Killeen

Killeen is the setting for a brief but consequential interval after the narrator returns from deployment: a place of practical resettlement, strained contact with Emily, and an unexpected connection that carries him onward to Dallas for Thanksgiving.

Return and Resettlement

After returning to base, the narrator went to a shopping mall in Killeen and bought a mobile phone. He had missed the spread of text messaging during the year he was away and did not know what a message should cost, so the shop’s contract left him feeling overcharged. His first important use of the phone was to call his parents and tell them he had returned safely. They were travelling to Texas to visit a dying friend of his father in Dallas; because Dallas was only a few hours from Killeen, the narrator said he would try to meet them there.

He also took a taxi to Walmart for clothes, sheets, and a table lamp, small necessities for settling back into life at the post. He then drank heavily. A twenty-four-hour army store near the main entrance also functioned as a gas station and liquor shop, making alcohol readily available. While drunk, he called Emily, upset that she had not been there when he arrived and voicing his suspicion that she had been unfaithful. The return to Killeen therefore combines ordinary efforts to re-establish himself with an immediate strain in his closest relationship.

The Road to Dallas

The narrator’s route out of Killeen began with a chance meeting at a shopping mall. A woman he encountered there offered to drive him to Dallas to see her family, and he accepted, paying her for gas. They headed north on Interstate 35. Partway through the journey, she asked whether he wanted Vicodin, which he accepted; the drive thus joined a practical act of help with the narrator’s continuing exposure to drugs.

During the trip, the woman described a car accident involving herself and her niece. She spoke of her guilt about the harm the accident had caused, and the narrator reassured her that it had not been intentional. She dropped him at the parking lot of his parents’ hotel in Fort Worth. He then spent Thanksgiving with his parents at a nearby restaurant before they visited his father’s dying friend in the hospital. Killeen functions less as a destination than as a point of departure: a temporary base from which family reunion, drug use, and an unfamiliar person’s kindness converge on the journey to Dallas.