Thad dreamed about waterboarding a man with diesel fuel. He dreamed this because it had happened. It was something he’d done. He was given a direct order and he poured the gas, and ever since, he’d tried to forget the smell and the sound of that man gagging and the way the fuel felt cold on his hands as he shook the metal can empty.
The man might’ve been thirty years old, though he could have just as easily been younger. Unlike most Afghani men, he did not wear a full beard. His dark face was patchy with hair and a scruffy mustache. Black hair draped the shoulders of his navy-blue thawb. Over the tunic he wore an olive-colored vest and on his head a Chitrali cap the same chestnut brown as his skin. He was kneeling in the middle of the road with a small trowel, like he might’ve been digging ramps when the patrol rounded a steep outcrop of sandstone. But that dirt merchant wasn’t digging anything out of the ground. He was burying something.
There was nothing more cowardly than burying IEDs and running into the mountains to play shepherd. If Thad’s patrol had come any later, it was likely the soldier whose boot found the trigger would have been killed and the rest would have been left to scour the ground for body parts to ship home.
They bound the man’s hands with zip cuffs and bagged his head in a black sack. Sergeant Spencer Lawing gave Thad the order. While one soldier held the man’s legs and another pinned his shoulders to the ground, Sergeant Lawing steadied the man’s head and told Thad to pour. The ANA interpreter shouted and Sergeant Lawing directed the questions and the man cried, and every time an answer didn’t suit the sergeant he simply hollered, “Gas!” and Thad would dump the diesel down the man’s throat. The can glugged and thumped, and Thad kept pouring until all twenty liters was emptied.
The part that was different in Thad’s dream was what came when the sergeant yanked the sack off the man’s head. Instead of finding that scraggly jihadi with his face greasy with fuel, everything was reversed and Thad was now the one being tortured. He could feel the gas in his eyes and coating his mouth and throat with a thick metallic taste. The smell stung his nose and he felt like he was suffocating. He was staring into daylight and it was hard to make out who was standing over him because his vision was blurred, but when that figure finally came clear it was Doug Dietz. It was Doug Dietz smiling down at him and Doug tossed the empty fuel can to the side and fished a lighter from his pocket. That was the moment Thad gasped and his eyes shot open and he slapped around the wetted ground to try and separate dream from reality.
Seconds passed before he realized what he had dreamed was not real, minutes more to realize where he was, and until those realizations came, he just lay there shivering in the cut bank with the shotgun clenched tightly in his hands. The rain had stopped sometime while he drifted in and out of sleep, but it was dark now. The creek had risen and lapped at his feet. Random split-second showers sounded when something high in the trees buckled and sprinkled water onto leaves below. He figured daylight was close because a titmouse kept calling from some hidden perch. He thought about how many times in his life he’d woken to the sound of that bird, and how he’d never once really thought about that fact until right then. He’d never heard it when he was on deployment. That place had its own birds with their own calls. This was a sound from where he’d grown up, a sound he’d known all his life. It only took something that simple for the world to solidify.
Once he realized where he was, Thad’s mind worked to remember how he’d gotten there. Ever since he’d come home there was always this washing around between the during and after, between here and there. He’d spent so long trying to build this separation so that he could navigate those two worlds, and suddenly he was back to where he’d started. All of it was mixed up and he couldn’t make sense.
The first image that came clearly was of Loretta Lynn, though it wasn’t how he and Aiden had found her. Rather it was when he watched the outline of her tiny body show through the blanket as he filled the grave and the shovelfuls of dirt weighed down the fabric around her. Something had seemed to happen at that exact moment on the hillside. Something had broken and the two worlds collided, and after that he could only make out fragments scattered about his mind like seed: the way a moth had patted its wings against his face as he stood by the porch light in front of the Dietzes’ trailer and nodded for Aiden to bust the door down; the way that trailer reeked of mildew and baby powder and sex when he cracked Doug Dietz in the skull and rained down on the back of Meredith’s head; the way Julie Dietz had this bright red lipstick smeared on her mouth, like she might’ve been sitting in her room playing dress-up when she poked around the corner with that bag of frozen corn niblets melting against her face; or the way Doug had woken up after Aiden left and how the veins in his neck looked like roots in the ground as he screamed against the gag. After that, things were less clear.
Thad tried to remember what came next, but it was blurry. After a few minutes, he recalled swinging the shotgun over Meredith’s back and centering the brass-bead sight between her shoulders, but nothing afterward. Everything was blank after that moment, just a long stretch of time that had been burned away like undeveloped film ripped into the light, all of the images, every frame, erased. What came next in his mind was the rain. He remembered being flat on his back on a giant rock in the gorge when the first drop hit his cheek. He remembered sitting up then and scanning the hillsides and realizing that he was alone. Then he remembered how he was almost to the dam when the sky opened up and a rain came that soaked him to the bone. The details were muddled, but he could remember everything after the dam, and that answered how he got to this place.
But how he came to sleep beneath the cut bank wasn’t what he needed to know. He was missing the important part of the story. Thad lay shivering for a long time, wet and cold, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not remember. He crawled out from under the bank, knelt by the stream, and cupped water to his mouth and drank, wiped it across his face to try and wake what little of his mind the drugs had yet to squander. He stood and stared downstream, wondering how long he’d been there and how much rain must’ve fallen to make the water rise. Hiking back would be harder than going farther, but he had to know. Thad simply had to know, and there was only one way to find out. So he headed downstream to find the place from where he’d come.
The sun wasn’t up, but the morning was cloudless except for a low-lying fog, and so the woods grew with light for a long time without the sun ever rising over the ridgeline and trees. The rain had made the stream high and off-color, though the lake being down left no need to open the gates at the dam and rush the gorge with overflow. Even with high water, the stream was less burdensome. There was no solid ground, just mud and rocks slick as owl shit, and Thad had already fallen three or four times to make his way back to the giant boulder he remembered lying across when the first raindrops slipped from the sky the morning before.
He knew he was almost there when he passed a creek bed that ran up a hillside, the moss-covered stones like the armored scales of some giant green reptile dormant on the slope. The place was shaky with the movement of ferns, bowed and hanging bracken lace that shuddered in the breath of early-morning fog.
When he saw the boulder angled over the river and the holes time had drilled into the stone, he knew that this was where he had been. Kneeling, he ran his hand across rough circles of lichen that seemed to have grown inseparable from granite.
As soon as he touched that place, what he had done hit him with the same horrible intensity as thoughts of killing that little girl. The line between good and evil was fine as frog hair, but at least what had happened to the girl was an act of war. Maybe what happened over there was a matter of survival, and when he thought about it for long enough after growing sweaty with guilt, he could slowly come to justify what he had done while he was deployed. When he woke up from nightmares, he could tell himself that he did what anyone would have done, and if he repeated that over and over to himself, he could eventually turn those memories into something he could live with. But the guilt he felt now was entirely different.
Thad felt like his body had been dredged in something he could not get off. That feeling was like working for days in a dust bowl with the sun cooking you alive and how your body just gets covered in dirt and sweat and how all of that seems to build into some weighted thing, a coating that hangs there and that you can’t help but feel cloaking you all the time, all of your attention focused on how you’re caked with it. Thad could hear what Aiden had said as he stood in the yard outside the Dietzes’ trailer. “You’re not going to be able to live with this,” Aiden had said. Those words now held meaning. All he wanted in this world was to wash that feeling away.