Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

We drove past her house, across the wooden drawbridge at the north end of the island, and onto the sandbar where the White Deer Motel stood. The eponymous deer, made of cement and painted white, had lost an antler. The room cost ten bucks. The bed was cupped and creased like a fortune-teller’s palm. Nat and I spent the next few hours generating what felt like an interstellar transmission. One that explained, via tiny modulations, who we were, what music we liked, what languages we spoke, and all that we knew about the universe up to that point.

We held hands as I drove her home. When I dropped her off, it was still dark. I parked at the far end of the school lot and watched the sun rise from inside my car. Condensation fogged the windshield. I wiped a clear spot so that I could see the locker room door. At six-thirty, Coach D. unlocked that door and propped it open with a dumbbell. Maz’s blue pickup arrived a few minutes later, followed by Gunner’s Firebird. Soon everybody started showing up. I entered the locker room with the crowd. Inside it was super quiet. I wanted to yell what had happened with Nat. I wanted to shout that love conquers all. Instead, I donned my sour pads and red jersey in silence. I laced my beat-up cleats. And I carried my white helmet onto the bus that would deliver us up the Black Horse Pike to Deptford.

It was a defensive game, as predicted, and scoreless at halftime. At the beginning of the third quarter, Deptford sacked Gunner in the end zone for a safety. With three seconds left in the game the score was still 2–0, Deptford, with us on offense deep in our own territory. Nat was cheering as if this were the most important thing in the world. As if she’d forgotten all about what we’d done the night before. Out on the field, there seemed to be some confusion in our huddle. Maz called a time-out.

Coach D. brought everybody in—offense, defense, special teams, and second string. “Listen to Maz,” he said. Maz, crouching at the center of the huddle, talked us through a trick play while drawing arrows in the grass. Looking over the huddle, I saw Nat. She raised a sign with Maz’s number written in glitter. She cheered her beautiful fucking head off. I looked past her to the distant end zone. The sun broke through the clouds and shone down on the uprights like something holy.

Seriously, it was like the picture on the cover of a program for the funeral of a kid who’d played football his whole life and loved the game, and died in a tragic accident way too young, and now here you were, stuffed into a coat and tie, sitting in a church pew, looking at that picture, like you were supposed to imagine the dead kid on this field in the sky, scoring touchdowns left and right. Only, the sunbeams shining through the clouds over that football field on that cold Saturday morning in Deptford, New Jersey, in 1984, were real, and I heard the voice of God.

“You want a miracle?” God asked.

The trick-play huddle broke with a loud, sharp clap. Our team took the field. Coach D.’s knees flexed under the weight of our imminent defeat. Nat started to cry.

“Please,” I said to God.

“All right,” He said. “But just this once.”

So it happened. The curtain was pulled back. A giant, heavenly finger poked around among the cogs, and the curtain slid back into place. Some skinny kid, whose name I forget, was sprinting down the sideline, headed for pay dirt. No one was even close. Nat, crying tears of joy, hugged the other cheerleaders, girls whose purity she’d called into question as we’d lain naked at the White Deer. My heart buzzed like a tuning fork. A chubby ref with his whistle in his mouth jogged on a diagonal after the skinny kid, who was still all alone.

“YOU REMEMBER, RIGHT?” the Virgin Mary asked me.

“Of course,” I said, a little surprised that she hadn’t just read my mind.

Then the Holy Spirit that had infused that twist of undissolved fertilizer on the surface of the river vanished. And, with it, Mary’s warmth and light and the golden roses at her feet. I was left to drown, numb with cold, without regrets. Then I bumped into a rock and snagged on another. I crawled onto the river’s far shore, and I was saved.

Lex splashed up to me. “Shh,” he said, because I was heaving loudly, and we were close, theoretically, to the Taliban patrol. Lex whispered into his radio, “It’s F.S.,” which stood for Fuckstick, which was what Hal called me, usually just joking around. “He’s okay.”

Lex splashed away, downriver. I stood, readjusted my goggles, and saw what was happening: my teammates on either side of the river, anchoring the rope. Others in the river, hooked to the rope, diving and surfacing. Still others walking up and down the banks with their rifles pointed at the surface, sparkling creases, eddies, and points where the dark water parted around rocks. Hal must’ve unclipped, too.

I turned to face the field, which was no less shitty on that side of the river, though the rain had stopped. My goggles clicked and whirred, trying to bring the darkness into focus. I walked into that darkness, half-expecting to find Hal walking the other way. Like he had that night in Marjah, after we’d been separated by the ambush. Or that day in Arizona, during our HALO refresher, when nobody’d seen his chute open, and we were all looking in the sagebrush on the windward side of the drop zone for his body, and he’d popped out the leeward side, carrying his chute like a pile of laundry. Eventually, I stopped walking and just stood in the mud, allowing its cold to rise into me.

I felt the Taliban out there still, their hearts transmitting something more elemental than despair. Something more akin to chaos.

Digger took over in Hal’s absence. I heard him, over the radio, making the report back to Higher.

“Roger,” Higher said.

That’s it? I thought. Fucking Roger ?

I wanted to get on the radio and tell Higher that a guy like Hal doesn’t just fall in a river and die. But then I was afraid that saying those words might make them true. Perhaps that was why Higher hadn’t said anything, either. We were in this gray area, status-wise, where nobody’d thrown out an MIA or a DUSTWUN. Where no one at Higher had directed anyone to open Hal’s dead letter to figure out where his next of kin were and what their wishes might be, as far as notification went. Hal’s ex-wife, Jean, for example—at her desk on the third floor of the insurance building—who wanted her dad to break the news. Or Hal’s son, Max, in high school, in an unidentified classroom, with or without the friends he might have wanted by his side. The letter containing that information remained sealed in a box, with everyone else’s.

“Say intentions,” Higher asked Digger.

As Digger considered his options, it started raining again, in reverse it seemed, as if the rain were coming up from the ground to fill the clouds.

“I’m gonna leave a squad here to search and take the rest to intercept,” Digger radioed back.

I was relieved when Digger put me on the intercept. The river was dizzying, even with my back to it. I wanted to distance myself. I wanted to make it a thing I could look back on.

Digger called Lex, whom he was leaving in charge of the rescue effort. Lex looked at Digger like he used to look at Hal. Like he didn’t know what came next.

“Let me know,” Digger said.

Then we walked away from the river, northbound. The sounds of the rescue, already quiet, fell away, and the heat signatures of the rescuers dimmed. Soon enough, behind us was no different from in front of us. The clouds refused to break. Rain wired the air in bright filaments.

The Taliban appeared in the east, at first, as a low cluster of stars. Then as phantoms. Then as men with heat rising off their backs like creeping flames. They walked in a shapeless formation, bunching up and stretching out, because they couldn’t see one another. They couldn’t see themselves.