Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

Each room I entered was a bit darker and colder than the previous room. My goggles fuzzed like bad reception on the TV. Radio static folded over on itself. I kept thinking that I’d discover something in the next room. I tried to keep my mind open to the possibilities. Like that night I’d found a sextant with its scope, mirror, and graduated arc. Or when I’d stumbled upon that tiny quartz elephant. I’d put those things in my pack and forgotten about them, until weeks later when I was digging around for something to eat. I’d pulled the sextant out of my pack and remembered finding it in a place that had smelled like cinnamon. I recalled a young woman weeping the night I’d discovered the elephant. These rooms, however, were odorless and silent. I left the doors open behind me so that when I turned around, the nearest door framed all the others. I thought maybe I’d find whoever was hanging these doors—a mujahedeen carpenter, if you will, planing the frames to fit just right, oiling the hinges to swing freely. He’d work by candlelight, I imagined, or perhaps he was blind and he’d work by feel. The doors were perfectly balanced and weightless. They seemed to go on forever, which I figured was discovery enough.

OUR THIRD AND last compound was three clicks west of the second. We took a meandering path through a sissoo grove to arrive at twilight. The diamond shape of the compound’s outer walls fit nicely inside the bear trap. A crooked archway in the southern wall opened onto a shadowed courtyard. Digger was just about to pull the pin on a flash bang and roll it through that archway when a woman exited, carrying an empty pot.

Hank raised the bullhorn and began reading the statement. The woman startled at the noise, then smiled.

Harek, is that you? she interrupted.

Harek was Hank’s real name. The woman, it turned out, was his aunt. Moles dotted her narrow face, and her teeth were crooked. Shocked by Hank’s battered visage, she touched the purple lump above his eye. She ran her finger over the pink meat of his split lip, which must’ve stung.

Hank’s aunt invited us into her courtyard, where apple trees bloomed and black ants rooted around in the crabgrass. She kept a pigeon in a cage that hung from the branch of a tree. At first, I thought that pigeon was fake—it stood so still, and its feathers were so smooth. But its eyes followed me around the courtyard from the woodpile to the bikes to the buckets. The way the bird stared at me, I felt the need to confess, though to what, I didn’t know. I supposed I could’ve gone down a list of regrets until I hit upon the one that would’ve made the pigeon look away. Instead, I entered the rooms. In one, two girls slept on the hard dirt floor, their heads touching as if they were Siamese twins. I stayed in that room for a while, listening to the girls breathe, hoping the bird would forget. But as soon as I returned to the courtyard there it was, staring at me with its beady eyes.

WE LEFT HANK’S aunt with aspirin, iodine, and MREs for the girls: Country Captain Chicken, Pound Cake, Sloppy Joe. We wished her peace in her native tongue. From her compound we walked west again, toward the open end of the valley.

The sun had risen over the horizon by then, but the valley remained in shadow. Those shadows appeared striped, like crime scene tape, through night vision. The Kingdom of Sand, off in the distance, shone in golden waves. Putting one foot in front of the other, we searched for a place where the helicopters could pick us up. Meanwhile, Hal radioed dispatch. I listened in on the same frequency. The clerk on the other end told Hal that our signal was “ROD,” which was the last thing we wanted to hear after a long night of traipsing around from dry hole to dry hole. It meant that we weren’t getting picked up any time soon. It meant: Remain Over Day.

WE FOUND A defensible position at the base of the northern mountains, where there was water from a spring and shade from a tall ash tree. The sun rose higher in the sky, shooting flames in all directions. I sat propped against my ruck. My brain felt heavy, my mind cold. I was gazing up at a cloud when the pale sky around it seemed to flash.

Hal whistled and waved me off my redoubt in the shade. I joined him in the sunny valley. He pointed up toward the western end of the valley’s northern mountains, where sunlight fell on a rock formation that resembled dragon’s teeth. There, I saw a clear, bright flash.

“You see that?” Hal asked.

The next flash wavered, like sun off an AK’s curved magazine.

“See what?” I said.

WE JOKED LIKE we used to when Hal would get some batshit idea and I’d try to talk him out of it. I said, “But we’ve got no air, no arty, no QRF,” meaning quick reaction force, to bail us out of a bad situation.

“Your mom’s our QRF,” Hal said.

“But they’ll see us climbing the mountain, and they’ll be ready,” I said.

“Ready,” Hal chuckled while tightening the laces of his boots. He looked over by the spring, where Hank was filling Q’s canteens and Q was dropping iodine into Hank’s.

“They seem to be getting along,” I said.

“What’d you say to them?” Hal asked.

I pushed fresh lithium cells into my holographic sight.

“Nothing,” I said. “I thought you were going to do it.”

“No,” Hal said.

I thought back to that conversation we’d had on our way to the first compound, as we’d crossed that hard stretch of dirt, and I thought maybe I’d gotten it confused with a different conversation, over some other expanse of dirt.

“So you’ll talk to them, then?” Hal asked.

“Sure,” I said.

Hal led the patrol uphill while I remained at the base of the mountain, waiting for Hank and Q. Knowing that we were in for a gunfight, the boys were all smiles. Digger shook my hand. Goon hugged me. Lex kissed me on the forehead, leaving the shit smell of his lips behind. Hank and Q tried to walk right past me without saying boo. I stopped them.

“Whatever happened between you two last night can’t happen again,” I said.

“No,” said Q, shaking his head.

“We have enough trouble as it is without having to babysit,” I said.

“I am sorry. He is sorry,” Hank said.

The purple lump over Hank’s eye rolled to one side.

“Don’t be sorry, just don’t do it again.”

Right after I said that, the pigeon popped its head out from under Q’s chest plate. Its gray feathers were ruffled. Its short beak was wide open in distress.

“Hello,” Q said to the bird.

“You let him steal from your aunt?” I asked Hank.

“Not my aunt. Friend of my aunt,” Hank said.

“Whatever,” I said. “You need to leave it here.”

Q stroked the bird’s head with a finger. He said something in Pashto to Hank.

“So you will leave yours here, too?” Hank asked me.

He meant the red balance scale in my pack.

“That’s different,” I said. “They use scales to make bombs.”

“They use birds to lay eggs. They use eggs to stay alive. Alive, they make bombs,” Hank said.

“Same,” Q said.

“No,” I said. “Leave it.”

Q left the pigeon on a rock, where it preened its feathers back into place and tucked its stubby wings away. I thought it might hop or glide back down into the valley, but it just stayed on the rock, staring at me as I followed the patrol up the mountain—over soft cascades of sand at first, then little red pebbles that zipped and smoked like matchheads under my boots, then flint. The flint clinked and scraped, and the noise hurt my teeth. Little purple flowers grew in the crags. Snow glittered in the shadows. Near the top of the mountain, the ground smoothed out again. Icy patches of dead grass stood in the shadows of sun-warmed boulders. We moved toward the dragon’s teeth like we were back in the States, following a well-worn path to someplace known.