fresh bananas? She helped herself to one and ate it on the toilet, the cleanest toilet she had sat on in a year.
She came back out of the house and started down to the road again. On the way there, she put her fingers in her mouth and sucked on them. She hadn’t brushed her teeth in a week, and her breath had a human stink on it.
When she returned to the street, Plough had stopped swatting the prisoner long enough to catch his breath. The Ba’athist looked up at him from under his heavy-lidded eyes. He snorted and said, “Is talk. Is boring. You are no one. I say fuck you still no one.”
Mal sank to one knee in front of him, put her fingers under his nose, and said in Arabic, “Smell that? That is the cunt of your wife. I fucked her myself like a lesbian, and she said it was better than your cock.”
The Ba’athist tried to lunge at her from his knees, making a sound down in his chest, a strangled growl of rage, but Plough caught him across the chin with the stock of his M4. The sound of the Ba’athist’s jaw snapping was as loud as a gunshot.
He lay on his side, twisted into a fetal ball. Mal remained crouched beside him.
“Your jaw is broken,” Mal said. “Tell me about the photographs of the U.S. soldiers and I will bring a no-more-hurt pill.”
It was half an hour before she went to get him the painkillers, and by then he’d told her when the pictures had been taken, coughed up the name of the photographer.
Mal was leaning into the back of her truck, digging in the first-aid kit, when Anshaw’s shadow joined hers at the rear bumper.
“Did you really do it?” Anshaw asked her. The sweat on him glowed with an ill sheen in the noonday light. “The wife?”
“What? Fuck no. Obviously.”
“Oh,” Anshaw said, and swallowed convulsively. “Someone said . . .” he began, and then his voice trailed off.
“What did someone say?”
He glanced across the road, at two soldiers from the Eighty-second, standing by their Hummer. “One of the guys who was in the building said you marched right in and bent her over. Facedown on the bed.”
She looked over at Vaughan and Henrichon, holding their M16s and struggling to contain their laughter. She flipped them the bird.
“Jesus, Anshaw. Don’t you know when you’re being fucked with?”
His head was down. He stared at his own scarecrow shadow, tilting into the back of the truck.
“No,” he said.
Two weeks later Anshaw and Mal were in the back of a different truck, with that same Arab, the Ba’athist, who was being transferred from Abu Ghraib to a smaller prison facility in Baghdad. The prisoner had his head in a steel contraption, to clamp his jaw in place, but he was still able to open his mouth wide enough to hawk a mouthful of spit into Mal’s face.
Mal was wiping it away when Anshaw got up and grabbed the Fedayeen by the front of his shirt and heaved him out the back of the truck, into the dirt road. The truck was doing thirty miles an hour at the time and was part of a convoy that included two reporters from MSNBC.
The prisoner survived, although most of his face was flayed off on the gravel, his jaw rebroken, his hands smashed. Anshaw said he leaped out on his own, trying to escape, but no one believed him, and three weeks later Anshaw was sent home.
The funny thing was that the insurgent really did escape, a week after that, during another transfer. He was in handcuffs, but with his thumbs broken he was able to slip his hands right out of them. When the MPs stepped from their Hummer at a checkpoint, to talk porno with some friends, the prisoner dropped out of the back of the transport. It was night. He simply walked into the desert and, as the stories go, was never seen again.
THE BAND TOOK THE STAGE FRIDAY evening and didn’t come offstage until Saturday morning. Twenty minutes after one, Mal bolted the door behind the last customer. She started helping Candice wipe down tables, but she had been on since before lunch and Bill Rodier said to go home already.
Mal had her jacket on and was headed out when John Petty poked her in the shoulder with something.
“Mal,” he said. “This is yours, right? Your name on it.”