Will Mackin - Bring Out the Dog

“Check-in!” I yelled through the wool blanket that separated the lobby from the cells.

Five detainees—most of whom I’d walked out of one place or another, all of whom had been with us since before Qa’im—knew what “check-in” meant. They started hissing their ventriloquist hiss, a neither-here-nor-there sound that served as both a means of communication and a form of resistance. Here, the hiss was meant to welcome the boy, while also letting him know that he wasn’t alone. Its message was unmistakable. Soon enough the boy would be practicing in his cell—projecting his hiss across the room at first, then through the wall, then around the corner and into the future. So that years from then, after the war was over and I was home for good, I’d lie awake next to my sleeping wife, with our children dreaming in their own beds, and I’d hear it.

“Hello!” I yelled over the hissing.

The interrogators, O. Positive and R. H. Negative, emerged through the wool blanket. They took in the boy’s pajamas, loafers, and overall scrawniness.

“Little young, don’t you think?” R.H. said.

“Yankee Two likes ’em young,” O.P. said, referring to me by my radio call sign.

“He was acting funny,” I said. “But I don’t think he’s bad.”

“They’re all bad,” O.P. said.

I heard a hiss right behind me, but I knew better than to turn around.

“What’d you find on him?” R.H. asked.

I produced the black box. O.P. took it out of my hand to see that it had no headphone jack, no speaker/mike, no charge port. He discovered, as well, that the black box weighed more than expected. And he might’ve noticed, furthermore, the harmony of its rectangular dimensions. Which, I’d later learn, obeyed the golden section; that is to say, side A was to side B as B was to the sum of A and B.

O.P. returned the black box to me and said, “If that thing ain’t bad, then I’m Mother Teresa.”

THE ICE MAKER had been a Christmas gift addressed to ANY SOLDIER. Positioned on the floor next to my cot, it played a lullaby. The tap rolled open, water poured from the tank into the freeze tray, and the heat exchanger kicked on. This was just a loop of copper pumped with Freon, but it purred loudly enough to drown out any tire flipping, forklifts, or mortar attacks outside. Days the interrogators played the crying baby tape over and over, it muffled the cooing, fussiness, even the screams at the end. The water froze, and a stainless steel auger turned to break the ice into half-moons. The ice slid down a chute and rumbled into the hopper. After several cycles, the hopper was full. The machine beeped softly, and its red light blinked.

I carried the hopper, full of ice, through the wool blanket that separated the sleeping area from the lab. The clock on the wall said eight. Starlight shone through the seams of my hut. The black box and the hard drive were on the workbench, where I’d left them before I’d gone to bed, around five. The hard drive, I’d discovered, was blank. Scattered about were all the tools I’d used to test the black box: gausser/degausser, car battery, jumper cables, acid bath, sledge. There was the jammer that I’d used to radiate the black box, hoping to elicit some response. All of those tests were negative.

Now I carried the hopper outside, under the clear night sky. The tiniest sliver of the waxing moon was visible. Gemini, Taurus, and Canis Major all looped around Orion, whom the Milky Way cradled in one arm. I dumped the ice on the ground by my steps.

R.H. hollered, “Hey!”

I walked across the road to where R.H. stood, behind the fence of the exercise yard. On the far side of the yard, detainees were lined up hip to hip. They walked slowly backward while combing the sand with their fingers. The boy was in the middle of the line. I watched him stand up to examine a rock that he’d discovered. He held it close to his face while turning it over.

“What’d you find out?” R.H. asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing?”

I didn’t think it was worth explaining my theory: that aliens had sent the black box to earth as a listening device, and the boy had just happened to stumble across it.

“I’m gonna have to bring him in,” R.H. said.

This meant that the boy would be interrogated, which, I believed, would yield no useful information, which would then land the boy in solitary while the crying baby tape played over and over.

“Give me another day,” I said.

“A whole day?” R.H. said.

“All right, noon tomorrow.”

A whistle sounded down the road. I turned to find Spot looking my way while holding the door to the briefing hut open. Light poured out the door, casting Spot’s shadow across the road and over the sand dunes beyond.

“You guys going out tonight?” R.H. asked.

“I guess so.”

“Where?”

“Hit,” I said, without knowing for sure. It just felt that way.

O. Positive kicked open the door to the Facility, and emerged with a bucket. He dumped black water with silver bubbles on the ground, releasing the smell of lavender.

“Hey!” R.H. called to him through the chain link.

O.P. slid off a headphone and raised his eyebrows.

“Hang up the NO VACANCY sign,” R.H. said. “They’re going back to Hit.”

A CAGED BULB, the kind you’d hang off the hood of your car while doing a tune-up, lit the briefing hut. We sat under the light on rows of wooden benches. A white bedsheet, which functioned as our projector screen, hung at the front of the room. J.J. turned on the projector, squinted against the light. “We’re going back to Heet,” he said, using the Iraqi pronunciation for Hit. Then he talked us through the slide show.

The helicopters would drop us off at the train station around midnight. From there we’d walk across the tracks and toward the Euphrates on a perpendicular road. We’d take a right this time. Our target was a four-story building on a corner. Actions on target, or those steps taken to kill or capture our enemies within, were standard. We’d pull detainees, as necessary, and exfil southeast. Now J.J. pointed his laser off the bedsheet, circling a spot on the plywood wall beyond. Out there we’d find an area with no tank traps, sinkholes, or barbed wire, where the helos could safely touch down. The last slide said, simply, QUESTIONS. There were none.

J.J. closed the brief, and white light projected onto the bedsheet. Spot stood up in that light, his lower lip packed with chew. He spit into a paper cup and said, “All right. How to put this?”

Events of the last mission had convinced him that things were getting a little too loose. Not just with laser discipline, although dudes were lighting up every moth and bunny rabbit in the shadows, and not only with bullshit on the radio—case in point, last night’s reading of War and Peace over troop common—but with ACTIONS ON TARGET. With our BREAD AND FUCKIN’ BUTTER. And although he shouldn’t have to reiterate our philosophy, he felt the need. “Speed and violence,” he said. And we allowed him to say it again.

How many times had his ass and the asses of others been saved by those two elements working in concert? The answer was unknown and unknowable. We knew that. As the reigning world champions of speed and violence, we knew. So to go in doing one thing without the other, or neither, or to go in half-assed? Jesus.

Dust motes followed Spot as he paced in the light of the projector beam. Nicotine entered his bloodstream through the thinnest of membranes on the inside of his lip. His wayward eye was humming.

These people, Spot would have us know, were trying to kill us. Example: Habbaniyah. Example: Ramadi. Example: Al Qa’im. Goddamn Qa’im in particular, with its remnants of the Republican Guard. Imagine had we not reacted like unconscious banshees there? Imagine if zero shits and zero fucks had not been given?