the clothesline overnight, then tucked my nose into the collar to gauge how badly I needed a shower. The test confirmed what I’d suspected—despite the field hygiene, I stank, and yet the fact of it bothered me only a little. The first few days of the trip had felt like the welcome escape I had hoped for, but now, with the last full day mostly over, I felt a measure of panic at the thought of going back. Real life awaited: the shitty job that took only a laughable stab at my expenses, my girl who could shed half her blood and still be twice as tough as I was, my little bud of a son for whom I was the model of manhood. It was what didn’t await me that gnawed at me most. My brother, who had died because he had burned out his usefulness to the country he had served, and also because I was an idiot.
I ducked into the tent to retrieve a fresh pack of cigarettes—the last from Elias’s carton. Since moving back I’d limited myself to two or three a week, mainly because it really pissed off Jill when she saw me smoking. But Jill wasn’t on the camping trip, and so I’d tossed the half-full carton into the SUV before we left. I’d smoked a whole pack each day of the trip. It felt decadent. I was using Elias’s lighter, which they had given me in the hospital along with the rest of the personal effects from his pockets. Dodge had last used it to kindle the fire at breakfast and hadn’t given it back. After a quick hunt around the campsite, I found it sitting on a stump in a pile of things Dodge must have emptied out of the SUV before he left: a copy of Sports Illustrated, a foil packet of freeze-dried chili, the lighter, a spool of fishing line and a handgun.
It was not Dodge’s gun; I could tell that right away. Dodge owned a 9 mm Glock. I knew that for a fact because I’d seen it a zillion times since we started shooting lessons months ago. This was an M9 Beretta, almost new, and I knew exactly where it had come from. It was Elias’s.
I picked it up and looked over the matte black metal. Dodge had cleaned it, wiped it down at least, thank God. I supposed he had intended to sell it to a dealer, which would explain why he had put it in his SUV and left the magazine in it. That made Dodge a scuzzbag, because he had no right to pawn Elias’s possessions—but then, for all I knew, he had run it past my father already. Both of them still thought I was basically an idiot when it came to guns and probably wouldn’t ask my opinion.
I sat on the fallen tree and turned it over in my hands. The sight of it took me back to that morning. The expanding triangle of light moving from the barn doorway across Elias’s sprawled legs. The way his body, heavy and dense as wet sand, had refused to be shaken back to consciousness, no matter how I tried. And all the blood, vast mucking quantities of blood that slicked my hands and shirt and just kept coming, a pornographic excess of the stuff that felt like a screaming confession of just how much Elias had inside him, how much life, how much of a god-awful mess.
The dark. The nervous animals who could smell death in their midst, looking at me above the stall doors with their oversize eyes. My own raw scream for Elias, and then for God, and then for Dodge, in order of their authority to fix this, and yet nobody could. The mistakes had already been made, turning Elias into a slowly ticking time bomb who had meant well and loved us all and then tucked himself away to detonate.
I rested my elbow against my knee and pressed the barrel against my right temple. The metal felt cool, like an ice pack. I pulled back and racked it, then returned it to the space above my ear. To obliterate oneself: mind and face all at once, smudged from the great class photo as though by a pencil eraser. I could take care of my miserable disappointing half-assed existence in one click.
But I had chosen to carry the standard. I had etched it into my arm. There was no point in having