The Deserter's Tale Read Free Page A

sank under the weight of “Dear John” letters and had no reason at all to go home.
    As for my own story, I am not yet thirty but feel as if I have already lived four distinct lives. In my first life, I lived at home in Guthrie, Oklahoma, and then started a family of my own with Brandi. In the second life, I spent eighteen months in military training and at war in Iraq. In the third life, I deserted the U.S. Army and hid in Philadelphia for fourteen months, slinking under the cover of darkness from one cheap hotel to the next. In this current life, I am hanging on in a new land with my wife and children, waiting to see if the Canadian courts will let us stay.
    * * *
    I was born in 1978 and grew up on a farm on the outskirts of Guthrie, a small town twenty miles north of Oklahoma City. The land was owned by my grandfather Elmer Porter, who bought it after serving in the Korean War. Elmer had been an airplane mechanic at Tinker Air Force Base, but he was retired by the time I came along. He lived on the property with my grandmother Doris Porter. Some aunts, uncles, and cousins of mine had their own houses on the property, and my mother, brother, and I lived in a two-bedroom trailer about two hundred yards from my grandparents’ house. Before heading to school, I would often stop by my grandparents’ bungalow for breakfast. Doris always made me eggs over easy, and Elmer cooked bacon in an iron skillet. My memories of eating with them are the fondest of my childhood. They were the rocks in my life, and I took refuge in their home when it was too hot or too violent in the trailer.
    Doris and Elmer were Pentecostal Christians. Elmer said it was wrong for a man to hit his wife. I never saw him raise a finger against anyone. He showed me how to whittle and taught me how to fix motors, pumps, and fences on the farm. He kept ten ancient tractors that he couldn’t bear to part with. Every spring, while I held his tools, he would tune them all up and drive each one around the property.
    When I was thirteen or so, my grandfather said there was no room on the farm for seven new puppies. He had a quick death in mind. It was nothing to him—nothing more than avoiding a situation where he would have to feed too many dogs. I knew he didn’t mean to be cruel, and I suspect he thought that with his sharp blows to the head he was bringing them an instant and painless death. But I had seen his solution before and just couldn’t stand by and watch him take a hammer yet again and kill the puppies that way. So I dug one big hole in the woods behind my trailer, spread the puppies out on the ground, aimed my .22 rifle, and shot them each once at point-blank range, hoping to spare them the misery of my grandfather’s hammer. I covered the pups with dirt, stood up with the shovel, took a step back, and could hear two of them still weeping under the ground. I dug them up in a panic. Two of them were barely moving, but they were still whimpering. I knew they were suffering and I didn’t like to see anything suffer. I choked back the realization that I had just caused them more pain than my grandfather would have done with his own technique. I ran back to the trailer as fast as I could, opened the unlocked gun cabinet, and scoured the shelves for a weapon I knew would be loaded already and much more powerful. I grabbed a silver nine-millimeter Ruger pistol and ran back to the hole. I shot every round from the gun—I believe it was thirteen bullets—into the bodies below. My lungs were heaving, and my body was racked with sobs, and I shot indiscriminately until I knew for sure that all the puppies were dead. I didn’t speak to a single person about what I had done, and for weeks I was haunted by the killing of the weeping dogs.
    My grandmother Doris smoked Virginia Slims and was always crocheting, sewing, or knitting. She watched Walker, Texas Ranger every day on TV. She used to make pecan pies and let me