The Heart You Carry Home (28 page)

“Everybody, just drink your soup.” Reno scowled.

Ben lifted his bowl to his lips. He dipped some bread into the watery liquid. It tasted okay. It just wasn't substantial. At least the hoplites had given him a decent breakfast: fresh eggs and bacon from Kleos's animals, strong coffee.

After lunch the hoplites led the men into a large hogan deeper in the woods.

The single room was dim, lit by a wood-burning stove, and the walls were lined with a kind of white canvas. A network of lights and speakers hung overhead. The CO entered and arranged himself yogi-like on a pile of blankets. The men sat cross-legged on the ground before him, like schoolchildren.

“From this moment, the competition officially begins,” the CO said. His resonant voice seemed to emanate from everywhere. “Twenty-four hours from now, one of you will be selected to carry on Durga's legacy. You will take my place as leader of Kleos and become the new CO. This is both a privilege and a burden. And it is the reason we compete. You must have enough strength to shoulder the responsibility.”

The CO unfolded his heavy body and stood up. Ben glanced to his left and right. All eyes were straight ahead.

“To prove that you are fully committed, you must be bound irrevocably to the service of Durga. Your willingness to do this is your first test.”

The CO walked to the wood-burning stove and pulled out a metal poker. The tip was the size of a child's fist and had been fashioned into the shape of a Greek military helmet. Ben deflated. So these were the trials the CO had in store? Ben thought about how King had begged the CO for this opportunity to be branded with a hot iron.

“Stand,” the CO commanded, “and remove your shirts.”

Ben's entire body tensed, but he could hardly think about himself, because the branding had begun. The men stuffed their T-shirts into their mouths and tried to stifle their cries. Their faces contorted. A few of the older vets fainted. A few ran from the hogan before it was too late. The poker approached.

“She doesn't want you to do this,” Reno hissed between his teeth. “Drop out, for Christ's sake.”

“You won't get me disqualified,” Ben hissed back, certain that Reno wanted him kicked out.

“We can get out of here,” Reno said with new urgency.

We?
Ben thought. But then he remembered his black eye and Reno dumping him on the roadside. “I don't trust you.”

“Like husband, like wife,” Reno said and shook his head. But before either one of them could say more, the CO arrived. He held the poker like a monarch's staff. The tip was so hot, it glowed white.

“This pain is for all the men you failed to save,” the CO intoned. “For all the brothers you disappointed. We receive our pain together, because only we know what it feels like to have entered the crucible of war and returned.”

“Thank God you did it too,” Reno said, forcing joviality into his voice. “Otherwise I'd feel like a sucker.”

The CO looked down at his own chest, which bore a similar brand, long healed. He nodded, completely missing Reno's sarcasm. “This marks us forever as separate. No one outside understands what you have been through, Reno. Hear the words of Achilles: ‘My heart bids me shun the society of men.'” And then the CO pushed the iron into Reno's chest. Tears poured out of Reno's eyes and his face contorted, but he did not cry out.

“Say it!” the CO commanded.

Reno struggled to speak against the pain. “‘My heart . . . bids me . . . shun . . .'”

A loud voice in Ben's head agreed with Reno: This
was
crazy. This was wrong. But Ben silenced the voice. It was his turn.

More men failed the CO's first test. Some fought the pronouncement of their defeat, and once or twice a Taser was used to subdue them. There was something brutal about the Tasers. They degraded the men, turning them into soulless, sniveling creatures.

Ben sat on the hogan floor with the other victors, breathing through his pain. On two tours in Iraq, he'd received no substantial injuries. Nothing worse than sunburn, blisters, and some damaged olfactory nerves. He had no right to complain about this.

“Who among you burns with pain?” the CO asked.

“Not I!” Bull shouted. He staggered to his feet. “Not I, sir.”

“Who here burns with pain?” the CO repeated.

“Not I!” Ben jumped to his feet. If Bull was going to be his main competition, it seemed advantageous to follow the man's lead. But no sooner had Ben spoken than hoplites seized the both of them and dragged them to the CO.

“Not you?” the CO asked, breathing heavily into their faces.

“Not I, sir,” Bull said, though Ben held back. If they'd given the correct answer the first time, the CO wouldn't keep asking. It seemed that Bull had forgotten the unwritten rules of facing a drill sergeant.

“Not you?” the CO spat at Bull. “‘When Hector saw great-hearted Patroclus fall back after being wounded with sharp bronze, he went down through the ranks, up close, and struck him with a spear-thrust to the belly, drove the point straight through . . . Now vultures will devour you here, poor wretch'!”
The CO made a stabbing motion into the air that caused both Ben and Bull to flinch. The CO smiled. “You feel no pain?” he said, still directing his ire toward Bull. “How about you, Sergeant Thompson?”

“I feel pain, sir.” He did not understand why this was the correct answer, only that it was.

The CO nodded. “You lie to me and to yourself,” he said to Bull. “
All
you feel is pain. And if you ever hope to achieve catharsis, you must give yourself over to it. Do you understand?”

Bull nodded vigorously.

“Do you understand, Sergeant Thompson?”

“Yes, sir.” Ben nodded and the movement made him horribly dizzy. He squeezed his eyes shut, willing himself not to faint. His chest burned. It throbbed. He felt pain, all right.

“You are blind, all of you,” said the CO. “But within the day, every single one of you will be made to see.”

B
ECCA LEFT HER
mother at the infirmary and began to explore Kleos. She peeked inside the hogans and found the most basic of living quarters. She used one of the composting toilets. Then she visited the animal pens. She bypassed the cows and pigs and stood for a while at the chicken coop watching the birds pecking around and the roosting poles crowded with hens. Ben's uncle in Kentucky kept chickens, and she and Ben sometimes drove over for fresh eggs. On their first visit, the animals had flocked around Becca's ankles like she was one of their own. They were like dogs or cats, the way they rubbed their plump bodies against her legs. Had anyone ever known chickens to act this way? “Did you rub your jeans with feed?” Ben joked. Unfamiliar with the ways of livestock, Becca was afraid the birds would start pecking her, so she stood there, paralyzed, in the center of the chicken swarm as Ben laughed and laughed. From that moment on, Becca was his chicken.
I love you, Chicken. Don't worry, Chicken. What's the matter, Chicken? Let me compete for your father, Chicken.

Becca left the birds and wandered toward the camp's northern edge. Then she stopped, her mouth open wide. Before her, a massive graveyard of wooden crosses stretched beneath the hot sun like a field of desiccated crops. Could these crosses actually mark bodies? And whose bodies? But the crosses were so close together. Maybe they marked remains? King said there were people who searched the jungles for remains to make sure the men missing and killed in action—the MIAs and KIAs—received proper burials. Even a strand of hair deserved a burial, he said. But would those men have ended up here?

She turned from the graveyard and walked toward the mesa on Kleos's eastern boundary. A broad stretch of matted grass tapered off around a forest of cottonwoods. No sounds came from the woods, although, as she approached, a guard materialized. Only then did she pick out the guard stations, camouflaged among the trees. He shouted at her to stop. She resisted the urge to raise her hands above her head.

“I'm just taking a walk,” she said.

“You'd best get back to the guest quarters,” the guard said.

“Sure.” Becca turned around. She felt his eyes on her. Whatever was happening, she thought, was happening in those woods. Whatever it was, it could not be good.

F
ROM THE HOGAN
, the CO led the men deeper into the woods and stopped in a small clearing. “‘They carried woodcutting axes and stout ropes, and the mules went before them. Far they traveled, uphill, downhill, sideways and aslant, until they reached the shoulder of Mount Ida of the many springs,'” the CO recited. “‘And there they set in haste to felling towering oaks with their long-pointed bronze. With a great crash the trees came down. These the Achaeans split and tied behind the mules, which measured the earth with their feet in striving through dense brush to reach the plain. All the woodcutters carried logs . . . and cast them down in a row upon the shore, where Achilles planned a great funeral mound for Patroclus and himself.'”

When the CO fell silent, Arne stood before the group. “Form teams of two and then chop up the trunks according to these specifications.” The hoplites held up long logs. “You will not stop for any reason.”

“You're with me,” Reno said to Ben and picked up the saw without giving him the chance to argue.

The implements were long and heavy, with wooden handles on each end. Ben and Reno dragged the metal teeth across the tree trunk; it took upward of an hour to take even a small bite out of the wood. The wound in Ben's chest throbbed, then burned, then grew numb, then throbbed again. He imagined that the alternating feelings of numbness and pain would never end. He felt like that man who pushed the boulder up the hill each day only to have it roll back down at night. Or did the man never reach the hilltop in the first place? Ben couldn't remember. But he understood the moral: how the false promise of healing made the pain that much worse.

For hours, the woods echoed with the sound of saws. The CO had said nothing about a time limit or what quantity of lumber he expected, but the men implicitly understood that they were vying for something. He and Reno kept on until their tree fell. Theirs was the second to go, behind Bull and his partner's. As soon as the trunk was down, they took up axes. The sounds gradually shifted from sawing to chopping. The older, frailer men were lagging. A few had already dropped their saws and been escorted away.

One old man sat on a log; he looked faint.

“You're out,” one of the guards said. “Go to the truck.”

“I just need to rest a moment,” the man said, panting. “I'm going right back to work.” He stood up.

“You're finished.”

“Please,” the man begged.

“Truck,” the guard said. “Now.” He held out the Taser, and the man slunk away.

“That's not fair!” his partner said. “I can't do this by myself.”

“Then give up,” said the guard.

At this comment, the man charged, but he didn't get far before a Taser hit him in the chest. The man convulsed and fell. Two hoplites picked him up and laid him in a truck like he was a piece of lumber. Ben kept chopping.

A
FTER HER RUN-IN
with the guard, Becca found the guest quarters. The Indian women, along with Jeanine, sat in a circle of folding metal chairs. Their eyes were closed and their bodies swayed back and forth like seaweed in a current.

“Lord Jesus, protect these men from their unbelief!” chanted a heavyset woman with black hair that fell nearly to the floor.

“Lord Jesus, protect these men from their unbelief!”
the others repeated.

“Save them from these pagan gods and devil spirits!”

“Save them from these pagan gods and devil spirits!”

“Protect King in his illness. Guard his soul from despair!”

“Protect King in his illness. Guard his soul from despair!”

“Oh Lord Jesus!”

“Oh Lord Jesus!”

Becca had never seen praying quite like this. She half expected somebody to speak in tongues. No one did, but their ranks grew more frenzied, all of them squeezing one another's hands so tightly, their knuckles turned white. Their bodies moved faster, more erratically.

“Please, Lord Jesus!”

“Please, Lord Jesus!”

It seemed to Becca that she wasn't watching twelve women but a single organism, all of their throats straining as a single voice. When Jeanine jumped from her chair quite suddenly, the circle shuddered in response to its severed limb. The two empty hands on either side fluttered and flailed violently, the ten fingers like sinews.

Jeanine crouched on her knees, her hands clasped in what struck Becca as a parody of prayer. She shook them at the ceiling, like she was calling on God to knock His heavenly fist through the roof. She grabbed her dress and twisted it as her body writhed. Watching her mother's contortions made Becca feel a little sick. How could Jeanine, so stalwart and disciplined, appear so out of control? What would drive her to this?

Becca couldn't think, nor could she bear to watch, so she ran from the guest quarters and made her way to the edge of Kleos. At the graveyard, she looked around frantically and then, not knowing where else to go, ran straight through the tangle of crosses. Her legs knocked the posts, but she did not stop. She ran toward the rocky slope that stood between the graveyard and the ghost towns. She stopped at the foot of the rise, panting. The sound of her blood whooshed in her ears. She turned to the north and looked up at the great mesa. After all these years, could her mother still be in love with her father? It seemed impossible.

“Hey!”

Becca whirled around to see a woman approaching, brown-skinned like the Indians but dressed more in Becca's own style, in faded jeans and a T-shirt. Beside her walked an oversize ball of tinfoil with a head and legs.