GELATINE JOE   
‘You’re laughing?’

To his credit, Patch Leedle was trying to keep it down. His hand was tight over his mouth to stop the wheezing, and he was crouched so low his helmet sat like a lid on his shoulders. Mike watched in horror, certain that his dry snorts, let alone the snickering, were sure to get them killed. But she too felt a rising in her chest. On some level everyone found the war funny. Anyone who’d survived a tour out here did.

‘Leedle, shut the fuck up right now.’ Sergeant Michelle Holder-Murray had christened herself Mike back in basic as one less distraction. Twenty-six years old, five foot nine, her hair was cut short in the college style. Her complexion was only slightly damaged by the sun, but the war had pushed her looks beyond thirty. This was cruel for someone who wasn’t especially old at heart. She was so lean beneath her armor that with her helmet and sunglasses on it was difficult to tell she was a woman. She liked how it felt.

Mike had them sit behind one of the boulders willing Patch to be quiet. It was hard to tell if this added distraction obscured or intensified her anxiety. Oncoming, irregular fire had them forfeit their position and the slopes were now speckled with light. The flash of each muzzle was another star on the horizon and even as the dark dissolved, its lush quality was evident in the purple of dawn. Everything looked sumptuous up here.

The laughter kept coming. He pushed his mouth into the crook of his elbow to minimize the noise, but it wouldn’t stop. This was his third tour and, he promised, his last. But he said that at the end of his second tour and no one believed him then either. There was much to recommend Patch. If there was mischief on base, he was at its heart. Forever swapping diuretics with laxatives, blanks with live rounds and back again. He wasn’t so much disgusting as merely disgraceful. Still, he hadn’t been the same since George went missing, presumed dead. The disbanding of their double-act in uniform left Patch touring solo with a phantom limb as a straight man.

‘Leedle, I swear I’m going to kill you.’ Murder might solve some of her problems. For one, she’d promised Lisa that if this mission went well, she’d get the kind of promotion that’d make the separations worth it. They could make inroads on their mortgage, put in a new kitchen, and finally give themselves some room to breathe. Walks in the park instead of out here in the field. Romance instead of resentment. The problem was that if it went well – if she succeeded – it meant more of the same: broken promises, patchy video calls, the hardships of a relationship but none of the pleasures. Jail time would give them both an out.

Patch had his own reasons for laughing. Running into gunfire, separated from the rest of their squad, their tiny caravan lacked only a mariachi band for company. If anything was going to stop him getting back to Anne, it was something like this. Each step forward – up – was another step closer in time, another step closer to death, but also one closer to home. It wasn’t just that Anne got his jokes, she had the courtesy to laugh at them too. And thinking of her laughing only made him laugh more.

Of course, comedy was rife in the field. After nearly a decade in Afghanistan, they still watched as roadside bombs destroyed armored vehicles. They scanned the wreckage of helicopters shot from the sky, and now sought the wives of Taliban leaders instead of the leaders themselves. None of this was lost on Patch. He’d asked more than once, and this was the real joke: if we’ve got the best army in the world, why do we keep losing?

The ground changed along with the altitude. The ivy, the vines, willows, and mulberry trees whose fruit steamed in the afternoon heat, were replaced by an altogether sparser terrain. Then everything got faster. The bullets probably came at the same speed, but there were suddenly so many more of them. The sound changed too. The snap of the snare driving their marching song turned into something altogether crazier, like a chainsaw growling in low gear. The Taliban had brought out their M240 machine gun. It was almost certainly the same one George’s squad hauled up a month ago.

‘Fuck.’ Both of them said it, their voices rising with the tide. It was too dangerous to look up.

Mike kept low and crawled as fast as she could. But when she saw Patch stop moving, her fear turned to shock, her muscles frightened into stillness. He was too close to the ground to really fall, it was more that he slumped forward. Dust wafted in his wake.

A beat passed before Patch roared with disbelief. ‘Jesus!’

‘What happened?’ Mike shuffled up close. They’d known each other long enough to tell when the other was faking it.

‘I don’t know,’ Patch called back. He lay flat, his head turned to one side, his face full of wonder. ‘Have you ever been shot before?’

Mike looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was coming toward them.

‘It doesn’t hurt that much.’ Patch was too disoriented to really absorb the pain. His lips pursed then puckered.

‘Wait – you’re shot?’

‘Isn’t it incredible?’ He tried to blink the sweat out of his eyes.

‘Where?’ Mike scrambled amid the oncoming fire to get closer to Patch, who was pinned by his pack.

‘I always thought it’d hurt more. My shirt’s all wet.’

Mike lay beside Patch. Their faces were almost close enough to kiss. But she was shaking her head incredulously, it was the only thing she could move without endangering herself. ‘Where’d they get you?’

She rolled Patch over, took her own pack off, and tried to find the wound.

The firing grew more sporadic but when it came the bullets were like locusts.

‘I can’t find it.’ Patch said, now tearing at his clothes, his fingers were too panicked to cope with buttons now beaded with blood. And his pack, heavy as a sandbag. ‘Shit.’

‘No, hold on.’ Mike pulled Patch’s hands away and tried to release him from the pack. ‘So wait, did they get your legs or something?’

‘I don’t know. My legs feel all right, I think.’

‘Are you even bleeding? Oh – ’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Keep your hands back, let me do it.’ Mike’s fingers had never been so nimble as when they got his arms free of the straps. The shirt beneath was drenched in blood and so she took out her knife and sheared the buttons from it. She peeled the cloth back and appraised Patch’s torso which looked like a chesterfield: blood and bullets, his ribs and abs.

‘Fuck … ’ Mike closed her eyes tightly. ‘Look, you’re hit, but I can’t tell how bad it is.’

Until this point, he focused on the weird feeling in his legs. ‘Wait – what about my dick?’

‘You’re kidding me?’

‘Wouldn’t you want to know?’ Patch’s pupils dilated at the prospect of survival.

‘Jesus.’

‘No – it tickles.’

Mike rummaged and scoffed. ‘All right. It’s fine. It’s gross, but fine.’

She somehow resisted the impulse to smell her fingers and spilled water over Patch’s torso to get a better look.

Patch began to panic once he clocked her hands were covered in blood.

She finally noticed. ‘Whoa … where’s your body armor?’

He didn’t look away from her.

‘When – ’

He looked up to his left and said, ‘Not since we started.’

‘But Anne …’ Mike was actually sick of hearing about Anne. She’d heard the stories of how they met on the dancefloor at a house party, and how sometimes she’d run her fingers through his hair, sing him to sleep each night with a different song, and quieten all the noise in his head. Not only did he not deserve Anne, but he’d totally one upped Mike. Her dad once told her, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. She laughed to herself. She could hardly kill him now.

Patch nodded as the M240 surged in the background.

‘Fuck – ’ She closed her eyes and tried to concentrate. Even if Patch could walk, she couldn’t see how they could stand with that gun trained on them.

‘You know, George said they’ve been sending soldiers up here for years?’

‘You know, I’m not very far from putting a bullet in the back of your head so I can get on with the mission?’ Until this point, Mike had been so busy with girl trouble she’d ignored the fact that the army was fucking with her. But she’d heard the same rumors and was unsettled by them.

‘He was real nervous about coming up here. It’s the only time I ever saw him like that.’ Patch looked away from her and pretended it didn’t hurt. ‘We’ve been on this same bit of ground three times in how many weeks?’

‘I’m not happy about it either.’ They assumed the target was a red herring – to capture Saamiya Hafiq, the wife of the Taliban leader, hiding high in the Hindu Kush – and that the actual mission would be revealed once they started out from Camp Jones. But if there was an alternate target, her commanding officer hadn’t let on. Meanwhile, her back caused her as much trouble as her heart and wandering up and down this mountain did nothing for either.

‘I wish George was here.’

‘Thanks, Leedle.’ She shook her head and tried to concentrate, searching through her pack for the bandages in the first aid kit. His skin waned from pink to beige to grey, and he was still as she tended him, stuffing the wound with a dressing pad then sealing it. She thought there’d be more blood, the closer she inspected she realized that the bullet had passed straight through him, just off to one side. She’d seen this kind of wound before. It was messy and painful, but he was probably going to be fine. If she was angry before, this last only made it worse. But she wasn’t about to tell him. He was going to pay for this.

Catching the colors of dawn, the soil was greasy and slick as petrol. Patch braced himself, he’d been in the field enough to know what was next.

So it was. Mike lifted him without warning, her arm around his chest, his over her shoulder. She shifted them laterally across the mountain. There was a rocky depression about seventy long yards east where they hunkered in relative safety.

‘You know these are live rounds, right?’

‘Shut up.’ She said as she half dropped him onto the soft, protected grass. This was too much.

Now that the day was starting, it was harder to see exactly where the bullets were coming from. Through her binoculars, she clocked the huts cut into the mountain’s face. These tiny outposts were common, really just abbreviated instances of the villages close to Camp Jones. They grew olives, carrots, and could herd enough sheep to support three or four families.

Patch had been quiet for some time, mostly staring at the blood on his shirt, before he said, ‘Hey, I’m sore now. Have you got something?’

She winced as bullets ricocheted off the rim and turned the scree to shrapnel. On her knees, she opened the side pocket of her pack and grabbed one of the morphine syrettes. She looked at the syrette and looked at Patch.

‘Sarge?’

‘I got you.’

‘Sarge?’

Soldiers did this kind of thing all the time, but this was the first time she’d seen it in the field. She looked at Patch. George was gone, Lisa was on the out, it was just the two of them. ‘Look who’s laughing now, huh?’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I’m sore, Sarge.’

‘I’m hurting too.’

‘Can you – ’

‘In a sec.’ She was trying to keep her breath level against the rising tide of anger. Thing was, they were supposed to be in this together.

‘Sarge?’

‘But isn’t this what you wanted?’ Mike said. She’d unwrapped the syrette and held it lightly in her hand.

Patch’s eyes were glassy, the whites tinged yellow. He closed them for a moment, and tried to soak up the pain. Then at once he opened them and took a deep breath, gasping. ‘Yeah.’

‘What the hell are you doing, Leedle?’

‘What the hell are you doing?’ He broke eye contact to look at the needle in her hand.

She couldn’t shake off the feeling that he’d betrayed her, and after another long pause, she injected the morphine.

He nodded as the first taste of it took hold. ‘Fucking hell.’

Mike spat off to the side, she was so angry she could hardly speak. But if they were truly in it together, she had to hold up her side of the bargain. ‘Let me get you set up a little better here. You could be more comfortable.’

‘Appreciate it.’

Her first aid training came back to her quickly. She inspected the wound, replaced the dressing pad, and tried to look calm while she did so. He smelled awful.

Even though the giggling had started up again, Patch kept his eyes closed.

‘You mutinous motherfucker.’

‘Do you know why the army’s trying to kill us?’

Mike looked across the slopes to Camp Jones which was visible ten miles distant. Part of her wanted to get on the next plane and the rest wanted to stay out here forever. It was easy to picture Lisa back home, crying and laughing all at once. But Mike knew that it wouldn’t be the same. Lisa didn’t. Which meant she couldn’t really enjoy her laughter because the crying was a sign of things to come. ‘Please just shut up.’

‘I can’t help it.’

Mike put her hand over his mouth. She didn’t care if her dirt-sodden glove gagged him. ‘You think I’m going to carry your corpse down the mountain?’

He shook his head, which felt lighter when she took her hand away and caught his breath as his insides spun and rested. ‘You know I volunteered for this?’

‘What?’

‘For this mission. To be with you. There was a ton of talk about you carrying Butterfield down.’

‘The only thing talking is the morphine, pal.’ She was flattered by Patch’s confession and gave up a quick smile. It was a selfless act that came back to haunt and define her. Not least all the yoga required to sort her back out afterwards.

By now he’d settled enough to whisper, ‘How is it?’

‘Not good. How does it feel?’

‘The morphine.’

‘Good.’ She was anxious about this talk of George. While her maps were accurate, no one had told her that other squads had been sent up here or what had happened to them.

‘Am I good or not good?’

‘Not good.’

‘Fuck, really?’

‘You were shot, right?’

That Patch was still alive was a quiet miracle. Not long before this mission, he’d spent a night at home in the garage – a few drinks and a bunch of pills in. For all their care, Anne’s songs were no longer enough for him. Instead, he listened to a different song over and over – the one he told everyone he wanted played at his funeral. Setting the music on repeat, the tune played through headphones while he polished his suicide note into a poem. After his gun jammed, Patch sometimes wondered why he simply didn’t clean it and go again? It often took him a while to remember that he’d burst into tears and then passed out a couple of minutes later. Which left him thinking of Anne and the mess she’d had to face the next morning. Patch figured his gun jamming meant that he hadn’t suffered enough and that she’d be better off without him. Despite Anne pleading with him to see a counsellor, George was the only other person he told about it. And it was this feeling that prompted Patch to dump his body armor on the first climb.

He opened his eyes and watched her scan the range.

Mike lowered her M4 and waited in silence. Weeks in the field had them both covered in dirt but Mike’s cheekbones stood proud beneath it. Dawn’s soft light lit the lines across her brow and temple, and her skull appeared to glow. She wasn’t so much born as quarried.

‘What’s going on?’ Patch was anxious, wars were never quiet like this.

‘We’re vulnerable here.’

‘Oh, man.’

The gunfire eased off entirely and they sat out a handful of minutes more to be sure it had actually stopped. As she pulled him up, Patch’s face collapsed. A hole opened up just below his nose and then shut abruptly as he tried to supress the scream building inside him. Mike shrank at Patch’s distress: his broken voice, his body twitching. But he was too weak to resist. Her natural response was to try to reassure him, but what was there to say?

‘The bandage will hold, won’t it?’ Patch whispered.

They adjusted their steps to the terrain. It was hard on their knees and the weight of their packs drove them into uncertain ground, encouraging disaster. Mike constantly stopped and turned and checked that they weren’t being followed. Patch’s attention to each step – knees slightly bent, heels down soft – was such that he might have been dancing. Poorly though, an unwieldy dance, short on rhythm, repetitious, and out of time. He was the weak link in their two-bit conga line staggering down the mountain. Sneaking instead of shuffling, trying to suppress the sound of his voice – a sharp whine, lots of vibrato – which was the music they were moving to.

Mike took them down and east, hopefully out of range. ‘This ain’t working. I know you’re hurting, but we’re dead if you can’t keep it down.’

‘Fuck.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said as she lowered him onto the ground. His legs sometimes tangled and she watched for them as well as his back.

They looked at each other in wonder, neither knew what to do.

‘Have you got another bandage?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Patch lifted his head, nodded as she handed it to him, and began fashioning it into a gag.

‘Are you sure?’

‘It’s better this way. I’ll worry less.’ He unfurled the bandage, tore it in half, and scrunched the first strip into a ball. He stuffed his mouth with it, then looped the lengths behind his head and tied them. The tail end of the bandage trailed down his neck and adhered to his shirt which was still wet with blood.

‘Jesus.’ Mike shook her head, watching and worrying.

They were up and away before they had time to think further. Mike held him by the armpits, but Patch’s breathing grew erratic and his cries were worse for being muffled. They staggered. Her boots dislodged rocks that cartwheeled and got faster as they fell toward the greens of the canopy which blurred the valley below. It looked as if she’d kidnapped and bludgeoned him. Patch was oblivious to all this, his eyes were shut so tight they might have been sewn. All that was left was to hustle him away from the scene of the crime and into a shallow grave. Who needed the Taliban when she took such care of him?

They descended as the sun climbed, following the trees’ shadows pointing the way down. Patch’s face soon mirrored the stain on his shirt, but Mike couldn’t see it. She was too busy surveying the ground for divots and the horizon for incomings. She kept such a tight hold of him, his steps followed automatically and masked his disorientation.

‘Whoa, steady,’ she said as if he were a horse starting to run away from her. Her own stench mingled with Patch’s, she turned her face in search of fresher air and his helmet knocked against hers. ‘What?’

At which point, Patch simply passed out.

She scrambled to his side, took off the gag, and slapped his face hard. ‘This is the worst suicide attempt I’ve ever seen.’

Patch’s chest heaved and he rolled onto his good side to minimize the pain while the world came back to him.

Mike took a step back. He breathed heavily and coughed twice as the air chilled his lungs. She looked down at the improvized gag, which was now soaked with saliva and about as big as a tennis ball. ‘Seriously, you think that purple heart is going to be any solace to Anne?’

‘Fuck off.’

Small outcrops of granite afforded cover, and the air remained cool and still. Mike grinned as she scoped the terrain. She took the chance to radio back to stop her from doing something stupid.

But Patch wasn’t listening. He was drifting, trying to keep his eyes open, talking to himself. ‘You know, since we started all I can think of are the mistakes I’ve made in the past. You know what I mean? The dumb things I said over the years, the people I’ve hurt. Chances missed. Is that what they mean by your life flashing before your eyes?’ He tried to laugh at this, coughing twice before trailing back to his thoughts. ‘And look at me now.’

‘Fuck you,’ Mike said. There was dancing Anne and devoted Anne and Patch chose neither. She couldn’t believe anyone would forgo such luxury.

‘Have they started shooting again?’

‘Yeah, but they’re wide of us. You want some water?’ She unscrewed the top of her flask and tilted it gently so not too much spilled as he drank.

‘I’m sorry. I know I fucked up.’

‘They want us to wait here until they can send in a medevac.’

‘I said, I’m sorry.’

‘I know you did.’

‘What do you think George makes of all this?’

‘What?’

Patch closed his eyes and smiled, woozy as he was. ‘Behind us.’

‘Are you fucking with me?’ Mike looked around until she caught the abbreviated outline of a pair of boots lodged between two rocks beside them. She was so worried about Patch she completely missed it and was too shaken to ask herself if things could get any worse.

She stood cautiously and crouched beside Patch for a second to gauge the silence. ‘I’m gonna check it out.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘So says G.I. Jello.’ But she caught herself and said, ‘Sorry. That wasn’t fair.’

He turned away from her. ‘Nah, I get it.’

She sighed and stepped over to the desiccated body. Of course, there was every chance that the body was – if not one of their own – at least a fellow soldier. A mountain claimed whomever it liked. It had been picked clean in a couple of spots and some of the bones shone through. ‘Yeah, he’s one of ours.’

‘Dog tags?’

‘No.’ But it was George all right. There were small white flowers growing beside the body and she could still make out the tattoos. Without realising it, she’d been waiting for something like this.

Patch was now up on both elbows, leaning to one side so as to see past Mike’s back. ‘What’s he doing up here?’

‘I don’t know and he ain’t saying.’ Mike started to shiver as she looked the body over for trauma. He was out of uniform, having swapped fatigues for local cotton trousers and a shirt.

‘Maybe small talk isn’t your thing – ’ He was laughing again, softly to himself. The morphine was the best thing that’d happened to him on this mission.

She stood carefully and kept low. ‘Whoa, this is bad.’

‘I feel a little better.’

Mike watched him drift in and out of consciousness. He looked so happy. She repositioned herself to try to get in his line of sight. She had a moment to check the range for any sign of trouble but flinched when a sparrow flew close and nearly toppled her.

‘Real cool, Sarge.’

‘Leedle, I don’t know … I’m so sorry.’ The air was fresh and the scent of gunpowder and jasmine made her giddy. The sky deepened from powder blue into sapphire and the morning sun warmed her back. ‘How did you know it was George?’

‘It’s good to have him back.’

‘I guess that’s one way to take it.’ Mike wondered just how much morphine was actually in the syrettes.

‘How does he look?’

She ignored the question. ‘Hang on, do you understand what’s happening?’

‘You found George?’

‘Yeah, I’m sorry.’

‘Isn’t that a good thing?’

Amid her concern for Patch, and her own feelings of loss for George, she was still in charge. She tried to be a better person here and not think of this as revenge. ‘Did you know he was AWOL?’

He shook his head.

‘You’re the only one he would’ve confided in.’

‘We talked about a lot of things.’

She leaned to one side to get a better look at Patch. ‘But he had doubts about the mission, right?’

‘He wasn’t the only one.’

‘Come on, Leedle. You said you talked about it.’

He smiled to himself, still lost in the morphine. ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

‘Leedle?’

‘I told him everyone got the jitters before heading outside the wire.’

Mike nodded. She couldn’t help herself, she said, ‘He abandoned you, huh?’

‘He’s right here.’

She looked down at Patch, and at George behind them. For the first time in months she’d got what she wanted and regretted it almost immediately. They sat together without speaking and waited for the medevac.

Patch stared at the horizon and started humming.

Mike smiled as she recognized it. She listened to the first few bars and came in after the first verse, their voices tried to harmonize.

‘You know this?’ He looked up and smiled.

She nodded and continued with the tune.

He was chuckling now. ‘That’s not it.’

‘What?’

‘It doesn’t go like that.’ Patch hummed it for her again, closed his eyes and eased back.

They started at the top and continued through to the chorus. But Mike didn’t know the song that well and halfway through the second verse fumbled the words again. She started laughing despite herself.

For a second, it was the only sound on the mountain. Patch opened his eyes as a big smile grew across his face. ‘You think this is funny?’

You can learn more about Mark by linking onto his bio: https://thievingmagpie.org/mark-tewfik-bio/