So in an airport lounge of four hundred chairs and one hundred people waiting for eight different flights to depart, he found me. Of course he found me. I should stop being surprised by these things.

I had been gone for two weeks, deep in the heard of Belize, Central America, cut off from most communication, and had decided to avail myself of the CNN airport network, in a semi-futile attempt to catch up with the time I'd missed. The reporter was chattering on, talking about homeland security and recently dead baseball players and bus crashes, when a voice with a Texas accent thick as a peat bog gestured to the seat next to mine and asked, "Anybody sittin' there?"

No, I told the man without really looking at him. He was welcome to sit there. And while I paid him not much attention, he sat down next to me.

A few seconds of silence. "Are you goin' to Kileen?"

"No, Corpus."

"You from there?"

Born and raised.

"Where you been?"

Innocuous questions. One traveler to another trying to make a minute or two of connection before lapsing into the silence that precedes the 'now boarding' call. And so I explained how I had been in Belize, working on an archaeological dig for educational purposes -- the semi-lie is always easier than the complicated truth.

He nodded as I talked, still located out of the corner of my eye, my head still turned mostly to the television. "Find anything?"

Oh, sure, I told him. Lots of stuff.

"Find anything valuable?"

I laughed. "Sometimes."

He smiled at me and raised a bottle of water to his lips. He had to do this a few times before I realised he was not drinking from it, but spitting chew, coca-cola brown, into it. "Well, like what?"

I chattered my little bit about jade, and what it was, and why it was valuable, all the while thinking this guy was just a friendly one, particularly talkative. Maybe he even though I (sleep-deprived, travel-ragged me) was cute. Or something.

"Do you get to keep it?" he asked, scratching his knee absently.

"I wish." I smiled again. "Most of it gets sent to museums or universities."

"Oh." There was a short pause. "I just got out of jail."

I have to admit, my heart stopped. Of all the words I had expected this young man to say, that phrase had been so low on my list as to be inconsiderable. So I did the only thing I could think of. I took a good, hard look at him.

He looked like he was pushing thirty, thuogh I found out later he was barely twenty-three. His har was short but shaggy, like someone had tried for the Emperor George Clooney look, but left the number on the clippers too high. He had a beard, or a week's growth of it, not trimmed but sprawling across his cheeks and down his neck. He wore a white t-shirt that had seen better days, and flimsy blue athletic shorts. I can't remember the colour of his eyes; he didn't look at me when he talked.

"Indeed," I think I managed to say, which is my standard response when I don't know what else to say. My default setting, as it were.

He took that as an invitation to talk. "Yeah. They've been holding me in the brig." He named a city; I've since forgotten where, and maybe it's for the best. "Went AWOL. They'd had a warrant since, oh, October 2000, but they just got me. My wife, she come to see me, and they scanned my license, and they arrested me."

He wasn't the world's best storyteller, and I kept having to look away to bite down my gag reflex every time he spat into that bottle. But he talked, and I listened, and I think I pieced together a story. Everybody's got a story.

I'll call him Jason. He never offered his name, and I never asked it, but I think I caught sight of his boarding pass, and his name was close enough. So, Jason. Eighteen, just out of high school, tried a factory job for a month but hated it, so he went into the Army Reserves and began to drive a truck for a living. Married to a girl who had a six-month-old baby already.

Then she started fooling around on him two years later, with a guy she had lived with before. He decided, in his words, "Fuck that," and went to the army full-time. But she came to Texas after him, crying and begging him to take her back, and he did.

Everything appeared to have been going fine until late 2000, when he deserted. Picked up and took off, to where I'm not sure, but both he and his wife made their living as truckers. About six months ago, she had a baby girl.

And then, for some reason, his licence was scanned somewhere around the Mason-Dixon Line, the warrent for desertion came up, and he spent a couple nights in lockup. Simple as that. Somehow -- I never asked -- he was released, and acquired a plane ticket to Kileen, Texas, and there we sat, waiting for our two planes to leave ten minutes apart.

"Do they make you pay to lock you up where you come from?" I told him I honestly had no idea. He pulled out a bunch of photocopied pages folded in half and stapled together -- the prisoner's handbook, for the county in which he'd been incarcerated -- and there, in the back, under MISC., sure enough, a note saying that inmates are responsible for their own upkeep at a price of $22.50 a day. How 'bout that.

He told me he hoped they just phased him out, let him go back to Reserve duty, let him out of the active service without a lot of hassle. After all, as he pointed out, he was traveling unescourted, of his own volition, back to Fort Hood. I realised then I was talking to a man about to turn himself in.

His wife had come to see him, apparently, while he was in jail. Former dalliance aside, she seemed fairly devoted. "Cost her twenty bucks from the hotel to the jail just to see me for fifteen minutes and back again." He reached into his pocket and pulled out two phone cards. "And then I pay ten dollars apiece so I can talk for eighteen minutes.

"This water," he continued, holding up the bottle that now held many things in addition to H20, "cost me $1.65. And $4.50 for a can of snuff. But this is the first airport I've seen they sell snuff in." Ah, you can always count on Texas for the finer things. "I hope they're payin' me for this time, though, 'cause if they ain't, we might lose everything."

He spat, and I turned my head as long as I politely could. "We don't got much, really. I mean, a bed, and a TV, and I can get another bed and a TV. But I've got a truck, and I'm still makin' payments on that." He scratched his chin, where his skin was dry and flaking a little. "My wife too my last paycheck, $500, and paid a few bills with it. Maybe I'll take the truck to my dad's until it's all over, you know? Get behind a few payments, I can make those up."

Out of curiosity, I asked if his father might not help him out a little. "Naw," he snorted, spitting again, "he's bein' a real motherfucker abuot it. He don't work none either, lives of his disability check and spends it fast as he gets it. Hell, he tries to sponge off me. C'n you believe that?"

What seemed as though it couldn't get any worse -- his story, that is -- proceeded to do just that. He had EMT and RN certifications, I found out, but patching up the same street rat crackheads week after week had burned him out. "I reckoned we should just let 'em die instead of havin' 'em in here, week after week, same old stuff." He shook his head. "But I reckoned, thinkin' like that, if that was the way I felt, I didn't need to be anywhere near a hospital." I told him this was probably a smart decision. He thanked me.

Mostly I could tell he was scared, scared of a court-martial, scared of not being able to take care of his family. Already he was scraping by on grace and luck. When he left the base, the MP at the gate had given him $20 and wished him well. The army had picked up his tab for time in prison, but his wife was going to have to send money for a haircut, because not only would they not let him handle live rounds anymore, they wouldn't let him have a razor in the brig. A barber, then.

I decided to ask him about his daughter, and his face lit up. "She's the most beautiful thing in the world," he told me with pride. "Born eight pounds three ounces, and she's so big. I miss her the most."

"Do you have a picture?"

He shook his head. "Ain't got nothin'. Gave it all to my wife before I got taken in. They let me keep my driver's license, though."

"Well," I pressed, "what's her name?"

The proud papa grinned. "Olivia Paige."

Then his gaze grew distant, and looked away. We were both silent as they announced boarding for a flight that wasn't ours, and we sat our ground as people around us stood and grabbed their carry-on luggage. "I'm gonna fix it," he said softly, "when I get back. I wasn't as good a father as I could've been. Didn't help with the kids, neither, didn't hear the baby cry at night.

"I drove a truck, see, so sometimes I was home every night and sometimes I was gone for a week. But when I get back, I'm gonna be home. I'll take a factory job, come home all tired, but I'll be home every night, 'cause I'm gonna keep it together. I'm gonna be a good father and a good husband. I'm gonna make it work."

And then it was time for my plane -- where I am right now, writing this -- and I had to go. So I stood, pressing a phone card into his hand. "You'll use it, I won't," I explained. "It's half used -- well, a little less than half -- probably has sixty minutes or so -- but it'll do you."

He looked at me, blinking. "You don't hafta--"

"Good luck." I took his hand and shook it. And then I walked away.

Because I can walk away. Because I don't live in a world where a man bright enough to get both EMT and RN certifications is pressed by circumstances either into a job he hates or military service he hates even more, or both. Or a world that has to make five hundred dollars last a month. Or a world where a story like that is told not in tones of incredulity or shock, but just as a matter of course. This is the way things are.

And I could do nothing more. Or maybe I could have. But the point is I couldn't have fixed anything. Not a damned thing. The fixing now is up to God and the US Government -- and I hope the latter has even a fraction of the mercy of the former -- and Jason himself.

So whereever you are, out there, Jason, God bless you. God bless you and may you find the best solution to the mess, because I don't know what it might be. But then again, it's not up to me to find the answers. I'm just the writer.

He asked me if I had children, and when I laughed and told him no, but maybe someday, he told me I was a real pretty girl. That there was worth the price of the phone card. So though he'll never know it, we're even. Nobody owed nothing.

I just hope he keeps that promise to his baby girl. He's right when he says, in the end, she's the one that matters the most.

--W. Cox, 24 June 2002
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