Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

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.”

THE SKY OVER Baker’s Strong was empty. No B-52, no moon, no clouds. Just blue, but not uniformly so. It was dark at the edges, like the void beyond was peeking through. Looking into that void, I imagined Cheyenne back in Reed’s motel room. She was sitting on the corner of the bed with the pistol in her lap, staring at the locked door. Or maybe she was on the highway, with the windows down, and she had to keep brushing her hair out of her face to see where she was going.

Reed was still looking through the scope while firing the laser. “It’s gotta be right fucking there,” he said.

And there it was: as unnatural as a castle suspended in midair. With its walls, gatehouses, drawbridge, and moat, suspended. With the earthen mound on which it was built, suspended, its underside whiskered in shadowed roots. With all its red flags blowing in the wind.

They piped all the shit into a reservoir. When the reservoir was full, they poured diesel on top of the shit and lit it on fire. The diesel burned, and the shit turned to vapor. The vapor rose and condensed into clouds. The clouds thickened, forming drops heavy enough to fall to earth. Then the stars disappeared and it rained shit. This happened often enough. This happened at night, whenever the shit reservoir was full.

Mir’s memorial took place on such a night. Mir was a Belgian Malinois, trained by monks. The monks taught Mir to obey voice commands and hand signals. They taught him to sniff out bad intentions in men. The monks sold Mir to us for a king’s ransom, and we took him to Afghanistan. There, Mir found booby traps, machine gun nests, and false walls. There, Mir flung himself at barricaded shooters. Nights the wild dogs howled, Mir did his best to ignore them, same as us. Then one night one of our own guys, Big Country, shot Mir. The next night it rained shit and we held Mir’s memorial.

The ceremony occurred in the plywood hut where we briefed our missions. First to arrive, I turned on the lights. The intelligence that had been used to brief the previous night’s mission still hung on the wall. Pictures of the men we were after hung in a row. The satellite image of the compound in which we thought we’d find those men was stapled next to their pictures. That image had been captured by the satellite in summer. There were leaves on the trees in the compound’s courtyard. Now it was autumn, almost winter, and those trees were bare. A map of the Helmand River valley, hanging next to the satellite image, showed the patrol route we were supposed to have followed. That route began at a point in the valley’s eastern foothills—where the Chinooks had dropped us off—and continued west in a long blue line toward our target compound by the river.

TWO CHINOOKS CARRIED us forty miles north of Kandahar and into the mountains. They dropped us off at midnight in a high meadow, five clicks east of our target compound. We filed westward across the dry grass. Passing through a narrow saddle, we descended into the valley.

The stars were so bright we could’ve gone unaided. Still, night vision afforded certain advantages. I saw ice crystals trailing off the drone’s wingtips, meteor showers in the ionosphere, plasma connecting unnamed constellations. Down in the valley I observed wind, not just playing on the corn, but the actual movement of air in evergreen loops. The sky was jade, the faraway mountains aluminum, the river like something you’d see out the window of a time machine.