by Will Mackin
I’d said some things about Reed’s true love the night before. So at breakfast, in the motel lobby, we didn’t talk. We didn’t talk loading the laser equipment into the government truck, either, or pulling out of the parking lot. I suppose if I’d been unsure of the way, Reed would’ve gotten out the map and told me where to go. But the signs through Wendover to I-80 eastbound were easy enough to follow. I cranked up my window in the merge, dropped the truck into fourth. The rising sun turned the windshield gold. I had to take it on faith that the highway unfolded in a long straight line before us.
This was our first trip to Baker’s Strong, a bombing range in the southwest corner of the proving grounds. Dugway OPS had issued us the truck, along with a binder on all the ranges. Reed opened the binder for directions. He looked out the window. Phone poles shushed past, interspersed with gleaming piles of salt. The word INFIDEL was embroidered into the back of his ball cap. Everything in the rearview mirror collapsed on a dot.
Reed broke the silence. “Take this dirt road,” he said.
“Where?” I asked.
“Right here,” he said, pointing.
A dirt road appeared. The sun rolled onto my left shoulder in the turn. We bumped off the easement and climbed up a hill. We descended into a prehistoric lake that had evaporated over millennia. Rings etched in the surrounding high ground marked the waterline’s gradual descent. All that remained was a wide bed of salt.
“Nineteen point seven miles to the OP,” Reed said.
I reset the odometer. Reed closed the binder and pushed in the lighter.
The OP, or observation point, overlooked the southern end of the salt bed, on which a number of targets would be arranged. Standing the laser at the OP, we’d shine it on one of those targets. The laser beam would refract off whatever out-of-service vehicle the target happened to be: half-track, earthmover, tank. Bombs from a B-52, scheduled to be overhead in an hour, would then guide on the refracted energy. Fuses would trigger warheads. Fireballs would bloom like marigolds, turning inside out and black.
The lighter popped.
“Listen, man,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?” Reed spoke out of the side of his mouth that was not concerned with touching the cigarette to the lighter’s red-hot coil.
“For what I said about Cheyenne last night.”
I’d known Reed for five years by then. In that time, we’d made three deployments to Afghanistan together. While deployed, we’d controlled air strikes in support of night raids. We’d had good nights and bad. Mostly good, early on; then the bad nights had started to accumulate. Toward the end of our second deployment, they’d pulled about even. Midway through our third, bad nights had surpassed good. I didn’t know how future deployments were going to play out, but the trend was worrisome. I couldn’t help but extrapolate that trend five or ten years into the future, when Reed and I would be civilians who, on certain nights, would recall things that had happened during the war. Looking back on those things, I’d probably see good stuff as bad, and bad stuff as worse. Some nights I’d probably want to call Reed and talk about it. Or, maybe, talk about other things as a way of getting around to it. For example, that morning we drove to Baker’s Strong OP—how the dust rose to a certain level in our wake. How the odometer, on every rotation, stuck at eight-tenths of a mile.
Reed filled his lungs with smoke, and held it. His eyes watered. He exhaled a stream, tight as wire, out the cracked-open window. “I’ll admit,” he said, “it’s not an ideal situation.”
“So how’d you leave it with her?” I asked.
“She’s in my room with the gun.”
* * *
—
HALF OF WENDOVER was in Utah, half in Nevada. A bright line painted across Main Street separated the two. The Nevada side had neon casinos, glittering strip clubs, fluorescent knife shows, et cetera. The Utah side had darker versions of the same things.
The Pump House was a cinder-block establishment on the Utah side, between the interstate and the railroad tracks. It was named for what it used to be. The pumps were long gone. Cut boards covered holes in the floor where pipes had risen from the ground. The music, I supposed, was at least as loud as the pumps would’ve been. A woman danced on a plywood stage in chrome heels. Others floated around in velvet capes, their faces turned purple by the black light.
I’d seen these women before, in Afghanistan, in the aftermath of an aerial bombardment. As I’d walked from my covered position toward the hissing point of impact—through bitter walls of smoke and over glowing rings of frag—these women had flown toward me. I didn’t know where they’d come from, but I liked to think that in guiding the bomb to earth I’d released them from captivity. Maybe they’d slipped through the hole the bomb had torn between our world and another, or perhaps they’d waited—burrowed into the dirt like spores—for the bombs to fall. In any case, they had wings and they could fly. I watched them climb, dive, and roll over half-dead men, half-buried in the smoldering earth. I watched them weave through stands of burning trees. As they returned to me, their wings smelled like burnt hair. Their kisses felt cold. In war, I was their savior. At the Pump House, however, I was just another man whose questionable urges lay barely submerged.
Reed sat with me at the bar for a while, drinking beers, until Cheyenne walked by. He shouted at her over the music, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?!”
Cheyenne’s eyes shone silver in the black light. Her lips were shiny and full.
“I don’t think so!” she shouted back.
* * *
—
REED CARRIED THE GPS in hand, and the laser designator in a backpack over his shoulder. I carried the laser spot tracker and the radio. The sun shone in our faces. We crossed sandy knolls dotted with scrub brush, following the GPS to the OP’s coordinates.
“This is it,” Reed said. He dropped his pack onto a sandy knoll among a thousand sandy knolls.
Trash left behind by previous controllers—spent D-cells, empty Rip It cans, rusty 40mm brass—surrounded the OP. We looked down on the salt basin, where, a half mile northeast, there ran a diagonal line of bombed-out targets. Misses on either side of the target line had cratered and scorched the salt. Chocolate mountains stood beyond the targets, on the far rim of the basin. The flawless blue sky narrowed their shadows into points.
Reed set up the designator, and I set up the tracker. The tracker had a powerful zoom. Through it, I could see the targets clearly. Although the cannons were missing—along with the turrets, tracks, armor plates, and engines—the burnt frames were unmistakably tanks.
The designator had a scope, boresighted to the laser. Lying prone in the sand, ball cap backward, Reed aimed through the scope. He put the crosshairs on the target, then pulled the trigger. The laser clicked loudly. It operated outside the visible spectrum; therefore, it was hidden to the naked eye. Looking through the tracker, though, I could see it.
First, Reed aimed for a half-buried sprocket at the end of a cracked axle under the northernmost tank, but a rise in the middle distance caused the laser to skip. Next, he tried to paint a stanchion that connected the main chassis to the turret ring on the center tank, but the energy reflected straight down. After several more attempts to achieve a good refraction, he shut off the laser.
“These targets are shit,” he said.
Twenty minutes remained until the B-52 was scheduled to drop. I powered down the tracker. “I’ll go,” I said.
Grabbing the radio, Reed said, “I’ll come with.”
* * *
—
THE MUSIC CONTAINED noises of a failing pump—the screech of cavitation, the whack of a thrown bearing, the rattle of a loose intake grate. A woman rolled on the stage, banging her heels against the plywood surface. Women waiting their turns to perform did so behind a curtain, in what must’ve once been the control room. The
bartender chewed her nails behind the cash register. Over in the corner, on a sofa they had all to themselves, Cheyenne and Reed wiggled under the cover of her thick black cape.
A tattooed runt in a Raiders jersey entered. Ignoring the girl onstage, he stared at Reed and Cheyenne, whose head was thrown back, whose long brown hair hung loose upon her cape. Reed’s boots stuck out from under the hem. The runt stood in the center of the room. He turned to the bartender, and she stopped chewing her nails. The runt pointed at the sofa.
“Does Bas know about this?” he asked.
* * *
—
REED CARRIED THE radio. I carried the tarp, the cord, and my knife. The radio was tuned to the frequency on which the B-52 would contact us. Static poured out of its speaker like sugar.
The salt basin was not what I’d expected. It was not the flat, milky surface it appeared to be from a distance. Rather, it reflected the sky. And it was made up of a billion salt teardrops stood on their pointy ends. These teardrops disintegrated into crystals under my boots.
A salt bridge between two craters led to the tank on which Reed and I would hang the tarp. We climbed inside its ashen frame.
Once upon a time, there’d been no such thing as a tank. Men had fought to a standstill using rifles, mortars, and artillery. Then someone had an idea to break through the lines: a heavily armored vehicle mounted with a cannon. So the first tank came to be, and it did its job well, until it was outgunned and outmaneuvered by a better tank. Then a new idea was hatched, and a new and improved tank came along. Eventually, that new and improved tank also became outgunned and outmaneuvered, requiring an even better tank, and so on. Some of the obsolete tanks wound up being sold to foreign nations—Egypt, Kuwait, Peru. Others decorated the lawns outside VFWs. Still others were sent here, to Baker’s Strong, where they were crushed, burned, twisted, and melted back into ideas.
I unfolded the tarp, silver on one side and brown on the other, with eyeholes in the corners. I measured a length of cord. I pulled out the ivory-handled hunting knife that I’d taken off a dead Taliban one night on our last deployment, and I cut the cord. I tied a corner of the tarp, silver side facing the OP, to what remained of the turret ring.
“Can I see that?” Reed asked, holding his own length of cord.
Reed had taken an AK off a different dead man that same night. I folded my knife and passed it to him.
* * *
—
THE BARTENDER SHRUGGED in response to the runt’s question regarding whether or not Bas knew about what was happening on the sofa. The runt then turned and left the Pump House in a hurry. I shouted to Reed from my barstool. He popped his head out from under Cheyenne’s cape.
“What?” he yelled over the music.
“Time to go!” I yelled back.
Noise smeared the space between us.
“What for?” Reed said.
“Her boyfriend’s coming!” I said.
“What boyfriend?” Cheyenne hollered.
Cheyenne swore that she and Bas weren’t a thing, and never had been. He was just a fat, dumb asshole from whom none of us had anything to fear. Still, she decided to leave work early. The bartender gave her a baseball bat from behind the register. Cheyenne handed the bat over to Reed. Reed insisted that we walk Cheyenne home.
We waited outside, by a power station, while Cheyenne changed out of her cape. High-tension wires bent down to connect with voltage converters. The buzzing converters tossed a carcinogenic heat.
“What happens when Bas shows up?” I asked Reed.
“We tune him up,” he said.
“What about the five dudes he brings with?”
“There’s no five dudes.”
Reed tossed the bat into the air and caught it by the business end. He passed the bat to me, handle first. Although it was the most nonconductive thing imaginable—a wooden bat with electrical tape wrapped around the handle—it acted like an antenna. Thus, I received an image of Bas, sitting alone at his beat-up desk, in his shithole office, behind East Wendover’s only muffler shop. I suppose he could’ve been the mayor of that side of town, which would’ve explained his overall weariness, as men like the runt were always running through the night to bring him bad news.
The door to the Pump House opened, and music blasted out. Cheyenne had tied her hair back into a ponytail and changed into jeans. She smiled at Reed in a way I’d never been smiled at, which made me wonder what I was doing wrong.
* * *
—
FIRST THING I did, upon returning to the OP, was draw the attack geometry in the sand. I’d learned this trick from Reed, years ago. It was his habit back then; now it was mine, as I’d found it harder and harder to keep things straight. With all the back-and-forth, that is, between the war and home, and training for the war, sometimes I couldn’t pinpoint the year, or the season. Sometimes I even forgot where I was, and I had to stop and think. For example: western Utah, 2009.
I made a point in the sand to represent the OP. I made a point for Wendover, where the B-52 would begin its target run, and a point for the target, both at relative distances and bearings from the OP. I drew a vector in the direction the B-52 would fly—east-southeast—from Wendover to the target. I drew an arrow from the OP to the target, in the direction the laser would shine. My finger in the warm sand felt like summer, when, in fact, it was fall.
The radio crackled: “Bulldog Zero One, Lava Seven Two, single Stratofortress, twenty miles northeast of Wendover, sixteen thousand feet.”
I briefed the attack, cleared the B-52 down to two thousand feet, and asked the pilot to report his arrival over Wendover, which was the entry point for the range. Looking through the tracker, I made one last check of the target area. Heat shimmered off the salt bed, liquefying the tanks. Wind bent the heat.
* * *
—
I CARRIED THE bat down the hill from the Pump House, following Reed and Cheyenne under the train trestles, around the water tower, and onto her street. She lived in a mobile home with lattice tacked over the wheels. A mirror ball in the front yard reflected the moon and stars. Cheyenne’s neighbor’s bloodhounds barked at us from their cages. I waited under the water tower while Reed went inside to say good night.
From the east, three locomotives pulled in a freight train, which clattered, screeched, and sparked, as a burgundy Cadillac rolled in from the west with its lights out. The Cadillac parked in front of Cheyenne’s house. Its long door opened and Bas emerged. He hiked up his pants in the street. Cheyenne was right: he was fat. He walked, pigeon-toed, around the front of the car. Behind me, the freight train continued to rumble. Blue sparks from the train’s wheels flashed in the mirror ball in Cheyenne’s front yard.
The bloodhounds shook their cages, their barking drowned out by the train. Bas lumbered over a crooked line of paver stones that led to the stairs, which he climbed one at a time to the porch. Bas held open the screen door to knock shyly on the main door. No lights came on inside.
Reed might’ve forgotten all about Bas. He might’ve even forgotten about me. Bas went to the window, cupped his hands around his eyes, and looked inside. The train’s reflection ran in one side of his head and out the other. He moved down the porch to the next window. The train ended, and as it continued westward, the street fell silent. I heard Bas breathing hard as he descended from the porch. I heard each stair creak under his weight. I saw the railing, made of galvanized pipe, shake. Bas stopped on the paver stones, halfway to his Cadillac. From there, he looked across the street right at me, standing under the water tower in a moon shadow. But that wasn’t why Bas didn’t see me. He was thinking about Cheyenne, and wondering who she was with. He was conjuring, for himself, an image of Reed, which made me invisible. Bas turned around and walked back toward the house.
I tried to stay on the balls of my feet. I tried to shoot in from
the side, on an angle. But the bloodhounds heard me coming and they gave me away. Bas turned to see the bat over my head, right at the point of weightlessness.
* * *
—
“WENDOVER, INBOUND,” THE pilot reported.
I radioed back, “Descend to five hundred feet and continue inbound.”
Reed triggered the designator—click, click, click. The tracker registered a ball of energy where we’d hung the tarp. I looked up in the sky where the B-52 should’ve been: three hundred thousand pounds of metal, trailing a curtain of soot.
“You see him?” Reed asked, aiming through the scope.
“Not yet,” I said.
* * *
—
REED AND I sat on the Cadillac’s hood, waiting for Cheyenne to pack her stuff. The bloodhounds mumbled in their cages. Bas lay unconscious in the dirt, on his back. In his waistband, I’d found an ivory-handled revolver, which I gave to Reed, whose face appeared among the moon and stars in the mirror ball.
“What’s your plan?” I asked Reed.
“Take her back to the motel.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
Reed rolled the revolver’s cylinder under his thumb.
“How about you give her the car, and the gun, and let her go.”
Reed thought about it. “I can’t just let her go.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“She needs my help.”
I thought about the dark angels in Afghanistan: how, after being released from wherever they’d come, they’d fold in behind me. How they’d whisper things that made me feel like a savior.
“She doesn’t need your help,” I said. “She just needs another dumbass to believe her bullshit.”
* * *