The Nix(117)

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.

“The soup can,” Bishop says, “must have been a decoy. So we let our guard down.” And he turns to Chucky and knows right away by Chucky’s look of terror and panic that something is wrong. Chucky holds his hands over his belly, clutching the wound. Bishop pulls the hands back and doesn’t see anything.

“There’s nothing here, Chuck.”

“I felt it. I felt something go in.” He is already turning pale. Bishop sits him in the belly of the Bradley and pops open his jacket to reveal the body armor underneath and still sees nothing.

“Look. You’re all armored up. You’re fine.”

“Trust me, it’s there.”

And so he pulls off the armor with Chucky moaning and peels off his undershirt and there it is, exactly where he said it would be, a few inches above his belly button, a dime-size spot of blood. Bishop wipes it away and sees the small cut underneath—maybe the size of a large splinter—and laughs.

“Jesus, Chucky, you’re all worked up about this?”

“Is it bad?”

“You dumb motherf*cker.”

“It’s not bad?”

“It’s tiny. You’re fine. You’re an *.”

“I don’t know, man. There’s something wrong.”

“There’s nothing wrong. Shut the f*ck up.”

“It feels like there’s something very not right here.”

So Bishop stays with him insisting everything is okay and suggesting he stop being such a * while Chucky keeps saying that something doesn’t feel right, and they stay like that until they hear the thumping of the helicopters, at which point Chucky says, very quietly, “Hey Bishop, listen, I have something to tell you.”

“Okay.”

“You know about my girlfriend? Julie Winterberry?”

“Yeah.”

“She’s not my girlfriend. I made that up. She doesn’t even know who I am. I only talked to her once. I asked her for her picture. It was the last day of school. Everyone was trading pictures.”

“Oh man, you’re going to be sorry you said that.”

“Listen, I made it up because every day I think about not talking to her.”

“This is good info. This might be new-nickname worthy.”

“I regret it so much, not talking to her.”

“Seriously, you are never going to hear the end of this.”

“Listen. If I don’t make it—”

“You will be taking shit for this literally nonstop forever.”

“If I don’t make it, I want you to find Julie and tell her how I really feel. I want her to know.”

“Seriously, it will last the rest of your life. I will call you when you are eighty years old and make fun of you about Julie Winterberry.”

“Just promise.”

“Fine. I promise.”

Chucky nods and closes his eyes until the medics come and take him on a stretcher and into the helicopter and they all disappear into the dull-copper sky. Then the rest of the convoy continues its loud, slow journey.

What happens that night is that Chucky dies.

A piece of shrapnel only about half an inch long and as thin as the straw on a juice box had clipped the artery feeding his liver, and by the time doctors figured it out he’d lost too much blood and was in full-blown acute liver failure. Baby Daddy is the one to tell them, the next day, right before going out in sector.

“Now forget about it,” he says when it becomes clear the news is going to interfere with their concentration on the upcoming patrol. “If the army wanted us to have emotions, they would have issued us some.”

And it’s a quiet and subdued and uneventful evening, and the whole time Bishop feels angry. Angry at Chucky’s senseless death and the f*ckers who planted that bomb, but also angry at Chucky, at Chucky’s cowardice, that he could never say what he needed to say to Julie Winterberry, that a man who could rush into dark rooms where people with machine guns wanted to kill him was unable to talk to a stupid girl. These two kinds of courage seem so different they ought to have separate words.

That night, he can’t sleep. He broods. His anger has twisted so that he is no longer angry at Chucky but rather angry at himself. Because he and Chucky are no different. Because Bishop has terrible things inside him that he cannot bring himself to tell anyone. The great evil secret of his life—sometimes it feels so big it’s like he needs a new inner organ to contain it. The secret sits inside him and devours him. It devours time and grows stronger as time passes, so that now when he thinks of it he cannot separate the event itself from his later revulsion of it.

What happened with the headmaster.

The man whom everyone revered and loved. The headmaster. Bishop loved him too, and when, in fifth grade, he picked Bishop for tutoring, for extra weekend lessons that absolutely had to be kept secret because the other boys would be jealous, it made ten-year-old Bishop feel so special and wanted. Picked out of the crowd. Admired and loved. And how he shudders at it now, years later, that he was so easily tricked, that he never questioned the headmaster, not even when he told Bishop that their lessons would be about what to do with girls, because all the boys were terrified of girls and didn’t know what to do with girls, and Bishop felt really lucky he had someone to show him. It started with photographs from magazines, men and women both, together, separate, nude. Then Polaroid pictures, then the headmaster suggesting they take Polaroids of each other. Bishop remembers only fragments, images, moments. The headmaster gently helped Bishop out of his clothes and still Bishop did not think this was wrong. He did everything willingly. He let the headmaster touch him, first with his hands, then with his mouth, afterward telling Bishop how wonderful and handsome and special he was. The headmaster saying, after a few months of this, Now you try it on me. The headmaster disrobing. The first time Bishop saw him, red and swollen and strongly persuasive. Bishop trying to do on the headmaster what the headmaster had done on him, and doing so awkwardly, clumsily. The headmaster getting frustrated and angry for the first time when Bishop’s teeth accidentally got involved, grabbing Bishop by the back of the head and thrusting and saying No, like this and later apologizing at the tears that arrived when Bishop’s gag reflex engaged. Bishop feeling like this was his fault. That he would practice and do it better next time. Then doing no better next time, nor the next time. One day the headmaster stopping him halfway through and turning him around and leaning over him and saying, We’ll have to do this the way adults do it. You’re an adult, right? And Bishop nodding his head because he didn’t want to be bad at this anymore, didn’t want the headmaster to be angry anymore, so when the headmaster positioned himself behind Bishop and pushed himself in, Bishop endured it.