Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

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.