Bring Out the Dog

by Will Mackin

  It went like this: We walked uphill into a village at night. A woman ran downhill, into our ranks, and searched the troop for me. I was the one wearing all the antennas. I was the one who’d talked to the plane that had shot up her house. I could see smoke rising from her house on the hill. Inside, in the corner of a room, a dead grandfather held his dead grandson. It was the daughter/mother who’d found me. It was she who’d insisted that I come inside her house to see what I’d done.

  I’d brought an A-10 down for a thirty-millimeter strafe on four enemy standing at the top of the hill. The attack had killed three and left the fourth severely wounded. The wounded man was trying to drag himself to cover. He was bleeding from an artery in his shattered leg. I could’ve done nothing, and he would’ve died soon enough. Instead, I’d brought the A-10 back for another strafe. Rounds had drifted into the house. They’d found the boy and his grandfather hiding in the corner. The woman had run out of the house to find me.

  I didn’t want to go into the house because I knew it wouldn’t do anyone any good, and I was right. But the woman’s grief was so profound, it resembled joy. I couldn’t ignore her, and I didn’t want to push her away. Nor did I want to threaten her, then be in a position where I might have to carry out those threats. So I followed her up the hill, through the disintegrated wall of her house, and into a clouded room. I walked over shattered tiles toward the corner, where she pointed. There, I discovered the grandfather and grandson alive.

  The grandfather brushed dust off his grandson’s shoulders. Can I help you? he asked, like stray thirty mike-mike blew through his house all the time. Then—bzzt!—the dream short-circuited, and we were walking uphill into the village again, and the woman was running downhill to meet us halfway.

  Somewhere in there, Digger entered my shipping container, which woke me up. Light and heat streamed through the open door.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I need a pill,” Digger said.

  My duffel bag lay against the wall opposite my armor. From it, Digger removed my flannel shirt. He searched the pocket where I kept my sleeping pills.

  “I don’t have any more,” I said.

  “Bullshit,” Digger said. “Hal says he gave you, like, twenty.”

  Digger dumped the contents of my duffel bag onto the floor. Car keys chimed against the plywood. My wallet flopped open. Live 5.56- and nine-millimeter rounds rolled out the door and into the sun.

  * * *

  —

  SOME CALLED THE pills “time machines”; others called them “TKOs.” They were tiny blue ovals coated in shine. Standard issue was ten pills per man, and no more, because they were addictive. But the pills helped us get over the jet lag resulting from our long trip to Afghanistan. They eased our transition to the nocturnal schedule on which the success of our mission relied. And they rendered us comatose, and dreamless, when, for whatever reason, we couldn’t sleep.

  Every time we deployed a medic would issue these pills, in little plastic bags, as we boarded the cargo jet that would deliver us from our home base in Virginia to the war. We always left home around midnight. This last time, my fourth, it was March. Frost hung in the air. Stars tangled in the bare branches of the tallest oaks. Hal received his pills from the medic and stuffed them in his backpack. Digger tucked his plastic bag of pills into the front pocket of his jeans. I buttoned mine into the pocket of my flannel shirt, and when I looked up, there was Digger, looking back at me. “Here we go again,” he said, smiling. Together we climbed the stairs into the dimly lit cargo bay.

  We took off, refueled high over the continental shelf, then drilled eastbound through the stratosphere. Halfway across the black Atlantic, as others slept on the cold metal floor of the cargo bay, I stood at the starboard jump door, looking out its little round window at the night.

  Swells rose on the surface of the moonlit ocean. Silver clouds whispered by. I removed the plastic bag from my shirt pocket and shook out a sleeping pill. It appeared gray in the moonlight. I swallowed it, then stayed at the window, waiting for it to take effect.

  Honeycombs, checkerboards, and cobwebs spun before my eyes. The moon set, the sun rose. Clouds vaporized and the sea turned red. I saw the City of Atlantis, the Colossus of Rhodes, and the Pyramids of Giza, covered in gold. I saw the Tower of Babel, its top spiraling toward the heavens. I knew these things were real because I could press my hand against the jump door and feel the cold sky pressing back.

  I kept the remainder of the pills in the pocket of my flannel shirt, in my duffel bag, against the wall of my shipping container. Spring was mild in Sharana, so the transition to sleeping days was easier than it would’ve been during summer. Every morning when we returned to the outpost, however, after both good nights and bad, the restlessness was the same. I’d sit on my cot and consider taking a pill, even though I knew that I wouldn’t be able to stop. Even though I understood that after I ran out of pills, I wouldn’t be able to find any more. In the end, I decided not to take one. And I slept well knowing that I had some in reserve.

  Then came that night, in April, out near Shkin, when I brought the A-10 down for a second strafe, and rounds drifted into that house. And the noise arrived after the rounds hit, like a fart in the bathtub. And the woman ran downhill into our ranks, her screams no different than laughter.

  I saw her twisted face by starlight. I saw smoke rising from her house as an infrared blur on night vision. She reached out to me, which I shouldn’t have allowed, because she could’ve triggered my rifle, or pulled the pin on one of my grenades. Instead, she touched my arm, and her grief transferred wholesale. I sensed the absence of her father and son, and I felt her wish that I could bring them back. Had I wished hard enough she might’ve felt me wishing the same thing. Still, it seemed possible. The A-10 was still in the sky. We were still walking uphill. Although I knew better, I followed the woman into her house.

  Returning to my shipping container after sunrise that morning, I didn’t care about the ramifications, I intended to take a pill. I opened my duffel bag, dug out my flannel shirt, and discovered the pocket empty. Ditto for the other pocket of that shirt, and all the pockets of my other shirts. I thought that maybe, in a blind fit of self-preservation, I might’ve hidden the pills somewhere so perfect that even I couldn’t find them. Then I remembered Digger, in line to board the cargo jet back in Virginia, turning around.

  I walked over to Digger’s shipping container and banged on its big orange door. He answered in his underwear. “Yeah?” he said.

  “Did you take my pills?” I asked.

  “Your what?”

  Looking into Digger’s eyes, I saw seahorse tails spinning clockwise.

  “You know what,” I said.

  Digger blinked, and those tails spun the other way.

  “I get all I need from Hal,” Digger said. He shut his door and barred it from the inside.

  I walked to Hal’s shipping container, which stood out in the wind. Blowing sand struck the broad side of it, making a noise like a finger circling the rim of a wineglass. The heavy door gonged when I knocked. Hal cracked it open just far enough to peek out. I explained my situation.

  “I gave all my pills to Digger,” Hal said.

  “I just need one,” I said.

  On missions, Hal wore the same antennas as me. The woman who ran downhill into our ranks could’ve just as easily chosen him as the focus of her grief. She could’ve reached out and touched his arm.

  “Hold on,” Hal said, and he shut the door.

  Putting my ear to Hal’s door, I heard what sounded like Hal putting his ear to the other side of the door, wondering how long I’d wait. Meanwhile, the sun froze in the sky. The wind stopped blowing. The door popped open, and Hal released a blue pill into my cupped palm.

  Back in my shipping container, I sat on my cot with the pill in my hand. I envisioned the honeycombs and
checkerboards. I imagined Alexander the Great, riding his elephant down from the mountains into battle. I considered what the next morning would be like, trying to fall asleep without a pill, and I wondered where I might find more. Tearing a piece of duct tape from a roll, I stuck the pill to the ceiling over my cot. The little blue capsule was perfectly hidden between the gray tape and the gray steel. As I drifted off to sleep, only I knew it was there.

  The steel walls of my shipping container turned to glass in my dream. I found myself alone on the barren steppe where Sharana once stood. The sun rolled backward across the sky. Night fell, frost formed on the glass, and it began to snow. A glacier descended from the mountains to bury me in ice for an eon before the thaw delivered a millennium of flood and driving rain. Then, one day, the clouds broke and the sun shone down on a forest of petrified baobabs. That night, the harvest moon crashed into the earth, smashing it to smithereens. I drifted in my glass box through space and time toward a tiny, blue, oval-shaped star that shone in the distance.

  And that was the pill that Digger wanted, on that hot morning in June, after he’d killed three men out in Wardak.

  * * *

  —

  SOMEONE HAD GONE to great lengths to find helium; then to inflate each red, white, and blue balloon, tie their nozzles, and knot them to strings. The other ends of the strings were tied to stones the way you might tie a threatening note to a brick before throwing it through a window. The stones anchored the balloons to the tables. The balloons floated over piles of bones. More soldiers entered the DFAC, and the heat coming off their fevered bodies threatened to lift the whole tent off the ground like an airship. All that commotion, and somehow Hal licking his fingers clean was what jolted Digger awake.

  “Need anything?” Hal offered, standing.

  Digger shook his head. Once Hal was out of earshot, I asked him, “Did you find a pill this morning?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Who’d you ask?”

  “Everyone.”

  Earlier, Hal, Digger, and I had walked from our outpost to the DFAC, whose opaque skin glowed amber in the night. Along the way, we’d passed two privates kissing in the moon shadow of a T-wall. We’d passed three colonels smoking cigars, and a gaggle of majors playing horseshoes. Sergeants, silhouetted by flame, had grilled the ribs on split oil drums. Clouds of bittersweet smoke had flavored the night air.

  Before entering the DFAC, we’d each cleared our pistols into a barrel full of sand. We’d dropped our magazines, pulled back our slides, and caught the rounds that flipped out of the chambers. Hal and I had pushed our rounds back in our magazines, but Digger had thrown his out over the HESCO barrier and into tent city where all the daywalkers slept.

  Inside the DFAC, at the steam table, Digger had just pointed at what he wanted. No please or thank you to the privates in their hairnets and aprons, holding their tongs and serving forks. No wishing them happy hunting, as was customary. From the steam table, Digger had set off for the milk.

  A row of industrial-size refrigerators, each packed with hundreds of those grade-school boxes of milk, stood adjacent to the steam table. Muddled lines of soldiers formed in front of each. Digger, I guessed, had picked his box of chocolate milk out from a distance. Maybe it had looked colder than the rest, or fresher. Maybe Digger had thought that, as a killer, he was entitled to whichever box he wanted. After all, he hadn’t spent his day making barbecue sauce, or stoking fires, or baking a fucking cake. He hadn’t blown up balloons or hung streamers. Someone must’ve cut in front of Digger and taken his box of milk.

  Digger had probably drilled the guy in the jaw. That was his signature move, anyway, the jaw-drill. I’d seen him do it under a streetlight in Virginia Beach, at a gas station in Salt Lake City, and on a bridge in Milwaukee. When Digger put his back into it, it was devastating. So whoever had taken Digger’s milk had probably hit the fridge door unconscious. And his tray of ribs had probably gone flying. Then came the brave souls to break up the fight. At that point, it must’ve looked to Digger like the entire population of the DFAC was closing in, which might’ve made it seem like it was him against the world. When he’d shouted, I’ll kill you, I figured that he’d meant everybody.

  Hal returned to our table with an extra tray of ribs for Digger and me to share. I took all the burned ones, and Digger took all the rare. The three of us ate, and made a big mess of bones on the table.

  A gray-haired master sergeant carrying a walkie-talkie appeared. He was followed by a skinny PFC with a widow’s peak and sleeves too long for his arms. The master sergeant pointed at Digger with the antenna of his walkie-talkie.

  “This the guy?” he asked the PFC.

  “Yeah,” the PFC said.

  “You need to come with me,” the master sergeant said to Digger.

  “I don’t need to do shit,” Digger said.

  “That’s how you want to handle this?” the master sergeant asked.

  “Yup,” Digger said.

  The master sergeant radioed for security. The name GRIMES was embroidered on his camouflaged blouse. The PFC looked at us like he didn’t know who we were, or where we came from, but he wanted in.

  “This guy’s mine,” Hal said to Grimes, while pointing at Digger. “How about you and me figure this out at our level.”

  “How about you eat, and let me handle this,” Grimes said.

  “I’m just trying to save us both some ass pain,” Hal said. “Incident reports, and all that bullshit.”

  “Assault is not bullshit,” Grimes said.

  This made Digger laugh, which made Hal laugh, too.

  “You’re not helping,” Hal said.

  Double doors swung open behind the steam table. Two soldiers backed into the tent, each supporting one corner of the gigantic cake that had been decorated to look like the American flag. Knowing the routine, birthday girls and boys stood up from their tables and made their way toward the stage.

  “Go tell them to wait,” Grimes said to the PFC with the long sleeves, who walked off while shaking his head. Grimes turned to Digger. “You think you can just come in here and tune up one of my soldiers?”

  “He started it,” Digger said.

  “That’s not what I’m hearing,” Grimes said. He held his walkie-talkie up to his ear and fiddled with the volume.

  “Whatever’s gonna happen, can you make it quick?” Digger said. “I got shit to do.”

  “Oh, it’ll be quick, all right,” Grimes said.

  “How long you been doing this?” Hal asked.

  At that, Grimes smiled. He almost laughed. Because to rise to the rank of master sergeant meant that Grimes had been in at least fifteen years, so he had to know that nothing ever happened quick. Army, navy, it didn’t matter which service. Try as you might, there was always that unbeatable thing pushing back. Grimes had to know. So when I saw him smile, I thought he was going to sit down with us, and he and Hal were going to work things out. Then we’d all shake our heads over how fucked up everything was, and how we’d almost gotten caught up in it there, for a second.

  A lieutenant with his own walkie-talkie appeared. He asked Grimes, “Are you ready for the cake, Master Sergeant?”

  The cake, by then, was up on stage. Soldiers were sticking candles into it. A few dozen birthday girls and boys, all way too young, stood around, waiting for those candles to be lit and for the lights to go out and for all of us to sing “Happy Birthday,” which happened on every rib night.

  “Does it look like I’m ready for the goddamn cake?” Grimes said.

  “I’m just asking,” the lieutenant said.

  “If I was ready for the fucking cake, do you think I’d be down here and not up there?”

  “Sorry, Master Sergeant,” the lieutenant said. “I didn’t know.”

  The DFAC’s aluminum frame creaked gently against the wind, as i
f it were being held down by ropes. As if, absent those ropes, we’d float away to a new and faraway place, where we might live by our own rules.

  “Your attention, please!” the lieutenant yelled from the stage. No one paid attention. Then Grimes whistled, and everybody shut up.

  “We’re going to postpone the birthday celebration for a few minutes,” the lieutenant announced, “due to a problem that we need to take care of first.”

  “That’s me!” Digger shouted, climbing on top of our table. “I’m the problem!”

  Soldiers booed and cheered. Digger held his arms open to them while turning a slow circle. Soldiers beat their tables with their fists.

  “Fuck you if you’re here to eat cake, and not to fight!” Digger yelled.

  There were more cheers than boos this time, as Digger climbed down from the table and returned to his seat.

  “See, now, that’s where you and I agree,” Grimes said to Digger. “You think they had birthday cakes in Nam?”

  “Exactly,” Digger said.

  Grimes’s walkie-talkie squawked. He put the speaker to his ear while looking at the DFAC’s entrance, on the far side of the steam table. Finding no security there, Grimes turned to check the fire exit next to the stage. “I’m in the middle, by the Jell-O cart,” Grimes said into the mike. “Where are you?”

  They could’ve been on the ground, surrounded by cut ropes, watching us float away. They could’ve been asking themselves where the hell we thought we were going.

  I couldn’t speak for anybody else in the DFAC on rib night. But Digger, it was safe to say, had joined to fight. Hal had joined because if he hadn’t, the war would’ve never been the same. And as for me, I’d joined to see the world.