THE FUGUE by Arna Bontemps Hemenway
Wild Turkey wakes up. It’s the last day of June, and an early summer thunderhead has marched across the peripheral Kansas plain (the lights of town giving out to the solid pitch of farmland) while Wild Turkey slept. He knew it was coming, the lightning spidering forth behind and then above him last night as he walked, the air promising the rain that is now, as Wild Turkey blinks in the thin blue morning, making the rural highway overpass above his head drone, a toneless room of sound below.
Wild Turkey lifts himself out from the body-shaped concrete depression that nestles just under the eaves of the little overpass – that word too big for the little nexus; really it’s just one lonely county road overlapping another. He knew to sleep here last night because of the rain and because he saw the overpass was old enough to have this body-shaped concavity, a ‘tornado bed’ they used to call it, and now he reaches up into the dark of the girder’s angle and feels around until he finds the ancient survival box for those erstwhile endangered motorists: a flashlight that doesn’t work, a rusted weather radio, and – yes – a bottle of water, thick with dust, but Wild Turkey is thirsty and doesn’t care. He stands and stretches on the sloped concrete bank, against the theater of the rain. He was right about the long night-walk out along the country road being good for coming down, the darkness being good for discouraging one of his fits, but wrong about being able to make it to the school before morning.
He makes it to the school now, in the rain, sopping wet. The school is, as it ever was, more or less in the middle of a cornfield, and the thick leaves and stalks cough in the rain as Wild Turkey comes once again upon the old buildings. He rounds the tiny campus in the storm as if he is still in junior high, still traipsing from class to class in the cloying polo and khaki uniform. Now, as then, he does not fail to think of the strangeness of time when he sees the buildings – themselves somehow eternal feeling, always but only half in ruin. Even in use (back then, as an ad hoc private Episcopalian school, and now, apparently repurposed as a childcare center) the moldering white portables and darkly aging main brick building sit in situ, oblivious.
Standing on the concrete path along the portables and trying to look into the darkened window of an abandoned room, Wild Turkey has one of his little gyres in time – a brief one, only sending his mind back to those moments when he just an hour ago woke under the little bridge – and he realizes he woke thinking of Mrs. Budnitz, his second-grade teacher, specifically of the rank, slightly fetid scent that would occasionally waft subtly from somewhere inside her gingham dress on a tendril of air in the last weeks of school before summer. Though the scent or smell itself wasn’t subtle at all but sharp, rich, pungent, even vaguely sweet, like the smell of human shit anywhere outside a bathroom. Nor was it really a smell so much as an emanation, or at least that’s how it’d seemed to Wild Turkey, sitting on the carpet in the middle of the room, transfixed by this sensate experience delivered to him on the wavering bough of the window fan’s breeze.
They did not have air conditioning installed in their classroom yet and the heat and consequent sweat, secreted beneath Mrs. Budnitz’s plain, sturdy dresses and folds of fat and thigh, probably amplified the smell. It was only noticeable every ninth or tenth breath and so not really something Wild Turkey ever felt he could really speak or complain about. But it was distinctly sexual, or carnal in its fleshy, mildly lurid bodilyness – in its intimate note of vaginal musk, though of course this particular understanding would only come later, the experience at the time being importantly a momentary one. The scent refused to linger, and so existed for Wild Turkey mostly in the wince of shame at his own interest, in the same way he sometimes at that age lingered for just a few seconds too long in the school’s bathroom over the shit-stained toilet paper in his hand before flushing it, feeling a rush of something he didn’t understand. It was oddly comforting, in the end.
And why this smell now, or rather, then, upon waking – why does it chase him? Maybe this school harkens his mind back to that other classroom, Wild Turkey thinks. Though really it’s the feeling of it as he drifted on the carpet in Mrs. Budnitz’s classroom during ‘nap’ time, the confluence of those two sensations – drifting helplessly into a tired, sweaty sleep; drifting helplessly into that intriguing, somewhat disgusting scent. It was a kind of surrender, a voiding of the mind; a reversion to some pre-infantile state of abandon. He’s been finding the declensions of that experience in his life ever since, often as he falls asleep, or which he wakes into: the stagnant air of soiled women’s bed linen and spilt chamber pot in the small house in Ramadi; the attenuated scent of the bare bed after he and Merry Darwani had anal sex for the first time; the closeness of the rain-soured, coppery metal of the small bridge’s girding. Wild Turkey is used to his life proceeding this way: this or that detail of his day stepping down out of some first world of previous, essential experience. These sensate allusions are always only whiffs or pale imitations of the original, in the same way that the rainy, pallid light now breaking from the clouds as the morning regains its heat is cousin to the small fist of bright fire over the limbs of the girl in the courtyard in Ramadi, or the rhythmic flash of the tactical grenade’s phosphorous strobe, and all three are mere shavings of the pure white lightning of one of Wild Turkey’s fits.
He turns away from the window. There is nothing to see here. It was stupid to come. He begins the long walk back.
* * *
Wild Turkey wakes up. He’s eight years old, on his back in the middle of the wheat field that has sprung up by chance in the sprawling park behind his parents’ subdivision. He does not know why he’s on his back, does not remember how he got there. Strangely, however, he does remember what happened just before he woke up, which is that he had his first fit (though he doesn’t know to call it that yet, knows only the image lingering spectacularly in his retinas, in the theater of his mind). He’d been running through the field, feeling the itchy stalks resist his stomping feet, and then he’d been standing in the field, caught up by something in the air, by a small flash in the sky, and then he was looking and looking and seeing only the beauty of the high afternoon sun on the blurry tips of the wheat as it rose and fell on the invisible currents of wind. Like on a seafloor, he thought, just before the brightening in the sky, before it turned in a flash into an overwhelming field of white lightning, so much and so close that he remembers nothing else.
Later, he will not tell the Marine recruiters or doctors about the fits but will have one anyway on the first night of initiation, before he even gets to boot camp proper. He will be among the guys at the long tables in the gym of the local armory building: the recruits being kept awake all night, forced to keep their hands flat out in front of them, hovering four inches above the tabletop. They are not allowed to move, or to move their hands, or to let their hands touch the tabletop. Then, the lightning.
“Why did you let me stay?” he will ask later, towards the end of actual boot camp, and the instructors will explain (allowing their voices to dilate a little with respect) how he’d looked, sitting there seizing, his hands the only part of him held perfectly still, four inches above the table. Though Wild Turkey will suspect the truthfulness of this, seeing as how he woke up in the wetness of the ditch outside the armory building, his white t-shirt stained with blood from the tips of the chain-link fence he hopped (he guesses) to escape, the faces of the instructors pale moons in their huddle above him. Eventually he will get medicine for his fits, but the medicine will make him spacey, drowsy – the medicine itself in effect simulating the aftereffects of the fits – and so Wild Turkey will be unable to parse his waking. It will never be clear to him whether he is waking from a lacunal fit, the medicine, or a memory, as if all three are essentially the same thing.
* * *
Wild Turkey wakes up, but Jeannie has already left the bed. Wild Turkey can see her, if he hangs off the side of the mattress, down the narrow hallway: the bathroom door ajar, the bathroom light golden and warm in the cool, cesious fall morning. They’re at his place, the duplex right on top of the train tracks, across the street from the college. Jeannie is doing her hair, naked, still over-heated from the shower. She stands in front of the mirror quietly, getting ready for class or work, he can’t remember which she has today. He’s been home from his deployment for two weeks now and he still can’t get a hold of time. In the afternoons he gets in the shower, wastes no minutes, gets out to find it’s two hours later.
Last night Wild Turkey took Jeannie out to the old school buildings, overgrown as they are, stilled in the interregnum between their days as the school he and Jeannie went to together and its current incarnation as some daycare’s repurposed space. This was something they did in high school too, back when Jeannie still had her green Mustang convertible; late October nights they’d drive out there with sleeping bags and put the top down and park in the middle of the erstwhile baseball field, already half reclaimed by brush, and look at the stars. The buildings were abandoned even back then, or between abandonments; Wild Turkey and Jeannie having decamped for the public high school, the original private school having finally amassed enough non-scholarship families to fund a new building (itself a repurposed old country club) inside city limits.
Later still last night, when they’d gotten too cold and came back to his duplex, Wild Turkey had lain down naked with Jeannie on his mattress, which was on the floor, and curled his body around her in-turning fetal position and called out, “Jeannie in a bottle!” which was one of their old jokes, and she’d laughed, sounding half-annoyed at her own easy nostalgic amusement, but then Wild Turkey had repeated it and repeated it, “Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle!” over and over, with just enough slight vocal modulation and wavering emphasis as to keep it from seeming like a glitch, repeating and repeating, which he did helplessly, “Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle!” on and on until the sound became extenuated, then lost all tone, then resolved briefly into song before crumbling into over-articulation, each alien phoneme distinct and meaningless. Eventually he’d stopped. Jeannie lay there very quiet, very still, stiffened as she had been from somewhere around the twenty or twenty-fifth repetition. Then, in the silence after Wild Turkey’s voice had ceased, when it was clear he had really stopped, when he finally released her, she very carefully unfolded herself up from the bed and walked silently to the bathroom. Though Wild Turkey knows at some point she must’ve returned to bed (did she? or did she sleep on the couch?), her presence now in the bathroom seems contiguous to her presence there last night, which makes it hard for Wild Turkey to tell how much time has passed, if any has passed at all.
She finishes doing her hair and makeup and gets dressed in silence. She does not avoid looking at Wild Turkey; she holds his eyes as she pulls on her jeans one leg at a time before turning and letting herself out, her expression level, empty of anger, empty of assessment. When she gets back, if she comes back to the duplex instead of her own apartment, Wild Turkey will be there or he won’t, she’s already used to that.
* * *
Wild Turkey wakes up, the voices of the other men in the unit insistent. They’re all in the dining area of the forward operating base, talking to the doctors from the casualty attachment, which is something the other guys on the team get a kick out of, Wild Turkey’s never known why. It’s Pizza Hut night, which is why the team is all out here in the base’s main area, the only real chance for the team and the doctors both to see each other, before the former, their day just beginning now that it’s nightfall, slouch back into the restricted access staging area and ready themselves for their next operation.
Someone is telling the story of how Wild Turkey got his name. Wild Turkey can’t see who it is speaking, but it doesn’t really matter as the story is now collective, accessed by anyone on the team, each small contortion of detail sponsored by the men’s own willingness.
It was back in Carolina, before the team was strictly assembled, when they were all still loosely gathered at the base waiting to be repurposed. It was the day before Thanksgiving and the commander in charge of the base had a vaguely sadistic obsession with getting the men prepared for the Suck, high concern over the lack of regulatory discipline etcetera, and so had ordered for the men no Thanksgiving meal, and had replaced that order with several shipments of turkey and mashed potato and cranberry sauce MREs, which were dried out, reconstituted, etcetera etcetera, and so Wild Turkey (though he wasn’t called that yet) had gone prowling during one of the exercises in the golden leaves of the fall woods, and gotten God’s Grace to go with him.
God’s Grace was Bob Grace, a gentle-faced, soft-spoken man from Tennessee, eventually included on the team mostly for his perfect marksmanship. He was religious, though very passive about it, and ended up being God’s Grace because he often said “God’s grace,” in a kind of summarizing way when he saw something that made him feel like speaking. Later, Wild Turkey would see God’s Grace get shot through the neck while their vehicle was stalled in traffic at an intersection in Tikrit. This day, though, God’s Grace stood calmly at the tree line as Wild Turkey crawled forward slowly over the rural highway, which they weren’t supposed to cross.
“So Wild Turkey’s out there, doing this dumbass crab-crawl across the highway because just on the other side what has he seen but three fat old birds, turkeys, wild turkeys, rooting around there in the ditch on the other side of the road and this is a no discharge drill and Wild Turkey’s got long underwear on beneath his gear and hasn’t brought his knife, so he’s going to god knows what – ring their necks, or whatever, but only if he can get close enough to grab one of them. Anyway, good old Wild Turkey hears a sound and must be real hungry or maybe just a pussy because he spooks and takes off sprinting at the birds, who of course just completely lose their fucking shit. We’re watching this all on the helmet cam back at the comms camp, laughing our fucking asses off.”
“So what happens?” one of doctors, a bald little man with glasses, asks.
“They fucking scatter, is what happens, because Wild Turkey’s a fucking idiot. You can’t chase down a turkey. And so we’re all on the line in his earpiece giving him all this shit about it and what happens just at that exact moment but a semi comes tearing around the corner of this bumfuck nowhere little road and almost kills Wild Turkey, who dives out of the way, only to find, when he gets up, that the fucking semi has taken three of the birds’ heads clean off.”
There’d been blood all over the highway. Wild Turkey had lain there in the ditch, shaking. In the concussive silence after the semi’s blasting passage, Wild Turkey heard God’s Grace shift in the leaves behind him. He’d retrieved the headless birds, was holding them out to Wild Turkey with one hand.
“God’s grace,” God’s Grace had said.
Mostly they call Wild Turkey ‘Wild Turkey’, the full name. Sometimes one or two of the black guys call him Jive Ass Turkey, with an unknown level of aggressive irony. Once, after the courtyard in Ramadi, Wild Turkey heard one of the newer guys ask someone in the bunks about him, heard whoever it was readjust their head on the stiff cot before answering, “That’s Wild, man, that’s just Wild,” in that ambiguous way that seemed to mean both the adjective and the proper noun. Ever since Bob Grace got killed, when they mention Bob at all they just smile and call him Gracie, like he was one of their lovers from back in the world that accidentally found himself there with them in the desert.
Wild Turkey has always been mesmerized by their language, the team’s utilitarian military patois always morphing what they said just enough to approximate some slightly more surreal world, a language somehow better suited to the world they are actually confronted with. Oftentimes the unthinking word or slight lingual shift ends up being eerily or confusingly apt, in the way that Wild Turkey’s friend the TOW missile gunner whom they call Tow Head really does resemble a “towheaded boy” (the phrase surfacing in Wild Turkey’s mind from some old novel read in a high school English class), or in the way that Wild Turkey will end up buying fifths of Wild Turkey to take the edge off his highs back at home. The Shit, meaning the desert, the war, Iraq, becomes The Suck becomes The Fuck becomes The Fug becomes The Fugue, finally meaning just everything.
* * *
Wild Turkey wakes up. He’s sitting in the rear corner of his brother’s large backyard patio, the snow having fallen so gently and quietly while he slept that he is now covered with its soft, undisturbed angles. Wild Turkey wakes to the sound of his brother carefully closing the patio door behind him so as not to wake Wild Turkey’s sister-in-law; wakes to the click of the motion-sensor light, which his brother has forgotten to turn off, tripping on. His brother approaches the wrought-iron patio table that Wild Turkey sits at, and sets down the familiar foil-wrapped plate. It is very late, and very cold, but the snow has quieted everything.
Wild Turkey’s brother is an associate minister or junior minister, Wild Turkey can’t remember the exact title, at one of the local churches. Few people in the town know they’re brothers. They only grew up together until the age of thirteen, when their mother died and they went to the group home and Wild Turkey couldn’t bear to go along to the better group home, the one that required adoption by the church or some family in the church. There’d been something so disgusting to Wild Turkey about the idea that they (the potentially adopted boys) should see their adoption and transport as “god’s grace”, which is what the man who came to talk to the two brothers said they should think of it as. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it and so his brother got out of the state home and he didn’t. They got along, though, after that, understood each other in some basic way; the brutality of that state group home (at least for those two months when they’d been fresh meat) a kind of dark night of the soul for both of them, forcing each to make this own manner of unfeeling calculation as to down which road salvation, etcetera, he guesses.
Now Wild Turkey’s brother sits down heavily in the snowy chair across from Wild Turkey. He sighs, rests the side of his face in his hand. He’s tired, equanimously perplexed by Wild Turkey, by his continued presence here these occasional nights.
The first time Wild Turkey came to his brother’s house it was for the same reason as this time: he needed to eat. This is one thing Wild Turkey knows his brother’s wife hates about him: she sees him as needlessly homeless, and as what she calls in her unselfconsciously cute little way a ‘drughead.’ Both of these assessments are more or less fair, insofar as Wild Turkey does technically have a home back at the duplex (he was officially evicted when he stopped paying rent, but then the building was foreclosed upon and Wild Turkey has just kept living there, the color of the notices on his front door changing every few weeks but nobody really bothering him about it) and yet he sleeps under bridges sometimes, or on the street, or in the fields, or spends all night walking around high or low on the pills he ingests. Paradoxically, Wild Turkey’s sister-in-law doesn’t count the duplex as a home, mostly, Wild Turkey guesses, due to the fact that three of the walls now have huge gaping holes, covered only by minimally effective plastic tarp, from where the landlord removed the windows to sell before the bank could take them. Though, in his own defense, it’s also true that Wild Turkey doesn’t have any money: he gave almost all of it to Jeannie, minus some he gave to Merry Darwani for her broken jaw and some he gave to Tow Head for his new gun. Wild Turkey doesn’t want the money. He brought back from Iraq enough pills to stay in Dexedrine for as long as he wants, and so doesn’t really need any money. Sometimes he eats with Jeannie. Sometimes he eats at the shelter. Sometimes he doesn’t eat.
Wild Turkey’s brother watches him unwrap the plate of leftovers and begin to eat. Neither says anything.
The first time he came to his brother’s to eat, Wild Turkey stood in the dining room afterward and listened to his brother help his wife with the dishes in the kitchen. The house was quiet and oddly peaceful in the nighttime lull. Wild Turkey knew his brother and sister-in-law wanted children but had none. His brother’s wife had been silent all through dinner. Wild Turkey’s brother had talked about his ministry.
Standing there that first time, Wild Turkey heard his brother in the kitchen apologize, his wife sigh.
“It’s like with a dog,” she said. “If you feed him, he’ll just keep coming back.”
The look on his brother’s face, when Wild Turkey had then risen and peered into the dim kitchen through the half-open door, was exquisitely pained: torn, it seemed to Wild Turkey, between his love for this woman and his real feeling of charity, of grace. His face, upon his return to the dining room (had Wild Turkey stayed around to see it, he’s sure), full of resignation at this discrepancy between the practical and theoretical theologies of love, or charity, or whatever.
Now his brother is very still, watching him. eat. He does this each time. Wild Turkey doesn’t know if the irony of the arrangement – of him now being actually fed like a stray dog: secretly, guiltily, on the back porch, with the implied hope that he will keep coming back – is lost on his brother’s wife, who tacitly allows it. He doesn’t blame her. Wild Turkey knows she was friends with a man in a Bible study group in her old home town who’d gone on an outreach mission early on in the supposedly safer Kurdish north and been kidnapped and was now missing, presumably beheaded. He knows she has, at some level of consciousness, transferred her anger and grief onto Wild Turkey himself, whom she is convinced committed his own atrocities, in Iraq.
“I am the least of you,” Wild Turkey’s brother says now, in a kind of bored wonderment, and Wild Turkey isn’t sure if he’s quoting scripture or paraphrasing scripture or if he has hit, in his unintentional summary of several of Jesus’ sentiments, an ambiguous middle-ground in which he can just say something and mean it, or want very much to mean it. Neither speaks. The motion sensor light trips back off, and they are thrown again into darkness.
* * *
Wild Turkey wakes up in the desert. He’s in a slight, body-shaped depression at the base of a mud wall, over the edge of which sits the fake village. This is a training exercise, the last preparation for the grab team before they go over to the Shit. They are in Arizona. Wild Turkey lies still, listening to the grumbling of the other guys on the team, and watches the mud ruins (fake? real?) seep with the grays and blue of the thin winter sunset.
Sometime before zero dark, Wild Turkey stands paused in his position in the team’s tactical column, lined up against the exterior wall of one of the village houses. Inside he can hear the muted noise of a radio. In a minute, at the first man’s signal (two consecutive toneless blips of static on the radio earpiece) the men will go into their suite of motion, so practiced and efficient and many-parted as to seem almost balletic. Wild Turkey, who is the DIA officer attached to the team (which really just means he is responsible for the confirmed identification of team extraction targets), breathes in the quiet, in the dark. He closes his eyes and thinks through what is about to happen, the steps so familiar, mechanical, though less in the way of machines than of soul-hollowing boredom. This is why these men were chosen for the grab team, Wild Turkey has often reflected in these moments: because they will do this with perfect disinterest, not keyed up, not even eager in the way of the adrenalized Army kids.
But what Wild Turkey thinks of now in the eternal moments before the twin blips throw the night into action is where he is standing, is the fake village, meant to be a simulation but really more of a simulacrum, a psychological agent at play in the men’s imaginations. It’s all an effort, really, at making their imagination of what they will soon face in Iraq “more real”, if such a thing makes sense, Wild Turkey thinks. As if anything could be more or less real than anything else, as if all reality isn’t contained in every instance of it, this desert being very apropos of all this in that it really is indistinguishable from the Iraqi desert (though Wild Turkey will only confirm this later) and so contains that other reality, or is contiguous to that other reality. The real desert and the village and the specific house that this one is meant to represent is actually just a double, a repetition. He’s had a lot of time to think about it.
Wild Turkey has often been overcome by this sense during their operations in the fake village – this feeling that the real Iraqi village/desert/target house is actually very close by, maybe over the next ridge, and that it is or will be the exact twin of this village. The feeling has spread until Wild Turkey hears two sounds in every one fake mortar explosion or real explosion of blank assault rifle rounds: the exercise’s sound and, somewhere behind it, the real one. In a way, this should serve the military’s purpose in making the fake village seem more “real” but has instead only emphasized the surrealism of the entire exercise. He wonders when they are actually there, if it will seem finally real. This is what he thinks about, in all the time they have to hurry up and wait, and think.
This is all made worse by the tasks they’ve been assigned so far in their time in the fake village here in the desert in Arizona. It’s a full exercise, meaning as close an acting-out of real operating procedure as they can possibly undertake without actually being in the Shit. The unit was dropped off kilometers from the village. They approached by night. For a week they’ve been calmly doing reconnaissance on the fake village, on its real inhabitants. Wild Turkey has watched through special optics fat middle-aged men take their tea, slurping it from saucers, has logged the arrival and departure from the water source (a nearby well) of women in flowing fabrics that are given form by the wind. He’s listened on his headset to conversations within the crumbling walls of the low houses, his half-learned Arabic lagging behind, keying into family names, locations, etcetera. It’s all very authentic.
It’s these people that get to him, as Wild Turkey now shifts uncomfortably against the wall, waiting for the signal. The crushing irony of their physical existence here: they are real Iraqi villagers paid to play Iraqi villagers in America; immigrants from Iraq given asylum and money to come to this other desert and this other village and play themselves. They are given whole complicated psychological profiles to enact, Wild Turkey knows; they each have a role and a set of actions or conversations to complete at pre-determined points. They each will behave differently when threatened. They are paid for the performance of reality, for the performance of their identities rather than for their identities themselves. It is all very thorough.
Two nights ago, Wild Turkey watched two of the younger subjects, masked by red kaffiyehs, drag one of the “local politicians” out into the square and videotape themselves staging an execution. The grab team received this video on their digital comms link the next morning, though it wasn’t the same video as the one taken below, in the fake village, Wild Turkey could tell. He doesn’t know if he was supposed to notice this or not, and has decided now it was a real video of a real execution, something scrounged from a dark corner of the internet.
The whole thing has worked by approximation, which Wild Turkey will especially think later, after Ramadi. Later, actual reality (Wild Turkey crouched in the tactical column outside the actual house in actual Ramadi) will seem also like an approximation of experience somehow, the distance between what happens (as Wild Turkey hears the two blips and rises into action, then later, as the tactical phosphorous strobe breaks the night and the vision of the house’s interior into its discrete pulses of scene) and the “real” experience (even then, something slightly Else or Other, as if there is yet another house, the real target, just over the next rise in Ramadi) making his own feelings seem like an exercise too.
Now, however, on this night, with this crowning exercise, something real will occur, Wild Turkey thinks. Someone really will get identified, then grabbed, then extracted. Wild Turkey has spent the entire week identifying the target, going over the tactical plan. He wonders if when the team does penetrate the building, when they’ve cleared the rooms and assembled the members of the family (a wife, a young teenaged daughter, a middle-aged man and the “cousin” they are housing, who is really the courier for a local “militant faction”) if they’ll show real fear, if, taken by surprise by the timing if not the nature of the event, they will revert to their natural human reaction, to terror. Though it occurs to Wild Turkey now (as the tactical column remains paused) that the family members must’ve had their dreams exploded into violent light and sound many times before as unit after unit was trained here, and Wild Turkey wonders if it must be frustrating to them (especially the teenaged girl) that they still feel scared when it happens, that it’s still actually terrifying, when they should sort of know it’s coming. And it will occur to Wild Turkey later, when he remembers this night’s exercise, that this thought was probably the seed of that later, momentary feeling, when he will be standing in the rear bedroom in Ramadi, looking down at the partially collapsed head of the teenaged girl: that flush of stupid anger at her for not somehow knowing what would happen.
In his ear, Wild Turkey hears the two blasts of static.
* * *
Wild Turkey wakes up. Tow Head is driving, drumming his fingers on the wheel, staring straight ahead and humming something that is not the song playing tinnily on the radio as the ancient pickup jounces around on the country road. It is January and so cold the air is almost completely thinned out, knife-edged in Wild Turkey’s nostrils and mouth. Tow Head picked him up from the crumbling duplex very early this morning, before first light, and Wild Turkey is coming down, the brutal sobriety of the air helping out.
Tow Head is excited to go shooting at the unofficial range they are now bouncing and fishtailing toward. He’s excited about his new gun, the re-issued, remade World War II rifle that, in its combination of antique design and modern mechanics, is a sort of simulation of itself, giving Tow Head both of the experiences he seems to want: the struggle of a marksman in Normandy in 1944 and the smooth riflery of all the advances made since.
Tow Head is Wild Turkey’s friend, and he isn’t doing too well, Wild Turkey thinks, though he’s never really been doing too well. He has a big, robust head and brow, but very small shoulders and a wilting torso that makes his whole appearance vaguely downcast and disconcerting to Wild Turkey, like his body has failed the promise of his martial features. This gives Tow Head a puzzled, frustrated mien. He’s a good guy, really, always says just what he means, which is why Wild Turkey has agreed to go shooting in the freezing cold even though it’s the last thing he really wants to do.
Beside him, Tow Head bops and twitches in his seat. He’s like this here in the States, Wild Turkey knows, always a little nervous, never quite holding still or maintaining visual focus on any one thing. He talks very fast (he’s talking now, Wild Turkey realizes) and pauses only occasionally to acknowledge the conversant, though not in a way that requires any response. He always has a lot of conversational energy, and jumps from one subject to another according to his inscrutably associative thought. In Iraq he wasn’t like this, at least not while Wild Turkey knew him there. When they first met, and Tow Head realized they were both from Kansas, from even adjacent tiny towns, he looked as happy as a small boy. It’s this look that Wild Turkey has kept in mind, when he was giving away all his military pay and set aside the amount for this rifle, which Tow Head, in their previous conversations, always circled back to the subject of.
Wild Turkey hadn’t heard from Tow Head for some time when he saw the flyer at the library for the Wounded Hero Arts Share event. This was two weeks ago. The reading was held in one of the public library’s anonymous meeting rooms, plastic chairs set up in solemn rows facing a podium. Tow Head was the featured reader. Wild Turkey went by himself and sat far to one side, where there was a chance Tow Head might not see him, beside a covered piano.
Wild Turkey didn’t know that Tow Head liked to write, and spent the time while several middle-aged women went through the introductions wondering if this was actually supposed to be some kind of effort at therapy, or if this was a preexisting interest of Tow Head’s, or, if it wasn’t, if Tow Head could possibly parse his own answer to that question now. Finally Tow Head got up and took the podium and began to read in a deep, affectless voice.
It was a story, sort of, though really it was just a long description of a man making a wooden guitar amplifier from scratch in his garage, which eventually disintegrated into a sort of list of instructions, but in the third person. As Tow Head’s voice settled further into its low timbre and the instructions became repetitive, the sum effect became markedly sinister, almost sexual in its fixated self-surety, until the description of the main character’s coating and recoating and recoating again of lacquer on the amplifier’s wooden exterior seemed distinctly violent. Before he began, Tow Head had mentioned that the story was about a veteran home from Iraq. Or maybe Wild Turkey only thought he’d said this when really he hadn’t.
This was more or less a true story, Wild Turkey knew; Tow Head had told him about fabricating from scratch a wooden electric guitar amplifier in his garage in Kansas, or attempting to fabricate one – now in the library, as in the original recitation, Tow Head reached the point where he fucks up the interior wiring – though Tow Head had begun the reading (this Wild Turkey does remember) by stating the story was fiction. In his uncomfortable plastic chair Wild Turkey wondered at this strange disavowal of the experience, wondered if it really was fiction or if he’d just said it was, or if, ultimately, Tow Head even knew anymore. This experience of the wooden amplifier had presumably happened at least three times, Wild Turkey realized: once in actuality, once in Tow Head’s recitation of the story to Wild Turkey in Baghdad, and once in the recreation of this, his fiction writing – like a Matroyshka doll of experience, understandably involuted, confused.
In fact, sitting in that little meeting room in the public library, Wild Turkey was having a very similar experience of confusion due to the particular arrangement of chairs. These same chairs, in this very same formation, were used in the fake/real base near the fake village in Arizona, in the fake (real?) chapel area for the fake/simulated funeral service that they were all required to attend during the exercise. Presumably this was held in order to prepare the men for attending the same thing in reality, in the Shit. They’d been very thorough, Wild Turkey remembered, with a chaplain and soldiers speaking and eulogies that managed to work in vague references to the details of the casualty.
But Wild Turkey had later found, after Googling the name on the fake funeral program, that the service was in fact held for a real soldier, for a real person who’d been killed in Iraq (IED), which made the fake funeral not so much a simulation of a memorial service (as the officers insisted) but a reenactment of it, a doubling, technically a recurrence. It was unclear if the ranking organizers (let alone the chaplain and the volunteer eulogizers) of the fake/real base near the fake village even knew that it was a real person they were memorializing: the fact that the biographical information on the fake funeral program didn’t match what Wild Turkey could find about the real soldier killed in action suggested that they didn’t know. This also brought up the possibility of sheer coincidence, of the chance that the master designers of the fake Iraq experience had chosen by accident the name of a victim of the real Iraq experience in order to simulate the loss of a real person. The whole thing was very similar, Wild Turkey felt, to the real video of the execution they’d received on their comms link that was supposedly of the fake execution he’d watched through the night optics the night before.
In the library Tow Head finished up, getting to the point which functioned as the end of the story, where the main character finally completes the wooden electric guitar amplifier only to realize that he does not, in fact, own an electric guitar, or even know how to play. In the applause afterward, Tow Head had caught sight of Wild Turkey and waved, compelling Wild Turkey to stay for the reception afterward, where Tow Head hatched the shooting range plan.
Now they’re parked at the edge of the wide field that serves as the range, and Wild Turkey is leaning against the side of the truck, watching Tow Head carefully reload the rifle, bobbing his head to the pulsing techno music coming from the huge boom box he’s set up by his feet on the little shooting platform. This is really a skeet range, and Tow Head has insisted that Wild Turkey sling the clay pigeons out into the white plane of the snowed-over field and washed-out winter sky. They only have one of the cheap plastic hand-throwers so for an hour now Wild Turkey has made the strange side-armed motion, skipping the bright orange clay disks out onto the currents of air. Tow Head is an excellent shot. He’s hit each one, the disks wobbling or splitting cleanly in half, their flight turned to mere gravity. He seems to be enjoying himself.
The landscape does in fact resemble Normandy in winter, which is fitting for the rifle, though since Wild Turkey has never actually seen Normandy in winter he supposes it really just resembles what he thinks it would look like. He wants it to look like Normandy in the snow for Tow Head, though, even if it did, Tow Head wouldn’t know it.
Tow Head is ready again and Wild Turkey flicks away his cigarette and steps forward. “Ready,” Tow Head says, then, “Pull!” and Wild Turkey whips his arm, sending the clay disk high into the air. Tow Head fires, missing, but at the sound of the rifle’s report a raft of geese rise into the air from some hidden tufts in the field, their winged shapes very dark against the air. Wild Turkey realizes Tow Head is screaming before he realizes that Tow Head is firing, though the two actions are concurrent. But Tow Head is screaming and Tow Head is firing, and firing, and firing, until Wild Turkey hears the small metallic clink of the ammunition cartridge going empty and there are no more birds in the air. Then Tow Head is running out into the field, slipping, falling down, getting up, still running, still yelling, though now laughing too, the techno music throbbing very loudly and finally Tow Head reaches the area of bloodied snow where he has expertly dropped what must be at least ten birds and Wild Turkey can see him lifting the rifle, holding it at either end above his head like he’s wading a river, and Tow Head is dancing and laughing wildly, the sound rising and rising in joy, and Wild Turkey, watching, loves him, loves him, loves him.
This is six months before Tow Head, who has this day refrained from his usual running obsession with the possibility that he suffered an undiagnosed TBI at some forgotten point during his deployment, will use the replica rifle to shoot himself through his cheek bone, perhaps purposefully making his theory impossible to ever disprove or confirm.
* * *
Wild Turkey jars awake. He’s in his position, last in the tactical column, crouched against a low mud wall in a residential compound in Ramadi. The target, Wild Turkey knows (the drone’s heat imaging burned into the inside of his eyelids), is sleeping in the small house just ahead. The team pads forward quietly in its line. They pause, waiting for the radio signal.
Inside the house, Wild Turkey mentally recites, there will be two civilians (a middle-aged male and a female, presumably his wife) and the target, whom they’ve previously claimed is a cousin but who is actually a low-level messenger between militias. All are asleep. The operational information has been confirmed, according to the radio clearance an hour earlier, presumably by more drone imaging.
In his ear, Wild Turkey hears the two blasts of static.
There is the sound of the steel ram battering the door open, the loud flash of the tactical stun grenade, the shadowy flow of the bodies in front of Wild Turkey funneling into the house, the shouted commands for the occupants to lie flat on the ground. From all corners of the house, from its four separate rooms, Wild Turkey hears the voices of the team confirming that the rooms are clear. “One female in northwest bedroom,” Wild Turkey hears someone tell him either over the radio or the night air. “Holding.”
There are several things that are wrong, Wild Turkey thinks as he stares at the lone male lying face down in front of him on the carpets of the main room. One is that this male is clearly not either of the males (not the target, and not the middle-aged man) from the assignment profile. Wild Turkey will have to go through the standard procedures to confirm this, but he can see, even in the dark, that the man in front of him is very, very old. The extraction clock in Wild Turkey’s head is ticking, ticking. The rest of the team stands, idly tensed, adjusting their equipment. Wild Turkey tells them he needs to go see about the female.
In the back bedroom, Specialist Freidel is standing inside the doorway, watching a teenaged girl, who is naked, cower in the far corner.
“What the fuck?” Wild Turkey says.
Freidel shrugs. The girl in her crouch seems almost feral, eyes flashing. Wild Turkey, in his real time catalogue of the operation, struggles to age her, distracted by the combination of her child’s face, her dirty thighs and half-hidden, adolescent breasts.
“Did two men leave this house tonight?” Wild Turkey asks in half-hearted Arabic. “Where is your mother? Where is your father? Was there a houseguest tonight? Did he leave?”
The girl doesn’t answer, but winces sharply at Wild Turkey’s voice, showing her teeth.
“Bring her into the main room,” Wild Turkey says, frustrated. Freidel steps forward and grabs the naked girl by the upper arm. He begins to drag her but then she stands up, still resisting.
“I think they gave us the wrong fucking house,” Wild Turkey says (to whom?), and Freidel turns, or starts to turn, starts to say to Wild Turkey, “What?” when the naked girl rears back, sending one hand with its nails arcing over, digging into Freidel’s neck.
“Goddamnit,” Freidel says, or starts to say, as he turns and brings his weapon’s thick stock up and around possibly more swiftly than he means to, and there is a single sound, something like a crack, and the naked girl is on the floor at both Freidel and Wild Turkey’s feet. Her head is unmade: the upper left quadrant of her skull collapsed, blood very dark on the floor, a jagged-edged concavity with a fleck of white bone just visible in Wild Turkey’s flashlight here and there, the wound tangling with her hair.
“Fuck!” Friedel says.
“Fuck,” Wild Turkey says.
Wild Turkey helps drag the girl’s body out into the dirt-floored courtyard, thinking maybe he can radio for a medical addition to the extraction, once he gets clear just what the fuck is going on, but Wild Turkey can see – the girl’s complete limpness, eyes lolling with the dragging motion between whites and wide, black, fixed pupils; the lack of any rising or falling of the small breasts, now bared where she lies on her back in the pitch of the night and the dirt – that she is gone.
“What do we do with this?” Freidel says, voice taut with desperation, and Wild Turkey can feel the stares of the rest of the team, gathered near the doorway out to the courtyard.
Wild Turkey is not afraid. He can write the report exactly as it really happened, he knows, and it will more than likely simply be forgotten, lost, after a brief bureaucratic murmur, to the labyrinth of operational After Action Reports. They’d be more interested in how the team was given the wrong house, the wrong info from the drone, more interested in the failure to extract the messenger man than anything else. Even if the report caught the eye of some officer worried about exposure, all that would happen would probably be that Wild Turkey would be rotated back home, though he didn’t want to go back home. Wild Turkey knows all this, looking down at the naked girl with the ruined head, knows that he can report it or not report it, but he can’t leave the body as it is. Not to be found, and photographed. Not to be seen. This is when he says it, when he raises his eyes to Freidel’s and the others.
“Burn it,” he says.
“Burn it,” he says.
“Burn it,” he says.
He helps them prepare the body. He gets the jug of kerosene from the house’s tiny kitchen. He has Freidel get the bed sheets from the room they found her in. The sheets are stained with the blood that has spread on the floor. Freidel deposits them next to the body, which Wild Turkey is pouring the kerosene over. Wild Turkey straightens up. He’s holding the tactical phosphorous strobe grenade in his hand.
And does Wild Turkey smell, cut by the fumes of the kerosene, that rank, fetid waft from the girl’s bed sheets? Does he feel himself falling for just a second into that complex of faintly vaginal, excretory musk – does it seem familiar to him? And the girl’s naked body, shining with the wetness of the kerosene there on the ground before him – what is it that strikes him as so oddly sexual about it? Is it what he saw Freidel doing as Wild Turkey entered the room? Did he see Friedel wrestling with the girl – in what, an effort to restrain her? Did he hear him laughing?
Wild Turkey has the team clear the courtyard and prepare for egress to the extraction point. He will experience this night twice, have two simultaneous nights: the one that now occurs and the one that occurs on paper. He will be honest in his report, but in his honesty he will be no more able to separate what actually happened, for the most part, from the false implantation of memory, of narrative memory, which was coeval with the experience itself. And so the truth of the night will forever feel to Wild Turkey somewhere in between the fragmentation of experience and what he remembers: he will have both seen and not seen what he saw, what he smelled. All of this with one lone exception: the moment when the phosphorous strobe, nestled underneath the naked girl’s back and buried beneath the shroud of the soiled bed clothes, ignites, and shatters the night into pulses of pure white light, and the absence of it.
And already, as Wild Turkey watches (though the strobe cannot be watched, though ‘watching’ the strobe would render him temporarily blind, as is the tactical strobe’s function), the team, and Wild Turkey along with it, is leaving, clearing the buildings in the neighboring compound just in case, only to discover empty room after empty room of desks, of broken chalkboards (the mistaken compound a school, apparently). Already they are clear of Ramadi’s outskirts and jogging into the field where the helicopter will briefly land and collect them; already they are back at the operations base, going to sleep; already Wild Turkey is waking in mid-fuck with Jeannie; waking in the invigorated air of Merry’s room after a punch; already he is waking to the town’s lights buzzing with the edge of his pills. He wakes outside the courthouse with Jeannie even though his heart’s not really in it; he wakes on his second tour in Iraq, on a pile of rubble in Fallujah, the roar of heavy metal being pumped at the insurgents a toneless room of sound all around him, as he closes his eyes again and falls back into the city air’s approximation of Mrs. Budnitz’s rankness; he wakes on the adolescent night he loses his virginity to a sweet-faced girl named Helen, who, out of fear of it hurting too much, gets him off manually and only then, as Wild Turkey drifts on the edge of sleep, mounts him unexpectedly; he wakes in the overgrown baseball field outside the country school, remembering the spring afternoon he woke in the outfield years ago in the middle of a game, the air heavy and perfect with the rumor of rain; in the desert, in the lightning, in his crumbling duplex, in the field, in the many rooms of night, Wild Turkey wakes up, he wakes up, he wakes up.
Arna Bontemps Hemenway’s stories have appeared in The Missouri Review, Ecotone, FiveChapters, and The Seattle Review.