Dog Tags (33 page)

Authors: Stephen Becker

BOOK: Dog Tags

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Where do we walk? Into the night. How do we walk? Heads up and ready for trouble. (Jacob said nothing, but wept, and rent his garments, and grew small.) Life is a riddle and death is the only answer, and each man dies alone. (Carol raged and ached: “Now what? Now what?” She learned what widows learn: to go on.) Benny's journey took him the road of good and evil, which wizened to better or worse, as love and hate wizened to rue and scorn; he never solved the riddle, but he never quit the quest. (Joseph and Sarah survived.) Benny knew that the answer was unimportant, a mere ceasing, and only the riddle mattered, or the riddling, the seeking and straining, yes, the old word, the striving, the strength to say no, to hold out, to do justly and love mercy, to see your own sins in the sins of others, to resist the strong and succour the weak, and to love men and women and children, the whole miserable, selfish, cowardly, pullulating lot of them, with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy might, because then weeds beat scurvy! and Benny lives!

About the Author

Stephen Becker (1927â1999) was an American author, translator, and teacher whose published works include eleven novels and the English translations of Elie Wiesel's
The Town Behind the Wall
and AndrÃ© Malraux's
The Conquerors
. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and after serving in World War II, he graduated from Harvard University and studied in Peking and Paris, where he was friends with the novelist Richard Wright and learned French in part by reading detective novels. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Becker taught at numerous schools throughout the United States, including the University of Iowa, Bennington College, and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. His best-known works include
A Covenant with Death
(1965), which was adapted into a Warner Brothers film starring Gene Hackman and George Maharis;
When the War Is Over
(1969), a Civil War novel based on the true story of a teenage Confederate soldier executed more than a month after Lee's surrender; and the Far East trilogy of literary adventure novels:
The Chinese Bandit
(1975),
The Last Mandarin
(1979), and
The Blue-Eyed Shan
(1982).

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Cover design by Kat JK Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2692-5

This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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New York, NY 10014

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