News From the Red Desert (48 page)

“So I've been talking to your lawyer again.”

“I'd just as soon you didn't, Susie.”

“She has some strong arguments for an appeal.”

“But I confessed.”

“Nevertheless, she says there are circumstances where confessions may be vacated. Have you not read about the whole false confession issue? It's generating a lot of discussion.”

“Susie, we're not talking about some frightened kid, bulldozed into signing something. We're talking about me. I did it. I confessed to it because I did it. And if anyone asks me again, I'll tell them that.”

“Okay.”

“It's not that I don't appreciate…”

“I know. I just don't understand why you don't fight a bit more.”

“You are not me.”

“I get it.”

After several moments of silence, he said, “School starts soon again, huh?”

“Yeah. We've been shopping all week.”

“Is he still seeing that girl?”

“I think that might have been more in his imagination in the first place, than a real thing. Nothing seems to have come of it.”

“Poor thing.”

“It's the age. He'll be okay.”

“Yes.”

“You should see his room. Covered in books. Floor-to-ceiling stacks of them.”

“A little like his mom.”

“I read a lot at that age, but nothing like he does.”

“It's great.”

“Oh, I know. He could be out doing who knows what instead.”

“Still, it would be nice if a girl was nice to him.”

“Were they nice to you, when you were his age?”

“No, not much.”

“And see how you turned out.”

Anakopoulus looked around him.

“I mean before this. And after, when you're out.”

“Susie.”

“I know.”

Susie said goodbye to the guard at the gate and walked to the car waiting for her in the parking lot. She would come back next month. It was very hot in the Kansan late summer sun. The corn and the wheat had both been harvested and now there was nothing but stubble in the fields. Nothing to restrain the dust. The sun blazed.

In the car waiting for her was her son, in the back seat, reading a magazine called
Hobby Modelist.
Behind the wheel was Scott. She got in and he started the car. They had a long drive in front of them.

T
hough some of the events depicted in this novel may echo things that have actually happened, this is a work of fiction. There really was a network television show called
Stars Earn Stripes,
for instance, but it was broadcast later than the show depicted in
News from the Red Desert,
and the people who participated in it are not those I've imagined here.

The troublesome thing about wars is their actuality—if war bore more relation to its fantasized version, war novels would be both less necessary and easier to write. In order for war novels to deal with their subject meaningfully, the novelist has to hew closer than usual to the things that have happened. To do that, I leapt ahead in time to borrow two snippets from the real coverage of the war on
this page
–
this page
, where Deirdre reads what her competitors are up to at the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post,
quoting from Scott Shanes' piece published in the
Times
on August 11, 2011 and from a story by Karen DeYoung published on October 24, 2012 by the
Post.
Neither of them would have been written when Deirdre is reading them, but both capture the necessary tone and content. Nevertheless, this is a work of imagination.

I wrote most of this book in the Vault Café in Nanaimo, and for hundreds of long afternoons, the better the writing went, the less coffee and
the fewer of Lolo's (fabulous) Super BLTs on beer bread I ate, and yet not one word was ever spoken to suggest that I might pay for my seat somehow. So thank-you, Amanda Scott, proprietor and curator, and my friend. And thank you to Hubertus and Gordie and Amanda Pitz and Lolo and all the other eccentrics and kind people who live there.

And thank you to Anne Collins, of Random House Canada, who has been my brave and loyal editor for eighteen years now, and is also one of my best friends. And to my agent, Martha Webb, and to Jane Warren, and Megan Saunders, and Ronald Wright and Deborah Campbell. Mike Kenyon and John Ronald also went to Afghanistan and are much more than colleagues. Thank you, also, to my children, Molly, Selamu, and Sisaye, and to Shauna Klem. My gratitude to my parents, Roger and Margaret, and to my brother, Mike. And to Marta Demuth, Patti Sonntag, Steve Hunt, Brian Daly, Nan Talese and Hilda Lambie.

KEVIN PATTERSON
grew up in Manitoba, and put himself through medical school by joining the Canadian army. Now a specialist in internal medicine, he practises in the Arctic and on Vancouver Island. His first book, a memoir called
The Water in Between,
was a
Globe and Mail
Best Book and an international bestseller.
Country of Cold,
his debut short fiction collection, won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize as well as the inaugural City of Victoria Butler Book Prize. He is also the author of the critically acclaimed novel
Consumption,
and co-editor of
Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan in the Words of Its Participants.
He lives on Salt Spring Island, BC.