The Best American Short Stories 2015 by T. Coraghessan Boyle
Someone is telling the story of how Wild Turkey got his name. Wild Turkey can’t see who it is speaking, but it doesn’t really matter as the story is now collective, accessed by anyone on the team, each small contortion of detail sponsored by the men’s own willingness.
It was back in Carolina, before the team was strictly assembled, when they were all still loosely gathered at the base, waiting to be repurposed. It was the day before Thanksgiving and the commander in charge of the base had a vaguely sadistic obsession with getting the men prepared for the Suck, high concern over the lack of regulatory discipline et cetera, and so had ordered for the men no Thanksgiving meal, and had replaced that order with several shipments of turkey and mashed potato and cranberry sauce MREs, which were dried out, reconstituted, et cetera et cetera, and so Wild Turkey (though he wasn’t called that yet) had gone prowling during one of the exercises in the golden leaves of the fall woods, and gotten God’s Grace to go with him.
God’s Grace was Bob Grace, a gentle-faced, soft-spoken man from Tennessee, eventually included on the team mostly for his perfect marksmanship. He was religious, though very passive about it, and ended up being God’s Grace because he often said “God’s grace,” in a kind of summarizing way, when he saw something that made him feel like speaking. Later, Wild Turkey would see God’s Grace get shot through the neck while their vehicle was stalled in traffic at an intersection in Tikrit. This day, though, God’s Grace stood calmly at the tree line as Wild Turkey crawled forward slowly over the rural highway, which they weren’t supposed to cross.
“So Wild Turkey’s out there, doing this dumbass crab-crawl across the highway because just on the other side what has he seen but three fat old birds, turkeys, wild turkeys, rooting around there in the ditch on the other side of the road and this is a no discharge drill and Wild Turkey’s got long underwear on beneath his gear and hasn’t brought his knife, so he’s going to God knows what—wring their necks, or whatever, but only if he can get close enough to grab one of them. Anyway, good old Wild Turkey hears a sound and must be real hungry or maybe just a pussy because he spooks and takes off sprinting at the birds, who of course just completely lose their fucking shit. We’re watching this all on the helmet cam back at the comms camp, laughing our fucking asses off.”
“So what happens?” one of doctors, a bald little man with glasses, asks.
“They fucking scatter, is what happens, because Wild Turkey’s a fucking idiot. You can’t chase down a turkey. And so we’re all on the line in his earpiece, giving him all this shit about it and what happens just at that exact moment but a semi comes tearing around the corner of this bumfuck nowhere little road and almost kills Wild Turkey, who dives out of the way, only to find, when he gets up, that the fucking semi has taken three of the birds’ heads clean off.”
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 with one hand.
“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 his 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 who 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. Oftentimes 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 grew up together only 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 this own manner of unfeeling calculation as to down which road salvation, et cetera, 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 which 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 pl
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 middle-ground 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.
Wild Turkey wakes up in the desert. He’s in a slight body-shaped depression at the base of a mud wall, over the edge of which sits the fake village. This is a training exercise, the last preparation for the grab team before they go over to the Shit. They are in Arizona. Wild Turkey lies still, listening to the grumbling of the other guys on the team, and watches the mud ruins (fake? real?) seep with the grays and blue of the thin winter sunset.
Sometime before zero dark, Wild Turkey stands paused in his position in the team’s tactical column, lined up against the exterior wall of one of the village houses. Inside he can hear the muted noise of a radio. In a minute, at the first man’s signal (two consecutive toneless blips of static on the radio earpiece) the men will go into their suite of motion, so practiced and efficient and many-parted as to seem almost balletic. Wild Turkey, who is the DIA officer attached to the team (which really just means he is responsible for the confirmed identification of team extraction targets), breathes in the quiet, in the dark. He closes his eyes and thinks through what is about to happen, the steps so familiar, mechanical, though less in the way of machines than of soul-hollowing boredom. This is why these men were chosen for the grab team, Wild Turkey has often reflected in these moments: because they will do this with perfect disinterest, not keyed up, not even eager in the way of the adrenalized army kids.
But what Wild Turkey thinks of now in the eternal moments before the twin blips throw the night into action is where he is standing, is the fake village, meant to be a simulation but really more of a simulacrum, a psychological agent at play in the men’s imaginations. It’s all an effort, really, at making their imagination of what they will soon face in Iraq “more real,” if such a thing makes sense, Wild Turkey thinks. As if anything could be more or less real than anything else, as if all reality isn’t contained in every instance of it, this desert being very apropos of all this in that it really is indistinguishable from the Iraqi desert (though Wild Turkey will only confirm this later) and so contains that other reality, or is contiguous to that other reality. The real desert and the village and the specific house that this one is meant to represent is actually just a double, a repetition. He’s had a lot of time to think about it.
Wild Turkey has often been overcome by this sense during their operations in the fake village—this feeling that the real Iraqi village/desert/target house is actually very close by, maybe over the next ridge, and that it is or will be the exact twin of this village. The feeling has spread until Wild Turkey hears two sounds in every one fake mortar explosion or real explosion of blank assault rifle rounds: the exercise’s sound and, somewhere behind it, the real one. In a way, this should serve the military’s purpose in making the fake village seem more “real” but has instead only emphasized the surrealism of the entire exercise. He wonders when they are actually there, if it will seem finally real. This is what he thinks about, in all the time they have to hurry up and wait, and think.
This is all made worse by the tasks they’ve been assigned so far in their time in the fake village here in the desert in Arizona. It’s a full exercise, meaning as close an acting-out of real operating procedure as they can possibly undertake without actually being in the Shit. The unit was dropped off kilometers from the village. They approached by night. For a week they’ve been calmly doing reconnaissance on the fake village, on its real inhabitants. Wild Turkey has watched through special optics fat middle-aged men take their tea, slurping it from saucers, has logged the arrival and departure from the water source (a nearby well) of women in flowing fabrics that are given form by the wind. He’s listened on his headset to conversations within the crumbling walls of the low houses, his half-learned Arabic lagging behind, keying into family names, locations, et cetera. It’s all very authentic.
It’s these people that get to him, as Wild Turkey now shifts uncomfortably against the wall, waiting for the signal. The crushing irony of their physical existence here: they are real Iraqi villagers paid to play Iraqi villagers in America; immigrants from Iraq given asylum and money to come to this other desert and this other village and play themselves. They are given whole complicated psychological profiles to enact, Wild Turkey knows; they each have a role and a set of actions or conversations to complete at predetermined points. They each will behave differently when threatened. They are paid for the performance of reality, for the performance of their identities rather than for their identities themselves. It is all very thorough.
Two nights ago, Wild Turkey watched two of the younger subjects, masked by red kaffiyehs, drag one of the “local politicians” out into the square and videotape themselves staging an execution. The grab team received this video on their digital comms link the next morning, though it wasn’t the same video as the one taken below, in the fake village, Wild Turkey could tell. He doesn’t know if he was supposed to notice this or not, and has decided now it was a real video of a real execution, something scrounged from a dark corner of the Internet.
The whole thing has worked by approximation, which Wild Turkey will especially think later, after Ramadi. Later, actual reality (Wild Turkey crouched in the tactical column outside the actual house in actual Ramadi) will seem also like an approximation of experience somehow, the distance between what happens (as Wild Turkey hears the two blips and rises into action, then later, as the tactical phosphorous strobe breaks the night and the vision of the house’s interior into its discrete pulses of scene) and the “real” experience (even then, something slightly Else or Other, as if there is yet another house, the real target, just over the next rise in Ramadi) making his own feelings seem like an exercise too.
Now, however, on this night, with this crowning exercise, something real will occur, Wild Turkey thinks. Someone really will get identified, then grabbed, t
In his ear, Wild Turkey hears the two blasts of static.
Wild Turkey wakes up. Tow Head is driving, drumming his fingers on the wheel, staring straight ahead and humming something that is not the song playing tinnily on the radio as the ancient pickup jounces around on the country road. It is January and so cold the air is almost completely thinned out, knife-edged in Wild Turkey’s nostrils and mouth. Tow Head picked him up from the crumbling duplex very early this morning, before first light, and Wild Turkey is coming down, the brutal sobriety of the air helping out.
Tow Head is excited to go shooting at the unofficial range they are now bouncing and fishtailing toward. He’s excited about his new gun, the reissued, remade World War II rifle that, in its combination of antique design and modern mechanics, is a sort of simulation of itself, giving Tow Head both of the experiences he seems to want: the struggle of a marksman in Normandy in 1944 and the smooth riflery of all the advances made since.