Trenton Makes

by Tadzio Koelb

  He had to wait before asking Bets to repeat herself. “I said, I think it’s beautiful,” she told him. “The way the light comes through.” Art took a long hit and explored the tips of his harelip with his tongue before exhaling. When he was younger he had hated that mirror in his parents’ room: it was the only one in the apartment low enough to show him what he least wanted to see, the rent, cockeyed nose above the tight swirl of his mouth. It was only in the dark that it offered him deception.

  “Yes,” he said finally. “I think so, too.”

  “Are you going back to school in the fall?” Bets asked suddenly.

  He thought for a minute before admitting, “Man, I don’t know.”

  “I wish you would, Art. I mean it, really.”

  “Dion calls high school indoctrination.”

  “He also says strategy is everything. What if the war isn’t over before you graduate? You have a better chance of deferment if you’re in college. Especially since you’re the only son, you could say you need the education to support your family.” At the word family he made a noise. She rolled over to hug him then and into his ear said, “Baby, I’m already so worried about Dion. Don’t make me worry about you, too. Not yet.” Art moved away so she wouldn’t notice his erection.

  After the lottery Dion and Bets argued, the first time Art had ever heard them like that, Bets yelling that she would drive him, that minute, to Canada, and Dion refusing, noises so unlike the usual sounds they made when alone of whispering and sex and sometimes Bets laughing with a husky sound like someone shuffling across a field of dry leaves. When the fight was over, Dion didn’t say anything about it, just took Art by the arm and dragged him up the fire escape to the roof under the folding light of the setting sun, where Art watched impotently as Dion then paced around, smoking his way through a pack of cigarettes and a dime bag’s worth of grass. It was as if his whole nature had been distorted by the restlessness of his thoughts, which raced to explore all the possible outcomes, prisons and battlefields, pain and horror, confinement and repression. It scared Art so much he retreated back down the shuddering ladder to the kitchen as soon as he could, leaving Dion to shout at the nighttime.

  “You know he can’t go,” Bets told him. She was at the table staring down at an untouched cup of tea, her face puffed from crying. “Dion can’t be drafted. They’ll destroy him. The person we know will be gone.” She looked at Art and he nodded. “And he can’t go to jail for dodging. That’s nearly as bad. Either way, if they get their hands on him, they’ll make it a goal to rearrange his brain. I mean, Jesus, listen to him. They’re hurting him already and they haven’t even got him yet.”

  In the dark kitchen Bets told Art something she said she’d never told anyone else except Dion: about how her father had killed himself with a Chinese-made pistol he had taken from the still-shuddering corpse of a uniformed boy in a patch of woodland in Korea. There had been a raiding party that caught her father’s patrol off guard with a mortar and sent them scattering into the trees. Concussed and half deafened by the explosion, her father had stumbled into the boy, a Chinese soldier, and they fought, rolling in the leaves and dirt. In the end her father stabbed him in the throat with a stick. His own Colt lost somewhere, his ears ringing, he had carried the boy’s weapon in front of him, his arm held straight, elbow locked, and pointed it at every imagined sound in turn and once or twice fired it into the trees as he staggered his way back to his battalion, scattering groups of men when he swung wildly through the tattered camp with the pistol held in front of him as if the tiny hole of the barrel were all that allowed him to see. He refused to let go of it even when two men he didn’t know—a radio operator and an artillery mechanic—had finally grabbed him from behind and pressed him into the mud. It was not long before that or after it—or maybe it was even just exactly while he had been driving a piece of wood through the throat of the Chinese boy in the trees, he didn’t know—that his daughter had been born, although it would be several days before he learned about it. The information had to follow him north from Seoul and then back again to the hospital where he was sent for evaluation. All this he had written to her in the letter he left behind.

  “It was somewhere they called Triangle Hill. It’s in North Korea now,” she said. “Thousands of people died fighting over this place, and because it was a failure, no one in America has ever heard of it. You’ve never heard of it, right? I don’t even know what the real name is of the place.”

  Art wondered impotently what to say, desperate to speak although he knew that nothing spoken would make a difference. Even before they met, Art had wished he could be like Dion, like any of the imagined Dions conjured in his lonely childhood, distantly observed across classrooms and playgrounds or on television screens, who in his dream he would occupy like a possessing spirit: fluent, assured, cool. Instead he was like poor Jacks, so confounded by words and yet desperate to use them.

  Art couldn’t answer Dion, either, when later he and Bets lay stoned on the roof and Dion called to them from his aimless, recurring, grassed-up procession, talking with all the strange fluency that came from a skull full of smoke. He yelled about the majesty of the darkness, about the impossibility of anything existing without its opposite. They looked south to where the huge sign on the bridge glowed behind the low skyline, lit the clouds red, and though Art couldn’t see the words he knew them like a prayer: THE WORLD TAKES.

  Now it seemed the world would take Dion. For one beautiful and terrifying moment, Art saw Dion and the orgiastic god as one, a powerful being touched with death, robbed of immortality by human transgressions. He felt as if he were at the very top of a tree looking down on the city blinking in the dark, out over a huge horizon of expanding darkness, and that Dion by his simple will had bent it to a ground he hadn’t known was there. Then reality rushed in again, and Art cupped his face in his hands as if to trap within himself the rising desire he felt to speak, and he thought again of Jacks trying so desperately on the day of the accident to build some comfort out of a material he would never master, telling Art’s mother, who wasn’t even listening, “They wanted that someone should tell you, and I said I would do it, and I made Butler drive me here, and he was happy to. Well not, not happy. Not happy, you know,” before finally collapsing with miserable relief into speechlessness, a willed look of vacancy on his face. Art guessed that he looked the same as Dion stared at him through the unhappy humid nighttime: ashamed at the comfort of his own silence, horrified by his own impotence. He was limited, he was insignificant, tiny, and worst of all he was thankful when Dion turned at last again furiously to admire and admonish the sky.

  * * *

  ·

  The next morning Dion was out. They hadn’t heard him leave, but they found him in the park as surely as if they had bloodhounded him through the sun-greased streets by his smell, which Art knew was fennel and sweat and unwashed denim. The park is where Turtle was. Dion and a group of people Art didn’t know that well were passing joints around a circle with Turtle, who crouched on his heels, hugely bearded and impenetrably grimy, still in the fatigues and boots he had been wearing when they handed him his discharge in Da Nang. There were rumors he had sworn not to take them off until every American was out of Vietnam, and that some or most or all of the dirt was really blood.

  Turtle had been living in the park nearly six months by then, and during that whole time Art had not known him to stop talking about the draft and the war except sometimes to sleep or shit or evade the cops for an hour or two. He certainly didn’t stop now to eat: instead he talked through every bite, as if there wasn’t space enough inside him for food and the story of his war to live together and the one had to make way for the other. Art desperately wanted to eat.

  While Turtle talked and chewed, the girls watched Dion, the knotty vines of his arms, his wine-stain lips, the brown fox eyes quarried in the high-cheeked stone of his face, with looks that said they hadn’t noticed yet that the habitual ease of his body had been
broken across the restlessness of his mind, left him straining like an animal against the slow, inflexible strap of time.

  “All along the process there’s hope, you know,” Turtle was saying. “And they dangle this hope in front of you, and the alternatives, well. Man, they don’t seem like alternatives at all from the way they tell it. Like they say, ‘You can go to basic training, or you can go to jail, it’s up to you. Ever been to jail? Ever try to have a life with a criminal record?’ And they’re still dangling that little bit of hope, you know. You might wash out, or you might get sent to Japan or Germany or Korea. So you get on the bus and you hope for the best. Then you find out, congratulations! They’re sending you to Vietnam.”

  Turtle patted at his various pockets and produced a packet of ketchup, which he tore open with his teeth and squeezed out onto some slices of white bread he pulled from a brown paper bag. He looked around at everyone through his dirty, chewing face before he started again. “So, now the options are get on the plane or go to military jail, which makes real jail sound like fun.”

  The short, balled-up trees surrounding the small square of grass where they sat shrugged off a breeze. Turtle always made sure he was someplace where he could keep one eye looking through the metal fence that gave out onto the street, in case the cops came, and he took a second to stare as if at something a hundred miles away. Art looked back over his shoulder but saw nothing.

  “So,” said Turtle, still staring out across the dying grass, “you get on the fucking plane, and you shit bricks, but you’re still hoping for the best. By the time you’re on the front and people are shooting at you, they don’t even bother threatening you with jail or court martial any more. They don’t need to—man, there’s bullets! Your choices are act like a soldier or get killed, so you just do what your body tells you: you start shooting and running and hope you don’t get killed. For a while you hope that you don’t get some other guy killed, either, until the terrible day you realize that really, honestly, if you tell yourself the fucking truth for just one goddamn time in your life, if it has to be somebody, you would rather it be anybody other than you. And, man, that’s the very worst part of it.”

  He stopped and shifted his weight from one squatting thigh to the other. For a moment he scratched at his beard with his knuckles, and Art thought maybe he had finished, but he started again, saying, “They’re always talking about how the army and war will make a man out of you, but I was never a man there, if by man you mean human. I would have ripped any one of you people apart to save my own life, and that’s the truth. It might sound crazy, but sitting there wishing some other bastard would get it in my place, I made a promise to God. I promised that if I got back alive, I would tell everyone I met about what a pointless, useless hell it is we’re building over there. And I would say, ‘Whatever you do, whatever the big boys say or threaten you with, don’t go.’ And if you have to break the law, you break it. That’s just self-defense, right? The law’s trying to kill you, literally kill you, by sending you off to die.” Suddenly he seemed completely exhausted. He face closed in on itself, his mouth half open on the cud of bread he had stopped chewing.

  “Governor Reagan said we could cover North Vietnam with parking lots and have everybody back by Christmas,” one of the girls said.

  Turtle didn’t look up at first. He was drawing something in the dirt with his finger. “When the hell did he say that?” he asked finally in a quieter voice than before.

  “Nineteen sixty-five.”

  “Shit. Well, I guess he was off by a day or two. I wish I had it in me to laugh about it, but I know guys who are probably dying right now to make that cocksucker’s bullshit dream come true.”

  It was clear Dion wasn’t listening. Art watched him across the circle of kids. Art loved Dion’s olive skin and curly hair, the strange power of his androgyny, the strength and vulnerability, empathy and severity, the narrowness of his hips and the fullness of his mouth. Concern worked across Dion’s beautiful face like a storm, and Art followed its unhappy progress. Later Dion talked to Turtle alone, the two wandering away, and Art knew, as everyone must have, that they were talking about how to dodge, because eventually dodging was what every eighteen-year-old with a draft card came to talk to Turtle about. It was a consultation with the oracle of the antiwar, the only man in Trenton anyone knew to ask. Even in the park the air was thick with paranoia and fear, with stories of kids getting busted by the guys they thought were helping them defer, and about how entrapment wasn’t an issue when it came to the draft, because if they didn’t jail you on dodging, they got you for the army. What the hell was the difference, Dion had once said, except that the army was probably worse?

  “What’s up with Dion?” one of the kids asked.

  “Wednesday night,” a skinny girl said. “The lottery. They really nailed him.”

  “Oh, shit. How low?” They all looked at Bets, but she didn’t say anything.

  “Pretty low, I think,” said the skinny one, rocking nervously as she spoke. She looked again at Bets. “Six. I think that’s what he told Turtle before. And no back door. I mean, no dependents, right? And let’s face it, he’s not going to be going to college or anything, and the new rules, man. I mean, even if some pregnant chick would say it was Dion knocked her up, it wouldn’t mean a thing, so he’s the one, you know. The real one-A.”

  “I don’t get it,” said a greasy-looking boy. “Why doesn’t the guy just take a drive to Canada, you know? Lots of people are going.” That’s when Bets got up suddenly with her big fringed leather bag and left, and Art followed. The girl was still talking as they left about how the war was a genocide perpetrated against the black people of America. “Middle-class white kids are welcome wherever,” she was saying. “It’s not so easy to find a new country when you’re black.”

  Bets and Art waited together for Dion on the park’s north side, where the city glimmered in the gathering heat. Everything around them was temperature and light: the sun rolled down the walls and windows of the buildings, flashed off the sudden windshields of the cars and buses, lay molten on the sidewalk. Bets dug in her bag for her weed and they smoked while walking in little circles. Art listened to his empty stomach grumble and moan, the pot making him even hungrier. Dion arrived finally. He climbed the fence and as if speaking to himself explained, “What Turtle says is, the only sure thing is to fail the physical way before you get anywhere near the induction center, because you can’t beat the system using the system’s rules.” The plan itself revolved around a first-year hospital resident known as Dr. Dodge. He knew what he was doing, Dion said, had done it before.

  Still, though, Dion didn’t seem comfortable with it, somehow. He talked around something that he didn’t seem to want to admit, and he talked for some time before it dawned on Art what it was all coming to, slowly and unwillingly: that Dion, who lived by sharing and taking what was unwanted and refusing to desire what couldn’t be his, had a plan in mind, but no idea how he would afford it. It was in the voice of a man admitting sin that Dion finally said, “I’m going to need money, man.”

  Art had never even heard him call it money before, but always something else, something that reduced it, belittled it somehow: moolah, clams, dough, “the long green.” We got to get us some of that dirty bread, man.

  Art was dizzied, disoriented by pot and hunger but even more, he felt, by admiration for Dion, and in a kind of dream made from Dion’s talk he thought of something one of his teachers had told him, a story about the way people had protected statues from being bombed in Europe during the war, and the teacher, one of those men who stood alone at the front of the classroom as if it were empty and talked as if to himself about a thing he had only just glimpsed, said that they had done it not because a statue had ever fed a man, and not even because anyone had ever even stopped to look at a statue that they could remember, let alone been touched by it or inspired or noticed its beauty. It was just so they could know they had acted, know they had protected somet
hing, anything, from the overwhelming situation, taken some tiny stand against the irresistible tide of history. “Do you understand?” the teacher had asked the silent room. It was only now that Art suddenly did: that the attempt was its own monument, and that he, too, could build one, now, by a simple act of the will. It would be, Art felt with a kind of thrill, magnificent in just that same way to keep something as beautiful as Dion alive through the darkness of the era, and so before he had even thought it through, he found himself telling them, “I might have some money.”

  The others stopped and looked at him with faces that almost made Art laugh. He said, “Well, hey, man, not me. But I might know where to get some. Like for an emergency. And this is, well…Jesus, you know.”

  Dion seemed to rise on the news, so it was only to Bets that Art admitted it was hardly certain: his father had long suspected his mother of hoarding cash. Art was like the others, he had nothing. “The thing is, honestly,” Art admitted, “I stole forty cents from your purse so I could buy a coffee at the diner and use a bathroom with a door.” Still, he felt sure it was there somewhere, because if there was one thing his father knew it was how much everyone was making and spending, how much should be left then for booze. On the day of their big fight Art had found the old man slowly tearing the place apart in search of what he had always felt by rights was his. Art was sure, too, that if he asked her, if he explained the urgency, if he made what he had just sensed clear somehow, his mother would give him what they needed, or at least what she could. It might be enough, and if not it might come so near to it that the rest was something they could hustle from somewhere, friends and strangers. All they had to do, he told himself, was avoid his father.