From Steve’s phone comes yet another collision of bowling pins. “Sheyit.” He kicks his feet once in frustration, messing up his sleeping bag. “Close as I’ll ever come,” he says to no one, and then, looking at JP, “If I’d picked up that spare, I would’ve beat my all-time high score.”
JP rolls up onto his elbow. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” says Steve, defensively. “Go a turn?”
“Naw, I’m not much of a bowler.”
“Got Call of Duty on here, too,” says Steve.
JP throws one end of his sleeping bag over his shoulder and turns to his side, showing Steve his back. “That’s not really my thing either,” he says.
Now the only sound is Steve breathing through his nose, which sounds to JP like a roaring fire fed by a bellows. JP shuts his eyes tight. Here and there the logs in the stove pop. He forgets about Steve’s breathing and waits anxiously for each pop. The harder he tries to relax and sleep, the more difficult it becomes. There is a tumbling noise, the fire collapsing on itself. JP opens one eye, the eyebrow bending high up on his forehead like a spider’s leg. Steve takes off his shirt and drops his jeans, stepping out of them with high knees, like a child, the cuffs catching around his feet. For a moment he stands in his white Jockeys, baggy in the back but too tight around a waist that already holds an inner tube of middle-aged fat. Balling his jeans and shirt into a pillow, Steve climbs into his sleeping bag. JP waits to hear something, but there’s nothing. He drifts slowly. Tomorrow Steve will take him somewhere to hunt.
In a tree outside, a rustling heavier than wind. Then, in less than a moment, something thumps against the side of the lodge.
JP shoots up from his bag. “What the fuck was that?”
Steve rolls over. “Harrier, I bet. They eat the field mice.” He pulls a tin of Copenhagen from the pocket of his jeans-pillow and fingers a fresh wad into his lower lip. The index finger of his other hand flicks at its screen and the lodge fills with the noise of crashing bowling pins.
JP holds Steve in a mean stare.
Steve smiles, his lips and teeth slickly coppered with tobacco. He turns back to his phone and begins the next frame, but not before muting the volume.
*
The fire goes out some time in the night and in the morning JP wakes up alone, in light made milky by the smoke leaking from the stove. JP looks through the lodge’s only window. The glass, melted with age, thickens along the crossbeam of each pane, strangely bending the view outside. JP can see the tree where the harrier perched the night before, a tall ash. Through the glass, the trunk appears to bow inward at the center, as though it were a toothpick holding up full branches, its thick roots spilling out below, where they bend back up from the earth. The tree looks sick.
On the floor next to JP is Steve’s sleeping bag, mussed into a ball. JP dresses, rolls his own sleeping bag up tightly, and straps it to the top of his rucksack which sits in the corner of the lodge, along with his rifle, a Remington 700.
From his pack he takes out a coffee pot, a vintage steel percolator, and pours grounds in the top chamber, filling the bottom chamber with two cups of water from his canteen. JP has taken this pot on three deployments and the steel is stained darkly from many fires. He stokes up the stove and sits the pot on a bed of embers. The water boils, its rumble heavy in the quiet, and the room soon fills with a pleasant coffee smell. JP pours himself a cup and leaves the other cup in the pot, warming next to the stove, saving it for Steve. He’s used to splitting the pot.
He rests his cup on the planks of the floor. They are cold from the night. Then he brings over the Remington, still in the soft-padded nylon case that he hasn’t unzipped in days. It isn’t even his rifle. Carlos bought it after their first deployment together. He’d told JP he had something “righteous” to show him. The two walked out to the battalion’s parking lot and when they got to Carlos’s car, a Honda, cheap in every way except for its sound system, the rifle sat propped up in the passenger seat like one of those inflatable mannequins people buy so they can drive in the HOV lane.
Elliot Ackerman, author of the novel Green on Blue, served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. A former White House Fellow, his essays and fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and Ecotone. He lives in Istanbul, where he writes on the Syrian Civil War.