In the mirror his legs are too short, his chin too weak; his feet embarrass him. Maybe in some distant, glittering city, he would belong. Maybe in one of those places, he could emerge, bright and new, as the man he wishes he could become.

Some days, walking to school, or simply rising from bed, he is knocked off-balance by a sudden, stomach-churning sense of spectators ringed around him, their shirts soaked in blood and accusation on their faces. Pansy, they say, and level their outstretched fingers at him. Sissy. Fruit Punch.

Zeno is sixteen and apprenticing part-time in the machine shop at Ansley Tie and Lumber when seventy-five thousand soldiers in the North Korean People’s Army cross the 38th parallel and start the Korean War. By August the churchmen who gather around Mrs. Boydstun’s table on Sunday afternoons are complaining about the shortcomings of the new generation of American soldiers, how they’ve become pampered, made weak by an overindulgent culture, infected with give-up-itis, and the lit ends of their cigarettes draw orange circles above the chicken.

“Not brave like your daddy,” Pastor White says, and makes a show of slapping Zeno’s shoulder, and somewhere in the distance Zeno hears a door slide open.

Korea: a small green thumb on the schoolhouse globe. It looks about as far from Idaho as a person can get.

Every evening, after his shift at the mill, he runs partway around the lake. Three miles to the turn at West Side Road, three miles back, splashing through the rain, Athena—white-muzzled now, lionhearted—limping behind. Some nights, the sleek and shining warriors of Atlantis keep pace beside him as though drawn along hot wires, and he runs harder, trying to leave them behind.

The day he turns seventeen, he asks Mrs. Boydstun to let him drive the old Buick to Boise. She lights a new cigarette from her old one. The cuckoo clock ticks; her throngs of children stand on their shelves; three different Jesuses stare down from three different crosses. Over her shoulder, out the kitchen window, Athena curls up beneath the hedges. A mile away mice drowse inside the cabin where he and Papa spent their first Lakeport winter. The heart heals but never completely.

On the switchbacks down the canyon he gets carsick twice. At the recruitment office, a medic presses the cold cup of a stethoscope to his sternum, licks the tip of a pencil, and checks every box on the form. Fifteen minutes later he’s Private E-1 Zeno Ninis.

Seymour

Bunny owns the double-wide free and clear, but Pawpaw still had a loan on the acre: $558 a month. Then there’s V-1 Propane + Idaho Power + Lakeport Utilities + trash + Blue River Bank for the mattress loan + insurance on the Pontiac + flip phone + snowplowing so she can get the car out of the driveway + $2,652.31 past due on the Visa + health insurance, ha ha, just kidding, she’ll never afford health insurance.