The Nix

by Nathan Hill

  Anyway, they don’t talk politics much. None of them do. It’s sort of beside the point.

  One time Chucky tried to get them to open the portals in the Bradley so that during the trip he could watch the horizon and keep his bearings, which he said would help with the dizziness and vomiting. But that argument went nowhere because if the portals came off then it wouldn’t be dark inside the Bradley and they couldn’t sleep, and also because the portals are covered with armor, and no one wants to sacrifice any armor at all given the number of mines and bombs and snipers they’d encountered thus far. Chucky pointed out that the Bradley was equipped with several M231 assault rifles that are expressly designed to fit through the portals (they are basically M16s without the front sighting assembly, which is too tall to fit inside the portal, and a much shorter stock, because the inside of a Bradley is pretty narrow) and Chucky asked didn’t the mere existence of the M231 imply that they should have the external portals open so they could shoot through them? Bishop said he was impressed with Chucky’s logic, even if it was transparently self-serving. Anyway, the commander of the Bradley, whose name is actually Bradley but whose nickname is “Baby Daddy” for the several families back home he joined the army to get away from, decided that the armor would stay. He said, “If you have protection you’d be a fool not to use it,” which was pretty funny coming from him.

  So one would think with the vomiting and the brittle knowledge of world events and the constant whining about the closed firing portals that Chucky would be a prime candidate for pariah status. Given how many times they have to go somewhere in the back of a Bradley, Chucky should be very unpopular indeed. But that’s not how it works. Chucky is roundly loved and adored and has been ever since this one midnight raid on a suspected enemy compound when his night-vision goggles broke, and instead of falling back like any of them would have done he kept on opening doors and clearing rooms with a goddamn flashlight. Which in an operation like that might as well have been a giant neon sign that said Shoot Me! Seriously, the courage of this kid is off the charts. He once told Bishop that the only thing worse than being shot at is when the people shooting run away. And Bishop really thought that Chucky would prefer the enemy stand still while trying to kill him rather than not try to kill him at all. So everyone loves Chucky. And it’s clear they do because they keep calling him Chucky, which is a nickname that maybe to an outsider sounds cruel for the way it ribs someone for his greatest personal flaw, but what it actually does is acknowledge that they accept this person and love this person despite that flaw. It’s a very male way of expressing unconditional love. All of this goes unsaid, naturally.

  Plus there is the thing about the girl. Chucky’s primary conversational topic: Julie Winterberry. Everyone likes hearing about her. Hands down the most beautiful girl in Chucky’s whole high school, the girl who won every relevant queen-type prize a girl could win, who ran the table four years in a row, a face that launched a thousand erections, a girl whose beauty didn’t cause the usual nervous sniggering among the teenage boys but rather an almost physical pain that biting the inside of one’s cheek was sometimes an effective cure for. The boys were despondent if she did not look at them, shattered if she did. Chucky has a photo, a senior portrait, that he passes around and everyone has to agree that he is not exaggerating. Julie Winterberry. He says it with church-like reverence. The thing about Julie Winterberry is that Chucky had always been so intimidated by her beauty that he’d never spoken to her. She didn’t even know his name. Then they graduated high school and he went to basic training, where he had the most punishing drill sergeant in the history of the U.S. Armed Forces, after which he figured if he could overcome that asshole, he could talk to Julie Winterberry. She didn’t seem like much of a challenge anymore, not after basic. So in those few weeks he was home before deployment he asked her on a date. And she said yes. And now they’re in love. She even sends him dirty pictures of herself that everyone begs Chucky to show that he will not show. People are literally on their hands and knees, begging.

  What everyone likes about the story is the part where he finally asks out the girl. Because the way Chucky tells it, it’s not like he had to work up the courage to do it. It’s more like it no longer required courage to do. Or maybe he discovered that he had plenty of courage all along, inside him, ready to be used, and everyone likes imagining that. They hope the same thing has happened to them, too, because they are occasionally terrified out of their minds over here, and they hope when the time comes for them to be brave, they will be brave. And it’s nice to think that they have this well of courage inside that can get them through the impossible things ahead.

  If a kid like Chucky could land a girl like Julie Winterberry, surely they can make it through one lousy war.

  They ask him to tell about it especially when they’re on clean-up, which is just about the biggest injustice of this war, that soldiers sometimes have to clean up the remains of suicide bombers. Imagine hunting around for body parts with a burlap bag oozing slop that looks like the inside of a pumpkin. And the road is baking in the sun and so the random pieces of flesh aren’t only sitting there but actually literally cooking. That smell: blood and meat and cordite. When they’re doing this, they ask Chucky to tell them about Julie Winterberry. It passes the time.

  Eventually Baby Daddy struck a deal with Chucky that he could ride up top next to the gunner. Of course this is against regulations because a person standing where Chucky stands interferes with the movement of the M242. But Baby Daddy was willing to go against regulations in this one instance because it’s better than having to smell Chucky’s puke every time. So Chucky gets to ride up top where he can watch the horizon in that way he needs to do to avoid motion sickness, with the tacit agreement that if any shit goes down he needs to drop into the cargo area pronto. Which he’d have no problem doing because no one wants to be near the M242 when it’s firing. That thing can tear up an SUV like it’s tissue paper. The bullets are as long as Chucky’s forearm.

  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.”

&
nbsp; “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.

  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 w
as 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.