Out There: a novel Read Free

brought him down—and so he kicked down out of it and smiled a big smile at the uniformed man who had rushed up to him, yelling “Move it along! Move it along!” Why was he holding on to Jefferson’s triceps so hard, pushing him along, making him walk—after all that—through the regular glass door off to the far right, the door usually reserved for people in wheelchairs? Hadn’t the man ever realized some people needed a little extra grounding to get through a revolving door?
    The guard pushed him through the door, and Jefferson lugged his duffel the final paces to his family. Esco was wearing her favorite mauve tracksuit, the one that had always made him cringe at the way it accentuated her thick middle. But her hair was cut short as always, wiry in its health, and her skin glistened. Nigel swayed from side to side on in-turned ankles that nevertheless appeared to be holding steady under their burden. He was as big as ever.
    It was true that Jefferson had left the jurisdiction of the US Army, officially and in good standing, at 8:15 that morning at Fort Drum, but only now, as he crossed the security threshold in Albuquerque, did he know he’d truly made it. He felt tired suddenly, much more so than he’d realized before the chanting and the walk down the long hall and the handstand and, even before that, all the packing and planning. But there was some relief, even if it was not the instantaneous happiness he’d hoped might descend like a miracle upon him. The smile on his lips was only partially forced, he realized, and he was able to find a few words, more words in fact than he had spoken in many days.
    “Esco,” he said, embracing her. “Nigel—” He held the large arm of his cousin, beginning to weep. And he found that he could say nothing more; he could only hold them and let them hold him in return.
     
    Now that he was living the moment, though, Jefferson felt that something about it wasn’t right. Esco was there, and that was right. Nigel was there, and that too was right. The Sandias welcomed him out to the east, and though he could not see them, Jefferson sensed the Jemez Mountains up in the north. The distant plateaus and red rocky mountains and wide-open sky all participated in his return, listening and watching and recording. So too the birds of the high desert and the lizards and the burrowing rodents of the ground. Jefferson’s body, unscathed, was there as well. But some large, unidentified piece of his spirit—he didn’t know where it was, or how long it had been missing—had remained behind.
    This was the part of the homecoming that was not right; not all of Jefferson had come home.
    Outside, a plane scudded down the runway and took to the sky, and he thought of all those other soldiers returning home. Survivors from San Francisco and Waco and Charlottesville and Birmingham, Las Cruces and Española and Abiquiu and Los Alamos, each one leaving a plane and walking through an airport and hugging and being hugged. Each one returning home.
    “Let’s go home,” said Esco, curling her small arm into the crook of Jefferson’s elbow as she had since he was a teenager. Nigel picked up his duffel, and the three of them moved as one through the airport and out into the familiar solace of the high desert.

3
    When that horrible thing happened to Ramon’s throat on the forty-seventh day, Jefferson wrote it down on a piece of paper and folded it inside the cover of the book, thinking it would be his tribute; there, he would keep Ramon’s memory close to his heart. It was a single line on a blank piece of paper, a lone memory of a solitary loss Jefferson had seen happen right next to him.
    Not too long after, the thing that happened to the guy named Adair, from Hollidaysburg, joined the thing that happened to Ramon. Then there was Dudzinski, twenty-two. Then Hazelton, twenty-nine. Then Alton with the corn-husk voice from Nebraska.
    Still, it was not a list.
    The string of losses on that piece of