Coop looked at the animal in the distance. Then back at the humvee. “Ride the fucking horse,” said Coop.
“Into the sunset,” said the sergeant. “Greely says his Skittles for a month.”
“And if the horse goes boom, I get what?” said Coop.
“The unending admiration of a grateful nation.”
“What about my Skittles?”
“Coop, I will personally present them to your widow.”
“Fuck her,” said Coop. “I want the Skittles buried with me.”
Over the radio came a burst of cackles. Coop reholstered the handheld in his MOLLE harness, the squawks of laughter making him aware of his own unsmiling face. I’m sorry, he thought, looking down at his boots, cold grit blowing against his face. I didn’t mean that thing about fuck you.
“Drive on, hero, drive on,” said the radio. “And here’s some shit for your listening enjoyment.”
Coop sniffed and headed off again, the mariachi music blaring around him.
They’d sighted the horse at dawn, only minutes after Coop’s convoy left FOB Snakebite. There were no towns within miles of the base. Just empty ruins, sketched under the shadows of the Sulaiman Mountains, whose vast and gauzy angles reminded Coop of a crumpled poncho. Martian desert spread endlessly west, bisected by a thin scrape of highway heading up-country to Bagram, along which the convoy would soon be traveling. And tied up along this same road, the mysterious horse. The wind had been picking up since dawn, and now the mission was on hold, waiting for a weather report. In the meantime, Captain Lee, the convoy leader, had suggested that the sapper team—consisting of Anaya, Coop, and Greely—might go investigate the animal and determine whether it constituted a mission-critical threat.
Coop had volunteered for the long walk. His solo approach was loosely informed by tactical dogma (avoid scenarios where more than one sapper could get killed in the same blast), but mostly he’d wanted a few moments to himself, away from the others. Only now Coop found his desire for solitude fading with every step.
All around him the earth had been burrowed and turned over, as if packs of wild dogs had gone digging for the bones of old wars. The excavations were the work of his colleagues, engineers on route clearance, who went out every day in big armored diggers, tractoring for land mines. If Coop had been a few degrees less hooah, this is how he would have spent the war. Instead he’d been loaned out to the infantry as part of a sapper detachment, his job to find hidden munitions in a country where there were more bombs than people.
* * *
—
As Coop walked he occasionally caught an angry red flare in his periphery; painted rocks flashing at him from the desert. The red rocks were an international warning symbol used for tagging minefields. Coop avoided looking at them. It was like ants on the ground, you noticed one and then suddenly the rest came wriggling into view. There were hundreds of rocks out there and despite his best efforts Coop imagined them swarming, surrounding him, causing an eruption of itchiness under his kevlar vest.
Coop tried to distract himself by making a scene of it, imagining the way he’d describe all this for Kay. The horse, still a figurine in the distance, standing alone on the cracked band of tar, Anaya’s music coming out of his radio. And all around him the raw desert permeated with land mines. The last three months he’d found himself doing this: everything he saw and thought and said and felt, it all got processed in terms of how he’d tell it to Kay. It made him feel better, a connection between his present circumstances and the imagined future when he got to see his wife again.
The horse was closer now. Coop could see it was hitched to a post, just standing there, swishing its tail. A few hundred paces and he’d be there, except there was still no way of telling whether the horse was some kind of trap.
The safest thing, he reasoned, would be to go back for his protective MOPP gear. Coop imagined how his teammates would react, laughing their asses off as he got dressed up for a chemical-nuclear apocalypse, all to go check out a horse. But then his imagination countered with a more ominous vision: Greely and Anaya at the Sports USA off Reilly Road, sharing a pitcher, commiserating in their disheveled Class A’s after Coop’s funeral. Sergeant Anaya would say: “Fucking tragic, man. What was Coop thinking?” And Greely, the FNG, would nod in solemn agreement. “You gotta MOPP up,” he’d say, slurping his Budweiser with the affect of a melancholy old-timer. The image made Coop pause on the road. He couldn’t abide the notion of his death becoming fodder for the new guy’s posturing.
While Coop was considering his options he felt the air began to change. Reflexively he ducked as a crackling wall of noise came tumbling over the floodplain, followed by a cold gust of sand.
“Clouds forming up,” said Sergeant Anaya from the radio. “Might want to get back here, you don’t want to get wet. Over.”
This was the contradiction of his training, that he should cultivate an instinct for hidden ordnance—vessels with enough power to rip a person to pieces and scatter them over hundreds of yards—and then overcome his body’s alarms, the chemicals that told him to flee.
“Out,” said Coop, and decided, Fuck it.
He lumbered forward in a jostle of gear, swimming in his sweat, heat escaping his mouth in rapid breaths, just like the snorting animal in front of him.
Coop had never seen a horse up close before. This one was white with gray and pink splotches. Its eyes stared forward, or to the side; Coop couldn’t tell. The horse’s ribs heaved massively, suspended in a carriage of muscle.
The two of them were alone together in the desert. Coop came closer and the horse bowed its head toward the ground. Then it charged, shooting out to where the rope snagged, the horse twisting into a circular run while thrashing its head against the leash, one eye aimed wildly at the mountains.
“Whoa there,” Coop said, because that’s what people in movies said to horses. And now he was trapped in the circumference of its gallop. The rope was closing fast. Coop ducked, but not before it twanged across his kevlar helmet. The horse reared and made another lap, and soon the leash was coming around again. Drawing his bayonet, Coop swashbuckled the line.
The horse broke free but then slowed to a stop, pausing nearby. Coop put away the knife, panting. He felt he could smell the hot life of the animal, its big, blood-filled heart. Left out along the road like an offering. He wanted to cross the distance between himself and the horse, wanted to put a hand to its dusty flank; not for himself and definitely not for Greely or Anaya or any quantity of Skittles, but for Kay; so this moment could be part of the story he’d tell her. Coop liked to think she would be moved by the danger of this place, the gentle courage he showed while navigating the bomb-strewn terrain. The way he did little things, like saving this fucking horse. And through the story Kay would know the goodness within him, and that would matter more to her than their fights, more than the constant lure of her family, more than the wars and all the other forces that had pulled them apart.