I looked over at Cooper. Things weren’t turning out the way he’d expected.
The young boys’ faces flashed back into my mind. We’d killed two children, the Army hadn’t been able to extract us, and now we were surrounded by city and sin, with no real plan for the chase ahead.
And here was Zeller, trying to figure out who he was and how he fit in this place. “You heard him talking about it, didn’t you?” he asked. “You heard him talking about the motherland?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s all he talked about.” Actually, I had never heard Cooper talk about the motherland. I just knew that Zeller wanted to talk, and that he wanted me to listen. And when he was finished, I wanted to share a story about Cooper that I remembered Cooper telling, about a time he went to a cave as a young child. They were deep in the cave when the lights went off and the tour was left in total darkness. Cooper said he wasn’t afraid. Then when the lights went back on the guide told them that they wouldn’t see any spots. Total darkness did that, Cooper said. He’d told me the story one night when we were on guard duty. The whole time he was telling it, he never stopped looking up at the stars.
Cooper was dead by the time Santiago returned. Zeller and I hadn’t even noticed when he died. He’d been too far gone by the time we checked into the hotel, but still.
Santiago spread a T-shirt over Cooper’s face. Cooper and his laugh, I thought. The way he had to touch someone when he laughed, as if he were letting them in on a secret.
I closed my eyes and tried to cleanse my mind of any image of this room. I didn’t want to remember it. I never wanted to be there again.
FOUR
WE SAT THERE QUIETLY FOR SOME TIME, LOST IN OUR own heads. As the light gradually faded on the ceiling, and the day gave way to dusk outside, the only sound in the room was Santiago’s footsteps as he paced. Finally, he spoke.
“Okay, so the owner doesn’t have a car. He did say that there are buses and trucks that give people rides for a fee. He also said that he would give us enough money to ride out of the city for something in exchange. We can try and find the Army out there.”
He turned and looked at me, perhaps waiting for a sign of agreement. “They don’t run on Sundays though, and they don’t run at night, so we have to wait until tomorrow. Besides, he says we have a better chance if we try it on Monday. By then he could sell some stuff and get us more money for bribes.”
He shook his head in disgust. “He says the clans have set up more checkpoints, which means we’d probably get caught on a bus. He also says it’s hard to steal cars here, because people will do anything to protect them. But if we give him some stuff he can sell he’ll give us some money in return, and then we can try to buy a car or bribe our way out.” He started looking through his rucksack. “We’ve got to have something for him.”
When he was finished with his rucksack he looked at me and then down at my gear. He walked over. “What do you have?”
“I only have a few books in here,” I said. “They’re not worth much, but you can take them.” I handed them to Santiago.
He stood above me holding the books, weighing them in his hands. Then he went over to Cooper’s bag and placed my books on the floor next to it. “I guess we could take something out of his bag,” he muttered.
“He wouldn’t mind,” I said.
Santiago kicked Cooper’s rucksack with his foot, almost as if there were something hiding inside that he had to scare out. “I’m really sorry, Coop.” He stood facing away from me, lost in thought, and then turned slightly and asked me over his shoulder, “Do you know what he has in here?”
“Same as everyone else,” I said. “Walkman, maybe a magazine. I think he has a watch.”
Santiago looked in the front pocket first and found Cooper’s watch. He seemed relieved to have found it right away. It was a normal Army watch, with hands that glow in the dark. “This should work,” he said. Then he found some tapes. “Jesus Christ, look at this shit.” He laughed a little. “How could anyone listen to this crap?”
It was true. Cooper had horrible taste in music. He’d spent too much time with his grandmother. I’d often told him how important it was to know what kind of music to use in order to set the mood. He’d tried to listen to music that I copied for him to use with his girl, but he never could get into it. He liked the stuff his grandmother sent him: show tunes no one had ever heard of, bad movie soundtracks, and the new song of salvation for the week.
I looked out the window and watched the last light fade in the sky. Then, as my vision shifted down to the building across the street, I saw a man waving at me. I quickly ducked away from the window. “There’s someone over there. He waved at me.” I peeked back across and he was still waving.
“What?” Santiago asked.
“There’s a white guy in the building across the street.” I looked again, and the man was still waving. “He’s fucking waving at me.”
“Bullshit,” Santiago said. He crept to the window and peeked out himself. He quickly drew back into the dark room. “I guess you better wave back.”
When I looked out the window and waved, the man gave me a thumbs-up sign.
“He just gave me the thumbs-up,” I said.
“Probably Special Ops,” said Santiago.
The man motioned for me to come across. “I
