The Best American Short Stories 2015 (20 page)

The first time he came to his brother's to eat, Wild Turkey stood in the dining room afterward and listened to his brother help his wife with the dishes in the kitchen. The house was quiet and oddly peaceful in the nighttime lull. Wild Turkey knew his brother and sister-in-law wanted children but had none. His brother's wife had been silent all through dinner. Wild Turkey's brother had talked about his ministry.

Standing there that first time, Wild Turkey heard his brother in the kitchen apologize, his wife sigh.

“It's like with a dog,” she said. “If you feed him, he'll just keep coming back.”

The look on his brother's face, when Wild Turkey had then risen and peered into the dim kitchen through the half-open door, was exquisitely pained: torn, it seemed to Wild Turkey, between his love for this woman and his real feeling of charity, of grace. His face, upon his return to the dining room (had Wild Turkey stayed around to see it, he's sure), full of resignation at this discrepancy between the practical and theoretical theologies of love, or charity, or whatever.

Now his brother is very still, watching him eat. He does this each time. Wild Turkey doesn't know if the irony of the arrangement—of him now being actually fed like a stray dog: secretly, guiltily, on the back porch, with the implied hope that he
will
keep coming back—is lost on his brother's wife, who tacitly allows it. He doesn't blame her. Wild Turkey knows she was friends with a man in a Bible study group in her old hometown who'd gone on an outreach mission early on in the supposedly safer Kurdish north and been kidnapped and was now missing, presumably beheaded. He knows she has, at some level of consciousness, transferred her anger and grief onto Wild Turkey himself, whom she is convinced committed his own atrocities, in Iraq.

“I am the least of you,” Wild Turkey's brother says now, in a kind of bored wonderment, and Wild Turkey isn't sure if he's quoting scripture or paraphrasing scripture or if he has hit, in his unintentional summary of several of Jesus' sentiments, an ambiguous middle-ground in which he can just say something and mean it, or want very much to mean it. Neither speaks. The motion-sensor light trips back off, and they are thrown again into darkness.

Wild Turkey wakes up in the desert. He's in a slight body-shaped depression at the base of a mud wall, over the edge of which sits the fake village. This is a training exercise, the last preparation for the grab team before they go over to the Shit. They are in Arizona. Wild Turkey lies still, listening to the grumbling of the other guys on the team, and watches the mud ruins (fake? real?) seep with the grays and blue of the thin winter sunset.

Sometime before zero dark, Wild Turkey stands paused in his position in the team's tactical column, lined up against the exterior wall of one of the village houses. Inside he can hear the muted noise of a radio. In a minute, at the first man's signal (two consecutive toneless blips of static on the radio earpiece) the men will go into their suite of motion, so practiced and efficient and many-parted as to seem almost balletic. Wild Turkey, who is the DIA officer attached to the team (which really just means he is responsible for the confirmed identification of team extraction targets), breathes in the quiet, in the dark. He closes his eyes and thinks through what is about to happen, the steps so familiar, mechanical, though less in the way of machines than of soul-hollowing boredom. This is why these men were chosen for the grab team, Wild Turkey has often reflected in these moments: because they will do this with perfect disinterest, not keyed up, not even eager in the way of the adrenalized army kids.

But what Wild Turkey thinks of now in the eternal moments before the twin blips throw the night into action is where he is standing, is the fake village, meant to be a simulation but really more of a simulacrum, a psychological agent at play in the men's imaginations. It's all an effort, really, at making their imagination of what they will soon face in Iraq “more real,” if such a thing makes sense, Wild Turkey thinks. As if anything could be more or less real than anything else, as if all reality isn't contained in every instance of it, this desert being very apropos of all this in that it really is indistinguishable from the Iraqi desert (though Wild Turkey will only confirm this later) and so contains that other reality, or is contiguous to that other reality. The real desert and the village and the specific house that this one is meant to represent is actually just a double, a repetition. He's had a lot of time to think about it.

Wild Turkey has often been overcome by this sense during their operations in the fake village—this feeling that the real Iraqi village/desert/target house is actually very close by, maybe over the next ridge, and that it is or will be the exact twin of this village. The feeling has spread until Wild Turkey hears two sounds in every one fake mortar explosion or real explosion of blank assault rifle rounds: the exercise's sound and, somewhere behind it, the real one. In a way, this should serve the military's purpose in making the fake village seem more “real” but has instead only emphasized the surrealism of the entire exercise. He wonders when they are actually there, if it will seem finally real. This is what he thinks about, in all the time they have to hurry up and wait, and think.

This is all made worse by the tasks they've been assigned so far in their time in the fake village here in the desert in Arizona. It's a full exercise, meaning as close an acting-out of real operating procedure as they can possibly undertake without actually being in the Shit. The unit was dropped off kilometers from the village. They approached by night. For a week they've been calmly doing reconnaissance on the fake village, on its real inhabitants. Wild Turkey has watched through special optics fat middle-aged men take their tea, slurping it from saucers, has logged the arrival and departure from the water source (a nearby well) of women in flowing fabrics that are given form by the wind. He's listened on his headset to conversations within the crumbling walls of the low houses, his half-learned Arabic lagging behind, keying into family names, locations, et cetera. It's all very authentic.

It's these people that get to him, as Wild Turkey now shifts uncomfortably against the wall, waiting for the signal. The crushing irony of their physical existence here: they are real Iraqi villagers paid to play Iraqi villagers in America; immigrants from Iraq given asylum and money to come to this other desert and this other village and play themselves. They are given whole complicated psychological profiles to enact, Wild Turkey knows; they each have a role and a set of actions or conversations to complete at predetermined points. They each will behave differently when threatened. They are paid for the performance of reality, for the performance of their identities rather than for their identities themselves. It is all very thorough.

Two nights ago, Wild Turkey watched two of the younger subjects, masked by red kaffiyehs, drag one of the “local politicians” out into the square and videotape themselves staging an execution. The grab team received this video on their digital comms link the next morning, though it wasn't the same video as the one taken below, in the fake village, Wild Turkey could tell. He doesn't know if he was supposed to notice this or not, and has decided now it was a real video of a real execution, something scrounged from a dark corner of the Internet.

The whole thing has worked by approximation, which Wild Turkey will especially think later, after Ramadi. Later, actual reality (Wild Turkey crouched in the tactical column outside the actual house in actual Ramadi) will seem also like an approximation of experience somehow, the distance between what happens (as Wild Turkey hears the two blips and rises into action, then later, as the tactical phosphorous strobe breaks the night and the vision of the house's interior into its discrete pulses of scene) and the “real” experience (even then, something slightly Else or Other, as if there is yet another house, the real target, just over the next rise in Ramadi) making his own feelings seem like an exercise too.

Now, however, on this night, with this crowning exercise, something real will occur, Wild Turkey thinks. Someone really will get identified, then grabbed, then extracted. Wild Turkey has spent the entire week identifying the target, going over the tactical plan. He wonders if when the team does penetrate the building, when they've cleared the rooms and assembled the members of the family (a wife, a young teenage daughter, a middle-aged man, and the “cousin” they are housing, who is really the courier for a local “militant faction”), if they'll show real fear, if, taken by surprise by the timing if not the nature of the event, they will revert to their natural human reaction, to terror. Though it occurs to Wild Turkey now (as the tactical column remains paused) that the family members must've had their dreams exploded into violent light and sound many times before as unit after unit was trained here, and Wild Turkey wonders if it must be frustrating to them (especially the teenage girl) that they still feel scared when it happens, that it's still actually terrifying, when they should sort of know it's coming. And it will occur to Wild Turkey later, when he remembers this night's exercise, that this thought was probably the seed of that later momentary feeling, when he will be standing in the rear bedroom in Ramadi, looking down at the partially collapsed head of the teenage girl: that flush of stupid anger at her for not somehow knowing what would happen.

In his ear, Wild Turkey hears the two blasts of static.

Wild Turkey wakes up. Tow Head is driving, drumming his fingers on the wheel, staring straight ahead and humming something that is not the song playing tinnily on the radio as the ancient pickup jounces around on the country road. It is January and so cold the air is almost completely thinned out, knife-edged in Wild Turkey's nostrils and mouth. Tow Head picked him up from the crumbling duplex very early this morning, before first light, and Wild Turkey is coming down, the brutal sobriety of the air helping out.

Tow Head is excited to go shooting at the unofficial range they are now bouncing and fishtailing toward. He's excited about his new gun, the reissued, remade World War II rifle that, in its combination of antique design and modern mechanics, is a sort of simulation of itself, giving Tow Head both of the experiences he seems to want: the struggle of a marksman in Normandy in 1944 and the smooth riflery of all the advances made since.

Tow Head is Wild Turkey's friend, and he isn't doing too well, Wild Turkey thinks, though he's never really been doing too well. He has a big, robust head and brow, but very small shoulders and a wilting torso that makes his whole appearance vaguely downcast and disconcerting to Wild Turkey, like his body has failed the promise of his martial features. This gives Tow Head a puzzled, frustrated mien. He's a good guy, really, always says just what he means, which is why Wild Turkey has agreed to go shooting in the freezing cold even though it's the last thing he really wants to do.

Beside him, Tow Head bops and twitches in his seat. He's like this here in the States, Wild Turkey knows, always a little nervous, never quite holding still or maintaining visual focus on any one thing. He talks very fast (he's talking now, Wild Turkey realizes) and pauses only occasionally to acknowledge the conversant, though not in a way that requires any response. He always has a lot of conversational energy, and jumps from one subject to another according to his inscrutably associative thought. In Iraq he wasn't like this, at least not while Wild Turkey knew him there. When they first met, and Tow Head realized they were both from Kansas, from even adjacent tiny towns, he looked as happy as a small boy. It's this look that Wild Turkey has kept in mind, when he was giving away all his military pay and set aside the amount for this rifle, which Tow Head, in their previous conversations, always circled back to the subject of.

Wild Turkey hadn't heard from Tow Head for some time when he saw the flyer at the library for the Wounded Hero Arts Share event. This was two weeks ago. The reading was held in one of the public library's anonymous meeting rooms, plastic chairs set up in solemn rows facing a podium. Tow Head was the featured reader. Wild Turkey went by himself and sat far to one side, where there was a chance Tow Head might not see him, beside a covered piano.

Wild Turkey didn't know that Tow Head liked to write, and spent the time while several middle-aged women went through the introductions wondering if this was actually supposed to be some kind of effort at therapy, or if this was a preexisting interest of Tow Head's, or, if it wasn't, if Tow Head could possibly parse his own answer to that question now. Finally Tow Head got up and took the podium and began to read in a deep, affectless voice.

It was a story, sort of, though really it was just a long description of a man making a wooden guitar amplifier from scratch in his garage, which eventually disintegrated into a sort of list of instructions, but in the third person. As Tow Head's voice settled further into its low timbre and the instructions became repetitive, the sum effect became markedly sinister, almost sexual in its fixated self-surety, until the description of the main character's coating and recoating and recoating again of lacquer on the amplifier's wooden exterior seemed distinctly violent. Before he began, Tow Head had mentioned that the story was about a veteran home from Iraq. Or maybe Wild Turkey only thought he'd said this when really he hadn't.

This was more or less a true story, Wild Turkey knew; Tow Head had told him about fabricating from scratch a wooden electric guitar amplifier in his garage in Kansas, or attempting to fabricate one—now in the library, as in the original recitation, Tow Head reached the point where he fucks up the interior wiring—though Tow Head had begun the reading (this Wild Turkey does remember) by stating the story was fiction. In his uncomfortable plastic chair Wild Turkey wondered at this strange disavowal of the experience, wondered if it really was fiction or if he'd just said it was, or if, ultimately, Tow Head even knew anymore. This experience of the wooden amplifier had presumably happened at least three times, Wild Turkey realized: once in actuality, once in Tow Head's recitation of the story to Wild Turkey in Baghdad, and once in the re-creation of this, his fiction writing—like a matryoshka doll of experience, understandably involuted, confused.