Purple Heart Read online

  Matt just looked at her. Everyday life wasn’t about filling up a gas tank or ordering a bucket of wings. Everyday life was about getting your gas mask on in ten seconds or calibrating the distance between your position and a sniper’s nest.

  He tried to concentrate. But all the information—the cost of a gallon of gas, the price of a can of Coke—slipped out of his mind as soon as he took his eyes off the page.

  His head had begun to ache and his attention had started to drift, when the cry of the muezzin sounded.

  The muezzin’s call, broadcast from atop a minaret summoning the faithful to prayer, was a regular feature of the Iraqi soundscape. It occurred five times a day, and Matt had long ago gotten used to the strange noise. But this time it felt like it was ringing in his ears, as if the muezzin were standing right next to him. He could see Meaghan’s lips moving, but all he could hear were the long, drawn-out strains of the ancient, mournful call. He wiped his hands across his upper lip. He was sweating.

  “Are you all right?” Her words reached him as if they were coming from inside a long tunnel.

  “Yeah, sure, I’m fine.” The last note of the call to prayer lingered in the air for a moment, then stopped. Matt shook his head, trying to get the sound out of his mind, and waited for his breathing to return to normal.

  Meaghan Finnerty seemed to be studying him.

  “I’m fine, really,” he said.

  And they went back to the everyday experience of figuring out which was the better buy: medium popcorn and a soda or an extra large and a free soda.

  A SKINNY KID WITH PIMPLES DOTTING HIS FOREHEAD WAS waiting for him with a wheelchair outside Meaghan Finnerty’s office.

  This kid was about his age. He had one earbud stuck in his ear and a dab of zit cream on his neck.

  “Okay if I walk?” Matt asked.

  “Nope.” The kid set the brake on the wheelchair with his foot. He was wearing high-tops. Few of the people in the hospital wore combat boots, Matt had noticed. Most of the doctors wore clogs, although one wore socks with sandals, and the nurses all seemed to wear sneakers. It felt more like a mall than an army hospital sometimes. The pimply kid shrugged. “Doctor says you’re not allowed.”

  Matt sighed and lowered himself into the chair, secretly relieved. He was keeping track of how many steps he’d gone since he’d gotten here—so far, sixty-four was the max—and Meaghan Finnerty’s office was actually pretty far from the ward.

  He wheeled the chair around a corner, then turned up the volume on his iPod. It was so loud, Matt could hear the clatter of the cymbals. “What are you listening to?” he asked after a while.

  “It’s kinda old-school,” he said. “The Clash. Mood music for Iraq.”

  Without another word, the kid pulled the other earbud out of the pocket of his scrubs and handed it to Matt. And they went down the hall, tethered to each other, listening to “Rock the Casbah.”

  Matt and Caroline used to share a pair of earphones like that on the bus on the way home from school. They’d sit in the last row and sometimes Matt would just marvel at the look of her knee next to his. Her legs were pale and lean and her skin was impossibly soft, and when she wore a short skirt to school, it drove him crazy. Sometimes, when the squad was riding in the Humvee, he had to fight the urge to take off his helmet and look at the picture of her in her cheerleading uniform, to look at her legs and imagine the two of them together again, sitting in the back of the bus.

  When the song ended, he handed the earbud back.

  “You don’t have anything, like, seriously wrong with you, do you?” the kid asked.

  “No,” Matt said. “Other than not being able to remember what a raincoat is.”

  The kid stopped the wheelchair a minute. “Like any internal bleeding or anything?”

  Matt shook his head.

  “Good. Because I think I can probably pop a wheelie on this thing if we get up enough speed.”

  THE CHORUS OF “BORN IN THE USA” CAME FLOATING OUT of the ward as Matt walked in. The soldier with the yo-yo—his name was Clarence, Matt was pretty sure—was fiddling with the dial on a radio that had suddenly appeared on his bedside table.

  “107.7 FM. Classic Rock,” he said. “Freedom Radio. Courtesy of the U.S. Army.”

  After the last few chords of the song died out, an announcer with a Southern accent came on and said there would be a Bible study group meeting on Wednesday and confidential evaluations at the combat stress clinic on Thursday. Life in the Green Zone.

  But the strangest thing about the Green Zone was the quiet—or rather, the ordinariness of the sounds. Cell phones trilling. Toilets flushing. The hiss of air as someone pulled the tab on a can of Coke. The sounds were both odd and familiar—out of place, ordinary, and extraordinary at the same time. Matt thought about Itchy, the cat, and how he’d grown accustomed to the pounding of mortar fire and wondered if he would stop noticing these everyday sounds and get used to the quiet.

  He opened his notebook to the page with the baseball trivia questions and tested himself again. He was pretty sure Sandy Koufax was the guy who held the strike-out record, but he couldn’t remember if the World Series was postponed because an earthquake in 1989 or 1998. He unfolded the page. It was 1989. He repeated that to himself: 1989, 1989, 1989. He tested himself again. But he couldn’t remember. Was it ’89? Or ’98?

  A warm breeze filtered in through the open window, carrying the crackle of static, then the lulling voice of an Iraqi sports announcer narrating a soccer match. Soon, Matt felt fatigue descend on him. He closed his eyes and let the notebook slide from his grasp.

  Then he heard gunshots. The staccato pop-pop-pop of an AK-47.

  Matt bolted upright, clutching the covers in his fists. The popping grew louder, closer; the shots seemed to be coming from every direction.

  He didn’t have his gun or his helmet. He didn’t have his vest and he wasn’t wearing his boots. He was in a hospital bed, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts and flip-flops.

  For a moment everything went quiet. A single shot rang out, ricocheting off the concrete.

  And suddenly Matt was back in the alley. In the distance, he could see a little boy, ducking in and out of a doorway. A candy wrapper fluttered from a coil of razor wire. The quivering radio voice of a woman singing a love song floated through the air. Machine-gun fire erupted. Bits of plaster rained down from overhead. A dog, a mangy stray with a crooked tail, trotted across the street, oblivious to the battle around him. A single shot rang out. The child was lifted into the air, paddling his arms like a swimmer. He looked surprised, then confused, then absolutely terrified as he soared through the turquoise sky, higher and higher, until all Matt could see were the soles of his shoes.

  Matt opened his eyes. All he could see was the deep green of the army blanket. He flushed with embarrassment. He had pulled the covers over his head like a baby.

  His whole body was shaking violently. He listened for a moment. The ward was hushed, the only sounds were the steady beeping of a medical monitor a few beds away and the distant rush of water from a toilet flushing.

  Slowly, carefully, he pulled the blanket away from his eyes. He heard a voice from a few rows away. It was the shop teacher with the bad back. “Dumb hajis,” he said. “Shooting off their machine guns just because they won a soccer game.”

  Matt looked around. He saw the guy with the yo-yo showing a nurse one of his tricks. Francis was scribbling in his notebook, and the two guys at the end of the room were playing cards. No one had even looked in his direction.

  Matt wrapped the blanket around his fist, put it to his mouth, and sobbed.

  MATT WAS WAITING OUTSIDE MEAGHAN FINNERTY’S OFFICE in the hallway when she arrived for work early the next morning. The sun wasn’t even up yet, and the hospital was shrouded in the silence that descended on it only rarely, in those predawn hours after the last of the night’s casualties were taken care of and the day’s new patients had yet to arrive.

  She stiffen
ed, unconsciously bringing her hand to her service revolver as she saw him sitting in the darkened hallway.

  “One hundred and three,” he said. “There are one hundred and three steps between here and the ward.”

  She scowled, but she eased her hand away from her holster.

  Matt held up the notebook that Francis had given him. “I know for sure,” he said. “I wrote it down.”

  She turned her wrist to check her watch. It wasn’t even seven in the morning. He had no business being off the ward, and she could report him if she wanted to.

  “Can we do some more of those picture cards today?” he said quickly. “Ma’am?”

  “At our appointment,” she said. “This afternoon.”

  Matt stuffed his hands in his pockets and went to leave. He took a step, then turned to face her. “You’re, like, the guidance counselor here, right?”

  “Not really,” she said.

  “But if a person has something they need to talk about, they can talk to you?”

  “You can talk to Father Brennan,” she said.

  “It’s not a religion thing. It’s a memory thing.”

  Meaghan Finnerty cocked her head to the side and studied him. In her gaze, he saw a flicker of sympathy, something he hadn’t sensed from her before, and he looked away, out the window, so she couldn’t see the tears that had suddenly welled up in his eyes.

  It was still sort of dark out; all he could make out in the dim, gauzy light was the silhouette of a palm tree. He counted to ten to try to regain his composure before turning to leave.

  “Come in,” she said.

  “SOMETHING BAD HAPPENED,” HE SAID. IN THE STILLNESS OF the early morning, the tiny room felt deserted, hushed, like a church before Mass. “Something really bad.”

  She nodded.

  “I keep seeing it in my head. Or parts of it, anyhow.” He wiped his hands on his pant legs, not looking up.

  “That’s not unusual,” she said. “A lot of soldiers have flashbacks, disturbing memories, nightmares….”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, his voice cracking. “I keep seeing him.”

  “Who?”

  “This street kid,” Matt said, toying with his plastic hospital wristband.

  She waited.

  “His parents were killed and he lives with his sister. Inside a giant drainage pipe. One of those things we brought over to rebuild the place. Except we never did.”

  He paused.

  “He’s a really good artist. And he runs circles around us on the soccer field. He can score a goal from twenty yards out.” Matt glanced up at her for a moment. “He’s like Itchy, this cat we adopted. Like our mascot.”

  Meaghan Finnerty furrowed her brow. “I don’t understand.”

  Matt hung his head. “Me neither.”

  The room was absolutely still. Matt could hear the hands on the wall clock advancing, second by second.

  He took a deep breath, then spoke so quietly, he wasn’t sure he’d said it out loud. “I think I killed him.”

  MEAGHAN FINNERTY DIDN’T BLINK. SHE JUST LEANED forward in her chair, and a slender beam of light snuck out from underneath the shade behind her.

  Matt looked away, at the exit sign above her door, its Arabic and English letters glowing red in the weak morning light.

  “He’s…I…he’s one of those kids who’s always hanging around, asking for candy. He’s so skinny….” Matt’s voice trailed off.

  He stopped and gazed out the window for a moment. It was oddly quiet, still, as if the whole city were asleep. He took in the sight of Meaghan Finnerty studying him.

  “I was in this alley…” he said finally. “I was crouched behind a car, taking fire. And there was this dog. He trots across the street. In the middle of a fucking firefight.” He paused, then shook his head. “Up at the other end of the alley, I see this kid ducking in and out of a doorway. And…”

  The ping of the elevator bell drifted in from the hallway. Then came the clatter of metal wheels and the aroma of bacon—an orderly bringing the breakfast cart—and then the deep-timbred laughter of a pair of male voices right outside the door. The loudspeaker crackled and a voice came on reading the day’s announcements, including a lecture at 1800 hours on the importance of proper hydration. The hospital was coming, suddenly and loudly, to life. And whatever feeling of intimacy there’d been in the hushed, predawn hallway vanished.

  “After that…” Matt sighed. “I don’t really know what happened.”

  MATT HAD ONLY GONE A FEW DOZEN YARDS FROM MEAGHAN Finnerty’s office when he had to stop and sit down. He saw a chair outside another office and sunk heavily into it.

  He was exhausted, having been up half the night, replaying the scene from the alley in his head, but he was also wound up, jumpy, the way Francis was after he’d taken a couple capsules of Ripped Fuel.

  Meaghan Finnerty had said she’d work on helping Matt remember more about the incident—she called it that, too, just like Kwong had—at their afternoon appointment.

  But Matt couldn’t wait. He pulled the notebook out of his pocket and looked at the puppies on the front cover, tumbling over one another. He flipped past the page of baseball trivia and turned to a fresh page. “The Incident,” he labeled it. He numbered each entry and wrote down what happened just the way Justin had described it.

  taxi runs the southern checkpoint

  Justin and I pursue the vehicle

  we turn down a side road, past the bootleg store

  we get out of the Humvee to give chase down an alley

  we take fire

  we go into a house

  Justin picks off the shooter from an upstairs window

  we leave the building, RPG hits wall

  Matt looked at his careful, precise handwriting. In high school his writing was so sloppy, he could hardly read it himself sometimes. But after his drill sergeant had yelled at him, saying unreadable coordinates on a battlefield could cost lives—Matt had taught himself to print according to SOP. Standard operating procedure.

  SOP. It was also standard operating procedure to keep the squad together, to always have the other guys in sight if possible. If not in sight, at least in touch by radio. But McNally and Wolf and the others weren’t there during the chase. Justin said they’d gotten separated.

  Matt closed his eyes. And saw the dog again. It was weird the way it trotted across the alley, right in the middle of the firefight. Matt couldn’t get it out of his mind. But Justin hadn’t seen the dog. Which didn’t make sense.

  Unless Matt had been alone in the alley.

  THE CAFETERIA HAD A GREASY, FAST-FOOD SMELL, A HUMID, tropical climate all its own. Matt walked in slowly, edging his way along the wall, watching people swarm by. It was his first attempt to venture into the mess hall since Dr. Kwong had given him permission to leave the ward for meals.

  “Your X-rays came back fine. No skull fracture. No neck or spinal instability,” the doctor had said. “Have any vomiting? Any dizziness? Problems with coordination? Any, uh, emotional agitation or any other, uh, problems?”

  Matt’s right leg was still weak and out of sync with his left, and he still found himself on the verge of tears half the time. “Nope,” he said. “I’m all good.”

  “Well, that’s what they like to hear,” he’d said.

  “Who?” Matt said. “Who likes to hear?”

  “CPA.”

  There were so many initials in the army. IED, MRE, RPG. It took him a minute to remember what CPA was. Central Provisional Authority.

  “They like us to get you fellas patched up and back out there as soon as possible,” Kwong had said. “A young, healthy kid like you ought to be back with your unit in a couple of days.”

  There was a slight hint of sarcasm in Kwong’s voice, and Matt wondered if Kwong was under pressure to get soldiers back in the field more quickly than he would like. But all Matt really heard was the part about rejoining his unit soon.

  “Meanwhile,” Kwong had sa
id, “let’s see if we can’t bulk you up a little.”

  The sour aroma of overcooked coffee drifted by, and a pair of officers in neatly pressed pants appeared, carrying trays of steaming food. There were a handful of men in uniform, but almost everyone in the room was dressed in scrubs. Matt felt foolish in his T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, almost as naked as if he were in a hospital gown. But he took a deep breath and stepped away from the wall, aware that his right leg was dragging, and he felt himself be pulled into the tide of people heading toward the chow line.

  He shuffled through the line mechanically and watched as men in white knit Muslim skullcaps doled out eggs and bacon with stoic, expressionless faces. Then he found himself suddenly back out among the chairs and tables, holding a heaping tray of food. Matt felt his knees begin to give out and he sat down abruptly at the nearest table.

  The guy next to him, a burly man with a faux-hawk, poured ketchup onto his grits and talked loudly in Spanish to another soldier across the table. The only words Matt could make out were “Paris Hilton.”

  He looked down at the grease around his eggs congealing on his plate and pushed his hash browns around with a fork. He pictured Ali going up to take Communion, his brown, bloated belly and the way he gobbled up the Host. He shoved his tray away, then got up and allowed himself to be pulled into the tide of people bringing their plates to the dish room.

  ON HIS WAY BACK TO THE WARD HE SAW AN ORDERLY COMING toward him, pushing a gurney. There was no patient on the cart but, rather, something oddly familiar, something large and black, plastic and weirdly lumpy. A body bag.

  Matt stopped, stood at attention, his eyes locked onto an imaginary point on the wall as he approached.

  He meant to hold his gaze steady, at a respectful distance from the body bag itself, but something about it caught his eye. It was, it seemed, strangely deflated. Instead of the unmistakable outline of a corpse, which was usually visible through the plastic, only one end of the bag seemed full.