An American Tune

by Barbara Shoup

  She saw a field mouse scurry across the living room floor and disappear into the woodwork. Then another. And another. Bridget screamed again, leapt up.

  “Jesus, they’re just mice,” Pete said. Then, “Shit,” when two more dropped to the floor, squeaking, from beneath the couch cushion on which Bridget stood. He got up, left the room, and returned with rifle he kept in the back closet for plunking tin cans in the field behind the farmhouse. He gestured to Bridget, who leapt from the couch to the chair, where Jane still sat, and when another mouse appeared, he took a shot that blew a hole in the arm of the couch.

  “Pete!” Tom said. “Jesus, what are you doing?”

  More mice appeared and scattered. Pete laughed, wildly, and shot again. “I’m going to kill those little fuckers,” he said.

  “Cut it out,” Tom said. “Come on. Somebody’s going to get hurt here.”

  Pete ignored him – and Bridget, too, who was screaming at him.

  “Are you crazy?” she said, when he finally stopped. “And that’s my couch, goddamn it. It was almost brand new. The guy at Goodwill told me it hadn’t been there two hours before I got there. I was lending it to you, Pete. You know Jane and I were going to use it in our apartment next year. Now look at it!”

  The couch was full of holes, smoking, tufts of stuffing singed brown sticking out every which way.

  “You’re acting crazy,” she said. “I mean it. What’s wrong with you, anyway? Every time I think maybe, maybe you’ve got your shit together –”

  “Maybe I don’t want to get my shit together,” he said, quietly. “Did you ever think about that? Maybe I don’t even think doing what everyone assumes I should do is what getting my shit together would be.”

  “Right,” Bridget said. “What, exactly, would it be, then?”

  “I don’t know yet. I just know it isn’t fucking college. Not now, anyway.” He blew his breath out, set the rifle on the chair beside him. “I enlisted, Bridge. Over Thanksgiving.”

  Bridget’s face turned so pale that, for a moment, Jane thought she might faint. She started to take a step toward her, but stopped when Bridget sank down, safely, on the ruined couch. She turned to Tom, who looked as shocked as Bridget did.

  “I didn’t know.” He mouthed the words.

  “But you were going to class,” Bridget said. “You were studying.”

  “I was pretending to study,” Pete said. “The thing is, Bridge, I couldn’t have made my grades, even if I had studied for real – at which point I’d have been out of here anyway. I figured, enlist. Get it over with.”

  “You could have made your grades if you’d tried,” Bridget said. “You could have talked to your professors and told them you’d be drafted if they failed you. Not to mention the fact that if you really did flunk out your dad could’ve gotten you a 4-F.”

  “I don’t ask my dad for anything,” Pete said. “You know that. Look. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right when we came back, but I wanted us to have some fun before I left. I wanted it to be like it used to be. I was going to tell you tonight.”

  “Tonight.” Bridget said. “As in, ‘Oh, by the way, I’ve enlisted in the Army. Have a great Christmas break.’ ”

  “I’m sorry,” Pete said, again.

  Bridget stood so she was eye-to-eye with him. “Do you think I’m stupid?” she asked.

  “No,” Pete said. “Why –?”

  “Do you think I don’t know the real, chickenshit reason you enlisted in the fucking army was to get away from me? For all I know you flunked out to get away from me. The only person in the whole world who really gives a shit about you? Well, fuck you,” she said. “Fuck you.” She whirled and rushed out of the room, out the front door, coatless, into the cold night.

  “Bridge –” Pete called, but he didn’t go after her.

  She was halfway across the front yard, walking purposefully toward the road by the time Jane and Tom could throw on their coats and catch up with her.

  “Bridget,” Tom called out. “Bridge! Hey! Stop.”

  She turned. Her face was white in the moonlight, her hair wild. When he opened his arms to her, she collapsed against him, sobbing.

  When she’d calmed down, he tossed Jane the car keys and went back inside to get their things. Bridget crawled, shivering, into the tiny space behind the seats in the MG; Jane got into the front seat, started the engine and turned the heater on full blast. “Unchained Melody” came on the radio, a song that brought back the long, lazy weekend at Pete’s.

  Bridget closed her eyes, rested her head on her bent knees. “He doesn’t love me,” she said, bleakly. “I’m so stupid I wouldn’t see it.”

  “He loves you,” Jane said, though she wasn’t at all sure it was true. “He just doesn’t know how to do it right. He’s afraid. You’ve said that yourself.”

  “Same difference, isn’t it?” Bridget said.

  They fell silent then. “Sunshine Superman” came on, oppressively cheerful. Jane watched Tom, framed in the lighted window, talking to Pete – maybe trying to convince him into coming out to talk to Bridget. But when the front door opened, he came out alone.

  He got into the car, sat there for a long moment. “Bridge,” he finally said, “He said to tell you he’s sorry – about everything. It’s not your fault.”

  “Oh, really,” she said. “Sorry. Not my fault. Gee, that makes me feel so much better. You notice, he didn’t say he loved me.”

  Tom glanced toward the window, where Pete stood, looking out. “He has to report on Monday. Do you maybe want to –?”

  “No,” Bridget said. “I don’t. Gutless fucking wonder. Just go, Tom. I mean it. Go. There’s no way I’m going back in there and tell him it’s okay what he’s done. Or beg him to keep on loving me.”

  5

  “Bird on a Wire”

  Jane was surprised by the change she saw in her brother when she went home for Christmas. The greaser kid was gone, and the unsettling obsequiousness he’d displayed after the accident had been replaced by a quiet sense of purpose that made him seem older, more mature.

  “A blessing in disguise,” Jane’s mother said, again and again.

  The Marines were exactly what Bobby had needed: a fresh start, a chance to excel. All that tinkering with machines, she marveled. Remember how he used to take apart toasters and radios? Remember how he loved Lincoln Logs? And his Erector Set? Then came the car engines! He always did have a head for how things worked, she said. Now he was able to put it to good use.

  “Jesus,” Bobby said in a quiet moment. “She seems to have forgotten that someone died for this alleged blessing. Not to mention the fact that where I’m going to be putting all this shit to good use is Vietnam. I’m fine with that. I signed up for it, but –”

  He blew out his breath. “I used to get pissed off when you’d get so crabby with her, you know? But I’ve got to say, she’s kind of driving me crazy.”

  “Thank you,” Jane said, and they both laughed.

  They talked about how she fussed over them, how from the moment they walked into the house she’d started dreading their departure – which Jane felt all the more guilty about since Bridget and Tom had talked her into taking the bus down to Evansville for New Year’s Eve and spending the last few days of break at Bridget’s house.

  “Does she send you money all the time?” Bobby asked.

  Jane nodded.

  “I told her, don’t,” Bobby said. “I don’t need it. And I don’t! I get paid, for Christ’s sake. But she keeps sending it anyway, so I send it to Amy and Susan.”

  “I wish I didn’t need it,” Jane said. “I feel horrible every time I open the envelope. But the money I made this summer wasn’t enough to get me through the year.”

  “I could send you money,” he said. “Seriously. What am I going to do with it in Vietnam?”

  “Bobby, you can’t do that,” she said.

  “Why?”

  She couldn’t answer, for fear of bursting into tears.
r />   “It’s no big deal,” he said. “Really.”

  Jane looked at her brother and saw the little boy he’d been. She remembered him sitting on the porch step every afternoon waiting for her to come home from first grade, how she swished past him so importantly with her little book bag full worksheets dotted with gold stars.

  “No,” she said, in a strangled voice. “You can’t.”

  “Why?” Bobby asked again. “Jane, what’s wrong? Why are you crying?”

  “I’ve been such a shit to you,” she said. “I always have been.”

  “Hey, you’re my big sister,” Bobby said. “That’s your job.”

  “It’s not.”

  “So you’re a pain in the ass. So what? Jesus, would you quit crying? You were only trying to keep me from screwing up all the time. Obviously, I should have listened to you.”

  He leaned over and drew her into an awkward hug. “If I promise not to send you money, will you write to me when I go overseas?”

  Jane nodded against his bony chest, laughing and crying until Bobby pulled away and did such a perfect and ridiculous impression of their mother’s “Blessing in Disguise” speech that her tears gave way to laughter.

  A few times during break, the two of them took the car in the evening and went to the Big Wheel, where they sat, talking over Cokes and fries. Bobby told Jane about boot camp and the buddies he’d made there. She told him about Tom and Bridget, about Pete and how rich and screwed up he was. How he’d enlisted because he was about to flunk out and was probably headed for Vietnam himself.

  “He didn’t like studying, so he just . . . didn’t,” she said. “All that money. He didn’t even care about going to college, and he’s the one who got a free ride.”

  “Yeah, well, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, life’s not fair,” Bobby said. “As far as I can tell, most of the guys heading for Vietnam are gung-ho morons, guys who couldn’t afford college or figure out some other way to avoid the draft, and dumb shits like me who figured it was better than going to jail. It’s been good for me, though – getting the hell out of here. San Diego’s cool, you know? I’m thinking I might live there when I get out. Maybe go to college,” he added, surprising Jane. “There’s that G.I. Bill, you know.”

  “You should definitely go,” she said.

  “You think I’m smart enough?”

  “Yes. You’re smart enough.”

  He shrugged, but Jane could tell it pleased him that she thought so.

  She wrote to him, as she’d promised, once she got back to Bloomington – about her classes, life on campus. But she also found herself writing about things she’d never shared with anyone, not even Tom – their father’s drinking, her conflicted feelings about their mother, the guilt she felt for wanting so much more than they could afford.

  He wrote back about his own conflicted feelings about their family, his regret for the behavior that had ended his girlfriend’s life and brought down so much sorrow on her parents and theirs. He loved the girl, he said, and regretted, too, that he had never told her so.

  Sometimes Jane thought about All Quiet on the Western Front and wondered how similar her brother’s life was to the lives of the soldiers she’d read about. She wondered about Wayne Dugan, too, and what he’d say to her if he found out she had a brother in Vietnam. She wondered what had happened to him.

  When she got to class the Monday morning after the fight in Dunn Meadow, she found one of the Baggers faced off with one of the fraternity guys, having the same argument she and Tom had had about the flag. Her instinct had been to turn and walk away, but Professor Farlow required a doctor’s excuse for absences. So she took her seat, opened her book, and bent her head over it.

  “You fucking frat boys,” the Bagger said, as Professor Farlow entered.

  In the utter silence that ensued, Professor Farlow had gone calmly to her desk, set her book bag down, opened it, and taken out a sheaf of papers. “Your essays on All Quiet on the Western Front,” she said and began to hand them back.

  The fraternity guy’s anger morphed when he looked at the grade on his. The essay question had been “Discuss the way All Quiet on the Western Front critiques the romantic rhetoric of war, honor, and patriotism.” Which was unfair right from the get-go, he said, a setup. To get a decent grade, you had to come to the conclusion that war was wrong – or lie and say you did. The whole point of it – for that matter, the whole point of reading the book at all – was to make them believe what she did.

  “Would you recall for us a time during our discussions of the novel that I said I personally believed all war was wrong?” Professor Farlow asked.

  “You didn’t have to say it,” the guy said.

  Jane instinctively turned toward Wayne Dugan’s place at the back of the classroom, expecting him to counter this idiotic response, but he wasn’t there. She had dreaded seeing him today, fearful that he might have seen her sitting at the Sig house on Saturday, known somehow that Tom was her boyfriend. Now it occurred to her that he might have been seriously hurt.

  She focused her attention on Professor Farlow, who quietly explained that she had chosen this question for them to consider for the challenge it posed in learning to think critically about a text that questioned the conventional wisdom about beliefs that everyone holds dear.

  “The question did not ask you to discuss your personal opinions concerning war, honor, or patriotism,” she said, “but to discuss how the experiences of Remarque’s fictional characters raise questions about them that are important to consider.”

  “I don’t question patriotism,” the guy said. “You do what your country asks you to do. That’s what I was taught. That’s what my dad did in World War II – and I’ll tell you something else. I don’t appreciate reading a book that’s supposed to make me feel sorry for German soldiers, no matter what war they were in. As far as I’m concerned, they got what they deserved.”

  Professor Farlow listened. “Love of one’s country is a deeply personal, deeply emotional issue,” she said when he finished. “I respect your view of patriotism. I honor your father’s military service. Nonetheless, your grade in this class is based on your ability to look objectively and analytically at the texts we consider. Your essay on All Quiet on the Western Front does not accomplish this. You may see me after class if you’d like to discuss it further. Meanwhile, we will move on to T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ ”

  Let us go then, you and I,

  When the evening is spread out against the sky

  Like a patient etherized upon a table . . .

  Which was exactly how Jane felt at that moment, numb, not quite there. She had read the poem, struggled through the footnotes trying to understand it, but all she could remember when Professor Farlow called on her was that it addressed the spiritual exhaustion of people in the aftermath of World War I and shook her head, as if unprepared, because she didn’t want to draw attention to herself, especially by speaking the word “war.”

  Wayne never came back. Rumor was he’d been expelled and sent home – or drafted. Some said he was in jail, awaiting trial for assault and battery of an officer, resisting arrest. Others that he’d jumped bail and headed for Canada. Jane was sorry for whatever had happened to him, but glad she didn’t have to face him anymore, glad when the class moved on from the literature of World War I to The Great Gatsby with its personal, apolitical concerns. She never told Tom that she knew Wayne Dugan, never mentioned the incident at Dunn Meadow again, and made up her mind to forget about the war, which, really, had nothing at all to do with her.

  But now that Bobby was in Vietnam, it seemed the war was everywhere: the gruesome body counts; the soundless, grieving peasants; jets zooming low over flooded rice paddies. Once, in the electronics department at Sears, she and Bridget stood, rooted, before a bank of televisions, the same scene unfolding on each screen: bodies of American boys stacked like cordwood, waiting to be loaded onto the helicopter that would carry them
back to the base.

  Increasingly, people began to question whether the war in Vietnam was a terrible mistake, logistically unwinnable, even morally wrong – thousands of Vietnamese civilians dead in the bombings, the lives and livelihoods of those left wrecked by the scorched-earth policy that had left their land useless for growing. Crowds at the antiwar rallies were bigger than they’d been the spring before, and not only Baggers. Sometimes Jane stood at the edges, trying to make sense of it, trying to figure out what to believe.

  “What’s it like there, really?” she wrote to Bobby.

  “A lot of sitting around, waiting, then some scary shit,” he wrote back. “Then you do it again. But, hey, the trucks are cool. I’ve got my own Jeep. Grass is plentiful. (Don’t tell Mom.) Semper Fi.”

  She made up her mind not to mention her feelings of uncertainty about the war while she was at home for spring break, but when Walter Cronkite reported on the evening news that even LBJ’s advisors were beginning to admit it couldn’t be won, she blurted out, “And he just keeps on sending kids like Bobby over there. My God, why don’t people see that?”

  “I’m proud of Bobby turning his life around the way he did,” Jane’s mother said.

  “I’m proud of Bobby, too,” Jane replied. “I’m not talking about Bobby doing anything wrong. I’m talking about the war being wrong. He shouldn’t be there. Nobody should.”

  “Well, he is there, Jane.” Her mother’s voice was quiet, but shaking with anger. “And as long as he’s there, it’s our job to support him. We have no choice but to believe he’s doing the right thing.”

  She knew better than to respond, but she felt the détente of the past months dissolve into anguished silence. It would be better for everyone if she stayed in Bloomington for the summer, she decided, and Bridget didn’t want to spend another long break battling over her independence. So they found a little two-bedroom house just off Kirkwood Avenue, within walking distance of everywhere they needed to go. Working full-time, they could cover their expenses; if Tom moved in and they split the rent three ways, Jane could take on a second job and be able to pay her own tuition in the fall. Within days of moving into the house, she felt right in this new life with Tom and Bridget, the three of them a happier family than her own had ever been.