not supposed to fraternize with the local children.”

  Matt couldn’t believe it. She was quoting from the new Army Field Manual. “We’re here to help these people, Charlene. Besides, he’s just a kid.”

  Matt picked up the drawing, studied it for a while, then tucked it inside the Ziploc bag along with Caroline’s letters.

  FRANCIS WAS BACK, WRITING FURIOUSLY IN A SMALL BLACK notebook. At the other end of the room, there was a new guy—a middle-aged man with soft, sloping shoulders and a bit of a paunch—sitting up in bed reading Hustler. Matt decided to go for another walk, to see if he could make it as far as that guy’s bed.

  He felt a little stronger this time, a little more steady on his feet, but he was aware that his right leg was dragging a little. It didn’t hurt; it just didn’t move in sync with his other leg. Two days and he was able to walk forty-five steps.

  The guy turned the magazine upside down on his belly. “So,” he said, “what brings you here?”

  “I was on the business end of an RPG,” Matt said. This phrase still didn’t sound quite right, but it was the one thing he was sure of. “What about you?”

  “Threw my back out hauling a drum of kerosene,” he said. “I’m pretty sure they don’t give out Purple Hearts for that. Too bad. I’d like to bring that back to my class.”

  Matt didn’t get it.

  “Shop class,” the guy said. “I teach shop. I’m National Guard. Never thought they’d actually send us here. But I’ll tell you, I am too old for this crap. I’ll be forty-three next month and I am too old to be running around this godforsaken place, chasing after kids half my age, looking for hajis around every corner…”

  An image—Justin bolting around a corner, running across the alley with his head down—flashed into Matt’s mind, then vanished as quickly as it had come.

  “…but they need me, you know what I mean?” The shop teacher kept talking, unaware that Matt had stopped listening. “I can even rig up a DVD player to run off a car battery. What about you?” he said. “What do you do back home?”

  “Me? Auto detailing.”

  “So the army gave you a big pay raise, right? Nine hundred a month to get shot at. I bet you’re not even legal to buy beer, am I right?”

  Matt nodded.

  Talking to this guy—or, rather, listening to him—was exhausting and Matt started to walk away, his head pounding.

  He’d only gone about a half dozen steps when he had to stop and grab hold of the railing of an empty bed. He stood there as his legs trembled uncontrollably. The railing started to slip from his grasp—his hands were suddenly sweaty—and he felt his legs give out from under him.

  A pair of hands grabbed him roughly, lifting him up by the armpits. It was Francis. Somehow he’d made it from the other end of the ward just in time.

  “Whoa there, little buddy,” he said. “Am I gonna have to tell the bartender to cut you off?”

  Matt looked into his eyes. They were deep brown, the color of a strong cup of coffee.

  Matt shook his head. “I don’t even have a fake ID.”

  Francis whistled through his teeth. “Your brain really did get shook up, kid.”

  He helped Matt back to his bed, practically carrying him the last few yards, then turned back the covers and laid him down with a gentleness that shocked Matt.

  “What did those MPs want with you?” Matt said as Francis was about to leave.

  Francis gazed out the window. “The truth?” he said, looking at some invisible point in the distance. “It’s like Jack Nicholson said. You can’t handle the truth.”

  MATT SAT IN BED FLIPPING THROUGH THE PAGES OF A BOOK of World Series trivia he’d found in the bathroom while the new guy in the bed across from him played with a yo-yo. Outside, he could hear the dull thrum of the hospital generator. A car drove by, its radio blaring a Middle Eastern tune—leaving a few quivering notes of the singer’s voice in its wake.

  He knew that song from somewhere. He put down the trivia book and stared at the bobbing yo-yo. But what he saw was a dusty alleyway. An overturned car. A candy wrapper snagged on a coil of razor wire. Bullets kicking up sparks on the pavement. A mangy dog with a crooked tail.

  “They all sound the same, don’t they?”

  Matt blinked. The soldier with the yo-yo was talking to him. The man was sort of short, but he was well-built, with biceps so big, they stretched the sleeves of his T-shirt. His head was shaved clean and shaped like a bullet and he had a tattoo on one arm that said Mom.

  “Their songs,” the guy said, not missing a beat as the yo-yo slid up and down on its string. “It’s always some chick with a high voice yodeling.”

  As the last strains of the song died out, Matt thought again of the dusty alleyway. All of the alleys in Baghdad looked the same—piles of plaster where mortar rounds had hit the buildings, flat tires and abandoned car parts in the middle of the street, razor wire and graffiti everywhere. But right in the middle of all that chaos, all that destruction, you’d stumble on signs of family life—laundry flapping in the wind, a chicken pecking in a yard, a radio playing from somewhere inside.

  “I know that song,” Matt said flatly.

  “What? You listen to that shit?” The guy had curled the yo-yo into his palm, stopping its rhythmic motion.

  “No,” said Matt. “Not really.”

  The guy swiveled a little so his back was almost facing Matt and he pointed to a spot on his shoulder. “Shot,” he said. “By a sniper.”

  Matt nodded to show his appreciation. “So are they sending you to Germany?”

  “No fucking way,” he said. “They wanted to, but I told them ‘fuck no.’ Told them I was going to stay here and get better as fast as I can so I could get back out there with my boys.”

  “Oh.” This guy was like Charlene: 110 percent committed to the mission. But he loved his squad, that was for sure.

  Matt thought about his squad, about Justin, about Wolf and Figueroa, abo
ut their new squad leader, Sergeant McNally. The first thought that came to mind wasn’t a firefight or a door-to-door search.

  It was the time Wolf’s mom sent him a bunch of cans of Silly String. The whole squad ran around the barracks, hiding and ambushing one another, spraying neon green Silly String everywhere, imitating the ack-ack sound of an M16 each time they fired. They were playing war, Matt remembered thinking, while a real one was raging outside.

  As he watched Wolf squirt Silly String down the back of Figueroa’s shirt, he remembered thinking, This is what war is all about. It wasn’t about fighting the enemy. It wasn’t about politics or oil or even about terrorists. It was about your buddies; it was about fighting for the guy next to you. And knowing he was fighting for you.

  He thought about Itchy, wondering if the guys in his squad were taking care of him. He could picture them, on their cots inside the abandoned school that they were using as their base. At this time of night, Figueroa would be writing to his wife, Matt and Justin would be playing Halo, and Wolf would be cleaning his weapon or doing push-ups. And Itchy would be curled up in the shape of a comma at the foot of his cot, purring.

  A SHADOW FELL OVER THE BED AND MATT OPENED HIS EYES TO see Francis standing above him, his leg twitching. “Here,” he said, holding out what looked like a small paperback book. “I traded some Vicodin for it.”

  Matt studied the thing in his hand. It was a notebook with a picture of a basket of puppies on the front.

  “I know,” Francis said. “It’s kind of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ but it was all I could find. Got it off a nurse from Mobile.”

  Matt flipped through the empty pages of the book, not quite sure what he was supposed to do with it.

  “Write down everything you know,” Francis said. “Everything about what happened the day they brought you in here. When they bring you over to Fuchs’s office, you’ll at least have something.”

  And then Francis disappeared, leaving Matt sitting there, staring at the blank first page of the notebook. Fuchs’s office. He struggled to remember who Fuchs was. Kwong had mentioned him. Was Fuchs the one who was going to question him, write up a report? Francis seemed pretty worked up about the whole thing. But Kwong had said it was routine under these circumstances. What did that mean?

  There was so much Matt didn’t know. He was in the hospital because of an RPG—Justin had told him that much. But he didn’t remember anything about the attack. Kwong said it was because of that brain thing he had. And he said he might have trouble learning new information. So Matt made two lists: the things he did know and the things he didn’t.

  The list of things he didn’t know included big things and small ones. The details of the attack. Where his squad was now. What exactly Francis had done to end up in trouble. When he’d last heard from Caroline. Where he’d seen that dog with the crooked tail.

  When it came time to list the things he did know, he couldn’t think of anything he knew for sure.

  A LETTER FROM CAROLINE WAS SITTING ON HIS BEDSIDE TABLE when he woke up the next morning. The army, despite all the many ways it was screwed up, always managed to get the mail delivered—even when they were out in some nowhere town in Iraq. And now they’d forwarded the letter from his old barracks to the hospital.

  He looked at the envelope. On the front someone had scrawled the name of the hospital. On the back was a message from Justin.

  Figueroa says he’s gonna eat all your mom’s cookies if you don’t get back soon. And Wolf says he wants your picture of JLo if you don’t make it.

  P.S. Fruit of the Month Club called; they want you to be Miss October.

  Inside was Caroline’s familiar writing.

  Dear Matt,

  Hey, baby, hope you’re doing good and killing lots of bad guys. I sent you some beef jerky like you asked and some baby wipes. My mom thought that was weird, but I explained about how you don’t get to shower and all.

  I’m gonna have to keep this short because I have to study for bio. Mrs. Crane said we were gonna have a pop quiz, but that was a while ago and I think it might be any day now. I’m sooo scared. I hate bio and I have dreams that the test is today and everybody knows but me and I forgot to study. I try to look off Brad Rigby’s paper in the dream and he tells Crane. OMG! I hate bio.

  Anyhow, I hope you’re good and that you’re keeping your gun clean. I saw on TV how the sand gets in them and they don’t work. They also said on TV that soldiers like to get tuna fish in those little single-serve packets. Or Crystal Light On the Go packets. Do you want me to send you some?

  Love ya,

  Caroline

  P.S. We beat Briar Cliff last week. This week it’s Upper Westfield. Ugh! I hate them!

  P.P.S. My little brother did a report on you at school last week. He brought in that old dollar bill you sent from when Saddam was king.

  Matt read the letter three times over, culling through it for hidden meanings in every word. Why did she mention Brad Rigby? And why was she dreaming about him? What did that mean? Everything else suddenly seemed stupid. She was back home and “sooo scared” about a pop quiz in bio while he was in Iraq with some traumatic brain injury.

  The normalness of her letters—the bland, ordinary details of high school life—used to make him feel good, like things were the same at home even if he was gone. He’d told himself that that was what he was fighting for: so Caroline and his mom and Lizzy could go to the mall or watch that show they liked, Gossip Girl, and do whatever they did and not have to worry.

  But now it bugged him that she was suddenly like some expert on the war, telling him to clean his gun and asking if he wanted single-serving packs of tuna. And she’d signed her letter “love ya.” That was what she and her girlfriends said when they hung up on their cell phones—or what you say to your mom when you leave the house. What was that supposed to mean?

  He looked up from the letter and saw Francis standing next to his bed. He was holding a jar with some kind of cream in his hands.

  “‘A lightweight lotion that packs all the moisturizing benefits of beta-carotene into a sheer, easily absorbed base,”’ he read from the label in a lisping, mock-gay voice. “‘The natural way to repair and revive sun-damaged skin.’”

  He opened the jar and sniffed. “My kid sister sent it to me,” he said. “I told her I needed sunscreen.” He shook his head. “Girls. They’re like a different species, you know?”

  Matt put his hands to his cheeks, an imitation of the Home Alone kid. “OMG!” he said in a high, girly voice. “That’s what my girlfriend says,” he said in a normal voice. “She’s like…turned into…you know…that girl, the one who drives her kids around with no seat belt?”

  Francis cocked his head to the side. “Britney Spears?”

  “Yeah,” said Matt. “Her.”

  “Dude,” Francis said. “That brain thing you have. Are you sure you don’t have Alzheimer’s?”

  Matt noticed then that Francis was also holding a picture. “What’s that?” he said.

  Francis handed him the photo, a picture of a little girl with the same lopsided smile Francis had, standing on a porch all decorated with red, white, and blue streamers. The house looked like it was in a city somewhere, in a not-very-good part of town.

  “My kid,” Francis said. He stared at the picture for a while. “I told my wife…” His voice drifted off. “Have everybody come to the side door. The mailman, the neighbors.”

  Matt had no idea what he was talking about.

  “When the army comes to your door, to give you the bad news,” he said, “they always use the front door. The chaplain, the guy with the letter from the president, they come to the front door.”

  Matt nodded.

  “So if everybody we know uses the side door, every time the bell rings, she doesn’t have to, you know, imagine the worst.”

  THE BLOND NURSE, THE ONE WHO LOOKED LIKE BETTY—OR was it Veronica?—had wheeled him to his appointment with Meaghan Finnerty, then left. Matt sat
outside the door to her office, studying the things in his notebook.

  Kwong had said that Matt might have trouble learning new information. So Matt had written a couple of facts from the World Series trivia book and made a sort of study guide—putting a few of the questions on one side of the page and the answers on the other. Then he folded the page in half, like he used to do when he was studying Spanish vocab, and tested himself.

  Which pitcher broke a sixty-two-year-old record when he struck out twenty-nine batters in the 1965 World Series? What year was the series postponed because of an earthquake? Who holds the series record for most home runs?

  He covered the answers with his hand and tried to focus. But as soon as he looked away from the book, his mind went blank.

  Meaghan Finnerty opened the door. He was surprised at how glad he was to see her. Then his heart sank: She took out her little deck of flash cards.

  But he went along with her, concentrating harder than he ever had in school, struggling to identify pictures of random objects—a radio, a butterfly, a lamp—then trying to fill in the missing words in sentences about situations from what Meaghan Finnerty called everyday life.

  “So, if you want to fill up your car and you only have twenty dollars, can you afford eight gallons of regular and still have money left for a Coke?” she asked.