The Deserter's Tale Read Free Page B

eat them warm. On nights when it wasn’t safe in the trailer, I slept near my grandmother in her bedroom. Doris was religious, but she swore like a trooper. She was reliable on one hand and easygoing on the other, and I loved my grandmother more than anyone else in the world.
    The day before I flew from Fort Carson to Kuwait, I called Doris on the telephone. I told her that I would think of her every day while I was overseas and asked what she was doing that day.
    â€œI’m covering all the house windows with plastic,” she said.
    I chuckled. “Grandma, what’s all that foolishness about?”
    â€œIn case of chemical attack,” she said. “Half the folks in Guthrie are doing the same thing. People say we might get chemical attacked, so they’re covering up their windows.”
    I laughed out loud. I wished I could be there to hug the woman and fix her a glass of iced tea.
    â€œGrandma, you ought to sit down and relax. Forget covering the windows. Plastic won’t help you if we get chemical attacked. If that happens, you might as well just bend over and kiss your ass good-bye because we’re all gonna die.”
    She laughed and said it was probably true. She said that I should take good care of myself, and that she would always love me. I never heard her voice again. Doris died seventeen days after I flew into war.
    When I was still a teenager, my father almost came back for me. His name was Donald Ernest Key. I knew little about him. He had three sons from an earlier marriage, but I’ve met them only once. He was a welder and he drank too much. He took off when I was three and never paid my mother a cent of child support or alimony. The next time I saw him was twelve years later, when he was lying in his casket. I heard that he had died in an accident while working on an oil rig off the coast of Africa. I was told not to go to his funeral, because he had remarried and his relatives might think I was chasing his money. So I didn’t go to the funeral but I went to the visitation. I spoke with his sister, who said she had heard that Dad had recently come to see me. That seemed a strange thing to say, since I had never seen or heard from him. A little later, I wandered through the woods on our property and came across a beaten-up old lawn chair in a grove of trees. Empty liquor bottles were strewn around the chair. Peering through the growth I could see my own yard. I assumed that my father had hidden himself there to watch me coming and going on school days. Who else would have been hiding in the woods on our family farm, south of Guthrie, emptying bottle after bottle of Wild Turkey? It sure wasn’t my stepfather, J. W. Barker, who kept his own beer locked up in a refrigerator in his bedroom. My father was said to be a fine welder, but he never found the courage to speak to me.
    My mother’s name is Judy Porter. She is fifty and lives in Guthrie. She has heart trouble and a pacemaker and uses an oxygen tank to breathe. I speak to her almost every day by telephone but haven’t been able to see her since I went AWOL four years ago. Most deserters get caught, and they get caught being stupid. They just can’t resist the urge to visit their loved ones. It was fortunate that Brandi and the children came with me the moment I went into hiding. And it was a good thing I never went back to see my mother. The military police would have caught me for sure. Mom told me that after my desertion she saw strange cars parked down the road. Even Captain Bower, my commanding officer in Iraq, called my mother on the telephone. Bower told her that a number of soldiers had deserted his company of 120 men, and that he had caught every last one of them except for me. He warned that she could be charged if she helped me in any way. “Aiding and abetting a criminal is against the law” is the way Mom said he put it.
    Here is how I avoided detection: by following every word of