My guts turned to water as I looked to my right. The DA’s face was impassive, his eyes focused on the judge. I did not want him to look at me, so I followed his example.

“Let me make this as clear and simple as I can, Mr. Hicks,” Judge MacGregor said. “There are three ways we can handle this. Only one of them is to your benefit.” She held up a finger. “One, you plead guilty to aggravated assault and resisting arrest, face six months of hard labor, and forfeit all of your registered salvage as restitution.” She held up another finger. “Two, you plead not guilty, we go to trial, and you wind up facing a year of hard labor, and we seize all of your property.”

She paused to let the words sink in. A year of hard labor. I had once met a man who had spent only four months in one of the prison camps. He had been a broken, hollow-eyed, starved thing. A shadow of a man. I shuddered.

“Or,” she went on, putting her hand down, “you enlist in the United States Army for a period of no less than four years. If you serve out your time and receive an honorable discharge, the charges against you will be dropped. If you do not serve the full term of the enlistment and are subsequently apprehended, you will be brought back into this courtroom, and if that happens, there will be no more deals. As it is, you’re lucky our docket is overly full and the Army so desperately in need of personnel, otherwise the court would not even be offering you this opportunity.”

The judge sat back and rested her hands on the arms of her chair. “So what’s it going to be, Mr. Hicks?”

I looked over at my defender, who had not said a word. He looked back at me and shrugged. “I’ve seen what happens to guys in the prison camps,” he said. “I’d take door number three if I were you.”

I stared at the floor for a long moment. The two swigs of liquor I had drunk earlier were wearing off. My hands shook, but not from fear. I knew I would not survive a year of hard labor in a prison camp. Death no longer had the power to frighten me, but deep down in a place I had forgotten existed, I felt a spark of something. A stirring I had not felt for so long it took me a few moments to identify it.

Hope.

It’s a hell of a carrot, hope. Put it on a stick and dangle it in front of someone, even someone as low as I was, and you can walk them for miles. My dad served in the Army. So did Blake. They had never talked about it much, but how bad could it be?

I looked up and said, “Your Honor, is there a recruiter in the building?”

*****

The Army could not take me in my current condition, so the judge ordered me into a treatment program. And by treatment, I mean they locked me in a cell, fed me two Xanax a day—one in the morning and one at night—to deal with the withdrawal symptoms, and an Ambien in the evening to help me sleep. This went on for five days.

The Xanax helped, but it could only do so much. I was in agony. I could not hold down food. Horrible black bile poured out of me every hour or so, until I began to ponder where it was all coming from. I was not eating, and so wondered if I was shitting out my internal organs. It would not have surprised me.

After the first five days, my heart stopped trying to beat its way out of my chest, the flow of high viscosity motor oil stopped, and I felt something I had not felt in months—hunger. Actual ‘I could seriously eat food right now and not puke it up’ hunger. The spark of hope in my chest burned a little brighter.

Near the end of the second week, I felt almost human again. To my surprise, there were no cravings. When I thought about booze, I just got mildly nauseous and that was it. Now, two years after recovering, I can drink without feeling the urge to get wasted like I used to. I have a theory about this.

Some people have a switch in their brains. When they take a drink, the switch closes, a circuit is completed, and they immediately want another drink. It is a phenomenon I have seen many times. For these people, once the booze train gets rolling, there is no stopping it.

I do not think I have this affliction. I can have two drinks and call it a night. I think for me, the drinking was a deliberate thing. I did not particularly enjoy it, but it took less courage than putting a bullet in my head. So once I decided I wanted to live, the problem solved itself. Well … that and two weeks of being locked in a room with no access to booze.

I doubt Judge MacGregor will ever know it, but I am grateful to her. She could have laid the hammer down, but she chose to give me a second chance. If I am ever back in the Springs, I will make it a point to find her and express my gratitude.

Near the end of my treatment/incarceration, Tyrel came to see me. He seemed reluctant and surprised I had accepted his visit. The guard put a chair in front of my cell door so Ty could have a seat and walked a respectful distance away.

“How’s it going, man?” I asked with a smile, my hands around the bars. “You doin’ all right?”

He looked confused a moment, then said, “I could ask you the same thing.”

“I don’t think I’m a hundred percent yet, but I’m a hell of a lot better than I was.”

“You look it.”

“Thanks. Where have you been? I figured you would come to visit before now.”

Again, the confusion. “You don’t remember, do you?”

Now it was my turn to be confused. “Remember what?” The memory of waking in my cell with a swollen eye came back to me, and I groaned and said, “Oh, jeez, what did I do?”

“We had a bit of a falling out.”

“How bad?”

“You took a swing at me.”

My stomach dropped. “Did I connect?”

“No, but I did. That was the end of it.”

“God, Ty, I am so sorry. I was out of my head, man. Please don’t hold it against me.”

He stood up and shook hands with me through the bars. “Water under the bridge, son. I’m just glad to see you’re doing better.”

“I’m glad to be feeling better. You hear about what happened to me?”

He nodded. “It’s a good thing the Army is so hard up for people. Otherwise you’d have ended up in a labor camp.”

“No shit.” I sighed and looked down at my hands. “Looks like I’m gonna be a proper soldier soon.”

“So I hear.”

I looked at my oldest and best friend and gave a wan smile. “Any advice?”

“Keep your mouth shut, do what you’re told, and don’t let your drill instructor learn your name. Aside from that, just remember the training we gave you and you’ll be fine.”

A memory sparked in my still marginally dulled brain, and I said, “Speaking of my training, have you heard from Mike? Letters or anything?”

Tyrel’s face took on a sad cast. “Got a letter about a month ago dated from December. Said he’d found his wife, but heard some disturbing rumors he wanted to investigate before he came home.”

“What kinds of rumors?”

A shake of the head. “He didn’t say.”

“Does he … does he know about Sophia?”

Tyrel shrugged. “I sent him a letter after I got his. The address was a trading post in Western Oregon. No telling if he got it or not. Those caravans that travel between here and the west coast lose as much cargo as they deliver.”

I nodded, my heart aching at the thought of Mike learning of his daughter’s death. I wondered if he would blame me, if he would hate me for what happened, his daughter dying giving birth to his grandchild, my daughter.

As if reading my mind, Tyrel said, “Son, it’s not your fault. What happened to Sophia was an accident. It ain’t nobody’s fault. We live in hard times, son. Bad things happen to good people. Sometimes you just have to accept it and move on. There ain’t always a moral to the story. Most of the time, there’s just what happens and how you deal with it.”

I nodded, thinking about Sophia’s chestnut eyes and the daughter I would never get to hold. My throat tightened, and I felt the old despair begin to burn within me. There was a vise around my heart, squeezing tighter, and tighter, and-