Chapter Twenty-One #3
Under tragic circumstance did you enter office, so I do not write to you lightly.
We all still mourn for the fallen Mr. Kennedy.
Other than his decision to remove air cover for the men he sent to Cuba and his obsession with the moon, I liked him.
But you, sir, are one more shitbird politician.
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution is a lie that has nothing to do with containing Communists or the safety of this country.
Furthermore, I do not believe it ever happened but was made up by your generals itching to play with their toys, and you have set them loose at a cost I fear will be tremendous when it comes to human life. YOU ARE NOT THE CANDIDATE OF PEACE.
Thank you for the most recent Civil Rights Act.
I wonder, though, why people on your side wait until people on our side are bleeding before you act.
Why werent civil rights handed out to everyone from the beginning?
You say change takes time. It is taking no time at all to increase our presence in Vietnam.
Why werent you in Birmingham last year when the police sicked dogs and sprayed fire hoses on a thousand young men and women?
I was one of the Bonus Marchers in Washington in 1932, we were shot at by the police.
Two of us got killed. A friend of mine was shot in the leg.
Hoover sent in the Army, he sent in MacArthur, he brought tanks.
Which is to say, now looks a lot like then.
Basic fairness should not take this long. This country is at war with itself while you meddle in Vietnam. Are you blind and deaf to your surroundings? Perhaps clean your glasses? And your ears?
Most sincerely.
Lance Corporal Everett B. Jenkins.
US Army Retired.
He took the letter from the platen, signed it, and set it on the snap-up leaf of the typing table Cal and Becky had given him for his last birthday. Then he lay down on his bed for a nap, and died some twenty minutes later.
Becky found him, thus sparing Cal—and inadvertently returning the favor he’d done her years ago.
The sight that greeted her was far less gruesome than what he’d found.
In fact, as if out of consideration, Everett—eyes closed, mouth just slightly ajar—was in the exact position of someone in a coffin.
He’d become almost easygoing over the past ten years, almost comfortable in the world.
He’d allowed her and Cal to sand some of his edges.
She hadn’t read any of his other letters to Washington but knew how he viewed the world, and when she read this one, she saw that they hadn’t smoothed him down completely. She was glad for that.
Cal considered keeping the letter. Then he slipped it into an envelope, addressed it to Lyndon Johnson at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, put a stamp on it, and dropped it into the mail.
At the cemetery, the two Zane Grey Boys who were still alive—both of them, it turns out, a decade younger than Everett—stood to one side of the casket and, when the Presbyterian minister was done saying a few words, said they’d like to sing something if that was okay.
The minister looked at Becky, who looked at Cal, and Cal said, “Of course,” half-expecting them to break into “Danny Boy.” Instead, in their leathery voices, they sang two verses of “I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier. ”
Cal’s inheritance was internal. His father’s death took most of the steam out of any ill feeling he still possessed.
He was surprised at how much he missed the old man.
Strangely, he felt him—not his presence in the room, but in him.
More and more often, lately, Cal understood—and felt—flashes of Everett’s anger toward the government.
He heard Everett’s grumble in his own. He caught himself moving his closed lips around his teeth while he mulled over a thought, as if he were trying to separate a bit of fish from a bone.
—
The Jenkinses had never much wondered why the U.S.
had gotten into the Second World War. Pearl Harbor had galvanized that decision.
They’d both been a little foggier on why the U.S.
had to fight so hard and for so long in Korea.
That had been another country halfway around the world with a line drawn across it, Communists on one side, Americans on the other.
Truman hadn’t even wanted to call it a war, but by the time it was over, the draft for that “police action” had called up one and a half million men.
Thirty-six thousand of them had died. There was a memorial plaque in the cemetery dedicated to the four from Bonhomie.
Whether or not the alleged North Vietnamese attack that led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was real—it wasn’t—they could see that the war was escalating.
The press could see that it was getting worse and talked about it nonstop.
In the year following the Resolution, the number of U.S.
troops stationed in Vietnam quadrupled. The number of draftees more than doubled—to two hundred and thirty thousand.
By the middle of 1966, thirty-three thousand young men a month were getting called up from around the country to go fight in a war nobody seemed to understand the scope or direction of.
People shrugged when you asked them what was going on. People shook their heads.
Tom was in his third year at TU, so Felix wasn’t too concerned yet, but the draft was on Cal and Becky’s mind more and more.
It occurred to Becky at one point that the war in Korea had been able to remain somewhat vague to them because they hadn’t had a child hanging in the balance.
Regardless, this war felt different. Even while it was growing, there were no posters encouraging support for it, no parades.
Skip, meanwhile, was twenty-two and, as Cal liked to put it, slow to take root.
Skip called it being cautious. Becky called it having foresight—which was a smart thing to have, she’d say, cutting her eyes at Cal if she thought he was leaning too hard.
Cal told her, one evening on their after-dinner walk, that he just wanted the kid to find a job he kept for more than six months.
Skip was nixing his chances of liking anything, with that kind of impatience.
He was too distracted, not serious enough.
Becky said, “I think you think you’re not doing your job if you’re not riding him about something,” and Cal was drawing a breath to counter that when he realized she was right.
Give him time, she said. He was working, at least. She’d finally gotten him to do his own laundry.
—
If only college had appealed. Even Skip thought of reconsidering it for a while.
But in the spring of 1965, he’d driven out to TU to visit Tom for a weekend—ole Buckeye, who was so serious now, with his saddlebag and his sideburns and his schedule of classes.
When Tom lit a cigarette, Skip had to tackle him, knuckle the part out of his hair.
Tom walked him to the campus radio station, in a little pale brick building under a tower antenna next to the student union, and showed him where he earned credits doing sound and equipment checks and keeping programming logs.
They let him do the weather on Sundays, if he felt like coming in, he said.
He’d once accidentally said “sner flowies” instead of “snow flurries” on-air and no one had noticed—probably because his five listeners weren’t paying attention.
Tom did everything he could that weekend to talk Skip into enrolling at TU in the fall.
To major in what? Skip wanted to know, and Tom said he could decide that later.
“You’ll like it, I swear. We can room together.
Even I get dates here.” He’d lost his virginity, that was his big news.
He couldn’t stop smiling about it. He said he’d help Skip with all the enrollment forms. Write his essay for him.
Why not give it a try? Skip didn’t think so.
Spending the weekend on campus had only confirmed his suspicion that college really was just high school with beds and ashtrays. But he said, “Maybe.”
The drive back to Bonhomie was a dull hour through an evening sky silhouetted with mills and refineries.
The town looked like a real place, with all its lights fanning out from the tiny tip of the courthouse, and that fucking tulip in the distance, and the sign that said Welcome to Bonhomie when you were still out in what used to be the sticks.
He didn’t not like it here. He wasn’t one of those guys like Denny Shep, who wanted to get the hell out of town as soon as he graduated, go someplace else (his uncle’s blueberry farm in Vermont).
Skip wasn’t restless like that. He just didn’t want to have to make any big decisions yet.
And when he did, he wanted them to be his decisions.
He punched buttons on the dashboard radio.
Not Bobby Vinton. Herman’s Hermits. The Four Tops.
He pulled up beside a pay phone in the warehouse district, dialed Patty Renneker’s number.
Long shot, he knew. Holding the receiver between his cheek and his shoulder so he could keep his hands warm. Outside chance of a hello—at her place?
“Better than outside, Skip,” Patty said.
—
He knows there’s no way to know what’s coming.
Consider that Denny Shep dies a month later in a head-on collision in Vermont, VW bug versus logging truck.
Consider Sam Riley, who a few years back drove with two friends down to a march in Birmingham and got beaten up so badly, they had to move him into his aunt’s house in Huntsville so she could take care of him.