how right she was.
Chapter 5
The desert was brown in the winter.
Though Andrew grew up in the desert and knew the scent of the rain and the taste of the dust by heart, he still found winter depressing. The sun still shone nearly every day during those drearier months, which encouraged the influx of winter visitors with their motor homes and blue license plates. But for him, seeing the short burst of green in the spring and during the monsoon season had always been more of a pleasure than the mild weather and sunshine of winter.
The property his grandmother owned had always been well maintained and beautifully landscaped every spring, and when he closed his eyes he still remembered seeing her on her hands and knees before her accident, planting perennials every spring until the yard around her house and barn was splashed with every imaginable color. Combined with the beautiful flowers of the blooming cacti and sage bushes on her property, her yard was a veritable rainbow of life. It was his favorite time of year and brought back some happy memories, unfortunately too few to live by.
All of that was gone now. His grandmother was confined to a wheelchair and had been unable to plant flowers since before he joined the military. In addition, his current abode was surrounded by brownish red dirt that blew relentlessly, overgrown mesquite trees that had become mostly brown despite a few carrying a tinge of green leaves left over from the fall, and brown walls topped with razor wire. The ugliness of the barren surroundings reminded him of his brief sojourn though the Middle East, a time in his life that he would gladly forget. Adding to that were gray fences, grey bars and gray skies that currently threatened a rare Arizona winter storm. He wondered if Florence would get a good solid dousing of rain. The rain would turn the yard to mud, and he could not imagine anything more unpleasant.
Life was great.
Not.
Even if life was not what he wanted it to be, he was at the point now where he realized that it still could be much worse.
At least he was not on death row.
He still thought about his conversation with Darren almost daily and still could not change his mind. As he had heard on multiple occasions, ‘isn’t everyone in jail innocent?’ What was the use in fighting it when no one and everyone would believe him anyway? If he were to speak aloud, the guards would nod their heads knowingly and tell him to move on, while the other inmates would cheer and laugh at his determination to be right. So he remained silent, as silent as the ghost he was known as by the other inmates. He had resigned himself to his fate and was trying to make the best of what his life had become. The dream that someday some smoking bombshell would appear that would shed the truth in light still occurred to him every now and then, but he stubbornly bit it back as he grew accustomed to the reality of what really was.
His life was over. His dreams were gone. He was beaten. Until the bombshell appeared, he refused to hold his breath or dream.
In reality, as his days passed and he learned more about prison life, he came to the conclusion that it was not much different than his time in Afghanistan. Though there was violence, it was not something he was unfamiliar with. For years he had lived in hastily thrown up camps, wandering through the mountain towns, speaking to elders and risking running into Taliban members eager to take a shot at them. Though the fighting in the northern part of the country ceased fairly quickly during those early years, he remembered the same sort of discomfort that he was experiencing now. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, blending in with the locals that would smile one day and then shoot at you the next, all of that was something he had grown accustomed to in the months before his arrest. That was all he had known before returning to his country after his medical discharge.
The trick in both those
Chapter 5
The desert was brown in the winter.
Though Andrew grew up in the desert and knew the scent of the rain and the taste of the dust by heart, he still found winter depressing. The sun still shone nearly every day during those drearier months, which encouraged the influx of winter visitors with their motor homes and blue license plates. But for him, seeing the short burst of green in the spring and during the monsoon season had always been more of a pleasure than the mild weather and sunshine of winter.
The property his grandmother owned had always been well maintained and beautifully landscaped every spring, and when he closed his eyes he still remembered seeing her on her hands and knees before her accident, planting perennials every spring until the yard around her house and barn was splashed with every imaginable color. Combined with the beautiful flowers of the blooming cacti and sage bushes on her property, her yard was a veritable rainbow of life. It was his favorite time of year and brought back some happy memories, unfortunately too few to live by.
All of that was gone now. His grandmother was confined to a wheelchair and had been unable to plant flowers since before he joined the military. In addition, his current abode was surrounded by brownish red dirt that blew relentlessly, overgrown mesquite trees that had become mostly brown despite a few carrying a tinge of green leaves left over from the fall, and brown walls topped with razor wire. The ugliness of the barren surroundings reminded him of his brief sojourn though the Middle East, a time in his life that he would gladly forget. Adding to that were gray fences, grey bars and gray skies that currently threatened a rare Arizona winter storm. He wondered if Florence would get a good solid dousing of rain. The rain would turn the yard to mud, and he could not imagine anything more unpleasant.
Life was great.
Not.
Even if life was not what he wanted it to be, he was at the point now where he realized that it still could be much worse.
At least he was not on death row.
He still thought about his conversation with Darren almost daily and still could not change his mind. As he had heard on multiple occasions, ‘isn’t everyone in jail innocent?’ What was the use in fighting it when no one and everyone would believe him anyway? If he were to speak aloud, the guards would nod their heads knowingly and tell him to move on, while the other inmates would cheer and laugh at his determination to be right. So he remained silent, as silent as the ghost he was known as by the other inmates. He had resigned himself to his fate and was trying to make the best of what his life had become. The dream that someday some smoking bombshell would appear that would shed the truth in light still occurred to him every now and then, but he stubbornly bit it back as he grew accustomed to the reality of what really was.
His life was over. His dreams were gone. He was beaten. Until the bombshell appeared, he refused to hold his breath or dream.
In reality, as his days passed and he learned more about prison life, he came to the conclusion that it was not much different than his time in Afghanistan. Though there was violence, it was not something he was unfamiliar with. For years he had lived in hastily thrown up camps, wandering through the mountain towns, speaking to elders and risking running into Taliban members eager to take a shot at them. Though the fighting in the northern part of the country ceased fairly quickly during those early years, he remembered the same sort of discomfort that he was experiencing now. Cold in the winter, hot in the summer, blending in with the locals that would smile one day and then shoot at you the next, all of that was something he had grown accustomed to in the months before his arrest. That was all he had known before returning to his country after his medical discharge.
The trick in both those
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