The Golden Woodpecker

Isaac Smith
Craft Friction
#13
The Golden Woodpecker
We watch from afar, the lights, cracking, invisible. Our eyes closed and the heat from each blast pushing us back, just a bit. “It’s like surfing,” someone says, “or standing next to a freight train.” We’ve come from rural and urban ghettoes, from doublewides and mountain passes, from single mothers and marbled mansions, from mac and cheese and chicken teriyaki, from cakes and cookies and bare cupboards littered with mouse shit, from overbearing fathers to ghost papas and stepdads, from great vast expanses of silence and from the immense din of siblings and hungry dogs racing down dirty hallways. From everything piled into a garage sale: jeans frayed and weak in the crotch, books ear marked and unfinished, black graduation gowns folded in clear plastic, highchairs yellowed and cracked, cassette tapes with the white worded titles partially worn away.
Now we are in the war. “The shit” is what we like to call it, sometimes literally, sometimes sarcastically, and sometimes with great enthusiasm. “The shit! This is the shit!” We’ve had dreams, as children of being here, in this very place, with our baby cheeks pressed against the heat of battle. “It feels good doesn’t it? Like putting your face against the microwave while the potato pops and faintly sizzles.” But this is better, we all agree, silently to ourselves. Some of us get erections, in honor of the shit, the war, our prepubescent dreams of sweating in the jungle with death trying to dry hump us around every dip and turn. With erections we feel immortal and take each distant blast like a mini orgasm. We even hold hands with each other and laugh. We call each other gay and punch each other hard whenever the opportunity arises. Sometimes we even fall in love with each, muscled behind the softness of a glance and we cry with long letters home because we know nothing will be the same.
We point towards the explosions and say, “In a few hours we’ll be where those blasts are right now.” We feel ready like specialized rats, trained to maze through the distinct body memory procedures. Inside we might loose our shit but outside our body will surface and perform, like a refined dancer, spinning little shards of death. We all wear the same thing, called a battle dress uniform or b.d.u. for short. The same color- digicam, a series of squares with different shades of green and tan. Our clothes fit loosely around our arms and legs. We like the familiarity of knowing how we all feel with our b.d.u.’s on. The way they stick and cling to certain parts when the sun stands dead center and beats at our brains like a bloated golden woodpecker.
Sometimes we say weird things when we’ve been waiting a long time for orders. “Doesn’t the sun just look fuckable today?” “God I’d like to shoot one of those rat ass kids. Right in the head. Always begging for our water. What? Their country didn’t have water until we came? Fuck them and fuck their shit smelling country.” We joke a lot. It’s how we pass the time. We play with dead puppies, trap each other in the shitter, and take lots of pictures of corpses. Lots of pictures. They become our screensavers, our proud little psuedo-family photo albums. “This is maggot face Joe.” “This is headless bloated man.” “This is Crispy. Notice his big smile.” “Shit man he must had a good death.” “Yeah, maybe I should call him Crispy the Masturbating Clown.” We get letters from third graders in North Dakota who say, “Thank you for keeping America safe.” Usually they spell safe without the e and a few times they use a k instead of a c in America. We joke about sending them back a bunch of our corpse photos as a way of saying thank you. We all pretty much hate kids. American or otherwise. It’s because most of us are still kids ourselves. We misspell some of the same words as the third graders. The kids like to call us heroes in their letters but we don’t think about being heroes. Mostly we think about not getting shot in the dick. That’s a big fear among us all, getting shot in the dick would be the worse. Sometimes we have nightmares about getting shot in the dick. We wake up holding ourselves and whimpering about our dicks. “Is it missing?” We ask? “Shut up! You were just having a nightmare. You douche bag.”
We don’t give a fuck. We’ve come to kill the golden woodpecker and everything else. And at night when we are about to fall asleep we even admit, that we secretly fantasize about our own death. Death is righteous. “Death is the shit.” “Bam!” We point our fingers at each other and say, “Bam!” We pretend to be comfortable with death. We have words penciled under our breath for the moment when we expire (hopefully not from a shot in the dick). Simple words, like “fuck you death.” We can’t lose. And if we do, the flags go half staff and bullets will be wrapped in velvet boxes for our weeping mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, wives, children, pets, cousins, hometowns, first kisses, coaches, all the third graders in South Dakota and lastly our weapons. The metal we so seriously cuddled and babied when the world seemed completely crazy like anything could happen, anything, absolutely anything.
We always want to leave but we never want to leave the company of each other. Even the guys we call, “Retards” and “Semen Shots.” We are those men and in the end we all look up at the sun, the golden woodpecker and think, “It’s looking pretty fuckable today. Wouldn’t a say?” “Yeah.” The answer is always the same.