AFTER LEAVING THE Shiprock casino, the bikers set up camp on the property of a local Gulf War vet and waited for the stragglers to arrive. In the civilian world, the men were loners, but out here, prowling the highways of the American Southwest, they were a united pack, traveling as one.
After their fight at the casino, King was back to ignoring Becca, but she felt oddly cared for by the others. The next day at lunch, the men made space for her. They gave her sunscreen and told her to use it. They showered her with snacks. Unprompted, Dooley offered her a clean towel, and Frank gave her a pocket Bible with the subheading Hope for the Highway. Becca knew that they’d been talking about her situation; the men believed she was a battered wife, which was not at all how she thought of herself. She was running toward a new future. And yet, standing on solid ground, without the road to distract her, she found that Ben easily crept into her thoughts.
Late in the afternoon, she sat on the steps of the Gulf War vet’s trailer and watched his young daughters chase their dog. The poor animal resembled a stray more than a pet, and it reminded her of a story from Ben’s first tour. He’d been in a firefight, taking cover in an alleyway, when a feral mutt had wandered by.
“The dog was clearly starving,” Ben had told her. “It was as much a veteran of the war as any of us, just out foraging for scraps. And right there in front of me, while I was returning fire, it got hit.”
Ben knew that he was supposed to ignore the dog. He was supposed to keep shooting. “I’d been trained to block out distractions,” he explained. “And a dog dying slowly not three feet away—well, that was a distraction.” But he couldn’t keep shooting. The animal yowled. It was bleeding from the neck. And Ben couldn’t focus, so he crouched down and leaned into the alley to pull the dog out of the street. In that brief, unprotected moment, a bullet whizzed by his ear. Millimeters from his brain, he said. Because of a dog! Ben was so terrified, so furious with himself, that without another thought, he shot the dog between the eyes.
“You did it a favor,” Becca had said. “You put it out of its misery.”
“I know, Chicken. But I didn’t kill the dog to ease its pain. I killed the dog because it was preventing me from doing my job.”
Ben said this like he was expecting her to be disgusted, like he wanted her to call him a brute. But she found his truth-telling brave. What had happened to that honesty? When they’d met, she could ask him anything about his first tour, and he never made her feel embarrassed or regretful or stupid. Even in the first months of his second deployment, Ben eagerly told her detailed stories. On the video chat, he seemed like flesh instead of a set of pixels. But then the stories dried up, and he became two-dimensional, a clone. She’d gone on the research binge because she was desperate to retrieve the flesh-and-blood version of Ben. The real Ben.
When she told her father that Ben had become reluctant to talk, King told her not to take it personally. It’s hard to explain to somebody back here what’s going on over there, he’d said. You don’t want to make things harder for him.
But what about me? She couldn’t stop herself from wondering, even though she knew that civilians had no right to ask such a question. The soldiers in danger—their needs came first. But she couldn’t wholly commit to this code of conduct. She needed parity; she couldn’t help it. King, meanwhile, seemed to sense that she was struggling, so he gave her a gift—well, it was more like a loan.
There are other ways to understand what he’s going through, King said and handed Becca his copy of The Iliad. Becca would come to understand that her father had an affinity for this particular book, but at the moment, she was dumbstruck. Epic poetry? Her father? Still, she devoured The Iliad, followed by other books and articles and movies. She felt prepared for Ben’s return—at least, as prepared as she could be with only secondary sources at her disposal. When Ben was finally home, he spent hours clicking through the photographs he’d taken overseas. He avoided her, left home for hours at a time, and snapped at her when she so much as opened her mouth. He refused to touch her. He was acting, she realized, exactly like a spurned lover. Except that the other woman happened to be the war.
Now, sitting on the trailer steps, Becca thought about Reno’s motorcycle jacket and the eagle shackled to Southeast Asia. All these vets were still trying to get over that destructive, codependent relationship.
“Hey. Mind if I join you?”
Becca looked up to see Reno standing before her. She made room for him on the steps of the trailer, and he pulled a cigar from his pocket and lit it up.
“Why do you smoke those things? They’re nasty.”
“What’s got your knickers in a twist?”
“You.”
“Fair enough.” He nodded. “I’ve been an ass.” Reno sucked on the cigar, blew smoke, then sucked again. Becca could tell that he wasn’t savoring the thing. He was medicating. He scratched at the thinning hair on the crown of his head. “I’ve been holding off explaining things because I can’t figure out what in God’s name we’re gonna do when we get to where it is we’re going.”
“What we’re going to do about what?” Becca said, exasperated.
Reno breathed deeply. “You seen your father anywhere?”
“He’s been in his tent all afternoon.”
“Sulking like Achilles. How fitting.”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded.
Reno looked around. He seemed nervous. “All right, then, Becca. Let’s talk.” He cleared his throat but didn’t say anything further. She waited, but his hesitance was almost visible, thick as cigar smoke. Reno really didn’t want to share this story, Becca realized. He was afraid of it. And so, what she’d been asking of him—to tell it—that was no simple thing.