So Sales went and did what he was told. When he returned, he realized that it had all been a lie, why they were there and what they were doing. He decided that he would live his own life, his own way, by his own rules. He didn't need to become anything just to please someone else. Those same people, parents, teachers, and coaches, had cheered for him as he boarded the bus that took so many young men away from the sanity of life in rural Texas to the hell of a jungle in a faraway land.

So he got a job as a carpenter and learned a trade. He fell in love with a young girl out of high school, a waitress with dreams of becoming a country western singer. Together they would go to the local dance hall on Friday and Saturday nights. She would sing with a band of old-timers and he would watch, drinking cold bottles of beer until the sound of her voice blended with the night in a perfect harmony of sight and sound.

Everyone told her she could do much better than Sales, a half-breed veteran with a stale and tattered dream of going to college. But she loved him as much as he loved her, and he worked as hard as any man to make them a home. By day, he was a dependable contractor. At night, under the lights of his pickup truck, with his young wife-to-be singing sweetly away with the radio, he toiled at erecting this cabin, raising it from the dust so that they would have a place they could call their own. An uncle who owned a corner store at a crossroads to the north had signed on the note to buy the land, an old, unwanted mining tract. Sales had never missed a payment. Theirs was a happy story, two handsome young people working hard, side by side, to build a simple life together.

He walked out onto the porch and into the shade of the midday sun.