Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

It was hard to explain. The leaves were so gigantic, and bright as hell. Some had fallen as if they were riding an invisible conveyor belt. Others had spun and flipped the whole way down. Able had started wondering if the monk, on the other end of the call box, had heard what he’d said.

“I appreciate that you’ve come a long way, Mr. Jones,” the monk had said, finally. “But I must insist that you take this last step in the—”

Able had cut him short with a click of the call button. “Bring out the dog,” he’d said.

Able didn’t know how much we paid for a dog, but he figured it was a lot. And he figured the monk at the other end of the call box didn’t know about the money, either. The reason for this, Able suspected, was that the monk in charge of the monastery had always told his subordinate monks that this dog-training business wasn’t about the money. In fact, it wasn’t even about the dogs. It was about them. It was about overcoming their weaknesses as human beings via the dogs.

The call box was silent. Able imagined what was happening. The monk he’d been talking to was going up the monk chain of command, asking had they ever given a dog away without completing the assessment? The monk’s boss hadn’t known the answer to that question. Neither had his boss’s boss. Finally, the call box monk went to talk to the top monk, who knew exactly how much we paid for a dog.

And the top monk had been like, “The man wants his dog, give him his dog.”

And the call box monk was like, “But what about the mirror?”

“Pray with me,” the top monk had said. Then he’d taken the call box monk’s hands in his. He’d shut his eyes, bowed his head, and said, “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…”

So the first time Able had seen Mir, the call box monk was walking him on a leash toward the open gate. Mir was happy and looking all around—like he was already downrange, doing his favorite part of the mission, which was mop-up. The monk, on the other hand, appeared to be unhappy. He looked as though he might’ve been done with all that monk shit.

At the gate, Able had offered, “You want to come with?”

The monk had thought about it while the bells rang, sounding more like a tape recording of bells than actual bells. “No, thank you,” the monk had said. Mir, however, had hopped right into the car and sat down on the blanket that Able had spread out for him on the backseat. He was looking at Able like, “Let’s fuckin’ go.”

Able’s chair creaked as he sat back down. The room smelled like the stale breath that had carried our words. Chuck leaned into me, as if he were already under the spell of an orange whip. As if the memorial was, for him, spinning. The chaplain began his benediction with “Long ago, the dog ran free.”

MIR BLED OUT in the field. Goon, our medic, bagged him. Able wanted to carry him out, but Hal said no. Going forward with the assault, Hal needed everybody’s head in the game. He told the breachers to carry Mir. Big Country stopped trilling, pulled back the bolt on his 60, and saw brass. The snipers set out first. Hal followed Able, Big Country followed Hal, and I fell in line. Cutting the last waypoint, we walked directly to the compound. About two hundred meters out, under a bare sissoo tree, Hal told the breachers to lay Mir down. This would’ve been our fallback position. Meaning, if everything had gone to shit during our raid on the compound, we’d have worked back to this point, and taken stock.

THE CHAPLAIN TOLD us to go in peace. Outside, we raised our hoods against the shit, and there was Big Country under the lean-to with the dirt bikes. His bags were packed and stacked next to him. We could forgive fear but not the inability to control it; therefore, Big Country was going home in shame. He was boarding a transport that night.

The shuttle that would carry Big Country to the airport was parked nearby. Its doors were locked. Telling me to wait right there, Chuck set off to scare up a driver. He jogged like his knees hurt, out the gate and left, toward a part of the FOB I’d never been to. As I waited, a transport lifted into the sky. The twang of its engines at full power wormed through the night air. It wiggled in the space between me and Big Country. The transport climbed into the shit clouds, leaving a transport-sized dent in the overcast.

It was not hard to predict what would happen to Big Country. He’d go home and be transferred to another unit. Though he wouldn’t tell anyone at that new unit what had happened, everyone would know. Big Country would try to reinvent himself, nonetheless. He had the rank to make it to twenty. He had the experience to lead his people into the battlefields of the new century. But every time he told them what he wanted done, or how he thought things should be, they’d think, He killed one of our own. And seeing them think that would make Big Country think it, too.

Best case for Big Country, then: his transport would be empty, allowing him to unbuckle at altitude and stand at the center of the cargo bay, where he could imagine himself an actor on a stage. Where the thunder of aerodynamic drag could be his applause, and all the cables, pulleys, and counterweights that rigged the hull would open the curtain on his performance of Great Circle Route Westward Through Perpetual Night. Worst case, he’d be surrounded by happy soldiers going home.

ONCE BIG COUNTRY was on his way, Chuck and I walked to Skip’s ER. The shit reservoir was nearly empty, the diesel all but burned off. Dying blue flames reflected against the low clouds. Normal clouds formed among the shit clouds.

Skip was a veterinarian. He cared for all military working dogs on the FOB, plus the CIA’s horses. Occasionally, he went outside the wire with civil affairs to vaccinate and deworm the GENPOP’s livestock. Every once in a while he’d need to bring a sick animal back to base.

Skip’s ER, therefore, was equipped with a full surgical suite, including slings, trocars, speculums, and refrigerators full of barnyard IVs. Whether the IVs were tinted orange by some chemical agent or by the sodium lights that hung from the vaulted ceiling, I didn’t know. I’d never seen them outside of the place.

Chuck and I entered through a corrugated steel door. It banged shut behind us.

“What’ll it be?” Skip asked.

“Three orange whips,” Chuck said.

Skip did Chuck first. Chuck’s eyes went glassy the instant Skip connected the IV. Maybe even a second before. Then Skip swabbed my arm and pushed the needle into a vein. Crimson blood filled the catheter. The taste of balloon filled my mouth, and the brightness of everything increased. I developed X-ray vision. Thus, I could see through the ER’s wall and into the stables. I could see all the way down the shadowy line of stables to the last one. There, a white horse popped its head out. Way back at the beginning of the war, we used to ride these horses, too. We used to dress up in purple cloaks and kufis embroidered in silver. We wore bandoliers full of bullets like golden eggs. Armed with ivory daggers and breech-loading flintlocks, we’d whip our horses to run faster through the darkness. I missed those nights. Meanwhile, Skip swabbed the crook of his own arm. He pushed the needle into his own vein. Reclining into a throne of hay bales, he sighed.

NOT MUCH LATER, we walked along a gravel berm that passed for a road. Light from the streetlamps fell halfway to the ground. Shit rain mixed with real rain.

“Where are we going?” asked Skip.

“To eat,” Chuck said.

“Now?” Skip asked, even though we always went to eat after orange whips.