Nathan Hill - The Nix

They were told to expect an hour’s travel to the village with the recently murdered mayor. Bishop sits in the back of the Bradley with his helmet over his eyes and his earplugs pushed practically into his brain. Blessed silence. Sixty sweet minutes of nothingness. Bishop doesn’t even dream over here. One of the many surprises of war is how it has turned him into a sleeping savant. If he’s told he has twenty minutes for a nap, he will use all twenty minutes. He can tell the difference between sleeping two hours and sleeping two and a half. He can feel the contours of consciousness over here that he never felt back home. Back home, life was like driving a road at sixty miles per hour, every little bump and texture flattened into an indistinguishable buzz. War is like stopping and feeling the road with his bare fingers. A person’s awareness expands like that. War makes the present moment slow. He feels his mind and body in ways he never knew were possible.

Which is why Bishop knows for sure when the Bradley comes to a halt and he wakes up that they are not yet at their destination: that was a thirty-minute nap. He can tell by the way his eyes feel, or maybe more accurately the way the space just behind his eyes feels, a certain kind of pressure there.

“How long have we been driving?” he asks Chucky.

“How long you think?” he says. They like to test each other this way.

“Thirty minutes?”

“Thirty-two.”

Bishop smiles. He climbs up top, blinks at the mighty desert sunlight, looks around.

“Suspicious thing in the road,” Chucky says. “Up ahead. Possible IED. You gotta see this. You’ll never believe it.”

He hands Bishop the binoculars and Bishop searches the dusty and cracked asphalt in front of them until he sees it: a soup can in the center of the road. Standing straight up. Its label pointing right at the convoy. That familiar red logo.

“Is that—”

“Yep,” Chucky says.

“A Campbell’s soup can?”

“Affirmative.”

“Campbell’s tomato soup?”

“All the way out here. I shit you not.”

“That’s not a bomb,” Bishop says. “That’s modern art.”

Chucky gives him a queer look.

“It’s a Warhol,” Bishop explains. “It looks like a Warhol.”

“What the fuck is a war hall?” Chucky says.

“Never mind.”

What happens when they see something that might be an IED is they call in the explosive ordnance disposal techs and then wait around, glad that disarming bombs is not their job. And of course the EODs are like thirty minutes away and so everyone’s on edge waiting and smoking and Chucky staring out into the distance suddenly says to Bishop, “I’ll bet I can hit that camel with your rifle.”

So everyone turns to see what camel he’s pointing at and they see this haggard lonely thing way off in the distance without anything around it, this weak-looking straggler all alone in the desert about a quarter mile away all wavy-looking from the heat radiating off the sand. Bishop is interested; Chucky is not known for his precision with a rifle. “What are we betting?” he says.

“Whoever loses,” says Chucky, who’s clearly thought this part through because he’s right there with an answer, “has to stand in the Port-a-John for an hour.”

Cries of disgust from the surrounding eavesdroppers. This is a proper bet. Everyone knows the only thing hotter than the sun in the desert is a Port-a-John in the sun in the desert. How the desert heat gets trapped inside the thick plastic walls and brings the collective excrement of the whole company practically to boiling. People swear a pork chop could be braised in there, not that anyone ever would. Most people hold their breath and get out as quickly as they can. There are stories of people becoming dehydrated only because they had a particularly long shit.

Bishop thinks about this. “An hour?” he says. “You have things to do, Chucky. I wouldn’t want to take you away from jerking off for a whole hour. How about five minutes?”

But Chucky’s not having it, because everyone knows that Bishop has been through sniper training, and one of the things snipers learn is to hold their breath a long time, maybe even upward of five minutes. Those are the stories, anyway.

“An hour,” Chucky says. “That’s the deal.”

So Bishop makes a show about thinking it over, but everyone knows he’ll take the bet. He can’t turn down a bet like that. And eventually he says “Fine” and everyone cheers and he hands Chucky the M24 and says, “Doesn’t matter. You’re never gonna hit it.” And Chucky gets into this kneeling position that looks exactly like the little green army men that kids play with — a posture that is decidedly not the textbook way to fire the M24 and which makes Bishop smile and shake his head — and the onlookers, who include the Bradley’s full complement and now even the guys from the supply truck behind them, start hollering and offering advice both genuine and not.

“Whaddya say there, Chucky? About four hundred meters?”

“I’d say three ninety.”

“More like three seventy-five.”

“Wind at about five knots?”

“Ten knots!”

“Ain’t no wind, jackass.”

“Make sure you account for the heat coming up off the ground!”

“Yeah, it’ll make the bullet rise.”

“That true?”

“That’s not true.”

“Stop fucking with him.”

“Shoot it, Chucky! You got this!”

And so on, Chucky just ignoring it all. He settles into position and holds his breath and everyone waits for the shot — even Baby Daddy, who as commander of the Bradley unit is supposed to be above all this and detached but really privately savors the idea of Chucky’s chutzpah landing him in a Port-a-John for an hour (Baby Daddy is in a war because of his shenanigans, so he loves when anyone else gets their comeuppance too). And the seconds tick by and everyone gets quiet expecting Chucky to shoot and they can’t decide if they should be looking at the camel or at Chucky, and he wiggles and lets his air out and sucks back in again and Bishop laughs and says, “The more you think about it, the worse you’re gonna miss.”

“Shut up!” says Chucky, and then — frankly faster than anyone expected after the shut up thing — Chucky fires. And everyone looks at the camel in time to see a small mist of blood poof up where the bullet glances off its left hind quarter.

“Yes!” Chucky said, his arms up. “I hit him!”

Everyone cheers and looks at Bishop, who is now sentenced to sixty ungodly merciless minutes in the shit oven. Except that Bishop is shaking his head saying, “No, no, no. You didn’t hit him.”

“What do you mean?” Chucky says. “I did too hit him.”

“Look,” Bishop says, pointing at the camel, who is understandably surprised and upset and confused and is now terrified and running, weirdly, right at the convoy. Bishop says, “That doesn’t look like a dead camel to me.”

“The bet wasn’t to kill the camel,” Chucky says. “The bet was to hit it.”

“What do you think hit means?” Bishop says.

“I shot it, with a bullet. That’s what it means, end of story.”

“Do you know what I’d be if all my hits were glancing shots off the ass? Demoted, that’s what.”

“You’re trying to get out of losing.”

“Didn’t lose,” Bishop says. “You tell a sniper you’re gonna hit something, that something better be dead. Otherwise you didn’t hit it.”

The camel, meanwhile, is now full-out charging the convoy, and some of the assembled spectators laugh at the idiocy of the thing, running toward the people who shot it. Kind of the opposite of an insurgent, someone says. Big dumb stupid animal. And Chucky and Bishop keep arguing about who won the bet and defending their own interpretation of what the verb “to hit” really means — Chucky taking a strictly literal approach against Bishop’s, which is more context-driven — when the camel, which is now maybe a hundred yards off, suddenly veers to its right and begins moving more or less directly at the Campbell’s soup can.