register, holding a fat envelope toward her. She took it.
“That the money Glen gave you, to swap for his wedding ring?” Petty turned away from her, shifting his attention back to the register. He pulled out stacks of bills, rubber-banded them, and lined them up on the bar. “That’s something. Taking his money and fucking him all over again. If I plop down five hundred bucks will you fuck me just as nice?”
As he spoke, he put his hand back in the register. Mal reached under his elbow and slammed the drawer on his fingers. He squealed. The drawer began to slide open again on its own, but before he could get his mashed fingers out, Mal slammed it once more. He lifted one foot off the floor and did a comic little jig.
“Ohfuckgoddamnyouuglydyke,” he said.
“Hey,” said Bill Rodier, coming toward the bar carrying a trash barrel. “Hey.”
She let Petty get his hand out of the drawer. He stumbled clumsily away from her, struck the bar with his hip, and wheeled to face her, clutching the mauled hand to his chest.
“You crazy bitch! I think you broke my fingers!”
“Jesus, Mal,” Bill said, looking over the bar at Petty’s hand. His fat fingers had a purple line of bruise across them. Bill turned his questioning gaze back in her direction. “I don’t know what the hell John said, but you can’t do that to people.”
“You’d be surprised what you can do to people,” she told him.
OUTSIDE, IT WAS DRIZZLING AND COLD. She was all the way to her car before she felt a weight in one hand and realized she was still clutching the envelope full of cash.
Mal kept on holding it, against the inside of her thigh, the whole drive back. She didn’t put on the radio, just drove and listened to the rain tapping on the glass. She had been in the desert for two years, and she had seen it rain just twice during that time, although there was often a moist fog in the morning, a mist that smelled of eggs, of brimstone.
When she enlisted, she had hoped for war. She did not see the point of joining if you weren’t going to get to fight. The risk to her life did not trouble her. It was an incentive. You received a two-hundred-dollar-a-month bonus for every month you spent in the combat zone, and a part of her had relished the fact that her own life was valued so cheap. Mal would not have expected more.
But it didn’t occur to her, when she first learned she was going to Iraq, that they paid you that money for more than just the risk to your own life. It wasn’t just a question of what could happen to you, but also a matter of what you might be asked to do to others. For her two-hundred-dollar bonus, she had left naked and bound men in stress positions for hours and told a nineteen-year-old girl that she would be gang-raped if she did not supply information about her boyfriend. Two hundred dollars a month was what it cost to make a torturer out of her. She felt now that she had been crazy there, that the Vivarin, the ephedra, the lack of sleep, the constant scream-and-thump of the mortars, had made her into someone who was mentally ill, a bad-dream version of herself. Then Mal felt the weight of the envelope against her thigh, Glen Kardon’s payoff, and remembered taking his ring, and it came to her that she was having herself on, pretending she had been someone different in Iraq. Who she’d been then and who she was now were the same person. She had taken the prison home with her. She lived in it still.
Mal let herself into the house, soaked and cold, holding the envelope. She found herself standing in front of the kitchen counter with Glen’s money. She could sell him back his own ring for five hundred dollars if she wanted, and it was more than she would get from any pawnshop. She had done worse, for less cash. She stuck her hand down the drain, felt along the wet smoothness of the trap, until her fingertips found the ring.
Mal hooked her ring finger through it, pulled her hand back out. She turned her wrist this way and that, considering how the ring looked on her crooked, blunt finger. With this I do thee wed. She didn’t know what she’d do with Glen Kardon’s five