The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck (books for students to read TXT) 📕

“I didn’t mean to shoot that guy over his car,” he muttered.

“He should have just left us alone,” I replied.

“Or those kids,” he added. “I just didn’t know.”

“There’s no sense thinking about that now,” I said. I didn’t remind him about the dead we’d left at the stadium or the hospital.

“I made a real mess of it,” he said, stretching to touch the ceiling. He hummed a few notes from a song I didn’t recognize. “God, I haven’t heard any music in weeks.” He looked down at me and his eyes were moist.

“I better go apologize to Zeller,” he said, and walked out into the rain.

The wind and the rain were heavy now, and in the silence left by the others I got to thinking about love.

For some reason I thought of the fact that I’d never really seen a woman nude before. I’d been with unclothed women before, but I’d never really seen a woman nude, walking around casually as if I weren’t even there.

And then I thought about Lura again. I thought about her more the longer I was here, and I wondered if that meant I loved her. I hadn’t even known her that well. We broke up a few months before I left, and since shipping out I had sent her a single letter with a single line: Sometimes I think of you.

My head hurt and my body shook. My pants were covered with shit and piss and blood. I tore at my scalp with my fingernails. I could never get the wind and rain out of my head long enough to make room for anything else. I shook my head, trying to clear it.

Lura had never responded to that letter, and I knew she never would. I closed my eyes and listened to the rain. I imagined her kissing me between the eyes. Then I sat back down in my corner and held my hands in my lap, rocking back and forth in rhythm with the world outside.

The rain had to stop sometime. Only a few more days, we’d say hopefully. We’d been eating nothing but rice for some time, and now the taste of it sickened us. We only ate when we really had to.

I finished the radio the following afternoon and inserted the batteries. It still didn’t work. I tried all the tricks I knew, but there was no sound at all.

Santiago had been watching me work. Suddenly he stood up from his corner, walked over, took the radio out of my hands, and threw it outside. It landed in a puddle on the beach.

Zeller watched the radio fly and then turned back to Santiago. After a moment of unspoken hostility, he turned over and tried to get some sleep.

Santiago went out to pick up the radio and brought it back in. He looked over at Zeller sleeping in the corner and smiled. “Do you like me?” he asked. I thought at first he was asking Zeller, but then he turned to me.

“I don’t dislike you,” I said, trying to be funny.

He nodded vacantly, as if he were thinking of something else. “I have two babies,” he said. “Did you know that?”

I said that I did. That I remembered them from the day we shipped out, when we were all waiting on the buses that would take us to Griffiths Air Force Base.

“They won’t even remember me when I get back,” he said. “They won’t even know who I am.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” I said. “You get a fresh start. Be a better father to them.”

Santiago was the soldier civilians imagined when they thought of their army. A drinker when he wasn’t on duty, and sometimes when he was. Strong, crazy even, but obedient when it came to orders.

That said, he was anything but stupid. I’d heard rumors that his rank had been reduced because he abused his wife and babies. But for all I knew they were nothing more than rumors.

He sat down beside me. His eyes were still bloodshot and his neck was all pus and scab. He smelled like rot. He put his heavy hand on the back of my neck briefly, then leaned back against the wall, pulled his knees to his chest, and dropped his arms to his sides.

“I don’t even know where she is,” he said. “They’ll never remember me.”

I couldn’t remember how old his babies were. All I could see when I thought back to that day was a fleet of old yellow school buses. I remembered thinking how pathetic it was that the Army couldn’t do better than the yellow school buses that stopped at railroad crossings. They stuffed us and our equipment, one eighty-pound rucksack and one M-16 each, into a space made for a child. And because they only gave us twenty-four hours notice, my parents and brother didn’t come up from Kansas to see me off. Not having a wife or lover to wish me well, it all seemed so cruel. The two-hour ride to the Air Force base was hell.

Santiago shattered my sad reverie by slamming the back of his head against the wall. The moldy wood planks rattled. “If I die tomorrow they won’t even remember me,” he said. Then he crawled back to his corner, spread out beneath his poncho, and turned to the wall in search of sleep.

The next day Zeller and I talked about the movies we wanted to see when we got back to America. We decided to go to a theater and spend a whole day watching movies we knew nothing about. We’d pick them by nothing more than their title.

“I bet they’ll make a movie about us,” Zeller said. His face was thin and pale by now, and his eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, surrounded by dark shadows. He’d lost a lot of weight. We all had. I wondered what I looked