Thank You Mike McKenna

Thank you, Mike McKenna. You don’t remember but I am the kid you went to junior high school with. You know, the one with the horned-rimmed glasses taped in the middle. A bowtie hooked to the top of the shirt. The plastic protector in the pocket. The kid who shuffled to class with a briefcase. Yeah, that one. The goofball. The savant. The idiot. The one you whispered about and pointed at. The one who you snuck up behind and stuffed a towel smeared with feces halfway up my nostrils. “Hey, shit head, sniff this!” You laughed. I am that kid.

And now, lo and behold, we share the same pathetic 6 x 8 piece of shit concrete box in the middle of the Mississippi swamp. The Squids knew there isn’t a better spot for a POW camp anywhere. Between the blistering, suffocating relentless heat, the snakes and gators swimming feet from our noses, or even the prods strapped to the tri-ped legs of the guards, I don’t know which is worse. If you were healthy enough, I’d feed you to them. I’d delight in watching them tear you to pieces, bit by bit. Eat you, they would. Vaporize a hole in you, they could. Hell, I have dreams at night about how to kill you. And who would have thought that just because we both had names that started with “Mc.” Prisoner 249456 and 249455 tattooed on the forearm just to remind us. Who would know that I’d be saddled with you? Again.

This isn’t hell. It’s junior high school all over, shit face.

You are coughing again. Time for your medicine. The morphine and sucrose solution I had to bribe Laurel the squid (the one with the lazy eye) for about a week ago. Don’t pay it any thought. It was just a momentary lapse of weakness. Cost me my only Ray Bradbury. Should have kept the book and traded you for an extra MRE or two.

The fire ants have covered the bottle again. So, now Mr. McKenna, just so they don’t go down your throat and chew up the inside of your intestines, I gotta wipe them off the cap and the outside of the bottle. Then, I have to get you to raise up enough to pour a bit of this gook down your throat. Four times a day. Morning. Noon. Night. Remember old man Carson, the chem teacher? He would have told us that the ants are attracted to the sweetness of the compound, but that isn’t really true. Like everything else in this hellhole, they are starving. Gotta find a morsel of sugar anywhere you can, I guess. I think that they eat better than we do, you know that?

Pissy, the fat squid (who smells like urine) walks by with her cart of contra, and motions with her little tentacle for me to come over. She clucks out a sentence, mostly clicks followed by certain pauses or tones. She wants to know if I want anything. I don’t. I tell her I’m busy.

“You be nice. I give extra.” She tones.

A tentacle reaches toward my face, but I turn away before it lands. I can tell that the prospect of something indecent is exciting her. I know because black ink is starting to ooze from her pores.

I smile. Always best to grin when you tell them to go stuff themselves. I cluck back a phrase that basically means she should go have sex with her mother.

The squid language wasn’t that hard to master really. I’m a scientist by training, but when the War started, I signed up and they needed linguists. Like the idiot I am, I volunteered. And when Fort Polk got overrun by more squid that you’d want to see in a lifetime, I was forced to negotiate the surrender of nearly 1500 of us. Right now, there are about 336. Why? The squids don’t know how to keep the cells clean or patch up any kind of wound. Their understanding of human anatomy is about as crude as medicine in the dark ages. Hell, they don’t even know how to bathe so that everything doesn’t smell like rotting rancid fish. They are just nasty as hell.

“He be ok? Your lover?” she clucks. I just shake my head. Pissy, if you only knew. I turn back to the task at hand, giving morphine to the dying. I know that without medical attention, Mike McKenna won’t last more than a couple of days. Don’t you go and die on me, shit head. I got back to the task of attending my patient and pulled him up just enough to put the bottle near his swollen lips. I can see the sores and pussy bumps all over his chest, except for where his dog tags and a heart-shaped locket from his wife were laying against the skin. Everywhere else is red and inflamed. Blistering. Fire ants can sting like a mother when they bite. You have to keep your body clean of them as much as you can.

After a bit, Frenchie (the foreign legion grunt who was too stupid not to get captured) bangs on the wall between our cells. I see the fingers of his hand waving from the bars. He can barely reach the corner.

Lt. Davie…” he whispers. “Lt. Davie….”

I tell him the same thing I’d just told Pissy. Only in English, which I know he can understand.

“I got news, brother. You are definitely going to want to hear this…”

I’m intrigued. As the camp translator, I am usually the one delivering the news during rollcall. So, I get up to find out what little tidbit of gossip I might have missed. Frenchie knows I’m a sucker for information about the squids.

“What do you want, Frenchie?” he knows I am disgusted at him.

“It’s a prisoner swap, asshole.” He stammers, just blurting it out. “And you will never believe who’s made the cut.”

I wait. He pauses for effect. I hate that almost as much as I hate Mike McKenna.

“Guess.” Now, he just wants to play games.

I stay quiet.

“Lt. Davie, you there?”

“Yep.”

“It’s you. You made the cut, ami. You gettin’ out tomorrow 0600. Great news, huh?” Then, he asks me for McKennas MRE. “He’s too weak to eat it anyway, right?” I hand it to him, making sure I bang his fingers against the bars of the cell when I drop it into his outstretched hand.

Yes. Great news. For once, I can be free of you AND Mike McKenna at the same time, imagine that.

I turn back toward my cellmate. Damn, I hate you, right now. I whisper to myself. I put the cap back on the morphine and seal it under my pillow away from the prying eyes of the guards. They’ll beat you for contra and I know that a particularly nasty squid is about to make his rounds. I close my eyes. But the heat won’t let me sleep. I toss a couple of times, but no use. I’m going to have to kill myself, I guess.

I don’t know if it will work, but I begin to roll things over in my head. I do some of my best work when things are quiet and my brain is in overdrive. How about that, Mike McKenna. I was always the brain. You were just the brawn. And everybody knows it’s brain over brawn any day of the week. Shithead. So I get up, grab the bottle of medicine and grab Mike’s forearm. I glance down at the tatoo, and I pour the whole damn bottle right over it. Can’t let any go to waste. I try to catch the runoff and reapply it. I smeared it all over both our forearms. Even though it might absorb through the skin, I figure it doesn’t matter. Hell Mckenna, if the morphine doesn’t kill us, I imagine the ants will.

I lifted him up and grabbed the tag off his neck. I would need to give to his next of kin. I left the locket. After all I do have some decency for a dying man left. After the bottle was emptied, I tossed it in the corner behind the toilet and laid back down on my bunk.

I hate mornings. 0600 came too quickly. Pissy was back, along with Laurel and a squid I didn’t recognize. They had come to escort me to the heliport. I had learned from Frenchie earlier that there were only three names on the list. Three of ours for three of theirs. The squid I didn’t know had some kind of Ipad looking device in his hand. He looked at my tag, tapped out a sequence and shook his head. Then he pointed at McKenna, scanned his tag and nodded. Both Pissy and Laurel looked at each other. Laurel grabbed the Ipad from him and stared at it. One of his tentacles reached down to match the tatoo on McKenna’s forearm. 249456 or 45. Couldn’t really tell from all the blistering the fireants had done eating their supper the night before. Then he walked over to me and grabbed my forearm – same deal. Blisters and puss. You could barely read the numbers. I could hear them clucking out – confusion was becoming the order of the day. McKenna was wearing the tag of 249456 which just didn’t seem right. I had 249455 hanging around my neck.

The plan almost unraveled. Pissy tapped the squid in charge on his shoulder and motioned him toward the door. I couldn’t let that happen. I jumped up, blocked their way, and asked them to wait. I walked over to McKenna and reached down, grabbing the locket and I yanked as hard as I could. The chain broke. I offered it to Pissy, motioning that they needed to take the man on the cot with them.

“You take him.” I clucked. “You take and I give you this.” I could tell that all three of them were thinking. “Precious metal. Bring lots of good fortune.” I added. She shook her head. The locket dangled from my hand.

By this time, the squid in charge was growing impatient. He pointed at McKenna. Pissy and Laurel just picked him up and stumbled with him out of the cell. It was only a couple of minutes before they had rounded the corner and were out of sight.

I still hate you, Mike McKenna. I’m probably a dead man walking. When the squids find out I’ll be in the hotbox for sure. But hopefully by now, you are back across our lines and in a field hospital somewhere. Hopefully, the medics are treating your wounds and getting you the right stuff. And as you recover, I want you to think about this asshole. I want to think about the kid from junior high school who saved your stupid pathetic life. Thank you, Mike McKenna. Oh and by the way, I’m keeping the locket, shit head.