“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.
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.
What happened with the headmaster.
The man whom everyone revered and loved. The headmaster. Bishop loved him too, and when, in fifth grade, he picked Bishop for tutoring, for extra weekend lessons that absolutely had to be kept secret because the other boys would be jealous, it made ten-year-old Bishop feel so special and wanted. Picked out of the crowd. Admired and loved. And how he shudders at it now, years later, that he was so easily tricked, that he never questioned the headmaster, not even when he told Bishop that their lessons would be about what to do with girls, because all the boys were terrified of girls and didn’t know what to do with girls, and Bishop felt really lucky he had someone to show him. It started with photographs from magazines, men and women both, together, separate, nude. Then Polaroid pictures, then the headmaster suggesting they take Polaroids of each other. Bishop remembers only fragments, images, moments. The headmaster gently helped Bishop out of his clothes and still Bishop did not think this was wrong. He did everything willingly. He let the headmaster touch him, first with his hands, then with his mouth, afterward telling Bishop how wonderful and handsome and special he was. The headmaster saying, after a few months of this, Now you try it on me. The headmaster disrobing. The first time Bishop saw him, red and swollen and strongly persuasive. Bishop trying to do on the headmaster what the headmaster had done on him, and doing so awkwardly, clumsily. The headmaster getting frustrated and angry for the first time when Bishop’s teeth accidentally got involved, grabbing Bishop by the back of the head and thrusting and saying No, like this and later apologizing at the tears that arrived when Bishop’s gag reflex engaged. Bishop feeling like this was his fault. That he would practice and do it better next time. Then doing no better next time, nor the next time. One day the headmaster stopping him halfway through and turning him around and leaning over him and saying, We’ll have to do this the way adults do it. You’re an adult, right? And Bishop nodding his head because he didn’t want to be bad at this anymore, didn’t want the headmaster to be angry anymore, so when the headmaster positioned himself behind Bishop and pushed himself in, Bishop endured it.
The horror of it now, these images cascading back to Bishop—so many years later and ten thousand miles away, in a desert, in a war. Bishop thinking how even this secret has another secret, a deeper and more devastating layer, the thing that made him sure he was evil and broken, which is that while the headmaster was doing what he was doing, Bishop liked it.
He looked forward to it.
He wanted it.