The Nix(116)

“Yeah, it’ll make the bullet rise.”

“That true?”

“That’s not true.”

“Stop f*cking 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 f*cking 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 was 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.