The Heart You Carry Home (12 page)

“She claims to be the only survivor,” I said and looked uneasily at the tree line.

Lai poured some of the liquid down Reno's throat. Then she scooped dirt into the remaining substance. When she'd formed a paste, she spread the thick brown stuff over his arm, shoulders, and chest. Reno's eyes fluttered, but he was barely conscious.

“Ask when he'll be better,” I said.

You complied and Lai answered, smearing a second layer of paste over Reno's arm. “She says by morning.”

“We'll take turns guarding her,” I said, surveying the tree line again.

“She's our prisoner?” You sounded alarmed.

“We can't let her wander off and bring back her gook friends, Willy.”

“She's not our enemy.”

For a moment, you and I just looked at each other. You were trying to tell me something, Willy, but I refused to listen. I was too proud, too hard. I considered myself a leader, a warrior. But I was the weak one. So very weak.

“We guard her,” I said and put King on first watch. “Over there.” I flicked my gun at Lai. She stood, seeming to understand what you did not, and moved toward the trunk of a nearby banyan tree. Then she sat cross-legged on the ground. “You keep that gun at the ready,” I told King. Clearly miserable, you sat down and pulled out
The Iliad
, which you'd cut into hundred-page chunks for easy transport and wrapped in scissored swaths of poncho to keep dry. It was almost cute, the way you'd done all that. But when you saw me smiling at you, you didn't smile back. You looked disappointed in me, your commander. It was an assault on the order of things; I was supposed to look at you like that. But why did I even care? You were a grunt, a pretty boy. I didn't expect you to make it through the week.

Currahee!

CO Proudfoot

H
OW ARE YOU
enjoying your first day on the road?” Reno asked. They'd spent the morning following a long, quiet highway into Wichita and were now eating sandwiches in a park beside the Arkansas River.

“I've been on the road for five days already,” Becca said, bristling. To her, it felt more like five months.

“Technically,” Reno said and balled up his sandwich wrapper. “But until now, you've been familiar with some part of each day—either the bed you woke up in or the bed you went to sleep in. Today, everything's new.” He snapped open a Coke and took a long sip, then added, “The road's not just a stretch of asphalt. It's a state of mind.”

“How philosophical.”

“Not philosophy, girl. Fact.”

“I thought you all like predictability, routine,” Becca said, nodding at her father. King lay a good twenty feet away, napping against a tree trunk. Still mad, he'd elected to eat his lunch alone.

“It's mostly true,” said Reno. “But on the bike, it's a different story. Eighteen-wheelers, bugs in my teeth, the worst Mother Nature can throw at me—I'll take it all. As long as I can have that feeling.”

“Which feeling is that?” she asked, impatiently eyeing her dad. It was not Reno she wanted to be having this conversation with.

“That everything's wide open. That I can just be. The feeling of nobody saying no. Your father, me, even Bull—we've had a lifetime of hearing no, of hearing we're not good enough.”

“I've already heard this lecture from Bull,” Becca said. “About how my generation is so entitled and we treat you all like crap.”

Reno shook his head. “I got nothing against you or your generation,” he said and seemed to really mean it. “But you know that I got spit on?”

Becca raised her eyebrows. She'd heard about this happening, but it seemed like such a cliché. “It's true,” Reno said, as though he'd read her thoughts. “I got off the plane in California—I'm in my uniform, of course—and there was this boy, about your age, I think. And here I am, back in the United States for the first time in a year, and all of a sudden a big loogie lands on my leg.”

“I would have gone apeshit.”

“I was jet-lagged, mentally and physically exhausted. So at first, I was just confused.”

Becca waited to hear more. At the very least, Reno must have cursed the kid out. Probably he'd taken a swing at him.

“I looked at him, but he couldn't bring himself to look at me. So I kept walking.”

“That's it? I don't believe it.”

“How do I explain this? I felt marked—and not just 'cause of the uniform. I wouldn't have been able to articulate it then, but I knew that for the rest of my life, I'd be either an object of people's hate or a source of their shame. I also realized that I wasn't going to get any kind of credit for the time I'd served, so I was going to pay myself what I was due. We fought for freedom, right? So that's what I claimed. My freedom is a piece of the road. Your daddy and I have talked about this. He'd say the same.”

Listening to Reno, Becca felt ashamed. When she thought about her father, she saw a man ruled by his emotions whose fury bulldozed through any kind of self-reflection. But this wasn't true at all. Kath had called the men children, but in fact they were grown. They might not be wise. They certainly weren't respected. But they'd worked tirelessly to clear the various and formidable roadblocks in their lives. That had to count for something.

After lunch, Becca walked along the Arkansas River toward a cable-stayed bridge, where a crowd of fanny-pack-wearing tourists snapped photos of a giant steel Indian. The thirty-foot-tall statue stood atop a rock promontory and reached its arms in supplication toward the sky. A sign said it was called the Keeper of the Plains, but for Becca, it brought to mind the invincible goddess Durga. She felt an urge to raise her arms high like the statue, as though the gesture could fill her with similar implacable strength.

The Keeper of the Plains faced east. Behind it stretched the rest of Kansas. And beyond that, the west. Becca felt herself at a threshold and saw the statue as a warning: Pass at your own peril. But unlike Durga, the Keeper was hardly invincible. What remained to be protected, with the Indians' entire history pillaged? Becca hurried back, worried the men might leave without her.

Kansas, she quickly discovered, was hell. The state was flat and hot. Hot and flat. Exactly the same forward and backward. The wind filled her head with its pounding, and her body ached from hours of sitting in the same position. Not even running the dreaded hour of power—sixty minutes sprinting up and down the stairs of her college's tallest building—had left her ass so sore. “Maybe if you had an ass to speak of, it wouldn't hurt so bad,” Reno joked when he saw her limping.

If only Becca could transfer her nonexistent ass to the luxurious Gold Wing, but King hadn't softened. Reno assured her that uncomfortable bikes were safer. He said the plains states worked a kind of hypnosis on bikers. The monotony might lull you to sleep or create mirages on the horizon. He claimed to know men who'd lost their minds riding after phantoms—beautiful women and wild buffalo. Clouds that resembled the gates of heaven.

Meanwhile, King's mood worsened. He raged about
The Iliad
disappearing from his saddlebag. He interrogated Reno and Bull. He'd even shouted at Becca: “What did you do with my book? Did Kath put you up to this?” Becca shook her head. She knew her father had a soft place for
The Iliad
. But to be
this
angry? She offered to call Kath and have her search the house. But he growled for her to stay out of his business. He spent the rest of the afternoon riding out ahead of the others. Whenever Reno's bike got even mildly close, King accelerated.

For the first time, she understood how Ben had felt, growing up with a father who had been there, but not really. So many nights, Ben told her, George Thompson would leave with his fiddle and not return until dawn. Even when he played in the house, he was distant; so far away, Ben said, as to be untouchable. When Becca asked why, Ben said he didn't know.

But didn't he?

When Ben was nine years old, his family had taken a trip to Colorado. Ben said he remembered camping out at a bluegrass festival. He remembered waking up in the middle of the night needing to pee and finding his mother asleep and his father missing. When he stepped outside of the tent, music wafted toward him from every direction, the sounds of fiddles and mandolins swirling in the flickering darkness. People laughed and stumbled by. Nobody seemed to notice him. As he searched for the bathroom, he saw musicians sprawled out in open-air living rooms. The whole place was a maze of colors and lights, fabulous and enchanting, and as Ben wandered, he realized he'd lost his way.

Then he heard a familiar melody. “Sally in the Garden.” Ben followed the notes like a trail of bread crumbs and entered a crowded tent lit by Christmas lights and the glowing nubs of cigarettes. Sure enough, sitting on a wooden bench between two other musicians was his dad. George Thompson's eyes were closed and he played his fiddle with furious energy. Behind him, a red-bearded man accompanied on the harmonica. The man was shorter than Ben's father and burlier, and Ben watched, mesmerized, as his hands fluttered across the holes, dexterous as wings. He'd seen this man before, he realized, in his father's hardware store. Years later, after his dad died, Ben would discover photographs of this man among his father's things, pictures from their time together in Vietnam.

Ben watched the red-haired man touch his dad's shoulder. He waited for the man to take his hand away, but it stayed, cupping the checkered print of his father's shirt.

“Are you lost?” A young woman with blond hair and sleepy eyes appeared before Ben. He glanced at the woman, then back at his dad. According to kid logic, his father's presence meant that Ben was no longer lost. And yet, he'd told Becca, he knew that he must pretend not to know his dad or his dad's friend. Which made him feel even more disoriented. He asked the woman where the bathrooms were. Then he ran.

George Thompson died when Ben was sixteen. “He was sick” was all Ben told her. But it was enough. She wanted to convince him that she would never judge. That she did not think like other people, and that even their own rigid culture was starting to change. But she sensed that Ben was still resolving things for himself. That it would be better for him to confess the complete truth on his own time. What mattered was that he was trying—doing his best to reveal to her this secret part of his life.

Ben never talked about why he'd taken up the fiddle, but Becca suspected that he was attempting to access his father, which he'd never been able to do in the man's lifetime. For all of Ben's talk about familial duty and a line of soldiers that stretched back to the Civil War, she guessed that he'd enlisted in the army for the same reason. He was searching for his father, much as she was searching for hers. King Keller and George Thompson could not have been more different. But they'd passed the same legacy on to their children: too many unanswered questions and the feeling that no matter how fast you scrambled along behind them, you'd never quite catch up.

T
HE MEN IN
Ben's platoon were superstitious. They kissed photographs of their wives and kids. They said a lucky number of Hail Marys before they left the command outpost. They chewed an even number of times on each side of their mouths and pissed standing on only one foot. One dumb bastard even refused to wash his socks. Ben told them that all of this was bunk. Save for knowing how to aim and not being extremely stupid, there wasn't much you could do to protect yourself.

Of course, Coleman was Ben's most vocal opponent. He advocated following what he called the movie rule: embrace the war-movie clichés and you'll avoid turning into one. “In war movies,” Coleman said, “it's always the guys who swap places with their buddies and say things like ‘Promise me you'll take care of Johnny if I don't come back' who bite it. If you want to avoid becoming that guy, then you've got to do the counterintuitive thing.”

“Which is?”

“Do
exactly
what the unlucky movie hero does. Offer to swap places with your friend and say the dumb, clichéd thing before you head out on patrol. It's like a wink to the universe:
I know your game
.”

“The universe isn't
aware
,” Ben argued.

“It's worked for me so far,” Coleman said. “I took Carlyle's slot on that mission last week and before I left, I said, ‘Carlyle, if I don't make it back today, I want you to give good head to my girlfriend for the rest of her life.' And, see, I came back alive. God willing, I will go home and the head will be forever given by me.”

A few days after this conversation, Ben's unit was sent out to patrol Ali's Alley. They called it Ali's Alley after an ex-girlfriend of one of the specialists; he'd come home from his first tour only to find his house cleared out, right down to the flat-screen TV. Ali (the girlfriend) had fucked that soldier over good. Which was exactly what happened when you drove patrol on Ali (the street). And still, the leadership routinely ordered patrols there. Like if the men proved their willingness to get blown up often enough, the local population would finally start to trust them.

On this particular day, Ben had woken up with a fever of 102, and the sergeant major had ordered him back to bed. He'd obeyed, half reluctant, half relieved, and was lying there aching when Coleman came in. “Fuck you for being sick, you bastard,” Coleman said. “I'm taking your place.” Ben groaned. His whole body felt stuck full of needles.