It was a blue night, a blue car, and Danny was full of shots of blue tequila.
“Slow down, man. Aren’t you going too fast?”
“Can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.”
“Shit, man, I thought I was the crazy one. Just get me back to my old lady in one piece.”
“No problem, bro. How’s she doing, anyway?”
“Good. She’s happy to see me alive.”
Chucho gunned it to make a light. That’s when a cop car came out of the parking lot and the sirens started.
When Danny came to, he was lying on the ground.
“Get up… I said get up!”
A foot prodded him.
“Okay, okay,” said Danny.
Danny was on his back. He slowly rolled over and got to his hands and knees. Chucho’s car was nearby, the passenger door open next to Danny. He vaguely recalled Chucho’s nervous laughter as they had careened past the fancy new condos on 23rd, past Garfield and the fire station to Jackson. The Seven Star Mini Mart was still open. Chucho made a bat turn left onto MLK in front of half a dozen cars and flew past the playground to Cherry.
“Híjole, man, that cop is mad!” he had said gleefully.
Danny wondered where his cell phone had gone. The last he remembered was Catfish Corner.
“Get up!” the policeman shouted again.
“Okay, I’m getting up now,” said Danny as he began to rise. “I’m going to get up.”
The policeman fired three shots into him.
“Shut the fuck up!” the cop shouted. “Shut the fuck up!”
Dying had seemed easy in Iraq—people did it every day. And when people were not dying in front of you, your buddies, the cooks, the officers, or the civilians who brought in supplies, they were telling you stories about people dying. About how they died, how long it took them, and what it looked like afterwards. Who killed them, or who might have killed them.
There was no death with dignity, only death. Danny spent most of his free time pretending he was someplace else. He plugged his iPod into his head, turned on some tunes, and tried to think about Aimee and the kid they were expecting early next year. Would it be a boy or a girl? It was too soon to tell, but when he went home on leave, they would visit the doctor, and maybe have an ultrasound done. Danny was ready to think about a little life—a little life after Iraq, if that was possible.
The next thing that woke Danny was sirens. A lot of them.
I ain’t dead yet, he thought. A collar was clamped around his neck, and he was rolled onto a stretcher. “Hustle! Hustle! Hustle!” yelled a woman. “I need an IV here, as soon as he’s in!”
Some more jostling, then a sharp pain in his arm.
“Go!” screamed another voice.
The ambulance, because he must be in an ambulance, started up, the siren more muted from inside, and they flew. It reminded him of the cab to the airport in Iraq, but with fewer potholes. He wondered if Chucho was okay.
Danny wakes in a bright, noisy room. People keep leaning over him and yelling in his face.
“I’m not deaf, you know,” he finally says.
“Oh good, he’s conscious. We thought we were losing you there,” a male voice barks at Danny. “Just keep talking to us.”
Danny is in a curtained-off area, and he can hear people near him yelling. Triage.
“Uh, what do you want me to say?”
A bright light is shined in one eye, then the other. “No concussion. Let’s give him some fluids… Are you in pain?” the man asks in that voice you use for the deaf, elderly, and foreign born. Danny recognizes it as the way he spoke to the Iraqis, as though it would somehow bridge the gap between his English and their understanding.
Danny has to think about this. “Actually, I’m kind of numb on one side.”
“Not good,” says the man.
Danny decides to pretend this man is a doctor.
“Can you feel this?… This?” The doctor pricks him with a pencil tip from his shoulder down his right side.
“It’s my arm. I can’t feel my arm,” says Danny. Damn, he thinks. Back from Iraq just in time to die in Harborview. The room grows dark again.
Danny could say “stop” and “open” in Arabic. And, of course, “Insha Allah”—If God wills it. Sometimes, when he listened to the Iraqi men talking and smoking, he could hear them say to each other simply, “Insha… insha…” a sort of running refrain, an affirmation of hope, with a strong note of fatalism.
Danny had gotten used to stepping in front of speeding vehicles. Iraqi drivers seemed to have two speeds—stop and go flat out—so he, taking their fatalistic attitude, assumed the drivers of speeding trucks would stomp on their brakes before hitting him at the base checkpoint where he was usually stationed. If not, his fellow MPs would open fire. It was that simple.
This habit of driving as fast as possible was soon picked up by the Americans. It started when you got out of air transport and on the road. Since the highway between the airport and the capital was mined, and also without cover, you felt as vulnerable as an ant as soon as you hit the ground. The drivers stepped on it and went at a suicidal speed, swerving away from suspicious objects and people, even if it meant driving directly into the path of oncoming traffic. But the trucks and cars coming the other way were doing the same thing.
Danny becomes aware of a shooting pain down his left side. It jolts him from sleep, or wherever he has been. He remembers the doctor poking him along that side, and feeling nothing. The pain jolts him again. Is this good? Pain is probably better than nothing at all—it means he’s still alive.
“Danny? Danny?” It’s his sister Sirena’s voice.
He feels a cool hand on his right arm, then against his cheek. He opens his eyes, then shuts them again quickly against the glare.
“Can you hear me?” she asks. Then a note of her old, mischievous self, his little sister: “Are you in there, Danny?”
He opens his eyes again, sees her silhouette against the window before shutting them again. It is raining outside. Good. This means he’s not in Iraq. Where is he, then? He remembers the car chase. The police.
“Chucho… happened to Chucho?”
“My cousin Chucho? He’s fine. Don’t worry about him. Only you were hurt.” Sirena leans over him.
He can feel her breath on his face, and tries again to open his eyes, fluttering his lids briefly. “What?” he says.
“Do you remember what happened?”
“Yeah. Somebody shot me.”
“A cop shot you. For nothing. Someone taped it, and it’s been all over the news.”
Danny grunts.
Sirena pats his hand. “Are you thirsty?” Without waiting for a reply, she reaches for a glass and places a straw to his lips.
Danny realizes he’s in a neck brace. He opens his lips and sucks.
“Is my neck broken?”
“No. I don’t know why you’re in that thing. Maybe we can get them to take it off soon.”
Danny can see a nurses’ station, more bright lights.
Sirena looks up at the clock. “Aimee will be here pretty soon, as soon as she drops off the kids.”
Soon. Soon. Soon. Her words echo in his head.
“Soon,” he says, then closes his eyes.
At Sarge’s urging, Danny tried driving the truck. After grinding the gears around the compound for a while, he got the hang of it. It was loud and hot inside. It was a hundred degrees outside. He had never learned how to drive a stick shift back home. His cousins in L.A., when he e-mailed them, teased him, told him he was finally a real man.
Danny met Aimee when he was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Her friend was dating another reservist and the four of them went out one night. The other couple broke up after about two months, but Danny kept seeing Aimee, simply knowing that he felt better when he was around her. This must be love, he thought.
At twenty-five, Danny was one of the last in his family—of the cousins—to marry, except for his little sister. The relatives blamed it on their college educations.
“Gotta get ’em while you’re young,” said Freddy, a sleeping baby balanced on his thick forearm. “Gotta get ’em while you still have hair!”
At twenty-nine, working fifty hours a week in a detailing shop, Freddy already looked old to Danny. Danny had gotten his degree in industrial design and was starting to pay back his debt to Uncle Sam. Aimee was a Cajun girl, not the sort anyone thought Danny would fall for, with wild red hair and a husky voice. She ordered up a plate of garlic shrimp and a mug of beer for each of them, and taught Danny the fine art of peeling shrimp. Then she taught him how to two-step to a zydeco band. It might have been the way she placed her boots on the sawdust and shrimp shell–covered floor of the nameless crab shack where they danced. It might have been the way she placed her hands on his chest during a slow number and took the wings of his collar between her fingertips before looking up into his eyes. But probably it was the way she double-clutched her pickup truck without ever glancing at the gear shift that won Danny’s heart.
Winning over Aimee’s family was another matter. Where Danny grew up, the place they lived would have been called “the tulees.” In Louisiana, it was called the bayou. Aimee drove the two of them south from Shreveport to the end of a paved road, then onto a sandy track that ended in water. Swinging her vehicle off to one side, she parked next to a stake truck that could have been there five minutes or five years.
“Daddy’s home,” she said. Wading into the shallows, Aimee retrieved a flat-bottomed boat from the reeds and they climbed in. They set a bag of groceries and Rikenjaks beer at one end and tucked their coats around it to keep it upright. Then Aimee grabbed the oars and steered them out onto the dark waters. Danny felt like he was in a movie, or at Disneyland, and waited for the giant, audio-animatronic gator to rear up out of the water and snap its plastic jaws at them.
“Don’t you think they ain’t real gators out here,” said Aimee, as though reading his mind. “Cause they is.”
Danny kept his hands well within the boat as the sun slipped lower on the horizon.
Danny wakes to Aimee’s kiss.
“Hey, stranger,” she whispers.
“I feel like Sleeping Beauty,” he says, “except woken by a princess.”
“Were you dreaming?” she asks, pulling her fingers through his short hair.
“Yeah. About you.”
“You seem better,” she says, dragging her chair closer. Danny notices that he’s in a regular hospital room with a door, not the ICU.
“What about Chucho? Is he hurt?”
“No.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“They arrested him, but he’s out on bail. Your uncle put up the money.”
“What’s he charged with?”
“Drunk driving. Speeding. Resisting arrest. The works. You were too, you know.”
“I was what?”
“Under arrest. You were chained to the bed. Don’t you remember?”
“No. How long have I been here?”
“Five days.”
“Am I still chained to the bed?”
“My God, no. Someone taped the whole thing. A police officer shot you without provocation. Now he’s on leave and under investigation. Don’t you remember anything?”
Danny tries.
“I can get flashes of things, like little snapshots. He told me to get up. I put my hands up, exactly like he said. But he shot me anyway.” Danny feels himself heating up just thinking about it.
“Well, a couple of lawyers have called. They want us to sue the bastard. They say we have a good case.”
“I’m supposed to rejoin my unit in a week.”
Aimee throws back her head and laughs. “Soldier, you ain’t going nowhere.” Then she leans over and hugs him, and bursts into tears.
Danny itched even after he’d had the good fortune to shower, which happened maybe once a week; the constant dust and grit irritated his skin. It worked its way under his watchband, under his waistband, under the sweatband of his hat. When he took his boots and socks off, there was a fine mud between his toes that he tried to remove with baby wipes.
Danny wanted to wear a bandana over his face when he worked the checkpoint, but his sergeant said no, it would spook the Iraqi civilians if they couldn’t see his face. When he coughed and spat, his phlem was brown.
A man Danny doesn’t recognize reaches up and pops a videotape into the slot in the television bolted to the wall. Gray screen suddenly goes to black with white walls, an upswing motion as the camera seems to be thrust upward, then pointed down.
Danny recognizes Chucho’s metallic blue Corvette, the front bumper crumpled, white streaks from side-swiping something.
“Get out. Get out!”
A figure on the right is holding a gun with both hands. The door opens and Danny puts his feet on the ground. He doesn’t see Chucho, although he can hear him yelling.
“It’s okay,” says Danny. He has his hands up.
“Get out of the vehicle and down on the ground.”
Danny hesitates.
“I said get down on the ground!” The voice is agitated, angry.
Danny kneels down slowly, then rolls onto the ground.
He remembers how he had been asleep, or so drunk as to be virtually asleep. That’s why he had left his car and ridden with Chucho.
The camera is jostled as the operator tries to focus on the policeman, on Danny lying on the ground. He is a light-colored, prone figure on a black background. The quality is poor, bluish for lack of light. It reminds him of night vision goggles.
“Get up!” the voice barks. It cracks with tension, near hysteria.
“Okay, I’m getting up now,” says Danny. “I’m going to get up.”
He rises to his knees, starts to put his hands up again.
That’s when the shots ring out, three of them. The camera wobbles wildly, but Danny does not see this part, because he’s shut his eyes and turned away.
“It’s okay, darlin’,” says Aimee, clutching his right arm, the good one without all the tubes in it.
Danny can hear Chucho yelling again. He must still be in the car. Danny opens his eyes and sees himself slumped sideways, close to the open door of the car.
“I told you to lie down!” screams the policeman.
Another police car pulls up, and Chucho is pulled roughly from the driver’s seat.
“He killed my friend!” Chucho screams. “He shot him in cold blood!”
“Shut up,” says a voice.
Chucho is spread against the far side of the car, searched.
“We are not armed, officer!”
“Just shut up. I’m arresting you on suspicion of drunk driving and eluding an officer.” He is led out of camera range as the officer tells him his rights.
There is the crackling sound of radios. An ambulance pulls up. The camera seems to sag with fatigue, again showing Danny prone on the ground.
The ambulance crew hustles out a stretcher, sets it on the ground next to Danny.
“What happened?”
“He has a gunshot wound. He tried to attack me.”
Someone clamps a collar around Danny’s neck, and two men turn him onto his back.
“Jesus!”
He is placed on the stretcher and taken away. There is a lot of shouting, doors slamming, and the sound of the ambulance siren starting up and fading away.
More radio noise, and a figure slams the door on the car. The video ends.
The man who played the video has been standing in the corner, watching it silently, observing Danny. “The officer’s name is Troy Amboy,” the man announces, “and we are going to sue him into the Stone Age.”
“Who are you?” asks Danny.
“I’m your attorney, Jason Ritchie.”
Danny glances at Aimee.
“He called,” she explains. “He says we don’t pay him. He only gets paid if we win the case.”
“Why did he shoot me?” asks Danny.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” replies Ritchie. “He claims you lunged at him, that he thought you were armed, but it’s pretty clear he was entirely unprovoked. Look here.” He points a remote at the TV and rewinds the tape back to where Danny is about to exit the car. “Right there,” Ritchie says, waving the remote and stopping the video where Danny has gotten up from the ground to a kneeling position. “He says you reached into your shirt, but you didn’t even touch your chest.”
Danny tries to look down at his body. In addition to the tubes, a complex web of bandages cover his chest, and he feels the pull of adhesive tape across the back of his left shoulder. “When can I get this damn neck brace off?” he asks.
There was the incident outside of Kirkuk. Two soldiers had died earlier that day, and everyone was jumpy. A rumor was spreading that a new shipment of weapons had just arrived from Afghanistan, including IEDs.
Danny had spent the previous day escorting a group of Iraqi detainees from one prison to another, always a dangerous business. One man in particular haunted Danny. As he was led out of the foul-smelling holding area along with fifteen others, the man had fixed an eye on him and said in broken English, “I know you. You promised to get me out of here! Where we are going, they will kill me.”
Danny did not recognize the man, had never been to that prison before. Did the man have him mixed up with someone else? Was it a ruse?
Danny didn’t answer, had merely gestured with his rifle for the man to move along onto the truck that would take them to another foul-smelling prison. Danny knew there was torture. He knew there was death. On their way to reinforce the battalion that had lost two soldiers, they had stumbled across a trash heap with five more Iraqi bodies, hands fastened with plastic ties behind them, no IDs.
Danny did not want to be recognized by anyone in Iraq. He just wanted to do his job and get home.
The following day, he was back on the AFB checkpoint. Forbes, Yamada, Meyer, and he had been checking IDs and searching cars for five hours. Their shifts had ended an hour before, but their relief had not shown up. They couldn’t leave their posts. All they knew was that there had been an “unexpected delay.”
Later, it turned out that Vice President Cheney had made an unannounced visit to the Green Zone to meet with top officials. All members of Danny’s squadron who had not been on duty at the time were called in to provide extra security.
“Dang!” said Sergeant Klein when they got back. “They’ve got hot water twenty-four hours a day in there. And a swimming pool! It’s like paradise, while we’re roasting out here like hot dogs on a stick!”
The incident started when a new black Humvee pulled into line for the checkpoint. The driver got out and walked up to Danny.
“We go around,” he said, indicating that they wanted to skip the line.
“All Iraqi citizens must go through the line and show ID,” replied Danny. Every day, a couple of people tried this stunt.
“He is late for meeting,” said the driver, pointing back at the vehicle. Danny could not see in through the tinted windows.
“Sorry,” Danny answered, “those are my orders. No exceptions.”
The driver returned to the vehicle, and Danny went back to asking for IDs, demanding that car trunks be opened, peering into sweat-smelling interiors at frightened men.
About ten minutes later, the Humvee roared up to him and the rear window rolled down silently. Danny found himself staring at a man in sunglasses pointing a rifle at him. Danny cocked his own rifle, and swallowed hard.
“I mean you no harm,” said Danny. He heard the hoarseness in his voice. He and the man stared at each other.
“I’ll take it from here, soldier,” announced a voice behind him. Major Samuelson and a translator approached the Hum-vee. The translator said something, and the man in sunglasses pulled the muzzle of the gun back into the car without taking his eyes off Danny.
Danny stood down, sweat pouring from his body. Samuelson and the translator got into the Humvee with the armed passenger and drove off.
Just then, Danny’s relief showed up. “What the hell was that all about?”
“Oh, man,” said Danny. “Not my problem. Not anymore.”
* * *
“Okay, we’re going to try sitting up today.”
Danny opens his eyes to see Pilar, the day nurse, rearranging the tubes attached to his body. Almost everybody who works at Harborview seems to be Filipino. When they speak to each other, their soft, clipped language has a lot of Spanish in it, but even so, Danny can’t understand it.
He thinks of an old punch line: “What do you mean ‘we,’ Kemo Sabe?”
“Very funny,” says Pilar. “Okay, ready?”
“Yeah.”
She puts one hand behind his back and pushes gently, while Danny uses his arms to press up. There is some pain and pulling. He catches his breath and grimaces.
“You okay?”
“Not too bad,” he says. “Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Good. The sooner you start moving around, the sooner you can go home. Want to try standing?”
“Sure.”
Pilar fits some slippers on his dangling feet. His legs look like somebody else’s coming out from under the gown.
“You going to give me something to cover my butt?”
“As soon as you stand up, I can put a robe on you,” she says.
Danny stands. Muscles pull. Bones creak as she holds him by the waist.
“How’s that?” she asks.
“Good.”
“Can you stand by yourself? Here, hold onto the railing.” Pilar works a robe onto Danny’s shoulders.
“Well, well! Look who’s standing.” It’s Danny’s father Sam in the doorway.
“Hey,” says Danny, pleased in spite of himself.
“He’s doing great!” says the nurse. “How about if I get a wheelchair and you can visit in the lounge?”
“What do you think, Danny boy?”
“Good deal.” Danny is so pleased that he doesn’t even object to the eternal nickname.
“Here. Stand right here,” Pilar positions Danny’s father next to him, “while I get a wheelchair.”
“Have you seen Aimee today?” asks Sam.
“I think so.” Time has been elastic for Danny in the hospital. “I think she and Sirena took the kids swimming. Is today Sunday?”
“Yes.”
Pilar returns with the wheelchair and Danny’s mother. “Look who I found.”
“Aye, mi’jo,” says Letty. She moves to hug Danny, already tearing up.
“Let him sit down first,” cautions Pilar.
Even after two minutes, Danny is grateful for the rest. The nurse attaches his bags to a rolling stand and wheels him down the hall.
“Don’t cry, Mom.”
“I can’t help it.” She dabs at her eyes. “I’m just so happy to see you can stand, gracias a Dios. It means you’re getting better.”
Danny’s father goes straight for the television. “Let’s see if the game is on.”
“Is that all you can think about?” says his mother. “You come to visit your son, and you want to watch the game?”
“Of course not! It’s up to Danny. It’s the Final Four.”
“The game is fine, Dad.”
Danny’s father watches Florida vs. UCLA while his mother recounts what Aimee and the kids did that day. They are staying with his parents on South Plum in what had been meant as a short visit upon his return from Iraq. It isn’t a big house, and Danny figures they must all be getting on each other’s nerves by now.
“They got up and had cereal, then went out. So I’ve just been cleaning all day.”
The sound of the game on the television suddenly rises, the announcers rabid with excitement.
“Turn that thing down!” snaps Danny’s mother.
“I just want to hear the scores. I’ll turn it back down in a sec,” her husband replies.
When Danny spots Aimee and the kids coming down the hall, he breaks into a big grin. Sirena is with them.
“Daddy!” chirp the kids, running up and trying to climb in his lap.
“Careful, careful,” says his mother.
Aimee holds them back, an arm around each waist. “You can’t climb up on Daddy yet. Remember, he was hurt. Just give him a kiss.”
Just then Danny’s father turns up the volume on the TV again. “Here you are,” he says.
The TV shows a clip from the grainy video taken the night Danny was shot. Danny sees the car window slowly roll down, the stone face of the policeman. The officer has his gun out. He yells at Danny, who stumbles out of the car, struggling to comply with the policeman’s orders as he barks out commands and expletives, his voice rising higher and higher. Then he hears himself say it: “I mean you no harm.”
The officer orders him down, then up, and Danny shuts his eyes, anticipating the sound of the gun.
“Not in front of the children,” Letty hisses.
“Sorry.” His father switches the channel to a commercial. Danny’s parents continue to argue in low voices in Spanish, until his father switches off the TV and stomps out.
“Was that you, Daddy?” asks Jacob.
Danny turns his wheelchair at the sound of his son’s voice. He continues to stare at the blank television, as though the ghostly blue-white images are still on the screen.
“No,” he says, “that was somebody else who looks a lot like me, talks a lot like me, but gets shot by the police. That’s not me.”
“But you were shot. Who shot you?”
Aimee says nothing.
“Somebody,” says Danny. “Somebody who thought I was a threat.”
Eight months later, Danny is back in Iraq. For better or worse, the cop in Seattle had missed all his vital organs and he healed up as only a young guy can. Danny had gladly rejoined his company.
“Soldier,” says his lieutenant, “you need to report to the CO’s office.”
Oh shit, thinks Danny. Now what?
The commanding officer has a desk, a couple of chairs, and an air conditioner. Danny removes his helmet and feels the sweat evaporate off his head and neck.
“Have a seat,” the CO says. “We just got a call from Seattle.”
Danny sits.
“There was a shooting incident there last night.”
Danny swallows.
“Same place, same block where you were shot. The police think the officer in question was deliberately targeted.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was the cop who attacked you.”
A pain shoots up Danny’s side from his leg to his shoulder. Amboy had been cleared of all wrongdoing and put back on the street. Danny tries to keep his face impassive. “Nothing to do with me.”
“We know that. And that’s what we told them.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I just wanted you to know.”
“Thank you. May I go now, sir?”
“Yes. Dismissed.”
Danny stands to leave.
“Oh, by the way…”
Danny turns.
“Just like cops, MPs take care of their own.”
The CO holds his eye for a moment, then waves him out.