Nathan Hill - The Nix

Baby Daddy is the first to recognize this.

“Hey!” he says, pointing at it. “Whoa! Stop it! Kill it! Kill it now!”

“Kill what?”

“The fucking camel!”

“Why?”

“Look!”

And they see the camel running at the soup can, which is right now also being approached by the EODs in their massive and almost comically large armor, and the soldiers who understand what is happening take out their sidearms and shoot at the camel. And they can see where their bullets strike the thing harmlessly, shaving off the outermost layer of fur and hide. All the gunshots really do is terrify the thing more, and it increases speed and runs with these huge bulging eyes and a foam dripping from its mouth and people start yelling “Duck!” or “Run!” at the EODs, who have no idea what is happening, not having been part of the whole camel-shooting thing in the first place. And the camel keeps going and it’s clear its path is going to take it right over the soup can and everyone now finds whatever cover they can find and they close their eyes and shield their heads and wait.

It takes a few moments to realize nothing is going to happen.

The first soldiers who pop their heads up see the camel tearing ass away from them, the empty soup can bouncing harmlessly behind it, end over end.

They watch the camel half gallop, half stagger into the immense desert horizon, overtaken eventually by the shimmers coming off the sand. The EODs have removed their helmets and are walking back toward the company, cursing loudly. Bishop stands next to Chucky, watching the camel race away.

“Fuck, man,” Chucky says.

“It’s okay.”

“That was too close.”

“It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t mean to.”

“It’s like everything slowed down. I was just like— ffft ,” he says, and he puts his palms up by his eyes indicating a total narrowing and tunneling of his vision. “I mean, I was in it.”

“In what?”

“The war hall,” Chucky says. “I get it now. That was it.”

And they think that’s the end of the story — a bizarre one to tell back home, one of those surreal moments that present themselves during war. But just as everyone is getting comfortable back in their positions and the convoy begins to rumble forward and they’ve been driving maybe thirty seconds, suddenly from inside the Bradley Bishop feels a jolt and a wave of heat and hears that crack-boom sound of something in front of them exploding. It’s that sound — in the desert they can hear it for miles — the worst sound of the war, the sound that will later make them all flinch even when they’ve been home for years whenever a balloon pops or fireworks explode, because it will remind them of this, the sound of a mine or IED, the sound of violent gruesome random death.

And now comes the panic and the screaming and Bishop pushes his way up to the turret and stands next to Chucky and sees how the Bradley in front of them is on fire, this tar-black smoke rolling out of it as one by one soldiers climb out bleeding and dazed. The front of the Bradley seems to have been cracked in half right at the spot where the driver would have been sitting. One soldier is being carried away by two others, his leg attached by only bare red ribbons at the knee, swinging like a fish on a line. Baby Daddy is already calling for helicopters.

“The soup can,” Bishop says, “must have been a decoy. So we let our guard down.” And he turns to Chucky and knows right away by Chucky’s look of terror and panic that something is wrong. Chucky holds his hands over his belly, clutching the wound. Bishop pulls the hands back and doesn’t see anything.

“There’s nothing here, Chuck.”

“I felt it. I felt something go in.” He is already turning pale. Bishop sits him in the belly of the Bradley and pops open his jacket to reveal the body armor underneath and still sees nothing.

“Look. You’re all armored up. You’re fine.”

“Trust me, it’s there.”

And so he pulls off the armor with Chucky moaning and peels off his undershirt and there it is, exactly where he said it would be, a few inches above his belly button, a dime-size spot of blood. Bishop wipes it away and sees the small cut underneath — maybe the size of a large splinter — and laughs.

“Jesus, Chucky, you’re all worked up about this ?”

“Is it bad?”

“You dumb motherfucker.”

“It’s not bad?”

“It’s tiny. You’re fine. You’re an asshole.”

“I don’t know, man. There’s something wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong. Shut the fuck up.”

“It feels like there’s something very not right here.”

So Bishop stays with him insisting everything is okay and suggesting he stop being such a pussy while Chucky keeps saying that something doesn’t feel right, and they stay like that until they hear the thumping of the helicopters, at which point Chucky says, very quietly, “Hey Bishop, listen, I have something to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“You know about my girlfriend? Julie Winterberry?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s not my girlfriend. I made that up. She doesn’t even know who I am. I only talked to her once. I asked her for her picture. It was the last day of school. Everyone was trading pictures.”

“Oh man, you’re going to be sorry you said that.”

“Listen, I made it up because every day I think about not talking to her.”

“This is good info. This might be new-nickname worthy.”

“I regret it so much, not talking to her.”

“Seriously, you are never going to hear the end of this.”

“Listen. If I don’t make it—”

“You will be taking shit for this literally nonstop forever.”

“If I don’t make it, I want you to find Julie and tell her how I really feel. I want her to know.”

“Seriously, it will last the rest of your life. I will call you when you are eighty years old and make fun of you about Julie Winterberry.”

“Just promise.”

“Fine. I promise.”

Chucky nods and closes his eyes until the medics come and take him on a stretcher and into the helicopter and they all disappear into the dull-copper sky. Then the rest of the convoy continues its loud, slow journey.

What happens that night is that Chucky dies.

A piece of shrapnel only about half an inch long and as thin as the straw on a juice box had clipped the artery feeding his liver, and by the time doctors figured it out he’d lost too much blood and was in full-blown acute liver failure. Baby Daddy is the one to tell them, the next day, right before going out in sector.

“Now forget about it,” he says when it becomes clear the news is going to interfere with their concentration on the upcoming patrol. “If the army wanted us to have emotions, they would have issued us some.”

And it’s a quiet and subdued and uneventful evening, and the whole time Bishop feels angry. Angry at Chucky’s senseless death and the fuckers who planted that bomb, but also angry at Chucky, at Chucky’s cowardice, that he could never say what he needed to say to Julie Winterberry, that a man who could rush into dark rooms where people with machine guns wanted to kill him was unable to talk to a stupid girl. These two kinds of courage seem so different they ought to have separate words.

That night, he can’t sleep. He broods. His anger has twisted so that he is no longer angry at Chucky but rather angry at himself. Because he and Chucky are no different. Because Bishop has terrible things inside him that he cannot bring himself to tell anyone. The great evil secret of his life — sometimes it feels so big it’s like he needs a new inner organ to contain it. The secret sits inside him and devours him. It devours time and grows stronger as time passes, so that now when he thinks of it he cannot separate the event itself from his later revulsion of it.