Straying From the Path Read Free Page B

for whatever it was I was going to say. Kill me, kill me and bury me now, who will play “Taps” when you’re gone?
    I held my hand to him. “Ken, take care.”
    “John. You too.” He shook my hand firmly. The shuttle boarded, and he was gone.
    They all walked away, in the end.
     
    When I was eighteen the draft came, I was made a soldier, and we fought, huddled in trenches, smelling gunpowder and blood all around us. No matter how many planes dropped bombs and satellites fired missiles, people still had to fight on the ground with their hands. War called for blood, blood had to be spilled, until war itself died. Or was reinvented.
    When I was twenty-one, my battalion pushed through to Beijing and stood guard when the armistice was signed. The film is famous: all of us—American, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Indian, Pakistani, EU and soldiers of a half-dozen other multinational contingents—gathered in Tiananmen Square and piled our guns outside the walls of the Forbidden City as the generals watched, smiling and shaking hands. And it was over.
    That young man in Beijing had been thinking of age. The age of the country I was in, the nations gathered, the flags, the hatreds that had brought us here. The age of the walls, almost buried under the mountain of weapons. The age of the ritual we performed. Military ritual was powerful. Nothing matched it. Nothing else had ever made me cry, not even the birth of my children.
     
    My granddaughter who usually met me at the shuttleport was away on a business trip, so I took the monorail home, to a one bedroom retirement condo with a view of the mountains. Sometimes I sat and stared at the peaks for hours. This time of year, a solid mass of white snow covered them.
    I checked my voice messages right away. I thought I’d get the call already, that Ken was dead, that I’d have to get on another shuttle tomorrow and fly to Florida. But that was stupid.
    My routine, interrupted less and less by funerals this past year, usually returned to normal quickly after one of these trips. Every morning, weather permitting, I walked in the county park behind my building. I took along my old pair of binoculars and dog-eared bird guide, though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had to look up a species in this area. I’d followed a half-dozen generations of red-tailed hawks who made the park their territory. Afternoons, I maintained the family internet site. I had two children, five grandchildren, one great-grandchild scattered all over the country. Along with a couple dozen cousins, we kept in touch by posting to the site: photos, letters, gossip. Saved them from travel to reunions. I also read. At a loss for what to give me at holidays, my family gave me book disks because I’d read anything. If nothing else, I’d read what Alice would have liked. She died ten years ago. I still rolled over at night and woke up when I didn’t feel her beside me.
    The morning after my return from Paul Hoover’s funeral, I didn’t walk. Wrapped in my robe, a cup of morning coffee in hand, I found myself sitting in front of the west-facing picture window, staring at the mountains. After hardly moving all day, I watched the sunset. The moon arced over, glowing three-quarters full in the rich blue twilight. With my binoculars, I could make out the strings of lights of Artemis Base on the shadowed quarter. I could just stop eating. The automatic cleaner that came once a week would bump against my wasted body sprawled in the armchair.
    Seemed a shame to live through war, to last this long, and think of suicide now.
     
    When we slogged through miles of rice paddies, I thought only of a glorious MRE and a dry blanket. I tried not to think of the future. I’d paid my dues, served my country. I’d put it behind me, forget the uniforms and medals, heat and wet and wounds and illness, look on war forever after as a thing that happened in movies.
    Seventy-odd years later, I still saw that boy, wet from toe