There’d been blood all over the highway. Wild Turkey had lain there in the ditch, shaking. In the concussive silence after the semi’s blasting passage, Wild Turkey heard God’s Grace shift in the leaves behind him. He’d retrieved the headless birds, was holding them out to Wild Turkey.
“God’s grace,” God’s Grace had said.
Mostly they call Wild Turkey “Wild Turkey,” the full name. Sometimes one or two of the black guys call him Jive Ass Turkey, with an unknown level of aggressive irony. Once, after the courtyard in Ramadi, Wild Turkey heard one of the newer guys ask someone in the bunks about him, heard whoever it was readjust their head on the stiff cot before answering, “That’s Wild, man, that’s just Wild,” in that ambiguous way that seemed to mean both the adjective and the proper noun. Ever since Bob Grace got killed, when they mention Bob at all they just smile and call him Gracie, like he was one of their lovers from back in the world that accidentally found himself there with them in the desert.
Wild Turkey has always been mesmerized by their language, the team’s utilitarian military patois always morphing what they said just enough to approximate some slightly more surreal world, a language somehow better suited to the world they are actually confronted with. Often the unthinking word or slight lingual shift ends up being eerily or confusingly apt, in the way that Wild Turkey’s friend the TOW missile gunner whom they call Tow Head really does resemble a “towheaded boy” (the phrase surfacing in Wild Turkey’s mind from some old novel read in a high school English class), or in the way that Wild Turkey will end up buying fifths of Wild Turkey to take the edge off his highs back at home. The Shit, meaning the desert, the war, Iraq, becomes the Suck becomes the Fuck becomes the Fug becomes the Fugue, finally meaning just everything.
•
Wild Turkey wakes up. He’s sitting in the rear corner of his brother’s large backyard patio, the snow having fallen so gently and quietly while he slept that he is now covered with its soft, undisturbed angles. Wild Turkey wakes to the sound of his brother carefully closing the patio door behind him so as not to wake Wild Turkey’s sister-in-law; wakes to the click of the motion-sensor light, which his brother has forgotten to turn off, tripping on. His brother approaches the wrought-iron patio table that Wild Turkey sits at, and sets down the familiar foil-wrapped plate. It is very late, and very cold, but the snow has quieted everything.
Wild Turkey’s brother is an associate minister or junior minister, Wild Turkey can’t remember the exact title, at one of the local churches. Few people in the town know they’re brothers. They only grew up together until the age of thirteen, when their mother died and they went to the group home and Wild Turkey couldn’t bear to go along to the better group home, the one that required adoption by the church or some family in the church. There’d been something so disgusting to Wild Turkey about the idea that they (the potentially adopted boys) should see their adoption and transport as “God’s grace,” which is what the man who came to talk to the two brothers said they should think of it as. He just couldn’t bring himself to do it and so his brother got out of the state home and he didn’t. They got along, though, after that, understood each other in some basic way; the brutality of that state group home (at least for those two months when they’d been fresh meat) a kind of dark night of the soul for both of them, forcing each to make his own manner of unfeeling calculation as to down which road salvation, etcetera, he guesses.
Now Wild Turkey’s brother sits down heavily in the snowy chair across from Wild Turkey. He sighs, rests the side of his face in his hand. He’s tired, equanimously perplexed by Wild Turkey, by his continued presence here these occasional nights.
The first time Wild Turkey came to his brother’s house it was for the same reason as this time: he needed to eat. This is one thing Wild Turkey knows his brother’s wife hates about him: she sees him as needlessly homeless, and as what she calls in her unselfconsciously cute little way a “drughead.” Both of these assessments are more or less fair, insofar as Wild Turkey does technically have a home back at the duplex (he was officially evicted when he stopped paying rent, but then the building was foreclosed upon and Wild Turkey has just kept living there, the color of the notices on his front door changing every few weeks, but nobody really bothering him about it) and yet he sleeps under bridges sometimes, or on the street, or in the fields, or spends all night walking around high or low on the pills he ingests. Paradoxically, Wild Turkey’s sister-in-law doesn’t count the duplex as a home, mostly, Wild Turkey guesses, due to the fact that three of the walls now have huge gaping holes, covered only by minimally effective plastic tarp, from where the landlord removed the windows to sell before the bank could take them. Though, in his own defense, it’s also true that Wild Turkey doesn’t have any money: he gave almost all of it to Jeannie, minus some he gave to Merry Darwani for her broken jaw and some he gave to Tow Head for his new gun. Wild Turkey doesn’t want the money. He brought back from Iraq enough pills to stay in Dexedrine for as long as he wants, and so doesn’t really need any money. Sometimes he eats with Jeannie. Sometimes he eats at the shelter. Sometimes he doesn’t eat.
Wild Turkey’s brother watches him unwrap the plate of leftovers and begin to eat. Neither says anything.
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 middleground 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.