Chapter Twenty-Two #2
He wanted to see them happy again but couldn’t think of a single comforting thing he could say that wouldn’t sound weird.
They didn’t need to hear from him what great parents they’d been, and how much Skip had loved them.
They didn’t need to hear how flattened he was, and how angry.
How could he tell them, anyway, without falling apart?
Skip’s death had killed all the years he was supposed to have and all the things he was going to do—and one of those things was being Tom’s friend.
His death had killed their friendship, their shared time and stories together as kids—now only Tom’s.
It had killed their chance to be middle-aged, and old together, and make fun of each other for dropping their teeth and stuff.
It had killed all that—for a war that made no fucking sense.
He’d been so uncomfortable, standing at that empty grave with them.
Not enough left to send back. Blown to bits.
He couldn’t stand next to them with those thoughts in his head.
He went back to the cemetery alone, whenever he came home.
Sometimes just to stand in front of the marker for a couple of minutes, then walk back to his car.
Sometimes he sat down at the foot of what would have been Skip, and picked at the grass, and an hour went by.
—
Becky couldn’t get over how utterly unprepared she was for grief.
Given how many people she’d helped over the years with this very thing.
And why hadn’t she heard from Skip by now?
He was no longer in this world; she felt that and knew it, unequivocally.
But three, four months in, nothing. She told herself what she’d told so many: that, unlike the living, the dead only seemed to speak when they had something to convey.
Maybe he had nothing to tell them, and never would.
She just wanted to feel his presence one more time.
It didn’t matter, because he wasn’t findable. Wondering why she couldn’t reach him had become one more layer of grief.
Cal, meanwhile, went from worrying that Becky was going to tell him she’d heard from Skip, to wondering if she’d heard from Skip and wasn’t telling him.
He hadn’t found the courage to ask. Instead, he broadsided her with questions she couldn’t answer.
Had he hounded Skip too much? Had he gotten on Skip’s case one too many times about finding a focus?
“I don’t know!” she would cry. And because he would seem to hear that as a yes, “No! You didn’t hound him too much. ”
One night, five months in, they sat down to watch Ironside, and Cal started to cry during the opening credits.
He apologized and, as if the news were still fresh, said he couldn’t stop thinking that Skip wouldn’t have enlisted like that, without saying anything, if he’d felt like he had a father he could talk to.
Becky told him that wasn’t true and that Skip could have talked to both of them about his intentions, if he’d really wanted to.
“You have to stop doing this to yourself,” she said.
Cal took in a breath, let it out slowly. Just then, the courage to ask her was there. “Have you heard from him?”
She knew he was asking without believing such a thing was possible, but, still—he’d asked. She couldn’t begrudge him the question now. Just hearing it from his lips, in his voice, made her ache to help him. But no, she said, she hadn’t heard from Skip.
Not yet.
—
When they thought back on how they got through 1968, it would seem to them a miracle—but not the kind they’d ever want to celebrate.
The year was a minefield in and of itself.
The press couldn’t stop talking about the disastrous Tet Offensive that had left PFC Calvin M.
Jenkins, Jr., and an estimated ten thousand other American soldiers dead.
Cal couldn’t help thinking about Tom in a new, heightened way.
College deferments might stop, if the war kept spiraling out of control.
Tom could get drafted. It was both an endless and a useless worry, and one that could not be expressed aloud in their house, Cal assumed—until Becky, her eyes hedged in shadow, expressed the same apprehension.
Tom was different things to them, maybe, but he was still Tom.
In February, Senator Robert Kennedy, who looked so comfortable out in public just five years after his brother’s murder, officially broke with Johnson and declared the war unwinnable.
Three weeks later, he announced he was running for president, setting him up for a fight against the sitting president.
Johnson looked tired, Becky thought. Like someone had vacuumed out his soul.
And he was tired; all that approving he’d done—and for what?
The Tet Offensive had offended his swagger; nothing looked winnable now.
Two weeks after Kennedy’s announcement, Johnson told the country he wouldn’t seek reelection.
Four days later, Dr. Martin Luther King, in Memphis for a march in support of the striking sanitation workers, was shot to death on the balcony of his hotel room.
Two months after that, Kennedy was shot to death at a campaign rally in California.
None of that year’s newsworthy events happened in Bonhomie, but the atmosphere there changed—as it was changing everywhere.
The air felt heavy with the reality that anything could happen, and lately that meant anything bad.
The flags at the courthouse and post office and public schools seemed to be at half-staff more often than not.
For Becky and Cal, every shock, every minor gasp, every horrible news item in that first year of their grief felt viscously attached to the loss of their son.
Whatever it was, it went straight to that part of their minds where Skip’s death crouched, and when it got there, it turned on the lights.
At times, they felt as if the world were scraping at the windows.
At times, they pushed off together in an imaginary dinghy, and the news of the world was like flames along a shoreline they watched from a distance, drifting.
—
Though the Jenkinses were looking at their television at the end of August, they missed Tom when he appeared—for just an instant—at the bottom left-hand corner of their screen.
He’d spent most of the summer in Bonhomie looking for a job, but he’d also remained in touch with his friends at the radio station at TU and with several anti-war groups he’d become involved with.
He’d hopped into his Corvair and driven back to Toledo for another march, driven out to Ann Arbor for a rally.
To get to the Democratic National Convention, he drove himself to Toledo, then carpooled with a van full of Quakers to Chicago, where they joined thousands of others outside the International Amphitheatre to protest the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, a candidate who was very fond of the war in Vietnam.
As Humphrey took the stage inside, a small group of counterprotesters descended upon Tom’s pocket of things, and suddenly, instead of being surrounded by people chanting and waving signs on sticks, he was in the middle of a brawl.
His tactic, in such situations, was to use his size to his advantage and slip through—what he thought of as his turn-sideways-and-disappear move.
This time, though, someone grabbed him from behind, and the fat neck in front of him punched him in the side of the head.
Not the most impressive punch, but okay, ow.
Punch number two was knuckling up, so Tom brought one of his feet back and kicked the fat neck in the balls so hard, the guy lifted off the ground a couple of inches.
He folded, fell. Whoever was holding Tom let go—fearing for his balls, maybe—and Tom darted.
Right around then, Mayor Daley gave the police free rein to forcefully subdue the demonstrators.
One of the Quakers Tom had carpooled with, running alongside him, grabbed his arm and yanked him out of the path of a tear gas canister.
And so, for just a moment, on televisions tuned to CBS all over America, Tom Salt appeared: a flash of red hair half-whitened by camera lights, then gone.
—
He’d had three girlfriends in college. The first one was a young woman named Amy.
Light on romance, heavy on sex, and they burned out over the course of one semester like a box of sparklers.
His second girlfriend was a young woman named Pam, and they found a fun balance between sex and quasi-romance, but he made the mistake of telling her his mother had taken off when he was eight, disappearing from his life.
Pam was majoring in psychiatric studies, and from that moment on, she “observed” Tom through the lens of motherlessness; she drew connections between his behavior and his childhood—down to the way he opened his mail—until he couldn’t take it anymore and pulled back without explaining why.
His third girlfriend was a young woman from Lima who called herself Cloud.
They met during his senior year, and he enjoyed their dates—but midway through spring semester, she also became involved with a guy who called himself Harmony, and Tom wished them both the best.
In the fall of 1968, he took a job in Toledo as overnight assistant sound engineer at WKML.
He moved in with a young married couple who were both grade school teachers and liked to drop acid on the weekends and draw each other’s shadows on the walls of the apartment with felt-tip pens.
Tom worked all night at the radio station, in headphones, and slept during the day with the sounds of the city and pictures of the war knocking around in his head.
Wondering, like so many other young men, what he would do if he found a draft notice in the mail.