The Deserter

A soldier deserts a war, on his journey back to his own country he encounters a man joining the war.

The young man stood at the crossroads and waited for a car to come. In front of him was the road, and behind him were the rolling hills of tall yellow grass. In the distance was a shabby brown shack. It looked deserted. The shack and the road were the only signs of civilization. The sun was high and white in the blue sky and it beat down upon the young man, causing him to sweat. He didn’t feel good. He saw spots and his spit was thick in his mouth. The young man was tall and he had a handsome face when it was not covered in dirt and sweat, as it was now. If you had seen him, the first thing you would have noticed was his leg. His leg was wrapped crudely in a ripped army uniform and blood was seeping through it, coloring the cloth red. He wore clothes that seemed far too big for him and he supported himself on a large stick that he had found in the woods. He leaned all of his weight on his good leg. He had been traveling for a day and half now, and he was out of food. He could barely stand. But he had made it, he had made it to the road, and soon there would be a car and he would not have to walk anymore. He thought that perhaps he should keep going alongside the road, keep moving forward. He was in dire need of food and medical attention, and continuing on would be bringing him closer to those things. Even if there was a car coming, he should be walking so that he was making progress. If there wasn’t a car coming he was killing himself by sitting there and wasting time. But he didn’t walk. He was exhausted and it was all he could do to remain standing and to lean against his stick. He wanted to sit but he knew that it would only hurt his leg, so he stood instead and looked at the road and hoped that a car would come soon.

 

He reached into his pocket to see if he still had any cigarettes. A cigarette would make him feel a little better.. He didn’t, but as he pulled his hand from his pocket, he held a crumpled photograph of Mickey Mantle. It was a baseball card. He had been saving it for a friend, but had forgotten to give it to him. It was too late now. He threw the baseball card on the ground and tried to forget about it. There wasn’t any good in remembering. It would be better for him to forget.

But of course, he remembered.

 

The baseball card had been for a man named Daniel who had fought with the young man in the army. They had trained together and they had been stationed together. Being together for that long had made them close friends. Daniel loved his son: that was the first thing that anyone who met him learned. Daniel was always talking about how his son was ten years old and collected baseball cards. He never stopped talking about his son. All of the soldiers wrote letters, but Daniel seemed to write more than all of them. He would write his son asking about the cards that he didn't have. Then he would talk to the younger soldiers who still collected baseball cards to see if he could trade for the ones his son wanted. He would trade packs of cigarettes, and slim army rations, and anything that he could live without, to have baseball cards to send home in the mail.

 

“The sooner we win this damn war, the sooner I can see my son’s baseball card collection,” he would say, “I’ve only seen it it in pieces, and I want to see the whole goddamn thing.”

 

Daniel died three days ago in the very first battle of the war. He was shot by an enemy soldier in the chest. The young man was standing a few feet away.

 

In a rage the young man shoved Daniel’s killer to the ground and pushed the barrel of his gun into the soldier’s throat. But as he was beginning to press the trigger, he saw that the soldier’s face was the face of a child. Daniel’s killer couldn't have been more than ten years old. Daniel’s killer was somebody’s son. He pushed the barrel of the gun hard into the child's neck, his finger on the trigger, but he couldn't pull. It could have been an hour that the young man stared at the child, trying to find the will to kill him. It could have been a minute. In that moment, time stopped being time. Eventually the young man lowered his gun and dropped it on the ground. His hands were covered in sweat. His body was shaking. The child soldier looked at him with disgust, disgust that the young man had been too weak to shoot him.

The young man knew that he could not return to the fight and kill after he had refused to kill. So he ran. He ran from the battle into the nearby woods. And as he ran, the child whose life had been spared picked up the young man’s gun and shot, hitting him in the leg.

 

The young man ran through the woods, for miles and miles, until his leg would allow him to run no longer. Then he hid and slept. The night was long and cold and miserable. The next morning he stole a set of clothes from a farmhouse clothesline and used his old uniform to patch his leg. The patching made it good enough for him to walk, but every step hurt. He set off again and he headed west, towards the ocean, to find a fisherman who would sail him far away from the war. He was behind enemy lines and he wanted to avoid people as much as possible, but knew he wasn’t strong enough to walk all the way to the ocean. So he decided to risk hitchhiking. He had arrived at the crossroads at two in the afternoon. It was now two thirty.

 

The young man sighed and looked at the road and wished he had a cigarette.

 

In the distance there was a man walking up the road. He was barely a speck but as he got closer the young man could hear him whistling. He carried nothing except himself. Once he was close enough to speak, he spoke.

 

“That does not look good.” He said, pointing at the young man’s leg. The young man laughed aloud. Saying that his leg did not look good was an enormous understatement.

“No. It does not. Tell me, do cars ever drive down this road?”

“Not very often.”

“I need to get to the coast. Do you know anyone who could give me a ride there?”

The man was closer now. He was older, in his fifties probably, and he had a thinning scalp. He looked at the young man curiously and he pointed at the wooden shack just a little down the road and said, “I am going to there to drink. My friends will be meeting me there. I am sure one of them will give you a ride to wherever you need to go.”

“It’s not deserted?”

“It is, but it's the only building between where I live and where my friends live. You are in the middle of nowhere, my friend. We meet at the shack sometimes and we bring our own drinks. “Will you drink with us?” Asked the stranger.

“I have no money.”

The man waved his hand to say that it didn’t matter.

The young man laughed. “I would be grateful for a drink.”

 

And so they walked into the old shack, the young man limping and supporting himself with his stick.

“I do not know your name.” Said the young man, through a grimace, as they sat down at the one small table inside the shack. Sitting down sent sharp jabs of pain through his body, but sitting was good.

“Damien. And yours?”

“Daniel,” lied the young man. “Do you often meet your friends here for drinks?”

The man called Damien smiled. “I am meeting my friends here for a goodbye drink. Tomorrow, I go to the war. This is my last day at home.”

“You are being drafted?”

“Yes.”

“You are old to fight in the war.”

“This is true, but lately, my country has been drafting everyone that they can. Have you noticed?”

An image of a child soldier looking at him with disgust flashed through the young man’s mind. he pushed it away and frowned. The way that Damien had said, “my country” made him nervous. He changed the subject.

“Do you wish to fight in the war?”

“No.”

“Then why do you go?”

Damian sighed. “You ask a lot of questions.”

 

There was silence. Eventually the young man spoke. He wanted to make sure that he Damien didn’t think he was a soldier.

“Why didn’t you ask me how I hurt my leg?”

Damien’s smiled. “Because I already know how you hurt your leg.”

“How did I hurt my leg?”

“You ran from the war and they shot at you.”

“I was not in the war. I am a traveler, hiking through these mountains. My leg is from a hiking accident.”

Damien was looking out the window. “That is a good story,” He said, “But nobody around here will turn you in. And there are many fisherman who will take you across the sea.”

“It is not just a story, it is the truth.”

Damien was still looking out the window. He was silent. “I go because my wife told me I must go.” He said eventually.

“I’m sorry?”

“I go to the war because my wife told me I must go.”

The young man laughed.

“I was not joking.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“When I was drafted, I did not want to go. My father fought in a war, and I have seen what war can do to a man. I wanted to take my family and flee the country, but when I told this to my wife, she told me that I had to go. ‘There are wars that need to be fought,’ she said, ‘not all men can run away.’ ”

“But what does a woman know of war?” said the young man scornfully.

“If my wife believes that this war is worth fighting, then I do too.”

“What if you believed otherwise?”

“Even If I was believed she was wrong, I would still go. If someone who loves me asks me to suffer, how can I refuse? If they truly love me, they would not ask me to suffer without reason, and If I truly love them back, I would not refuse to suffer.”

 

The young man thought about what Damien had said. He wanted to tell his story. He wanted to tell about Daniel and the child who had killed him. But he didn’t. He was behind enemy lines and to do so would be foolish. Sunlight was shining through the window casting a square patch of sunlight onto a dark floor. The young man chose his words carefully.

“You don’t know what you will find at the war.” He said. His voice was full of bitterness. “You don’t know what the war will do to you.”

Damien looked into the eyes of the young man and saw all of the anger and pain that was inside of him. Damien was a brave man, and not easily scared, but as he looked into the eyes of the young man he was afraid.

 

Their conversation was interrupted then because the door of the shack had swung open. Damien’s friends were her. They came into the shack and they were loud and happy and had brought lots to drink. Before too long the young man and Damien forgot their conversation, and let themselves enjoy the drinks and the celebration around them. Drinking numbed the pain in the young man’s leg, and for a while, he forgot his misery. They were there for several hours, drinking and talking and joking, and it wasn’t until night that they finally said their goodbyes.

 

One of Damien’s friends had offered to take the young man to the coast. They climbed into his car and started the engine. They drove west, towards the ocean.

 

“Perhaps we should stop by my place before we go to the coast. My wife used to be a nurse. She could patch up your leg some.” The young man nodded. A melancholy had settled upon him and he didn’t want to be around people anymore, but his leg needed it.

 

As they drove away from the crossroads, from the shack, from the war, the young man saw Damian through the car window. He was walking home to spend one last night with his family and his wife. He was walking on the side of the road, and every step that he took carried him farther from the life that he had known. He walked confidently, and if he was afraid it did not show in his walk. Above the noise of the engine, the young man could hear him whistling.

Sitting in the car, the young man felt terribly alone. It was dark outside and if there were stars they were not visible yet. As the rolling hills of yellow grass slid past the window he hated himself. He hated his own weakness. And he hated that he had never suffered the insufferable for a person who loved him.

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