The Vulture
This story was originally published in Consequence, volume 13.
The war hadn’t changed him like it was supposed to — he didn’t wake up at night screaming, didn’t drink too much, didn’t think about mortality, didn’t “have his demons,” didn’t hate riding in cars, didn’t look for IEDs on the roadside, didn’t mind crowds, didn’t flinch at fireworks. War hadn’t changed him at all, which broke his damn heart because the whole reason he’d gone was so that it would.
Instead, life after war was much like the time before it. Captain Conrad Dixon chose a practical job in finance that deadened his soul but made him enough money to date pretty girls who smiled when he paid for their meals. He still went to church out of respect for his dead mother, even though he’d never believed in God, and he held his hand over his heart as expected when crowds sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at sporting events. He often thought about taking up guitar or painting or writing but never did.
Conrad shoved his uniform into the back of his closet, his dog tags lost somewhere at the bottom of his go bag. At parties, nobody asked him if he’d killed anyone (he hadn’t) or coaxed him into sharing deployment stories (his only good one involved a pack of feral cats that kept pissing on his bed). If he ever stared into space for too long, his steady girlfriend would murmur about PTSD, even though he’d told her the most traumatic thing he experienced in the Army was food poisoning.
He had no grand narrative that could explain the lack he felt. A lack of memory. Of violence. Of life. Were those things too much to ask for? And where could one find them if not in war?
All he wanted was one real conversation about what he hadn’t done Over There, even if the honesty left a sour taste in his mouth. Yet when the opportunity finally presented itself, he barely glimpsed its arrival.
It started with Dante Robinson, one of his dad’s old platoon sergeants in Iraq. Dante and Conrad’s father, Russell, weren’t friends exactly. More like acquaintances who had burned barrels of their collective shit but probably wouldn’t bother to attend each other’s funerals. The three of them were hanging around the hardware store, both D’s flickering on the Dante’s Depot sign out front. Conrad had dusty memories of grabbing a glass bottle of Faygo Redpop from the mini fridge and a paper bag of popcorn from the machine that still dutifully popped away in the corner. In those youthful days, Conrad had wanted to be — of all things — a truck driver. He’d imagined riding a metallic steed with nothing but the open road ahead of him, like a modern-day cowboy. Such romantic expectations never lived up to the reality, of course, but he still felt a tug in his chest whenever the image came to mind.
Now, with those yearnings behind him, Conrad leaned against the cashier counter, half-listening. Dante and Russell fell into reminiscing about gobbler hunting, back when the Robinsons lived on a farm.
“Haven’t even dusted off my shotgun in nearly ten years,” Russell said through a mouthful of overly buttered popcorn, spitting a kernel on the floor. It didn’t seem to bother Dante, but the habit made Conrad want to stick a kernel up his old man’s nose.
Dante swatted an imaginary fly. “A shit-shot like you should never have been allowed any kind of gun.”
“Least I didn’t trip and chip a tooth on my own gun,” Russell shot back. “Let’s get out there tomorrow. Conrad, how about you bring that musician friend of yours? Round out the group.”
“I’m not sure it’s really Paul’s thing,” Conrad replied flatly. Paul was the type of guy who fed squirrels in the park and dramatically addressed Russell as “sir” all the time, as if he were about to be led into a war zone. He’d once asked Paul why he’d never considered joining the military. Paul had tossed him a question back: “Why does it sound like joining is the default to you?” He hadn’t known how to answer that.
“We could teach him a thing or two,” Russell insisted.
Dante grinned, showing off a jagged incisor. “Two oldies and two goodies. No Fuss Russ over here will make sure nobody trips up. You know how he is.”
Calm under pressure was what Dante meant, like the time Conrad had eviscerated his elbow trying to do a rail flip on his skateboard as a kid, and his dad had simply said, “How about that?”
He texted Paul: What are your thoughts on turkeys?
In the morning, the four of them jumped into Dante’s truck and headed out to Big Walnut Creek, where the forest spread wide enough to fool you into thinking you’d left suburbia a state away, even though the nearest neighborhood could probably hear the gunshots. This early in spring, Dante said the jakes and toms would be strutting around in flocks, and the male turkey decoys were what would snag their attention most, since they’d be jonesing for a fight. It was all about the pecking order.
“Bought this land last year for a heck of a deal,” Dante shouted over his shoulder.
Conrad had gone hunting once or twice before, but he held little love for the sport. It wasn’t that he had any moral qualms about it. Rather, the waiting killed him. All that silence and waiting, silence and waiting. It was enough to drive a man mad with boredom.
During the war, he’d known monotony with an intimacy that bordered on obscene. A thousand hours spent in the TOC behind a radio, checking on the towers, writing reports. Cleaning weapons and vehicles with endless regularity. After working nights, he’d fall asleep in the middle of the day to the omnipresent sound of generators running and doors slamming. Sometimes he’d wake up to that same noise an hour and a half later, so exhausted when he’d fallen asleep that he hardly knew where he was when he woke, but eventually he’d drop off into the sleep of a dead man.
When his father described his own time in the Forever War, he spoke of IEDs hidden in mosques, night raids, a Black Hawk descending to take away the final words of a friend. He waxed on about riding along the well-worn streets of Erbil, through the city’s curious blend of modern and ancient, across the wide, green plain between the mountains. He said it was one of those empty places in the world that felt every bit as old as it was, a place with not even so much as a telephone pole to remind you it was the twenty-first century, and when you turned your head to spy a distant shepherd in his dishdasha, you realized the land looked just as it did when Abraham walked across it. His father hinted at, but did not discuss, the bodies he left in the sands and in crumbling houses, and the people whose lives he had a twisted power over.
Conrad glanced at his father. Even as his mutton chops grayed, he hadn’t lost the precision and purposefulness in his step. He matched his father’s stride as they walked deeper into the woods, past an abandoned hunting tower that hung lopsided halfway up an oak tree, the ladder barely clinging to the bark. The land dipped and rose in small wrinkles, ending at a cliff that overlooked a ravine, the water barely audible thirty feet below. Above them, the underside of a dark-feathered bird cut a hole in the sky.
While Dante and Russell held their shotguns with a calm readiness, Paul kept fumbling his, as if he were afraid of accidentally squeezing the trigger and shooting off his piano fingers, despite the safety being on.
“Having trouble?” Russell asked, and Conrad tried not to cringe on his friend’s behalf.
“Yes, sir. To be honest, I’ve only shot a gun once before.” Paul grinned sheepishly.
“We’ll whip you into shape quick enough,” Russell said. “I first started when I was a quarter of your age.”
“Ah, well, sir, I’m further down on the manliness meter than the rest of you.”
Russell shook his head, his expression serious. “You don’t become a man when you learn to shoot a gun. You become a man when you understand what it means to be given a gun to shoot. Ain’t that right, Conrad?”
Conrad looked around for a way to change the subject. His gaze homed in on a dark splotch in the ravine. “There’s something down there.”
“What’s that?” Russell asked, the words slurring together into a surprised single syllable. Conrad had already started jogging down the steep dirt path that led to the river. His curiosity overtook the desire for a distraction. He was certain he had found something new and yet unseen by human eyes.
Heart hammering, he approached the mass he’d sighted from a distance. It leaned against a peeling tree trunk. A dead deer, he might’ve thought at first, especially based on the hard-to-breathe rankness, but the unmistakable flash of blue told him otherwise. The man — or what was left of a man — wore a navy jacket, matching pants, and brown suede shoes, all dressed up for the special occasion. His attire made the gun in his lap seem entirely out of place.
It was the first time Conrad had witnessed a corpse up close. Overseas, he’d encountered carnage in person only once, when a rocket strike had obliterated someone’s living trailer, but then the soldier who’d died had been so far buried under twisted sheet metal and debris that the body was more in the mind than in the eye. The body had been theoretical, unreal, in a way — of course there was one there, but no one could see it. Here, he spied dirt under fingernails. An invisible thread pulled him nearer, and he found himself getting lost inside the man’s open mouth, the image of it so sharp it felt like he hadn’t been alive until he’d looked into that void.
“Jesus Christ.” Dante panted, coming up to him. The other two followed close behind. “Christ. What happened?”
“Oh, boy. What a way to go,” Russell said slowly. He walked past Conrad and inspected the body with a long glance, not even flinching.
Dante took a few steps back and jerked his head away. “You never get used to the smell.”
“I wonder how long he’s been here,” Paul murmured.
“Can’t have been all that long,” Dante said, then added softly, “Hey, Conrad, why don’t you look away now? You don’t want that burned into your brain. Trust me.”
“Yeah. I just — ” With a cough, Conrad quickly looked down to the man’s shoes. The sudden intensity he’d felt had dulled, replaced by an ache of shame, as if he were a teenager who’d gotten caught looking at dirty magazines.
“Well, at least it was a clean shot. Anybody got a signal?” Russell asked.
“I do, sir.” Paul waved his phone, one of the new kinds with a double-sided screen. He kept glancing between the gun in the man’s lap and the one in his other hand.
While Paul called 9–1–1, Russell kneeled beside the body. “What’re you doing?” Conrad asked.
“Searching for ID.”
“The police will do that. You probably shouldn’t touch anything. Just in case.”
“It won’t make a difference.” His father shimmied a wallet out of the man’s pants pocket and flipped it open. “Sorry to see you go, Jason, buddy. Wasn’t your best idea.”
There he was again. No Fuss Russ. Conrad couldn’t pinpoint what bothered him about the scene, but surely he should show indignation at his dad’s blasé attitude. Surely, this wasn’t how people reacted in the presence of the dead.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” Conrad blurted out.
He gave Conrad a befuddled look. “Son, I’m no stranger to death.”
“I know, but you’re acting like it doesn’t mean anything to mess with — ”
“It’s not like I’m the one who shot him. Sometimes these things happen, and some people aren’t equipped to deal with it.” He gestured over to Dante, who stood by the river, watching the water flow past. “But like it or not, the rest of us have to clean up the bodies. I’m only trying to find some humanity in all of this. Trying to keep myself sane. Didn’t you learn that during your time?”
“I don’t know what I was meant to learn from it,” Conrad said in a rush. “I don’t think I learned much of anything.”
His father scoffed. “It changes all of us, whether we like it or not.”
Paul stepped over to them, looking embarrassed, the phone pulled away from his ear. “They want to know which side of the river we’re on, sir. But I don’t actually know where we are.”
Russell stood and motioned for Paul to hand him the phone. He rattled off directions to the operator.
Paul turned to Conrad. “Crazy stuff. When I woke up this morning, I had a lot of disaster scenarios in mind, but not . . . You all right?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“You’re smiling.”
“Just had a funny thought,” Conrad said. How could he describe the hunger for a story worth telling? It seemed so twisted and depraved that it chased away any trace of satisfaction on his face.
Paul looked at Conrad for a moment, and Conrad sensed the unasked question. “I’m going to go check on Dante,” Paul said.
He jogged off to stand beside Dante at the riverbank, their conversation so quiet that Conrad couldn’t catch more than “okay” and “tough,” followed by a muffled sob from Dante. Paul’s hand rested on the older man’s shoulder, and Conrad turned away.
The rustle of feathers drew him back to Jason. Death itself alighted beside the body — a vulture with slick black plumage and an ashen head. Life twinkled in its dark eye, which was set deep into corrugated skin. Conrad’s father paced just beyond the bird, his back turned to it. The vulture seemed utterly indifferent to their presence as it craned its neck to peck at a piece of dangling flesh. Turkey vultures were skittish creatures. But black vultures like this one feared little, not even humans, roosting on rooftops, utility poles. Bodies.
Such birds traveled in flocks, yet there was no sign of its brethren. An outcast, then. Lost or sickly or despised. As the vulture’s beak stabbed at the man’s open throat, Conrad expected his stomach to churn and rebel, but instead that strange calm consumed him again. A sense of duty and purpose cleared him of all doubt. The enemy was attacking, and he had to fight back.
Conrad raised his gun, his finger steady. The timing seemed like serendipity, and if he were a religious man, he would’ve seen it as a sign, an invitation.
He fired.
The vulture exploded with a resounding report that spiked Conrad’s blood with energy and set his ears to ringing. He had been so focused on killing that he hadn’t seen his father pace past in the background until Russell let out an agonized cry. The shot had ripped open his jacket right below his shoulder.
“For fuckin’ fuck’s sake!” Russell clutched his left arm and hissed in a breath. Paul’s phone lay on the ground. He gaped at the dead vulture. “You — God! What’d you need to shoot the fucking bird for, huh?”
Conrad’s throat seized up like he’d just swallowed a rock. “I didn’t see you — ”
“Didn’t see me? I’ve had drunk-ass gunners make better rookie mistakes.”
Dante and Paul ran over during the commotion, flanking Conrad’s father. “Take your jacket off, Russ. I’ve got you covered.” Dante unzipped his hunting pack and pulled out a hefty first-aid kit.
“Shouldn’t we take him to the hospital, sir?” Paul asked, his voice surprisingly even.
“Let me take you, Dad.” Conrad knew the words were little consolation after what he’d done, but he couldn’t think of what else to say. His head buzzed with white noise.
“Somebody’s got to stay with . . . Jason here. Till the cops come.” Russell winced as Dante helped him shrug off his camo jacket. Beneath, red soaked through his long white T-shirt sleeve. The stench of new blood mingled with the old, a metallic tang that reminded Conrad of sniffing his hands after clutching swing-set chains in elementary school. The blood kept coming and coming. Dante cleaned the wound, not appraising the damage, and wrapped it in adhesive bandages until he ran out of the entire roll. In seconds, the pale material darkened with the blooming loss.
“I’ll stay and make sure he’s not here alone again.” Dante’s expression took on a shade of serenity. His cheeks were dry, his movements smooth. To Conrad, it seemed an entirely different man stood before them.
“Let me take you to the hospital,” Conrad repeated to his father, louder this time.
“What makes you think I want to spend another fucking minute with you, huh?” Russell turned to Dante. “Give me the keys to your truck, and I’ll be out of your hair.”
Dante handed him the keys in silence, and Conrad watched his dad amble up the side of the ravine and disappear into the forest. Paul wore a concerned look.
“Could you . . . ?” Conrad began.
“Yeah. That’s probably a good idea.” Paul gave him a half-smile, and Conrad couldn’t decide if it was filled with pity or empathy. His friend strode up the hill with his hands in his pockets.
After a few minutes, Dante spoke. “Your dad’s always been stubborn, even before the war.”
“I didn’t mean to do it,” Conrad whispered, trying to blink away the traitorous tears in his eyes. He felt like he’d shrunk, become a useless kid again.
“He’ll live. But I sure as hell won’t take your sorry ass hunting again.”
Conrad looked up at the sky. “Will you be okay here by yourself?”
“I’ve been through worse. Russ won’t like it if you — ” “I’ll walk. Give him time to . . . Give him space for a bit.” Conrad checked his phone. The hospital was only about a thirty-minute walk. It’d be faster by foot to follow the ravine to the adjoining neighborhood rather than go back through the woods. So, he walked.
He had no sense of time. A single image in his head blurred out all external stimuli: the vulture being there, then not there. That vanishing sensation reminded him of a dumb coin trick his dad would whip out at birthday parties. A penny placed on a black paddle would turn into a quarter when he flipped it back and forth. Then he would change the quarters back into pennies. Conrad never figured out how it worked, but what had bothered him was the way his dad always said, Watch, every time he did the trick, no matter how many times Conrad had seen it. He wouldn’t let him look away.
When he arrived at the ER, the doors opened for him with an automatic swish. Strangers dotted the waiting room. A woman sat with crutches leaned against her seat, and a man rocked back and forth in his chair, clutching his stomach. Conrad spotted his friend sitting beneath a framed photo of the Grand Canyon and took a seat beside him.
Quietly, Paul explained how Russell had already been admitted, after several attempts to convince Paul to drop him off at home instead, claiming he might as well grab a pair of tweezers and slap a Band-Aid on it for how much the hospital would charge him, but Paul kept driving. Paul seemed to think it was his duty to make Conrad feel less terrible about the whole thing, so Conrad accepted all the well-meaning platitudes, then told his friend to head home and vowed to buy him a drink later.
“You know, when I was talking to Dante by the river, he said that playing war was never really his thing,” Paul said before he left. “I didn’t really know what he meant by that — playing war.”
“It was his idea to go hunting.”
Paul shrugged. “Guess it’s easy to compartmentalize things. Like it’s less real when you’re here rather than away from home. Although that man seemed pretty real to him.”
Conrad couldn’t think of what to say.
“He told me about this soldier who wanted to become an Apache pilot so bad. He left the infantry and got accepted to flight school,” Paul continued. “Name was Sanford. Young guy, very religious. Two kids at home. Then, his first tour, he broke both of his legs and messed up his spine in a crash. Shot himself six months after he got home. Couldn’t take not being able to fly or walk again.” He gave Conrad a meaningful look. “I’m glad I’ve never had to go through anything like that.”
“Yeah, me too,” Conrad replied, and he wanted to mean it.
After Paul left and twenty minutes passed, Russell walked out of the emergency room. Conrad straightened in his chair the moment their eyes met. His father wavered on the threshold between the hallway and the waiting room before walking over. Phones rang at the reception desk, and a commercial for heartburn medication murmured from the TV overhead.
“I’m really sorry about all this.” Conrad kept his voice low, aware of the other people in the waiting room. “And I know ‘sorry’ doesn’t really cover it when someone’s shot you in the arm, but — I’m sorry.”
Russell sat down and rested his freshly bandaged arm on the armrest. “You missed my elbow.”
“I wasn’t aiming for it,” Conrad replied. “The vulture wanted to pick at him. I didn’t want that to happen.”
“Yeah, but even before all that, it seemed like you . . . ” He didn’t finish the thought, but Conrad guessed the blanks: Like you were hungry for something. Like you wanted to have no other choice.
He couldn’t express how part of him had long hoped that holding a gun in his hands would take him through the same painful sieve his father had endured and filter away the soft particles until only the coarse, pure parts of himself remained. But now the truth lay plain, like the bandages on his father’s arm. It didn’t mean anything, going to war, taking a life. It could mean nothing at all.
“I just thought things would be different when I came home. That I’d be different,” Conrad admitted. “It’s like I never even went to war. I don’t have any stories to tell. So when you asked me those questions . . .” He shrugged.
His father slumped forward with a sigh. “Your great-grandfather fought in WWII. Never had any war stories, even though he was at Iwo Jima. When I was younger, I thought maybe he didn’t want to talk about it. After going to war, I thought that maybe he didn’t have anything to talk about. And for me, it was a whole ’nother story.”
“Your leg of the war was different than mine was,” Conrad said matter-of-factly.
“Yeah, I forget that sometimes. It casts a long shadow.” His father closed his eyes. “I’ve seen men live and die, and whether they went out crying and screaming or in complete, stoic silence, they all came home in the same box. Death was everywhere you looked. That wakes a person up, in good ways and bad ones. And it’s all so un-fucking-believably tragic. Is that the kind of story you wanted?”
Conrad’s mouth went dry. He had wanted tragedy. He had wanted spectacle, gunfire, loss. To gain trauma and be trauma for someone else — to move the needle on the compass of the world in some infinitesimal way. To be nameless in a greater design that could make his life serve a purpose before the vulture came to roost on his shoulder, and he became carrion. But now he wanted to see his father’s wound stitched shut and hoped it wouldn’t leave too dark of a scar.
“You are different than before,” Russell said. “You’ve got this look on your face like you’re thinking about someone other than yourself for once. And that’s good. A man’s gotta think to know. Now come on, you owe me a nice steak dinner.”
They both stood, Conrad placing his hand on his father’s back. The doors opened for them, and they walked through, the pavement firm beneath their feet. Conrad took in the sharpness of the spring air and wondered what clothes the man in the ravine would wear for his burial.
