by Tim O'Brien
I couldn’t find a great deal to say.
The nights were slippery, but the days were fine. I remember Sarah in her alpine climbing hat. Sarah swimming under a waterfall. A box canyon, a secret cave, a stream where I found the uranium.
We were barefoot, I remember, and the water was fast and cold. I bent down and scooped up a rock and showed her the purple-black crystals.
“A souvenir,” I said.
“It isn’t—?”
“Harmless.”
Sarah squeezed the ore with both hands, deliberately, the way a child might handle modeling clay. There was a bright sun. I remember the heat and the cold water and the red polish on her toenails. Squinting, she looked at the stream, tracing its course toward the violet ridges.
“You don’t suppose … I mean—”
“Maybe.”
“Up there?”
“Chemistry,” I said.
With her thumb, she flicked the ore away.
“What we’ll do,” she said after a moment, “is we’ll pretend it’s not there. Leave it be.”
“Sure. That’s how it’s done.”
“William—”
“Wish it away,” I said, and smiled. “No sweat.”
But there was a dynamic at work.
It was all around us. In our lovemaking, in the mountains. It was there in the music that summer.
On August 9, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson lifted the old restrictions on U.S. bombing policy. Warplanes were now unloading over the city limits of Hanoi and Haiphong.
On August 20, the United States Air Force flew more than two hundred combat sorties—a new record for the war.
On August 23, a plane bearing nuclear weapons crash-landed at Edwards Air Force Base.
The world, I reasoned, was not entirely sane.
The dynamic was permissive.
On August 27, during Custer Days, Sarah and I sat up in the grandstand at the county fairgrounds. It was no big thing. We held hands and watched Crazy Horse gallop away with my father’s hair.
“Kids,” she said afterward. “They just can’t take a joke.”
At the end of August, on a humid afternoon, Sarah took me on a tour of the Strouch Funeral Home—her own home, actually—a lived-in place with bright kitchen curtains and family photographs. It did not smell of death. Even her father’s workshop, I thought, seemed warm and cheery, the walls painted in bright pastels. At the center of the room was a white porcelain table with slightly raised edges. “So anyway,” Sarah said, “home, sweet home.” She held me lightly by the arm, just in case. There was a faint hospital odor—nothing terrible. An oversized sink, a few cabinets, a closet, a coil of orange tubing, a second table mounted on rubber rollers. “Hop aboard,” she said, but I declined. Later she showed me the viewing room, which did smell of death, then she led me up a wide staircase to her own bedroom. “I don’t want pity,” she said. She undressed and pulled the shades. In bed, despite the muggy afternoon, we lay with a quilt up to our necks, side by side, only our arms and ankles touching. “Not pity,” she said, “but love would be nice. You can try, can’t you?”
“It’s not a question of love.”
“Time?”
“I don’t know. I guess.” I thought about it for a few minutes. “Screwed up, probably. It’s like I can’t take the jump. Can’t believe in miracles. I don’t know.”
Sarah pulled a pillow over her face.
We lay there quietly, without moving. After a time I pried the pillow away and kissed her.
“What I’m saying,” she murmured, “is I don’t want to be alone. Not ever. You had your Ping-Pong table, I had this.”
The rule of thumb was acceleration. During our senior year, 1967 and 1968, Sarah led us toward new occupations. History had finally caught up with itself. On November 30, 1967, Eugene McCarthy announced his presidential candidacy. Robert Kennedy sorted through the scenarios. In the city streets, there was organized disorder, and at Berkeley and NYU, even at Peverson State, the writing was on the wall in big black letters. Evolution, not revolution. Abbie Hoffman was now a somebody; Jane Fonda was making choices; Sirhan Sirhan was taking target practice; LBJ was on the ropes; Richard Nixon was counting noses; Robert McNamara was having second thoughts; Dean Rusk was having bad dreams. By the turn of the year, the American troop presence in Vietnam had approached 500,000. Bad omens, I thought, but General William Westmoreland declared that “we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.” And he was right, of course. The silhouette was there. The end revealed itself as an ending that would never quite end. When I look into my hole, allowing for distortion, I can see the end all around me. I can see Sarah leading the rallies at Peverson State. A baroque cartwheel, a fingertip handstand, a pair of identical somersaults—like the tracings of a compass, like school figures in skating. “We’re all cheerleaders,” she says, “you and me and Nelson Rockefeller. High fidelity, William. No switching sides at half time.”
There are fracture lines in the continuum from past to present. Are the dead truly dead?
Dig, the hole says, but I’m watching Sarah and Tina and Ollie in action at a Friday-night football game. I can see the American flag at stiff-flutter beyond the goalposts. I’m up in the bleachers. I know what’s coming. The score is deadlocked, the teams are at midfield, it’s a punting situation—imagine it—that brown ball spiraling through the bright yellow flood-lights, the crowd, the stadium, the artificial greenness of the grass—and the ball never comes down—it’s still up there, even now, it’s still sailing high over Canada and the Arctic Ocean—and there’s a distant sputtering sound—Sabotage, I think, it’s the work of Ollie Winkler—then the floodlights flicker and the stadium goes dark. At the fifty-yard line Sarah lights a sparkler. Tina, too, and later Ollie, and then I join them. “Spine straight,” Sarah whispers, “show me some class.” The pep band plays peace music. It’s all orchestrated. The sparklers and the music and the blackout and people standing and locking arms and singing and swaying under a huge autumn sky.
Impressive showmanship, but what disturbed me was the outlaw mentality. Too reckless, I thought. Those sabotaged floodlights: there was a cost involved, and over the next months it kept rising.
In January they seized the campus radio station. A year of decision, 1968, and Tina manned the microphone, and Sarah and Ollie took turns issuing demands. My own contribution was minimal. Five minutes into the operation I excused myself and found a men’s room and sat there for a long while, just reflecting, tracking goofiness toward sorrow.
Afterward Sarah said, “Well.”
Ollie laughed. “He’s not tuned in. Too shy, maybe. Hasn’t got that on-air personality.”
“Poor boy,” said Tina.
Recklessness, that was one thing, and there was also secrecy. Sarah had undesignated irons in the fire; she wouldn’t always confide in me. Security, she called it, but the variables seemed to graph out as conspiracy. On three occasions during our senior year, Sarah took off on extended trips to various unspecified locales. She came back tan and silent. There were late-night phone calls and coded conversations with anonymous personages. In February, after one of her trips, I came across a packet of twenty-dollar bills in her book bag. The currency still smelled of mintage, stiff and unwrinkled, two thousand dollars in all. And there were other such discoveries. There was an airline schedule. A Spanish-English dictionary, a travel brochure with photographs of Key West by moonlight, a set of house keys, a snapshot of two imposing black gentlemen dressed in berets and fatigues and combat boots. Unhealthy, I thought. I didn’t like the way things were trending. “Loose lips, leaky ships,” she’d tell me. “What you have to bear in mind is that this college crap won’t last forever. Pretty soon we graduate. Commence, et cetera.”
“Et cetera?”
“You know,” she’d say, and smile. “Apply our educations.”
The drift was disquieting. It put a crick in my dreams, I could sense the conclusion, but the real
bitterness came in March when Ned Rafferty joined the Committee.
“He’s not a fuzzball,” Sarah said.
“I know.”
“Not a son of a bitch.”
“Sure, I know.”
“And we need him,” she said.
There was no subtle way to express it. Chemical, I suppose—just hate. It was irrational, in a way, because on the surface Rafferty was a genuinely nice person, friendly and courteous, almost formal in the way he’d call people “sir” or “ma’am” without irony or affectation, as if he meant it. He had a solid handshake. He looked you in the eyes. A jock, of course, but he didn’t brag about it, he kept it in reserve, a certain power that was there in his shoulders and arms and gray eyes. It was a modest sort of strength, which is why I hated him. I hated the goddamn modesty. I hated the good manners and the firm handshake and the body mass and the quiet confidence and the way he’d stare at Sarah until she blushed and looked away. Partly, I think, it was the Crazy Horse connection—I couldn’t dismiss the feathers and war paint—but there were other factors too. His obvious affection for Sarah, for instance. They had a history between them, something more than friendship, and although she insisted it was over, I could read the subtext in their body language.
It wasn’t paranoia. A truly nice guy—that’s what I hated most.
When he walked into our strategy session that afternoon, I stood up and let him shake my hand and then backed off. For the next half hour I didn’t say a word.
The meeting, I remember, was in Tina Roebuck’s dorm room, which was small to begin with, and the place was cluttered with empty Coke bottles and dirty dishes and diet books. The air had a sweet oily smell, like scorched butter. For me, though, the really peculiar thing was the room’s décor: All the walls were papered with photographs of fashion models—trim, well-tailored girls out of Vogue and Seventeen, shapely specimens out of Cosmopolitan—and beneath the pictures were little hand-printed notes:
THIS CAN BE YOU!
TINY TINA—THINK LEAN!
SIZE 8 OR BUST!
It was somehow touching. Leaning back, I found myself measuring the vast distance between reality and ambition. Tina with her Mars bars and anorexic dreams, Ollie with his short fuse and high-heeled boots. Even Sarah. Or especially Sarah, who wanted to be wanted and soon would be.
And there was Ned Rafferty, too, whom I hated, but whose strength and modesty I would one day come to admire.
That afternoon, however, my thoughts were unkind.
I remember Rafferty sitting on a window ledge, quiet and composed. The conversation had come to departure points. Unfinished business, Sarah was saying. College was one thing but the world was something else. We had to grow up. Time to make commitments. Turning, she looked straight at me. Bombs, she said. The war—did we care? Active or passive? Were we in for the duration? Were we serious? Then she smiled and looked at Rafferty. Her voice was low. She had access to certain resources, she told us. A network. Connections: people and places. First, though, we had to resolve the basic question. In or out?
A stirring little speech, I thought. The ambiguities alone carried weight.
I was considering the risks when Ned Rafferty cleared his throat.
“I’m new at this,” he said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but what you’re saying is we have to put up or shut up. Make a choice. That’s the gist, right?”
And then for the next five minutes he completely dominated the proceedings. A smooth talker, I thought, slow and deliberate, but there was a glibness that made me uneasy. Like grease. The whole time he kept his eyes fixed on Sarah.
“So anyhow,” he’d say, “here’s the gist of things.”
The gist of things: that was his favorite expression. The same phrase over and over, like dripping water. This gist, that gist. It was amazing how long I kept my composure. No doubt I was looking for an opening, some flaw in all that niceness, but the sheer enormity of it surprised me. The gists kept piling up. Whenever Ollie or Tina made a comment, he’d mull it over for a while and then smile and say, “I see what you’re driving at, but what you really mean is this—here’s the gist of it.” A couple of times I almost laughed. I couldn’t understand why Sarah kept nodding and taking notes.
Finally I had to cut him off.
“Hey listen,” I said, “you lost me somewhere. I see what you’re driving at, but what’s the gist of it?”
“Gist?” Rafferty said.
“The nub. The nutshell. I need the goddamn gist.”
A little muscle moved at his jaw. “William,” he said slowly, “I just gave you the gist.”
“You did?”
“Yes, sir. I did.”
For a moment I came close to backing down.
“Well, fine,” I said, “you gave me the gist, but I need the absolute gist. The gist of the gist. You have to step back and boil it all down for me.”
“Now listen—”
“Sum it up, put it in perspective.”
Rafferty’s eyes fell. There was puzzlement in his face, even hurt. I wanted to stop but I couldn’t.
“Nail it down solid,” I said. “The bottom line. I need the ultimate, final gist.”
Sarah stood up.
“Enough,” she said.
“Let’s get to the heart of it. Real fundamental basics.”
“William.”
Something in her voice stopped me. Apparently Ollie felt it, too, because he laughed and then busied himself with a fingernail clipper. Tina Roebuck studied the fashion models across the room.
After a moment Rafferty shrugged.
“A comedian,” he said. “Humor, I can appreciate that.”
“It wasn’t humor,” said Sarah. She looked at me for a long time. “Unnecessary. Whatever it was.”
“A joke,” Rafferty said. “No harm.”
“Harm, bullshit,” she hissed.
I felt some tension. There were things I could’ve said, and wanted to say, but I was already out the door.
That night, in bed, Sarah faced the wall.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re not sorry.”
“All right, I’m not. Slimy bastard. The way he looks at you, it’s almost like—” I waited a second, then said, “Are you sleeping with him?”
Sarah rolled sideways.
“And what does that mean?”
“What it means.”
“Cry wolf, William.”
“The truth.”
There was a long quiet. She leaned on her elbow and stared down at me. Her eyes, I thought, were a little puffy.
“Am I sleeping with him?” she said softly. She made it sound like a problem in mathematics. “Well, it’s not something a nice girl talks about, but let’s hypothesize. He likes me, I like him. It’s mutual. I said it before, life has this weird built-in factor called shortness. All this time I’ve been waiting and waiting, for you, just waiting, but the joyride never showed up. So maybe—it’s all hypothetical—maybe I decided to stick out my thumb and pull up my skirt and see if I could stop a little traffic. Conjecture. But what if?”
“I’m asking.”
“Ask.”
“Are you?”
Sarah closed her eyes.
“You know what it is, William? It’s a sickness.”
“Yes or no?”
Again, there was silence.
“Funny thing,” she finally said, “I thought I was sleeping with you. Appearances deceive.” She lay back and watched the shadows. “I care about you, William. A whole lot—too much. But this sickness I mentioned. There’s a name for it. Shall we call it by its name?”
“No,” I said, “let’s not.”
“But you know?”
“I know.”
Sarah touched me.
“So then,” she said. “Imagination time. Am I sleeping with him?”
“You’re not.”
“Sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“I’m not,” she sighed
. “More’s the pity.”
Then she turned away.
It was a bad night. I kept turning the unnamed name over in my head, just letting it tumble. I thought about pigeons and bombs. Crazy, I thought, but that wasn’t quite the name.
In the morning Sarah got dressed and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Rafferty,” she said. “He’s in. You realize that?”
For a few moments she looked away, then she shrugged and pulled the bedspread over me. “The strange thing about it, William, is he likes you. Thinks you’re extraordinary. Extraordinary—his word. The bombs-are-real stuff, that poster of yours, he says you started it all. Says he respects you.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s very genuine.”
“Yes, isn’t it?”
“Very sweet.”
“He is.”
“A nice guy,” I said. “I’ll bet that’s the gist of it.”
We graduated on May 27, 1968.
There were hugs, I remember, and slapped backs and promises, and on May 28 there were departures. In a way it was sad, in a way it wasn’t.