He found him there on the bunk, outside the door a plate with a couple of fried pork chops and some rice and beans. Webster hadn’t touched it. Gaines recognized the expression on Webster’s face. It was called the thousand-yard stare. In Gaines’s experience, mostly those he had known at the VA, all veterans had it at one time or another—the odd moment, perhaps a week apart, growing ever more infrequent as the months elapsed. Seems that Webster had it almost all the time. Once again, the man seemed to possess the ability to look right through Gaines, and he did it with such intensity that Gaines felt like nothing at all. It really was that intense. If Webster had just reached out in that moment, Gaines knew Webster’s fingers would touch him and then pass right on through. “Michael?” Gaines said. A faint smile crossed Webster’s lips. Gaines had also seen that smile before—the haunted, guilty survivor’s smile—at the VA, at the Veterans Hospital up in Jackson, in the awkward silence of the Demobilization Center as those who had served their tours were processed out of a war and back into a world that neither could, nor would ever, understand.
