Arna Hemenway - Elegy on Kinderklavier

•

Wild Turkey wakes up, but Jeannie has already left the bed. Wild Turkey can see her, if he hangs off the side of the mattress, down the narrow hallway: the bathroom door ajar, the bathroom light golden and warm in the cool, cesious fall morning. They’re at his place, the duplex right on top of the train tracks, across the street from the college. Jeannie is doing her hair, naked, still overheated from the shower. She stands in front of the mirror quietly, getting ready for class or work, he can’t remember which she has today. He’s been home from his deployment for two weeks now and he still can’t get a hold of time. In the afternoons he gets in the shower, wastes no minutes, gets out to find it’s two hours later.

Last night Wild Turkey took Jeannie out to the old school buildings, overgrown as they are, stilled between their days as the school he and Jeannie went to together and its current incarnation as some daycare’s repurposed space. This was something they did in high school too, back when Jeannie still had her green Mustang convertible; late October nights they’d drive out there with sleeping bags and put the top down and park in the middle of the erstwhile baseball field, already half-reclaimed by brush, and look at the stars. The buildings were abandoned even back then, or between abandonments; Wild Turkey and Jeannie having decamped for the public high school, the original private school having finally amassed enough nonscholarship families to fund a new building (itself a repurposed old country club) inside city limits.

Later still last night, after they’d gotten too cold and come back to his duplex, Wild Turkey had lain down naked with Jeannie on his mattress, which was on the floor, and curled his body around her in-turning fetal position and called out, “Jeannie in a bottle!” which was one of their old jokes, and she’d laughed, sounding half-annoyed at her own easy nostalgic amusement, but then Wild Turkey had repeated it and repeated it, “Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle!” over and over, with just enough slight vocal modulation and wavering emphasis as to keep it from seeming like a glitch, repeating and repeating, which he did helplessly, “Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle!” on and on until the sound became extenuated, then lost all tone, then resolved briefly into song before crumbling into over-articulation, each alien phoneme distinct and meaningless. Eventually he’d stopped. Jeannie lay there very quiet, very still, stiffened as she had been from somewhere around the twentieth or twenty-fifth repetition. Then, in the silence after Wild Turkey’s voice had ceased, when it was clear he had really stopped, when he finally released her, she very carefully unfolded herself up from the bed and walked silently to the bathroom. Though Wild Turkey knows at some point she must’ve returned to bed (did she? or did she sleep on the couch?), her presence now in the bathroom seems contiguous to her presence there last night, which makes it hard for Wild Turkey to tell how much time has passed, if any has passed at all.

She finishes doing her hair and makeup and gets dressed in silence. She does not avoid looking at Wild Turkey; she holds his eyes as she pulls on her jeans one leg at a time before turning and letting herself out, her expression level, empty of anger, empty of assessment. When she gets back, if she comes back to the duplex instead of her own apartment, Wild Turkey will be there or he won’t, she’s already used to that.

•

Wild Turkey wakes up, the voices of the other men in the unit insistent. They’re all in the dining area of the forward operating base, talking to the doctors from the casualty attachment, which is something the other guys on the team get a kick out of, Wild Turkey’s never known why. It’s Pizza Hut night, which is why the team is all out here in the base’s main area, the only real chance for the team and the doctors both to see each other, before the former, their day just beginning now that it’s nightfall, slouch back into the restricted access staging area and ready themselves for their next operation.

Someone is telling the story of how Wild Turkey got his name. Wild Turkey can’t see who is speaking, but it doesn’t really matter as the story is now collective, accessed by anyone on the team, each small contortion of detail sponsored by the men’s own willingness.

It was back in Carolina, before the team was strictly assembled, when they were all still loosely gathered at the base waiting to be repurposed. It was the day before Thanksgiving and the commander in charge of the base had a vaguely sadistic obsession with getting the men prepared for the Suck, high concern over the lack of regulatory discipline etcetera, and so had ordered for the men no Thanksgiving meal, and had replaced that order with several shipments of turkey and mashed potato and cranberry sauce MREs, which were dried out, reconstituted, ready-to-eat, etcetera etcetera, and so Wild Turkey (though he wasn’t called that yet) had gone prowling during one of the exercises in the golden leaves of the fall woods, and gotten God’s Grace to go with him.

God’s Grace was Bob Grace, a gentle-faced, soft-spoken man from Tennessee, eventually included on the team mostly for his perfect marksmanship. He was religious, though very passive about it, and ended up being God’s Grace because he often said “God’s grace” in a kind of summarizing way when he saw something that made him feel like speaking. Later, Wild Turkey would see God’s Grace get shot through the neck while their vehicle was stalled in traffic at an intersection in Tikrit. This day, though, God’s Grace stood calmly at the tree line as Wild Turkey crawled forward slowly over the rural highway, which they weren’t supposed to cross.

“So Wild Turkey’s out there, doing this dumbass crab-crawl across the highway because just on the other side what has he seen but three fat old birds, turkeys, wild turkeys, rooting around there in the ditch on the other side of the road and this is a no-discharge drill and Wild Turkey’s got long underwear on beneath his gear and hasn’t brought his knife, so he’s going to do god knows what — wring their necks, or whatever, but only if he can get close enough to grab one of them. Anyway, good old Wild Turkey hears a sound and must be real hungry or maybe just a pussy because he spooks and takes off sprinting at the birds, who of course just completely lose their fucking shit. We’re watching this all on the helmet cam back at the comms camp, laughing our fucking asses off.”

“So what happens?” one of the doctors, a bald little man with glasses, asks.

“They fucking scatter, is what happens, because Wild Turkey’s a fucking idiot. You can’t chase down a turkey. And so we’re all on the line in his earpiece giving him all this shit about it and what happens just at that exact moment but a semi comes tearing around the corner of this bumfuck nowhere little road and almost kills Wild Turkey, who dives out of the way, only to find, when he gets up, that the fucking semi has taken three of the birds’ heads clean off.”