I begin walking again, and John trails behind me. He doesn’t offer anything else to the conversation, and we drift into silence, our journey punctuated by the sounds of the night.

The weather is pleasant enough, but there’s an undercurrent contained in the air, a taste on my tongue, a scent that suggests a storm is brewing despite Tom’s insistence it would miss us.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” I ask John. Most of the highway workers are transplants from other areas.

“No, I’m not.”

“Do you like the Keys?”

“I’ve been worse places,” he replies. “It’s warm, at least. Pretty enough scenery if you don’t mind things a little wild. It’s about as good as any a place to recover.”

“Were you injured in the war?”

He gestures to the leg he’s been favoring. “Shot. Healed fine, but it stiffens up on me in the cold or at the end of a long day. Don’t find much cold down here, so it suits me.”

“I’m sorry.”

He makes a noncommittal sound beside me.

“Really, thank you for helping me tonight. You’re right, it could have been much worse.”

“I didn’t do anything special. Just what anyone would have done.”

“I don’t know about that. It wasn’t your fight.”

“The day we stop fighting for others is the day we might as well pack it all up and go home.”

“I’m not sure many people see it the way you do,” I reply.

“You must see all sorts of people coming through Ruby’s. Did you recognize the men who tried to rob you tonight?”

“They were in there earlier this evening, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them before. We get a lot of men like that coming through our doors—hungry, a little mean.”

“Did you grow up in Key West?” he asks.

“Lived here my whole life. My daddy used to work on the railroad.”

“It’s a hard way to make a living,” he comments.

“Daddy was a hard man. A good one, but a hard one just the same.”

“If it was anything like working on the highway, then there wasn’t a lot of room for softness. It’s dangerous work. It can make you hard.”

“Is that why you come to Key West so often? To escape?”

“Perhaps.”

“Why’d they send you all down to the Keys?” I ask. “Surely, there are plenty of projects around the country for you all to work on. The weather might be good, but the elements aren’t exactly welcoming.”

“They didn’t want us in Washington, causing trouble, reminding the American public—the voting public—that we weren’t taken care of, that the government hasn’t exactly lived up to its promises. They probably thought the Keys were far enough away to send us so everyone would forget about us.”

A few years ago, many of the men who fought in the Great War went to Washington D.C. alongside their families to demand that the government pay the bonuses they were owed for their wartime service in an early lump-sum payout rather than making them wait years for the full payment in such desperate economic times. The papers referred to them as the “Bonus Army.”

“Were you involved with the Bonus Army?” I ask. “The protests in Washington D.C.?”

“I was. I marched with them. A lot of veterans are out of work. Hungry. Losing hope. The government made a promise to them, had the means to help them, to give them the money they were owed by law. Instead, they shoved them aside.”

“The images in the papers—”

They showed chains on the gates at the White House, men living in tents, guards patrolling the street, tear gas bombs released on the remaining veterans, their tents burned.

“The movement changed, of course,” he says. “People gave up hope. Went home. Others came in who had no real affiliation to the war. Near the end we had people join us who were there to cause trouble.

“It’s a shame what’s happening to this country, the mess that’s consuming us. We fought the war to end all wars. Lived through hell. We won. Only to come home to a different sort of hell. And the people who are in a position to do something? You have congressmen making almost nine thousand dollars a year while the people they’re supposed to be serving make a fraction of that.”

Nine thousand dollars is an unimaginable sum of money compared to the few hundred I make at Ruby’s each year.

“Why not home? Why didn’t you go back?”

“I tried. After the war. I’m not—” He takes a deep breath as though bracing himself for something unpleasant. “I’m not the man I was when I left. Everyone was happy to see us home, but once we were there, they didn’t know what to do with us. Wanted to pretend we were the same people who’d left, that we hadn’t seen the things we’d seen.”

“Will you stay down here permanently?”

“I don’t know. There are rumors they’re considering closing the camps. Not that anyone’s told us. They sent us down here like that was going to fix what’s broken in us, and now they want to get rid of us again.”

“That’s not right.”

“No, it isn’t, but not much is in this world.”

I can’t disagree with him there.

“What do you do down in Key West?” I ask.

As soon as the question leaves my mouth, I regret it. I’m a married woman—it’s fairly easy to guess what he gets up to down here.

“During the week, we’re working on a stretch of highway between Grassy Key and Lower Matecumbe. On the weekends? The other guys like to go out. Sloppy Joe’s and the like,” he answers evenly.

“And you don’t like to go out?”

He shrugs. “I went out plenty before the war. Drank myself to sleep enough nights after. Trouble’s the last thing I need.”

“What did you come here looking for?”

“Peace,” he answers, before turning my own question around on me. “And you? What are you searching for?”

“I’ve never been anywhere else.”

“Where would you go?” John asks. “If you could go anywhere?”

Away. Far away.

“Is it like they say?” I ask, sidestepping his question. “In the camps?”

“What do they say?”