had been stuck to the sinew beneath with rubber cement.
Not long after, the patrol grabbed the Professor—so named because of his horn-rimmed glasses and because he insisted he was a teacher—two blocks from the site of the explosion. He broke his leg jumping off a high berm, running away after the soldiers fired over his head and ordered him to halt.
Now the Professor lurched along on the crutches, Mal and Anshaw flanking him and Plough walking behind. They made their way out of 1A and into the predawn morning. The Professor paused, beyond the doors, to take a breath. That was when Plough kicked the left crutch out from under his arm.
The Professor went straight down and forward with a cry, his johnny flapping open to show the soft paleness of his ass. Anshaw reached to help him back up. Plough said to leave him.
“Sir?” Anshaw asked. Anshaw was just nineteen. He had been over as long as Mal, but his skin was oily and white, as if he had never been out of his chemical suit.
“Did you see him swing that crutch at me?” Plough asked Mal.
Mal did not reply but watched to see what would happen next. She had spent the last two hours bouncing on her heels, chewing her fingernails down to the skin, too wired to stop moving. Now, though, she felt stillness spreading through her, like a drop of ink in water, calming her restless hands, her nervous legs.
Plough bent over and pulled the string at the back of the johnny, unknotting it so it fell off the Professor’s shoulders and down to his wrists. His ass was spotted with dark moles and relatively hairless. His sac was drawn tight to his perineum. The Professor glanced up over his shoulder, his eyes too large in his face, and spoke rapidly in Arabic.
“What’s he saying?” Plough asked. “I don’t speak Sand Nigger.”
“He said don’t,” Mal answered, translating automatically. “He says he hasn’t done anything. He was picked up by accident.”
Plough kicked away the other crutch. “Get those.”
Anshaw picked up the crutches.
Plough put his boot in the Professor’s fleshy ass and shoved.
“Get going. Tell him get going.”
A pair of MPs walked past, turned their heads to look at the Professor as they went by. He was trying to cover his crotch with one hand, but Plough kicked him in the ass again, and he had to start crawling. His crawl was awkward stuff, what with his left leg sticking out straight in its cast and the bare foot dragging in the dirt. One of the MPs laughed, and then they moved away into the night.
The Professor struggled to pull his johnny up onto his shoulders as he crawled, but Plough stepped on it and it tore away.
“Leave it. Tell him leave it and hurry up.”
Mal told him. The prisoner couldn’t look at her. He looked at Anshaw instead and began pleading with him, asking for something to wear and saying his leg hurt while Anshaw stared down at him, eyes bulging, as if he were choking on something. Mal wasn’t surprised that the Professor was addressing Anshaw instead of her. Part of it was a cultural thing. The Arabs couldn’t cope with being humiliated in front of a woman. But also Anshaw had something about him that signified to others, even the enemy, that he was approachable. In spite of the nine-millimeter strapped to his outer thigh, he gave an impression of stumbling, unthreatening cluelessness. In the barracks he blushed when other guys were ogling centerfolds; he often could be seen praying during heavy mortar attacks.
The prisoner had stopped crawling once more. Mal poked the barrel of her M4 in the Professor’s ass to get him going again, and the Iraqi jerked, gave a shrill sort of sob. Mal didn’t mean to laugh, but there was something funny about the convulsive clench of his butt cheeks, something that sent a rush of blood to her head. Her blood was racy and strange with Vivarin, and watching the prisoner’s ass bunch up like that was the most hilarious thing she had seen in weeks.
The Professor crawled past the wire fence, along the edge of the road. Plough told Mal to ask him where his friends were now, his friends who blew up the American GI. He said if the Professor would tell about his friends, he could have his crutches and his johnny back.
The prisoner said he didn’t know anything about the IED. He said he ran because