The Heart You Carry Home (9 page)

King halted, looked back. “I know you and Ben had a fight, but if you two really love each other then I'm sure—”

But King stopped talking midsentence because Becca had pulled up her T-shirt. She did not glance down. She was already familiar with the sight: it looked as though Ben had tried to wring her out like a rag.

The trio on the porch—Kath had joined Reno and Bull—cast their eyes away. King looked stunned, his mouth slack. Quietly he said, “I'm so sorry, Becca. I don't know what to say.”

“Say you want to kill him!” Becca screamed. “Say you can't believe my
husband
did this to me. Say you want to take me as far away from him as you possibly can!”

But why would he take up her crusade? They were barely more than strangers to each other—which was precisely why she'd vowed to expect nothing from him. And yet she could not take her own advice. Her brain and her gut were working at cross-purposes, slowing her down.
Momentum, Becca,
she thought.
Momentum.
She turned from her father and took off down the mountain at a sprint.

Dinner that night was tense. Bull hid behind a phalanx of beer cans. Reno leaned back in his chair like an apathetic teenager, and King affected a forced normalcy, as though nothing much had happened. Eventually Kath stomped down to her metal shop. Becca took this as her cue to stomp upstairs to her bedroom.

Many hours later, insistent voices roused her from sleep.

“Everything will not be fine, and you know it.” Her aunt's voice was uncharacteristically bitter. “If you insist on going through with this nonsense, then you've got to at least let her in. Leave her with something she can keep. That girl's on the verge of losing everything. And if you think her mother's going to step in once you depart, then you're a fool.”

Becca didn't know what nonsense her father was involved in or what her mother had to do with anything, but it hurt to hear her life discussed like this. She was just starting to sneak out of the room when King's words froze her still.

“Jeanine came to the wedding,” her father said.

Aunt Kath gasped. “What?”

“Too much pride, that woman. She said she didn't approve of the marriage—of Becca yoking herself to the military and all that—but in the end, she couldn't stay away.”

“She came because she knew
you'd
be there, more like.”

“She knows there's no chance of us—”

“You just go around breaking everyone's heart, big brother. Your wife's, your daughter's. It's a wonder that Elaine—”

“Enough!” King growled. “We're done talking.” He stomped down the stairs.

Becca shrank away from the door and into the dark of her room. Had her mother really been at the wedding, hiding in the shadows? It was confusing and sad and Becca just didn't want to think about it. But she also didn't want to think about this other thing that her aunt seemed to be suggesting—that her mother was somehow hung up on her father. It couldn't be true. Jeanine had kicked King out. She
hated
him. It made no sense.

Becca crawled back into bed. Stumbling into her family's past was not part of her escape plan. She needed to keep moving forward. Running, after all, was what she did best. And running was a solitary activity.

B
EN DROVE WEST
from Sparta at ninety miles an hour. He could not retreat, not from his wife and not from the war. The former was beautiful and the latter was hideous. Logically, they should repel each other, like two positive charges. But they lived together inside of him, fused like Siamese twins.

An hour outside Dry Hills, Ben came to the exit for Pretoria, Becca's college town, and, as though some external force were guiding him, he followed the signs to campus. He parked and, still being led along by powers unseen, entered the cloistered college green. He told himself that he was traversing the campus only to get lunch, but he soon found himself drifting off course, moving toward Frederickson Hall, where he and Becca had first met.

Ben had come to campus in the fall of 2006, a few months after his first tour had ended, as part of an army recruiting team. Generally, such positions went to career soldiers in their early thirties, but Ben was distinguished. He'd made sergeant at an almost unprecedented speed, and his commander at Fort Campbell prided himself on creative thinking. Which in this case meant sending a soldier who was not much older than college students to help recruit college students. Ben wasn't thrilled about the position. Anyone with the motivation and smarts for college would obviously prefer to lug around sixty pounds of textbooks than the equivalent weight in body armor. Ben decided that since he was being forced to play car salesman, he'd insist on a decent commission. Having never attended college himself, he requested permission to audit a class.

The commander acquiesced on the condition that Ben choose a subject related to his recruiting effort. And that's how Ben ended up in Literature and Film of War, a seminar the commander thought would attract army-friendly students. Ben knew this assumption was way off base, but he couldn't argue. Sure enough, the students arrived on the first day sporting Free Palestine patches and buttons that read
Bush, the Fascist Gun in the West
. The syllabus, meanwhile, displayed its own bias, filled as it was with Graves, Remarque, Kubrick, and Coppola. Still, Ben settled in. He'd asked for this.

On the last day of registration, a new girl arrived. Ben liked the way her jeans molded to her muscular quadriceps. He liked her large, challenging eyes and delicate chin. As she sized up the other students, he saw the fierceness in her face dim to circumspection before blazing forth with double brightness. Ben realized that he'd witnessed a moment of vulnerability, and that it was rare for her. He was smitten.

The girl's name was Becca and she kept to herself. The others were vocal; highly critical of war, eager to “support the troops” (whatever that meant), and indignant about the recruiters on campus. One of them, a girl named Leah, was even trying to get the recruiters kicked out. Ben found his classmates' ignorance and smugness infuriating. They'd all walked within inches of the recruitment table and never even looked at him. To them, he was almost invisible, nothing more than a uniform, a symbol.

A few weeks in, Leah volunteered to read aloud from a story she'd written. The piece featured a Vietnam vet who refused to acknowledge that the war had ruined his life. It was only after befriending a young antiwar protester that he faced facts. “If only I'd run when I had the chance,” said the vet in the story. “Now I know I fought for nothing, killed for nothing.”

Ben listened, and he boiled. Who was this girl to claim that she knew why anyone had fought or what someone had gained or lost in the process? As he tried to gauge the others' reactions, he noticed Becca's mouth tightening. Then, to his astonishment, he watched her hand go up.

“Do you know any Vietnam vets?” she asked before the professor had a chance to call on her. It was the first time Ben had heard her speak. Her voice was deeper than he'd expected based on her size.

“I've been to plenty of rallies,” Leah said.

“But you don't actually know anyone? Personally, I mean.” Becca was perfectly calm. There was nothing overtly aggressive in her voice. And yet.

“Does it matter?” Leah shrugged.

“Well, I don't think it's right for you to act as if you know what other people are thinking.”

“And you're an expert?” Leah said.

“My father was in Vietnam. So, yeah, I guess I know something about it.”

Hearing this, Ben felt his annoyance toward Leah vanish. Let her float inside her self-righteous little bubble. She would not be a party to his future. But Becca, he now knew, would. Ben's own father had served two tours in Southeast Asia between 1969 and 1971.
Thank you, Dad,
Ben thought as his heart swelled.
Thank you for this gift.

Class ended and Becca booked out of the room. By the time Ben caught up with her, she was on the front steps of Frederickson Hall engaged in a heated argument with Leah, who had half a dozen people, mostly her compatriots from class, standing behind her in a blockade. They seemed to be one body: a giant Goliath staring down the diminutive David.

“I'm terribly sorry that your family was screwed over by the war,” Leah said. “But anyone with half a conscience would have gone to Canada.”

“You'd do that?” Becca smirked. “If it were you? You'd give up your home and your rich parents who buy you whatever your ungrateful heart desires and go live in
Canada?
”

Even from where he stood, Ben could feel the air around the group change, and he started down the steps, pulled forward by a feeling honed by months of training and patrolling.

“I'd leave in a heartbeat. It's been forty years and we're
still
at war,” Leah retorted. “Jesus, I feel sorry for you.” And then, under her breath: “Brainwashed hick.”

Becca's shoulder muscles tensed and she shifted her weight in a way that told Ben exactly what was coming. The silent, beautiful, indignant Becca was about to punch Leah in the face.

“Hey!” he said jovially, jogging over. “What's going on?” The girls fell silent and looked at him, annoyed.

“What do you want?” Leah snapped. She seemed eager to get back to her tirade, oblivious to the fact that Ben had just saved her from a bloody nose.

Ben glanced at Becca, who observed him coolly.
She knows why I came over,
he thought.
And she is not happy about it.
Becca turned back to Leah. “You think because your father got a deferment, that makes you better than me?”

“I think you're an ignorant bitch.”

Ben cursed himself. His intervention had accomplished nothing. “I love my freedom,” he said. “How about you guys?”

Becca and Leah, momentarily united in their confusion, just gaped.

“You love life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” Ben continued. “The right to get an education? To go to college? To meet people who don't think the way you do and be incredibly rude to them? I mean, it's not everywhere in the world that people can trash-talk each other so openly. It's actually kind of beautiful. I mean, you
could
go to Canada,” Ben said to Leah. “But you probably wouldn't find anybody there who'd want to fight with you.”

That was it. He'd killed the argument. Leah gave him a look of perplexed disgust and left with her friends. Becca started off in the opposite direction. She walked incredibly fast; he was impressed.

“You were going to punch that girl,” he said. “You were going to throw away your scholarship on her! I'm happy you didn't. Even though she deserved it.”

Becca stopped and looked at him. “You're not a student,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

Ben was equally impressed by the fact that she made no attempt to deny her intentions—or, for that matter, her scholarship. “Come by the student center at noon tomorrow and you'll see,” he said. He walked away, ordering himself not to look back. He couldn't help it, though, and when he did, she was still standing there, watching him. Playing coy could easily have backfired, but the following day at noon, she walked through the doors. Ben stood there, dressed in his uniform, right down to the regulation cap. “Figures,” she said. But she was smiling.

In the following months, Ben learned that as a child Becca had played POW in the grocery-store cart and that King was known in their town as the Landmine due to his unpredictable outbursts. He learned that kids called Becca Rabid Dog because of her constant fighting. From the outside, Ben's childhood had looked very different. He was well liked, and his father had no obvious battle scars. But Ben too was an only child who wore the uniform of confident, jocular athlete to hide a deeper loneliness. His father had demons too, quiet ones that the family did not discuss.

In Becca, Ben saw a similar—albeit stronger—version of himself. She didn't just own her isolation. She gloried in it. Ben's favorite example of this was her admiration of Durga, the Hindu goddess of self-reliance and strength. For reasons unknown, King had gotten the ten-armed deity tattooed on his forearm, and on his sober nights, he regaled his daughter with stories featuring the goddess and her tiger bound for battle. Becca admitted that it was often Durga she channeled at races. And Ben could tell. It was an awe-inspiring thing to see her hurtling toward him, fierce as a tiger, proud as a goddess.

Having reached Frederickson Hall, Ben decided to visit their old classroom. He felt almost giddy—the first wave of positive emotion he'd experienced in a while. He walked quickly down the long entrance hall, his shoes echoing against the floor, and stopped outside the seminar room. The knob turned easily. Except that the room Ben entered was a metal cave. And it smelled not of chalk but of charred aluminum. He knelt down and touched the floor. His palm came away sticky. He raised his hand to better examine the substance, and a terrible smell assaulted him. Ben knew what it was. Of course he knew.

Gagging, he stood and backed out of the room. He tried to run, but his body felt leaden, like something heavy was tied to his waist. He could feel the enemy approaching, but when he turned around, he saw nothing. How could he fight an invisible enemy? With considerable relief, he exited the campus and hurried into the first bar he saw. He needed to be somewhere else. Somewhere safe.

The college green was soft like a rug, and the stars floated like swimmers in the sky. Ben was blitzed. After many beers, each with a whiskey chaser, he was blitzed to the perfect point of blitzedness: not so drunk that he was going to pass out, but drunk enough that Coleman's Humvee and the load attached to his own waist had no power over him. He imagined the nightmares draining out of his ears and into the grass. He imagined that a tree would grow where his thoughts had soaked the earth. Years from now, some innocent student—a twenty-first-century red riding hoodie—would happen along the college path. She'd pluck a poisonous berry from the tree branch and pop the succulent thing into her mouth. Once the poison took hold, she'd skip over to the recruiter table and sign her name on the dotted line.