The Nix(113)

This is how it feels, this expansiveness, which is why it’s such a shock when Bethany jolts up and away from you and grabs your hands to stop their progress and says, “Wait.”

“What?” you say. “What’s wrong?”

“Just…I’m sorry.” And she pulls away from you and fully disengages and curls up on the other side of the couch.

“What is it?” you say.

Bethany shakes her head and looks at you with these sad, terrible eyes.

“I can’t,” she says, and inside you feel something you might call a plummeting.

“We could go slower,” you say. “We can just slow down a little. It’s okay.”

“This isn’t fair to you,” she says.

“I don’t mind,” you say, and you hope you don’t betray all the desperation you’re feeling because you know if you come this close and still fail with this girl it will break you. You will not come back from this one. “We don’t have to have sex,” you say. “We can, I don’t know, take it easy?”

“The sex isn’t the problem,” she says, and laughs. “The sex I can do. I want to do that. But I don’t know if you want to. Or will want to.”

“I want to.”

“But there’s something you don’t know.”

Bethany stands and smoothes her clothes, a gesture meant to signal calm levelheaded dignity, a very serious break from the theatrics on the couch.

“There’s a letter for you,” she says. “On the kitchen counter. It’s from Bishop.”

“He wrote a letter? To me?”

“We got it from the army, a few months after he died. He wrote it in case something happened.”

“Did you get one?”

“No. Yours was the only one he wrote.”

Bethany turns now and walks slowly to her bedroom. She’s moving in that careful way of hers again—perfectly straight, perfectly upright, all movements composed and purposive. When she pulls open her bedroom door, she stops halfway and turns to look at you over her shoulder.

“Listen,” she says, “I looked at the letter. I’m sorry, but I did. I don’t know what it means, and you don’t have to tell me, but I want you to know I read it.”

“Okay.”

“I’m going to be in here,” she says, nodding toward the bedroom. “After you’ve read it, if you want to come in, that’s fine. But if you want to leave”—she pauses a moment, turns around, drops her head, seems to look at the floor—“I’ll understand.”

She withdraws into the dark bedroom, the door closing behind her with a soft click.

To read the letter, go to the next page…





Private First Class Bishop Fall sits in the belly of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, his chin on his chest, asleep. His is the second vehicle in a small convoy—three Bradleys, three Humvees, a supply truck—driving single file to a village they don’t know the name of. All they know is that insurgents have recently kidnapped the mayor of this village and beheaded him on TV. It strikes the soldiers in the convoy as bizarre that the executions are televised, and also that they’re done in this particular manner: beheading. It feels like a kind of death from another era, a viciousness called up from the dark ages.

Three Bradleys and three Humvees can carry approximately forty soldiers. The supply truck carries two more, plus water and gasoline and ammo and many hundreds of boxes of MREs. Each MRE—or Meals Ready to Eat—has a densely syllabic ingredient list that makes many of the soldiers claim that, behind beheaders and IEDs, MREs are the biggest threat to their physical health out here. A popular game is to guess whether a certain chemical is found in an MRE or a bomb. Potassium sorbate? (MRE.) Disodium pyrophosphate? (MRE.) Ammonium nitrate? (Bomb.) Potassium nitrate? (Both.) It’s a game they might play during meals when they’re feeling complexly cynical, but not when they’re traveling via Bradley to a village an hour away. When they’re on the road like this, mostly what they do is sleep. They’ve been pulling twenty-hour shifts lately, so an hour in the armored belly of a Bradley is a little slice of what goes for heaven around here. Because it’s totally dark and it’s the safest place to be when they’re outside the wire and—because a Bradley at top speed sounds like a flimsy wooden roller coaster going Mach 2—they’re wearing earplugs, so it all feels real nice and cocooned. Everyone loves it. Everyone except this one guy Chucky, whose real name no one even remembers because he was nicknamed Chucky a long time ago for his tendency to vomit while riding in the back of a Bradley. It’s due to his motion sickness. So they nicknamed him “Up Chuck,” which was soon shortened to “Chuck,” which inevitably became “Chucky.”

Chucky is nineteen years old, short-haired, spindly muscled, fifteen pounds lighter now than he was at home, often forgets to brush his teeth. He comes from some kind of rural place no one has strong opinions about (maybe Nevada? Nebraska?). He’s a kid with very deep convictions that are unburdened by facts or history. Example: One time he overheard someone calling this whole operation in the Gulf “George Bush’s war,” and Chucky got all puffed up about it and said Bush was doing the best he could with the mess Bill Clinton left. And that started this whole fight about who actually declared war and whose idea it was to invade Iraq, and everyone was trying to convince Chucky that Clinton didn’t start the war and all Chucky did was shake his head and say “Guys, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about this” like he felt sorry for them. Bishop pressed him and insisted that it didn’t matter if he was pro-Bush or pro-Clinton or whatever, that who started the war was a simple neutral objective fact. And Chucky said he thought Bishop needed to “support our C and C” and Bishop blinked at that and asked “What’s a C and C?” and Chucky said “Commander and chief.” So this started a whole new argument where Bishop told him it’s not commander and chief, it’s commander in chief, and Chucky looked at him with an expression like he knew they were pulling a prank on him and he was determined not to fall for it.