Chapter Twenty-One #4
Not everyone gets the same view, the same ride.
When Skip talks to Ron and Theo about the war, the three of them vacillate between wishing it would end and wondering what it’s like over there.
Theo gets quiet when they talk about how they could get called up any day.
Ron says he’s ready to kill some Commies.
When Skip talks to Vincent about the draft, Vincent says the government’s coming for him, one way or another.
“They’ll vacuum up all the brothers, for sure.
” Since what happened to Sam, Vincent hardly ever raises his brow, seldom smiles.
He doesn’t even look at Skip the same way—unless Skip’s imagining that.
So—follow him—Skip goes from high school to the gas station, to the produce plant, to the lightbulb plant, to the import store, to laying linoleum, to glazing windows.
For the last half of 1966, he can’t get the smell of linseed oil out of his nose.
In terms of his love life, he goes from dating nobody to dating Jill Peaks, to dating nobody again, to dating Babette Morrison, then Jill Peaks again, then Patty Renneker.
He likes Patty, likes this two-nights-a-week thing they have going, thinks, this is how people don’t make mistakes, they ease into things—until Patty starts crying one night right in the middle of kissing him and says she’s in love with a guy named Todd in Findlay.
The beat goes on. In January of 1967, Ron Burgess gets his induction letter, goes on a fishing trip two days later, and is never heard from again (as far as Skip knows).
Sam Riley dies of a lung infection in a hospital bed in Huntsville.
In February, Vincent Deeds is called up.
He shakes his head, holding his letter. “Those motherfuckers,” he says.
“One way or another.” He and Skip and Theo ride up to Owen’s Ridge in the Snot Rocket.
Drink Old Dutch. Share a joint. Vincent doesn’t like the Beatles, and it’s a bad time to not like the Beatles because they’re on half the stations.
“Me and Theo’ll probably be over there with you soon,” Skip says.
“I hope not,” Theo says from the back seat.
“They might not snag you guys,” Vincent says. “If they do, look me up. We’ll make some trouble.” He frowns at the radio. “What the hell are ‘marmalade skies’?” He changes the station, finds Aaron Neville. “There you go. Tell it like it fucking is.”
Two weeks later, he’s off to basic.
—
“Landscaping?” Cal says. “Since when?”
“A couple of weeks,” Skip says. “Just feeling it out.”
“You’re going to feel your way out of job options, if you keep trying and quitting things,” Cal says, and with his eyes he adds: Come work for me.
Skip can read the look. But it wouldn’t be his decision, if he went to work for his dad; it would be Cal’s. And he’d be under Cal’s thumb all day, which sounded to him like the opposite of adulthood. I love you, Dad, he wants to say, I just don’t want to peddle hardware—or be your employee.
—
One night in March, he and Theo are sitting at the bar of the tiki lounge on Odom Street and Theo’s telling him how cool it is to sell lawnmowers high, when a man in a Hawaiian shirt sits down beside Skip.
He’s around fifty. Casual demeanor, smoky voice, and the face of one of those slightly grizzled teachers who look tough but don’t really want to fail you.
He strikes up a conversation with Skip and Theo about the whiskey he’s ordered—Bloxham’s, he says.
The finest whiskey Ohio has to offer, he says.
He introduces himself as Bill Sharp and buys them each a shot of Bloxham’s so they can enjoy it, too, then buys them each another beer.
They aren’t used to people buying them drinks.
They get a kick out of it, cut their eyes at each other, try not to grin.
Hell yes. As the three of them drink, Bill Sharp looks up at the television mounted in the corner.
Footage of a war protest in D.C. Footage of an open-doored helicopter taking off somewhere in Vietnam.
“Awful state things are in,” he says, almost sounding amused.
“Can either of you explain this goddamn war to me?” They can’t, so he starts explaining it to them.
He doesn’t seem surprised when Theo gets up a few minutes later, says good night, and walks out.
He looks after him, opens his hands around his glass, oh well, and talks to Skip for the next hour.
What Bill Sharp says makes as much sense as anything Skip’s heard about the war.
In fact, it’s the only time anyone’s bothered to explain it to him.
Bill Sharp goes right from the war to talking about the beauty of having a job you believe in.
He talks about guys making two-year commitments to the military and getting to write their own tickets.
Cushy assignments. Early retirement. These are the best-kept secrets of the war, he says.
He likes Skip, he says. Good build—play football?
Naw, Skip says, and doesn’t add, Sports are stupid.
If Skip were to consider the Marines, Bill Sharp says he has no doubt they’d make a strong, happy, and well-situated man out of him.
A respected man—for the rest of his life.
And then Bill Sharp is kind enough to walk Skip all the way over to Union Street, where the recruitment office is open late these days.
—
They’d spent two years worrying about the draft.
Becky had sat down with two different mothers from Bonhomie whose sons had died in la Drang.
She’d sat down with a father who had a son missing in action since mid-1966.
She’d told Cal that if Skip got called up, she’d do her best to convince him to go to Canada.
If he didn’t want to go, she’d chloroform him and drive him there herself.
She’d read enough mysteries and crime novels to pull it off.
Cal said he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
It hadn’t occurred to either of them that, beneath the veneer of youthful restlessness and eye-rolling, Skip’s thinking could be out of line with theirs.
It hadn’t occurred to them the extent to which his mind was malleable, that he would look at all his options for the future, weigh them equally, and come to his own conclusion.
It hadn’t occurred to them that he would enlist.
Still in shock at his decision, they had to prepare for his departure.
Ida called Skip from Pompano Beach before he left for basic and tried not to cry but did. “I used to call you my little doughboy,” she said, “but I never meant for you to take it to heart. Will you please, please be careful?” He said he would. “And smart,” she said. “Not brave. Smart.”
It was excruciating for them to watch him leave for a total of fourteen weeks of training—first basic on Parris Island in Port Royal, South Carolina, then infantry at Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, North Carolina—knowing that, even while he wasn’t immediately stepping into harm’s way, he was starting the process.
He’d already started the process, but they knew that the next time they saw him, he was going to belong to it.
The days between hearing his news and seeing him off raced cruelly by. Then he hugged them, climbed the steps of a Greyhound bus, and was gone—bound for the Carolinas.
While he was away, Cal wondered to himself if it was time, finally, to tell both boys the truth. But when he brought it up with Becky, she became even more upset than she already was. “You don’t get to just step in and decide that,” she said.
“I’m not deciding anything. I’m just thinking, and I’m talking to you.”
“Well, stop thinking!”
It was the implication she didn’t like. The why behind the suggestion. The more she turned it over in her head, though, the more she thought Cal might be right. Still, wasn’t the choice really Felix’s to make?
—
She called him at the end of the first week Skip was away and asked if the two of them could meet for coffee.
A new place equidistant from their houses, with an incongruous western theme.
Resin-filled wagon wheels for tables, lariats nailed to the walls.
They’d neither avoided nor sought each other out over the years, but whenever they crossed paths, even for a minute of chat on the sidewalk or in the grocery store, the unique connection between them took on a glow.
Now, with her nerves on edge, a wave of goosebumps crossed her forearms when he walked into the coffee shop, midmorning.
He was fifty-six and at the top of that slide that delivers handsome, up-till-then boyish men swiftly and without apology into their sixties.
Unlike her now salt-and-peppering hair, his had come in discriminately: silver patches at his temples, sprigs of it in his eyebrows.
After they’d settled across from each other in the booth she’d chosen, she told him what Skip had done.
Felix made to speak but went quiet.
He seemed to be wondering what was the right thing to say, so she circumvented that and asked him what he, as a veteran, felt about the war.
Both as a veteran and an American, he said, he thought it was a god-awful mess the country had no business being in.
Still, he tried to eke out some assurance for her: Skip had a good head on his shoulders, always had, it would serve him well.
Plus, he added, he’d seen how enlisted men got a better shake than guys who waited till they got drafted to go in.
But Becky wasn’t interested in being consoled.
She recounted what Cal had talked to her about, explaining why she’d gotten so upset at the suggestion, but, after some rethinking, had realized Cal had a point.
That’s why she was here, she said, and why she’d called; she wanted to know if Felix thought it might be time to tell the boys.