The Right Side Read online

“Sorry if I woke you,” the woman said.

  There was something about her, something not good. LeAnne took off her sunglasses and things brightened up. That took away all doubt. This newcomer, this woman who wanted to occupy the seat right beside her, was wearing a burqa, the full kind, with only a slit for the eyes. LeAnne grabbed her duffel, wrenched it loose, bolted up, shoved her way past the woman, knocking her aside—or even down to the floor—and strode, almost running, to the front of the bus. The door was closing.

  “Sorry,” the driver said. “Stop’s over.”

  “Open the door.”

  “I can do that, but then we’ll leave without you.”

  “Open the fucking door.”

  The door opened. LeAnne jumped off, not taking the time to use the steps. She hurried away from the bus. The bus hurried away from her.

  LeAnne got her bearings. She stood in foggy flatland, a row of gas pumps on one side, a low, square building on the other, with a neon sign on the roof: Okeydokey’s Easy On Easy Off. She hitched her duffle higher on her shoulder, fumbled for her sunglasses, again finding them on her head, again getting them back in place, and entered Okeydokey’s.

  There was no one inside except a big Native American man behind the counter. LeAnne scooped up a few Hershey bars and went over to him. He had two long braids, black and gleaming, the best sight LeAnne had come across in a long time. She handed him the Hershey bars. His gaze moved to the duffel.

  “Just coming back?” he said.

  LeAnne sensed a trick question and kept her mouth shut.

  “Back home from overseas?” the man said.

  “Yeah. Overseas.”

  “Iraq? I did a tour in Iraq.”

  “Yeah. Iraq. Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany, Maryland.”

  “Maryland?”

  “Bethesda’s in Maryland.”

  He seemed to think that over. “True enough.” He handed back the Hershey bars. “No charge.”

  What the hell was he up to? LeAnne peered at him through the big dark left lens of her sunglasses. “Yeah?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  Now was the time for saying thanks, but LeAnne just couldn’t get the word out. She nodded and tucked the Hershey bars in her pocket.

  “You from here?” he said.

  “Here?”

  “Okemah.”

  “What’s Okemah?”

  He smiled. “This town. Okemah, Oklahoma. Saw you get off the bus. No one gets off at this stop except they live here.”

  “What’s it like?” LeAnne said.

  “To live here?” He shrugged. “Depends on you, pretty much.”

  She turned, looked out the windows. The fog was starting to lift, peeling away from strip malls, empty lots, and I-40 in the distance, a headlight stream and a taillight stream flowing in opposite directions.

  “I want to buy a car,” LeAnne said.

  “What kind of car?”

  “Rolls-Royce.”

  He laughed. “Good you got your sense of humor. When I came back . . .” He took a deep breath and shook his head.

  “I’m a fuckin’ laugh riot,” LeAnne said.

  He backed away a step, tilted his head slightly, as though trying to get a fix on a position. “You serious about a car? My uncle runs a used-car lot.”

  “Is he honest?”

  “For military, yeah, he’ll be honest. Within reason.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “This Honda over here I can let you have for thirty-seven fifty,” said the uncle.

  “What about if I pay cash?”

  “At my place everybody pays cash. Thirty-seven fifty.”

  LeAnne walked around the Honda. Her last car—sold before she deployed to Afghanistan—had been a very cool Mini, British racing green, six-speed manual, the biggest engine they had. She’d practically flown that baby, jitterbugging through traffic like she was in a video game. This sun-bleached beige Honda sat in the corner of the uncle’s lot like sitting was what it liked to do and did best. In its favor it had no deep dents, only a few dings here and there, plus the tires matched and had plenty of tread left.

  “What’s the mileage?”

  “Hundred twenty, give or take.” The uncle was a little guy, half the size of his nephew but had the same gleaming black hair. “My nephew says you were in Iraq.”

  “A few years ago.”

  “He didn’t come back the same as how he left.”

  LeAnne grunted. He stared at her, a stare she’d seen a few times now, when people tried to see through her sunglasses. Which she knew was impossible on account of the darkness of the lenses; all anyone saw would be their own gawking selves. She got down on the pavement, peered under the car, spotted no oil stains. When she rose, a headache started up behind where her right eye used to be. Why all these goddamn headaches? LeAnne had been about to offer three grand, but now she only wanted to be done with this. “I’ll write you a check.”

  “Got an ATM here. For actual currency of the Union, I’ll knock off two hundred.”

  LeAnne began disliking this little uncle. She didn’t want to dicker; she wanted to go. “The daily limit’s . . .” She couldn’t remember. “Five hundred.” Only a guess but it sounded right.

  “Call the bank.”

  Call the bank? She felt her hands curling into fists. A horrible deterioration of this little back and forth was somewhere in the cards.

  “They’ll usually extend,” the uncle said. “Use my phone, if you want.”

  LeAnne realized she didn’t have a phone. Where was it? Left behind at Walter Reed, or Landstuhl, or on the hard, dried-out ground of that village of hovels? In that case, it would have been sold and resold and re-resold, or repurposed as a bomb igniter, or some other bad shit.

  “That’s what happens over there—even the shit turns to shit.”

  “Uh, at your bank?” said the uncle.

  Had she spoken aloud? LeAnne turned away, got a grip. “Nothing,” she said. “I’ll call the bank.”

  LeAnne had had an account at a small community bank in Columbia, South Carolina, since Fort Jackson days. They approved a cash withdrawal of $3,500, leaving her with a balance of $11,090. She traded the cash for the keys to the Honda and hit the road.

  Here was one plan: drive back and forth across the country until some better idea cropped up. Why not? She’d always loved driving, starting out as one of those babies whose fussing could always be stopped with a car ride. But right away, headed west on I-40, a problem, and so obvious: driving with only one eye, while possible, was not easy, forcing her across the line separating play from work. On interstates, LeAnne had always driven the passing lane, eighty plus, which now felt too fast. Seventy was about right, or even a bit less. But seventy in the passing lane meant cars zipping by on the right, each one a kind of shock, looming suddenly out of the dead quadrant. LeAnne steered her way into the right-hand lane, taking her spot among the old and the timid. It occurred to her that she’d forgotten to take the Honda for a test drive, kind of basic. She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror, saw someone she didn’t know and didn’t want to know.

  What went on in the hearts of these women? “They are just like you and me,” Katie always said, “except for different circumstances.”

  At the moment—waiting for the ceremonial opening of the Afghan and American Women’s Friendship Weaving Co-Op—the women looked happy. There were thirty-five of them—LeAnne counted twice—plus Katie and her, crowded into the still not quite completed twelve-hundred-square-foot cinder block space, funded by some program at the embassy in Kabul. They wore robes and scarves, but their faces were uncovered and the mood was one of vacation. Beautiful rugs on the walls, newly built looms on the floor, plates of baklava and pistachio fudge: optimism was in the air, and LeAnne hadn’t felt much of it on this posting. She heard motorized vehicles pulling up outside and moved to the door. The women covered their faces; Katie put on her head scarf; LeAnne, wearing a standard-issue multicam patrol cap, counted the w
omen one last time.

  The door opened and in came three Afghan men, a lead muckety-muck in pantaloons and embroidered shirt with a blue blazer, and two followers in traditional dress. The muckety-muck raised his hand in greeting and began to speak. The women rearranged themselves into neat and attentive rows, messing up LeAnne’s count.

  “Would you like me to translate for you?” Katie whispered.

  “Sure, that would be—”

  What was this? A tall woman in the second row was wearing boots? Boots, in fact, similar in color and style to the ones LeAnne was wearing, except bigger, sticking out from under her robe? All the other women whose feet she could see were wearing leather sandals or woven slippers; and on the petite side, each and every pair.

  “Well,” Katie was saying, “first he’s praising Allah for his kindness in . . .”

  LeAnne had tuned out. She was moving away from the door, around one of the new looms, toward the woman in the boots. A tall woman, the tallest in the room, and she wore a niqab of the most concealing kind, a rectangle of netting covering even the eyes. The woman seemed to turn her head slightly in LeAnne’s direction, but it was hard to tell and her eyes could not be read.

  “Hey,” LeAnne said. “You.”

  Yes, the woman was looking at her now, beyond doubt.

  “Hands, please. Show me your hands.”

  The woman did nothing; maybe not quite nothing—it was possible she tensed up, but hard to tell because of the burqa.

  LeAnne slid her M9 from its holster. “Hands! Hands up where I can see them! Yad! Yad!” Yad being the Arabic for hand, the Pashto word not coming to her when she needed it.

  The woman backed up, backed up in a powerful sort of way, her hands not in view. From the rows of women came uneasy stirring, like penguins in a rookery.

  LeAnne raised the weapon and sighted. “I’ll blow you away! Hands up! Yad! Yad!”

  The muckety-muck fell silent. Fearful murmurs started up and spread across the floor, growing in volume, on their way to screams.

  “Hands up!”

  There was movement under the tall woman’s burqa, the movement of hands. But hands did not appear. Instead they were doing other things, out of sight. That was that. LeAnne let loose a controlled pair. The woman toppled over and lay still, blood seeping through the burqa on the left side of her chest—a breastless chest, the woman turning out to be a man with four pounds of C-4 loaded in a suicide belt around his waist.

  The muckety-muck had given LeAnne her pick of the rugs hanging on the walls of the Afghan and American Women’s Friendship Weaving Co-Op. Later, through Katie, LeAnne had found out that the rug wasn’t his to give, and sent it back, a six-by-nine rug with a border of finely detailed purple flowers. The women had quickly lost their enthusiasm for the co-op, and it closed within months. She never learned what was in their hearts.

  LeAnne made two big mistakes in her military career, the first a secret now guaranteed never to get out, the second known to everybody, both coming late in the game. As she drove through Oklahoma, a scene that hadn’t happened in real life played and replayed in her mind, a scene that ended with her saying no to Colonel Bright. Each time, she pounded the wheel, trying to get the scene that should have been to stop, trying to flip her mind to something else, but it wouldn’t flip. Thank you, Colonel, but no. I’ve done enough. My plans are set. She tormented herself with that scene for miles and miles, before noticing a grandmotherly type looking down at her from the passenger seat of a passing eighteen-wheeler, peering down at LeAnne pounding the wheel until it shook. Now she was getting spied on? LeAnne gave the grandmotherly type the finger and got the finger right back. For a single red-hot moment, she considered a quick leftward swerve, just to let that grandmotherly type—and anyone else who wanted a piece of her—know what sort of person they were dealing with.

  Not long after that, her eye got too weary to go on. LeAnne took an exit, loaded up on chocolate bars and chocolate milk, plus a couple of bacon burgers for protein. It was probably the first time she’d even uttered “bacon burgers” in her life. She sat in a parking lot—chocolate bars, chocolate milk, and burgers on the passenger seat—and fell asleep.

  Fraternization can kill. LeAnne had heard someone say that all the way back in basic, but it was one of many things she’d innately known already. She’d never had a military boyfriend of any rank, or even come close, never given out the slightest vibe and never responded to one. Never even come close, up until that last posting. And did something expressed only on leave count as fraternization? Maybe LeAnne fooled herself a bit on that, although the code did not. She’d checked.

  LeAnne had three boyfriends after Ryan: the first a whitewater rafting guide on the Ocoee River, a relationship that hadn’t survived her Iraqi posting; the second a charter boat captain in Islamorada, which had an ending similar to the first, Afghanistan substituting for Iraq; and Jamie.

  “Captain Cray,” said Major Ladarius, “like you to meet Sergeant LeAnne Hogan, who’s been running our CST program here in Herat province. She’s the brains of the outfit.”

  Jamie Cray was about LeAnne’s height, had similar coloring, and even the same sort of broad-shouldered build, although much more exaggerated in the male version. LeAnne saluted him.

  “Sir,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you,” said Jamie. “I’ve heard good things about CST.”

  “I wasn’t just referencing CST,” the major said. “She’s the brains, period.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind, sir.”

  “You do that,” said the major.

  Later she learned that Jamie had graduated from the same West Point class she would have been in, a fact she kept to herself. She also kept the feelings he aroused in her to herself, and he did the same with how he felt about her. Nothing untoward, verbal, physical, or noticeable in any way ever passed between them, not in the Afghan theater. But they both knew.

  “Cork blew off,” Jamie said.

  “One way of putting it,” said LeAnne.

  “I meant about you and me—the pent-up things inside.”

  “Sure you did.”

  He laughed and rolled her off him. She let herself be rolled. This was in LeAnne’s room, night two—the last night—of a three-day leave in Qatar, her second, and the last leave she’d have before going home and mustering out. They weren’t staying in the same hotel—officers usually stayed at the Hilton, enlisted personnel at the Ramada—and had spent no time together out in the open, but he’d knocked on her door at 2:00 a.m. on the first night. She’d known who it was just from the knock, even though she’d never heard his knock before. LeAnne had opened right up and after that things had happened fast, except for those that were better when they happened slow. He’d left before dawn.

  Now, night two, same MO in the cards, meaning late arrival and early departure, the whole world—huge and violent, as they both knew as well as anybody—shrank down to just them.

  “I’m going to be exhausted when we get back,” Jamie said.

  “Boo hoo.”

  He shook his head. “How come you’re so tough?”

  “I’m not tough.”

  “Right. That’s one thing I love about you.” The debut of that word coming up between them. “But it wasn’t the first.”

  “No?”

  “Your eyes—that was first. Like, so beautiful and not missing a trick at the same time. Second was your butt.”

  “I believe that part.”

  Which was the part he smacked. She smacked his, maybe harder. That led to other things, despite his exhaustion. Then, way too soon, he was pulling on his pants and headed for the door. He turned to her.

  “So what are we going to do?” he said.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Be together.”

  “You know that’s impossible.”

  “Impossible now, but you’re out in three months.”

  “So? You’ve got a year left. And aren’t you re-upping?”


  “I was going to. Now it’s not what I want.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I told you already. Six letters. Starts with L and ends with E.”

  “Lassie.”

  “How come you’re so tough?”

  “Does every time you say that mean we’re going to do the spanking thing again?”

  He laughed and went out, closing the door.

  “Either way, I’m in,” LeAnne said to the empty room. Two empty bottles of Negra Modelo—his favorite beer—stood together on the coffee table.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LeAnne awoke.

  Eye.

  She was slumped sideways against the door of her Honda. Behind her empty socket she felt a strange new pressure, the pressure of something being stuck, like the metal lid on a jam jar, and someone very strong was trying to twist it off. Her daddy had been a champ at that, never once failing to open anything capped or lidded, and could also crush improbable things with his bare hands, coconuts, for example.

  LeAnne sat up. Nighttime in a parking lot, a single sodium lamp leaving it mostly dark. She took off her sunglasses and saw that things were brighter than she’d supposed. Brighter meaning more depressing, the opposite of what you might expect: deserted parking lot, scraps blowing across the pavement, low bushes at the boundaries, all hung with scraps. Plus she saw now that the seats and floor coverings of the Honda were worn and ratty; also there were smells she didn’t like. She gathered up the chocolate bars, chocolate milk containers, and bacon burgers, carried them across the lot and dumped them in a trash barrel. It turned out to be full to the brim, even overfull, topped like a muffin with trash. Her trash bounced off all the other trash and made a big mess on the ground. LeAnne got into the car. It still smelled bad. She sniffed her armpits.

  “Fuck.”

  LeAnne hit the road. Her expectation was that after a day of practice, she’d be more like her old motoring self, back in the passing lane. The truth was she’d gotten worse. Everybody—even the old and the timid—was now going too fast. It wasn’t just on account of her eye straining to carry the whole load by itself. Her brain, too, was part of the problem, so slow to process all the movement around her. And that stuck metal lid thing going on behind her . . . what would you call it? Crater? Yes, exactly, like a bomb crater. Where had she been headed with this? She’d lost the thread. But then a new idea came and settled her down: she was simply overtired. There was nothing wrong with her brain, and the fact that she seemed to be sweating profusely was also not a problem, most likely due to . . . to something or other. Meds, perhaps? Was she even on any meds? Yes, since the nurses brought little paper cups full of pills twice a day; no, since she’d left all that behind. Wasn’t cold turkey the only way to really quit anything? Where had she heard that? The details eluded her, but not the big picture, which was all about being overtired—had to be way worse than simply tired. LeAnne resolved never to sleep in the car again, to find a motel by eighteen hundred hours at the latest every day of the trip and bed down in a real bed. There: a plan. Knowing she had one sent a little surge of optimism through her body. She pulled out of the slowpoke lane and passed an ancient lady with her hair in curlers and a cigarette sticking out the side of her mouth. And as she passed the ancient lady, LeAnne twisted around and called to her: “Thank you for your service.” The ancient lady, eyes on the road, didn’t see her and, with the windows rolled up in both cars, could not have heard her. No matter: saying those words was enough. They weren’t ironic or sarcastic; LeAnne meant them from the bottom of her heart.