Tow Head is ready again and Wild Turkey flicks away his cigarette and steps forward. “Ready,” Tow Head says, then, “Pull!” and Wild Turkey whips his arm, sending the clay disk high into the air. Tow Head fires, missing, but at the sound of the rifle’s report a raft of geese rise into the air from some hidden tufts in the field, their winged shapes very dark against the air. Wild Turkey realizes Tow Head is screaming before he realizes that Tow Head is firing, though the two actions are concurrent. But Tow Head is screaming and Tow Head is firing, and firing, and firing, until Wild Turkey hears the small metallic clink of the ammunition cartridge going empty and there are no more birds in the air. Then Tow Head is running out into the field, slipping, falling down, getting up, still running, still yelling, though now laughing too, the techno music throbbing very loudly, and finally Tow Head reaches the area of bloodied snow where he has expertly dropped what must be at least ten birds, and Wild Turkey can see him lifting the rifle, holding it at either end above his head like he’s wading a river, and Tow Head is dancing and laughing wildly, the sound rising and rising in joy, and Wild Turkey, watching, loves him, loves him, loves him.
This is six months before Tow Head, who has this day refrained from his usual running obsession with the possibility that he suffered an undiagnosed Traumatic Brain Injury at some forgotten point during his deployment, will use the replica rifle to shoot himself through his cheekbone, perhaps purposefully making his theory impossible to ever disprove or confirm.
•
Wild Turkey jars awake. He’s in his position, last in the tactical column, crouched against a low mud wall in a residential compound in Ramadi. The target, Wild Turkey knows (the drone’s heat-imaging burned into the inside of his eyelids), is sleeping in the small house just ahead. The team pads forward quietly in its line. They pause, waiting for the radio signal.
Inside the house, Wild Turkey mentally recites, there will be two civilians (a middle-aged male and a female, presumably his wife) and the target, whom they’ve previously claimed is a cousin but who is actually a low-level messenger between militias. All are asleep. The operational information has been confirmed, according to the radio clearance an hour earlier, presumably by more drone imaging.
In his ear, Wild Turkey hears the two blasts of static.
There is the sound of the steel ram battering the door open, the loud flash of the tactical stun grenade, the shadowy flow of the bodies in front of Wild Turkey funneling into the house, the shouted commands for the occupants to lie flat on the ground. From all corners of the house, from its four separate rooms, Wild Turkey hears the voices of the team confirming that the rooms are clear. “One female in northwest bedroom,” Wild Turkey hears someone tell him either over the radio or the night air. “Holding.”
There are several things that are wrong, Wild Turkey thinks as he stares at the lone male lying face down in front of him on the carpets of the main room. One is that this male is clearly not either of the males (not the target, and not the middle-aged man) from the assignment profile. Wild Turkey will have to go through the standard procedures to confirm this, but he can see, even in the dark, that the man in front of him is very, very old. The extraction clock in Wild Turkey’s head is ticking, ticking. The rest of the team stands, idly tensed, adjusting their equipment. Wild Turkey tells them he needs to go see about the female.
In the back bedroom, Specialist Freidel is standing inside the doorway, watching a teenaged girl, who is naked, cower in the far corner.
“What the fuck?” Wild Turkey says.
Freidel shrugs. The girl in her crouch seems almost feral, eyes flashing. Wild Turkey, in his real-time catalogue of the operation, struggles to age her, distracted by the combination of her child’s face, her dirty thighs and half-hidden, adolescent breasts.
“Did two men leave this house tonight?” Wild Turkey asks in half-hearted Arabic. “Where is your mother? Where is your father? Was there a houseguest tonight? Did he leave?”
The girl doesn’t answer, but winces sharply at Wild Turkey’s voice, showing her teeth.
“Bring her into the main room,” Wild Turkey says, frustrated. Freidel steps forward and grabs the naked girl by the upper arm. He begins to drag her, but then she stands up, still resisting.
“I think they gave us the wrong fucking house,” Wild Turkey says (to whom?), and Freidel turns, or starts to turn, starts to say to Wild Turkey, “What?” when the naked girl rears back, sending one hand with its nails arcing over, digging into Freidel’s neck.
“Goddamnit,” Freidel says, or starts to say, as he turns and brings his weapon’s thick stock up and around possibly more swiftly than he means to, and there is a single sound, something like a crack, and the naked girl is on the floor at both Freidel and Wild Turkey’s feet. Her head is unmade: the upper left quadrant of her skull collapsed, blood very dark on the floor, a jagged-edged concavity with a fleck of white bone just visible in Wild Turkey’s flashlight here and there, the wound tangling with her hair.
“Fuck!” Freidel says.
“Fuck,” Wild Turkey says.
Wild Turkey helps drag the girl’s body out into the dirt-floored courtyard, thinking maybe he can radio for a medical addition to the extraction, once he gets clear just what the fuck is going on, but Wild Turkey can see — the girl’s complete limpness, eyes lolling with the dragging motion between whites and wide, black, fixed pupils; the lack of any rising or falling of the small breasts, now bared where she lies on her back in the pitch of the night and the dirt — that she is gone.
“What do we do with this?” Freidel says, voice taut with desperation, and Wild Turkey can feel the stares of the rest of the team, gathered near the doorway out to the courtyard.
Wild Turkey is not afraid. He can write the report exactly as it really happened, he knows, and it will more than likely simply be forgotten, lost, after a brief bureaucratic murmur, to the labyrinth of operational After Action Reports. They’d be more interested in how the team was given the wrong house, the wrong info from the drone, more interested in the failure to extract the messenger man than anything else. Even if the report caught the eye of some officer worried about exposure, all that would happen would probably be that Wild Turkey would be rotated back home, though he didn’t want to go back home. Wild Turkey knows all this, looking down at the naked girl with the ruined head, knows that he can report it or not report it, but he can’t leave the body as it is. Not to be found, and photographed. Not to be seen. This is when he says it, when he raises his eyes to Freidel’s and the others.
“Burn it,” he says.
“Burn it,” he says.
“Burn it,” he says.
He helps them prepare the body. He gets the jug of kerosene from the house’s tiny kitchen. He has Freidel get the bed sheets from the room they found her in. The sheets are stained with the blood that has spread on the floor. Freidel deposits them next to the body, which Wild Turkey is pouring the kerosene over. Wild Turkey straightens up. He’s holding the tactical phosphorous strobe grenade in his hand.
And does Wild Turkey smell, cut by the fumes of the kerosene, that rank, fetid waft from the girl’s bed sheets? Does he feel himself falling for just a second into that complex of faintly vaginal, excretory musk — does it seem familiar to him? And the girl’s naked body, shining with the wetness of the kerosene there on the ground before him — what is it that strikes him as so oddly sexual about it? Is it what he saw Freidel doing as Wild Turkey entered the room? Did he see Freidel wrestling with the girl — in what, an effort to restrain her? Did he hear him laughing?