The Deserter's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page B

but persuaded me to forget the restaurant and settle on fast food. Why waste money when we could park the pickup by a quiet creek, talk, look out at the water, and let the night grow late?
    Brandi liked my mother, but she could read J.W. like a book. She knew the score. When Brandi was three her mother was murdered. At the time, her father had been doing a seven-year jail term. J.W. tried to tell Brandi and me what we could and couldn’t do in bed, but we didn’t listen to him. It wasn’t his trailer anyway, it was my mother’s. To hell with his instructions that Brandi sleep on one side of a bedsheet and that I sleep on the other.
    Although I tried to have as little as possible to do with J.W., I liked his father a little better. His name was Bill Church, and he had fought in the Korean War. He had been sprayed with tear gas in Korea and lost an eye. I tried to ask him about Korea, but he never wanted to talk about it. The last time I spoke to him was just before leaving for Iraq. He cried to hear the news that I was going to war. He said he understood that I had to go but warned me to be careful.
    I have seventeen cousins and various aunts and uncles and Brandi has relatives too, but we have hardly spoken to any of them since I deserted the army. With the exception of my mother and my brother, most of them are scandalized by what we have done. I believe they fear they’ll have trouble with the law if they talk to us, and so have written us out of the family. Brandi and I lost more than just our country when we came with our children across the border at Niagara Falls, New York. We lost our families too.
    * * *
    Brandi and I agree that it was love at first sight. We were inseparable from the day we met. Within two weeks we made plans to get married. We wanted to have a decent wedding, but we couldn’t save enough to pay for it.
    Brandi and I took an apartment together after I graduated from high school. We worked at every imaginable kind of job. Wherever we went, Brandi worked as a waitress and I held down jobs as a welder, general laborer, roofer, cook, salesperson, or pizza delivery man. I usually made about $7 or $8 an hour. We moved all the time in search of better jobs and better pay. When things got too hard in Guthrie, we tried our luck in Oklahoma City. Then we tried Madison, Wisconsin. And then we moved back to Oklahoma City.
    Zackary, the first of our children, arrived in 1998 when we were both twenty. In February 1999, Brandi and I gave up on our dreams for a family wedding and eloped to Arkansas. We were married by a justice of the peace. We had a crowd of four: Zackary, Brandi’s sister, and her father and stepmother. Brandi’s folks took care of Zackary during our one-night honeymoon. We stayed in a hotel in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and ordered in pizza for dinner.
    By the time Adam came along in October 1999, Brandi and I were finding it hard to live on her tips and my salary. Changing cities and jobs never led to better pay. I picked up some welding work on a few of the jobs but got no formal training. To cut down on costs, we bought clothes at secondhand stores and stayed in run down apartments. Our place in Oklahoma City had holes in the floor and in the windows. The water didn’t run and the toilet didn’t work. The place didn’t even have a stove. Brandi had to go to her grandmother’s home to cook for us.
    Brandi had Oklahoma state health insurance for herself and our children, but I had no health insurance. One day, I felt stabbing pains in my back and started urinating blood. I drove to a hospital in Oklahoma City, but they turned me down because I had no insurance. The next hospital I tried let me in and X-rayed the kidney stone but couldn’t get it out. In that first of four hospital visits for kidney stone problems I was billed more than $2,000. I couldn’t pay it. Our debts piled up while our credit rating sank. I still have the stone in me and it