“All right. Probably most of you don’t know me,” he says. “I’m Mr. Russell.”

  It is Kent Russell, Kristy Robinson’s boyfriend. He is Tausolo’s next rescuer.

  Kent, who knows some things about wounded soldiers and the effects those wounds can have.

  Who took the engagement ring back from Kristy and said to her, “I’m going to hang on to it, and if the time is right, if it ever comes, I’ll have it.” “Thank you,” she had said.

  Who took the ring home and put it in a drawer, and now, trying to move on, has turned his attention to a new class of students, including one in the back row who is using his pen to poke himself in his arm.

  He turns around and writes his name on the board.

  “Mr. Russell,” Tausolo writes in his notebook, and forty-five minutes later, he walks outside feeling pretty good, as if he’s getting somewhere at last. “So I’ll see you back tomorrow” was how Mr. Russell ended the class, and Tausolo thought: Yes you will. He likes Kent Russell.

  As a matter of fact, he likes Meg Vernon, too. And Sergeant Jung and Sergeant Lewis. He even kind of likes the winker.

  Some days he wonders why he ever wanted to be in the WTB. But there are also days when he can sense some progress, and on one of those days he heads over to the main building to meet with a new sergeant and get a travel request approved. The sergeant looks it over. “Go see the human resources lady,” he says.

  So Tausolo goes to see her. “Leave? Emergency? What?” she says. She tells him to go back to the sergeant.

  “Ask her,” the sergeant says.

  “He told me to ask you,” Tausolo explains to her when she asks him why he’s back.

  She signs the request and tells him to take it back to the sergeant.

  He takes it back, but the sergeant is busy now, having a heated discussion with someone else about which is better, Whataburger or In-N-Out. It seems like it might go on for a while, so Tausolo takes a seat and looks around the sergeant’s cubicle. There’s not much to see, since the guy just arrived at the WTB, only a blank form tacked to a wall that looks like every other army form in the world.

  “Hurt Feelings Report,” it is titled.

  “Whiner’s name,” it says under that.

  “Which ear were the words of hurtfulness spoken into?” it says under that. “Is there permanent feeling damage?” “Did you require a ‘tissue’ for tears?” “Has this resulted in a traumatic brain injury?”

  “Reason for filing this report,” it says under that. “Mark all that apply.”

  “I am a wimp.”

  “I am a crybaby.”

  “I want my mommy.”

  “I was told that I am not a hero.”

  “Narrative,” it says under that. “Tell us in your own sissy words how your feelings were hurt.”

  Finally, at the bottom of the form:

  We, as the Army, take hurt feelings seriously. If you don’t have someone who can give you a hug and make things all better, please let us know and we will promptly dispatch a “hugger” to you ASAP. In the event we are unable to find a “hugger” we will notify the fire department and request that they send fire personnel to your location. If you are in need of supplemental support, upon written request, we will make every reasonable effort to provide you with a “blankey,” a “binky” and/or a bottle if you so desire.

  It’s a joke, Tausolo supposes. He waits for the sergeant to finish his conversation, suddenly feeling tired. The dream was so vivid last night he couldn’t get back to sleep. Up he went. Down he came. “Why didn’t you save me?” Harrelson asked.

  Some things he can’t remember. Some things he can’t forget.

  13

  When Fred Gusman was little, his father came home from World War Two and began beating him with a belt.

  Too young to know why, what he did know was that anything could trigger it. One time it was some Spanish rice that his mother had piled onto his dinner plate, the smell of which was making him sick. Eat it, his father said. I don’t want to, he said. Eat it, his father said again, laying his belt on the table. Fred remembers using a fork to push around the rice until a single grain was stuck to it. He lifted it to his mouth. Stop it, his father said. He ate another grain, thinking he might vomit, and his father picked up the belt and took aim.

  Sometimes, anticipating, he ran to a closet and hid. It didn’t matter. Eventually the door swung open.

  Even now, Fred doesn’t know what was wrong with his father. The war, of course, had affected him—“If he didn’t have post-traumatic stress, he was really weird,” Fred says—but what about it? What specifically would fill a man with such fury? The one person who might have had an answer was a neighbor, also a war veteran, who one day asked Fred’s father to help him build a boat. They spent hours together in the neighbor’s yard, talking now and then as they worked, but any chance that friendship had of loosening something in Fred’s father came to an end when he went over one day and found the man hanging dead in his garage. He cut the man down and continued his beatings, and at last Fred’s mother fled with Fred to live with her mother, a church-going woman who believed in redemption. There’s goodness in everyone, she told her grandson over and over, which was news to an eight-year-old struggling against bad dreams and wetting the bed. Even the worst people have some good in them, she said, and made him a promise. If he looked for it in anyone, he would eventually be able to find it.

  The Pathway Home

  Sixty years later:

  He had gotten through the rest of his childhood in California’s Central Valley by working in middle school as a janitor’s assistant and in high school as a picker in the vegetable fields. He had spent a few years in the military and come out with money for college. He had received an undergraduate degree in child development and a graduate degree in social work, and gotten a job at a VA hospital. He had tracked down Vietnam vets who had come home to scrapheap lives and coaxed them into therapy. He had started the country’s first residential treatment program devoted to those vets and, after treating thousands of them, had come to believe that their best hope depended on their having enough time to understand their illness in the context of an entire life, that what mattered wasn’t just who they became after a traumatic event, but also who they had been the moment before. Deep digging, without time limits, back to the beginning and down to the soul—this was Fred’s approach, and after decades of success with it, he had become concerned when the VA and other providers switched to treatment models with maximum stays. Seven weeks. Four weeks. One week with optional renewals. Eventually, he had grown discouraged enough to consider retiring, and that was when the call had come about Pathway. It would be entirely donor-supported, they told him. No insurance companies to answer to. Independent of the VA. He would have his own building on the vast grounds of the California Veterans Home in Yountville, and the program would be his to design and oversee. “One last run” was the way he explained his decision to people who asked why he was doing it, and now, on a Friday afternoon, three days from starting the hard part of treatment with his newest group of war-wounded vets, the part referred to as Trauma Group, he walks over to a visibly distressed Adam Schumann.

  “Looking forward to Monday,” he says.

  The distress is due to a text that just arrived from Saskia.

  He was upset even before he looked at it, just by hearing his phone buzz. Why can’t she leave him alone? Just let him get better, and one day he’ll come home to her healed. Instead, since quitting her job, she has been texting more and more, fifty times a day sometimes, about anything, as if he were still in Junction City. What did he get at McDonald’s? That was a text. Jax growled at her when she told him to go to bed. That was a text. What now?

  “Any way you can be home by Monday nite? They’re doing tubes Tuesday morning. He’s got complete hearing loss in his left and mild in right.”

  It was about Jaxson, who still wasn’t talking, in spite of being eighteen months old, and as soon as Adam read it, he was once again thinking of the night he fell asleep and Jaxson rolled off the bed.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  So he will go home. He is needed there. But Monday is when Trauma Group begins. How can he not be here?

  He goes outside, where some of the other guys in the program are hanging out on a second-story landing of their building. From a distance, they look no worse off than any other young guys with dangling cigarettes and softening muscles. Only up close does the nervousness in their eyes become noticeable, along with the three bubbly scars on a guy who is now describing the great sex he had once with a girl he met on a psych ward. One scar crosses his left wrist. One crosses his right wrist. One covers the length of his left forearm.

  Fred was right in what he had said on the drive from the airport: a lot of ups and downs in this place, and after two months, Adam is feeling at home among them. He doesn’t know if he’s any better yet, but after a shaky first couple of weeks, the thought of going back to Kansas at this point, even temporarily, makes him feel like he’d be betraying the best chance he might ever get. The counseling sessions, the anger-management classes, the Monday-night bowling with the Rotarians, the meditation lessons—he likes all of it. And he has been looking forward to Trauma Group, even though he has heard it described by someone who went through it as “a kick in the face.” Is that progress? He supposes it is.

  The conversation switches to things they used to do to kids during the war. One guy mentions putting Tabasco sauce on the M&M’s they handed out. Another says they used to throw dollar bills to kids and bet on who would win the inevitable fights. Someone flicks away a cigarette butt, and they all watch it pinwheel to the ground in a satisfying shower of sparks.

  Adam finishes his own cigarette and goes inside to check on his roommate, Will, who, after nearly a year in the program, is leaving. Another thing Fred says: it takes a guy a few months to overcome the sense of hopelessness he arrives with, and Will was a case study in that. For a long time, he didn’t want to talk to anyone or even come out of his room, and now here he is, swearing he’s ready to return to the wicked world that sent him here in the first place.

  “You need help packing up, shitbird?” Adam asks him.

  Will shakes his head. He’s all done. The only thing left is to get rid of his TV, which is too big to take with him. Adam borrows Will’s car, runs to an ATM, grabs two hundred dollars, and comes right back. “All right, let’s do this,” Will says to himself. He turns to Adam and extends his hand. They’ve been roommates since Adam’s very first night here, when an attendant searched Adam’s duffel bag for weapons and drugs and discovered a hidden note from Saskia that said “Baby, I love you so much.” He’s the only one who Adam has told about Emory and Doster. “I’ll see you later, Kansas,” he says.

  “You’re not gonna take the trash out?” Adam says to him as he walks out.

  The door closes.

  “That’s a dickhead move,” Adam yells.

  The door opens. Will is laughing. He grabs the trash.

  “See you, man,” Adam says, and there goes Will for good, leaving Adam to wonder if it’ll take a year for him, too.

  A moment later, his phone buzzes with another text. What does she want this time?

  “Why’d you take so much money out of the account?”

  He sighs. It’s been, what, twenty minutes since he went to the ATM? “It fucking feels like I have a fucking satellite watching me,” he says, and instead of replying, he turns off the phone and goes back outside.

  The others have gone somewhere, so he lights a cigarette, and then another, trying to figure out what to do. From his first day, the place has unnerved and seduced him: hundreds of acres, grape air floating over from the bordering winery, and trees everywhere, of all types, including the tall, skinny palm with the weird leaves outside of his window that, when the wind is blowing, he can’t help but hear. It’s a different sound than in Kansas, when the wind moves through the cottonwoods and he’s hidden up in a tree stand. That has a scratchy sound to it that can make him feel chilly, especially in autumn, when everything is turning brittle. This is more lush, and comes with a chill of a different kind. It would be easy to shimmy up it, he thinks, and the jump, if not soul-cleansing, at least would guarantee relief. That’s the chilling part, the way the leaves in this lovely place seem to be calling to him.

  He watches now as one of the elderly people who live here year-round comes toward him on a sidewalk. There are said to be eleven hundred of them tucked into the various buildings, most of them old, some of them disabled, most of them men, and all of them with military service at some point in their lives. Judging by the caps they wear, most of them were in Vietnam, but this one, so old and moving so slowly, must be World War Two. He is using a walker. He takes a step and rests, takes another step and rests. He keeps coming, and as he nears Adam, he stops, turns as if he’s about to break, and stares at him. Adam stares back. The man takes off his sunglasses and keeps staring. Adam finishes his cigarette. Finally, the man turns away and walks on.

  “Goddamn,” Adam says, a little creeped out.

  More of them are coming now, headed to the dining hall. Some walk on their own. Some use walkers. Most are driving motorized scooters adorned with American flags. Adam keeps watching along with another guy in the program, Rob, who has come out to join him. Now one of those scooters is swerving along the sidewalk instead of going in a straight line like all of the others.

  “Wasted,” Adam says.

  “No, if he was wasted, he’d be going off the sidewalk,” Rob says.

  They keep watching as the scooter goes off the sidewalk. “Oops,” Rob says. But the old man driving it only wants to stop under a magnolia tree for a cigarette, and after finishing it and doubling over in a fit of coughing, he steers onward toward the dining hall.

  Another old vet comes along now who probably is wasted, one of the hard-core guys who spend every day drinking beer at the picnic tables behind the Pathway building, which has a snack shop on the ground floor. They never say hello, or even wave. They just sit there and drink.

  “They’re always fucking drunk,” Rob says of them.

  “They look alone” is what Adam says. “They look broken.”

  “Six in the morning and they already have a beer pyramid going,” Rob says.

  “That’s me in thirty years,” Adam says. “If this doesn’t work out, that’s me.”

  Actually, it’s ten in the morning when the beer pyramid gets going.

  Six in the morning is when Raymond Sherman shows up. He’s the first. He often is, the result of a day in the army a long time ago when he was sent on a clean-up detail to Guyana, where nine hundred people at a religious compound had poisoned themselves in a mass suicide. A few years later, he began having dreams about those nine hundred people, and now he sits alone in the morning chill, his hands wrapped around a cup of coffee, waiting for beer sales to begin. At 9:59, he goes into the snack shop. “Three Keystone Lights and three Natural Lights,” he tells the cashier, and a minute later, the pyramid is under way.

  Paul Alexander—army, World War Two—is the next to arrive. He is wearing a cowboy hat and driving a scooter with two beers in the basket, and after him comes Jim George—Marines, Vietnam—who has neither beers nor legs and is balanced high on his hips on his motorized wheelchair. Soon there are seven of them, all drawn here by the snack shop, which for years was the only functioning part of a vacant two-story building. One day, they were surprised to see painters show up. Next came furniture movers hauling beds and bureaus to the second floor. Then came the first of the haunted soldiers from America’s two latest wars, and now a voice is floating down from an open second-floor window:

  “Wake up, motherfucker.”

  It’s Rob, trying to wake up Adam, who wants to sleep in on a weekend.

  “Wake up, bitch,” Rob tries again a few minutes later, laughing, and meanwhile, at the picnic tables, Jim George is telling about the day he was shot three times. “September 21, 1971,” he is saying. “I’ll always remember that date.” He says it happened in Laos, when he was part of a five-man reconnaissance team that was ambushed. The others were killed, and he lay alone for a long time under a bush, blood seeping out of three holes in his stomach and who knows what seeping in. The area was coated in Agent Orange, and after several days under the bush, he was down to hallucinations when rescuers finally arrived. The years passed. His immune system deteriorated. One day, thirty-three years later, he got an ingrown toenail that became infected, and when it wouldn’t heal, they amputated half of his right foot. The infection continued to spread, and next they amputated the rest of his foot above the ankle. The next amputation was below the knee. Then above the knee. Then mid-thigh. Then all the way up at the hip. The entire leg was gone. And then, he says, the infection showed up in his left foot. Six more surgeries. Six more amputations. Both legs entirely gone. “I enlisted,” he says, thinking back to how this began. “I was mad at the world. I wanted to be a Marine. Big, tough guy. Did me a lot of good. I went in the corps, I was six-foot-two. Thirty-three years later, I’m three-foot-one.”

  He laughs. No one else does.

  “I mean, all wars are the same,” he says.

  “Only the landscape changes,” someone else says.

  The beer pyramid grows higher. One person plays solitaire. A few others watch until one of the Pathway guys walks past with a dog he is training to be his service dog, and two more come out and head to the parking lot. The young soldiers don’t say good morning. The old soldiers don’t say nice-looking dog. No one acknowledges the others at all.

  “They won’t talk to us.” Raymond Sherman shrugs.

  “Most of them won’t even look at us,” Jim George says. “It’s like we done something wrong.”

  “They act like they don’t even see us, and yet they’ll come to our home—and this is our home, for them it’s just a stopover—and they’ll bring their dogs out to take a shit and not even pick it up,” Raymond Sherman says. He is sitting with his knees together, apart, together, rocking back and forth.