by Chris Lynch
Beck and I meet at the doorway at the same time, stopping to face each other. Caesar squeezes past us while Mom pats both our cheeks on her way to the kitchen.
“You’ll love it,” I say, grinning. “You’ll feel like a new man. Hey, you’ll feel like a man, period.”
“No, I won’t,” he says.
“Oooh,” I say, “is that a confession? I always had my doubts about you anyway.”
He laughs. “After you,” he says.
“No, after you,” I reply.
Then we go through the door at the same time, calculating just right to get wedged in there, stuck together, arms flailing and making Mom dissolve in giggles.
A love for the Three Stooges is probably the strongest bond between Beck and me.
By the time we reach the porch, Rudi is sitting happily up in the big chair with a baby blue bath towel tucked around his neck. Dad is checking his hardware: sharp scissors, electric clippers, straight razor.
“So,” Rudi chirps, sounding more like the barber than the client, “did you hurt your knee in the war, then?”
Morris is having trouble with patience. “Rudi, please, just get your hair cut without saying anything else.”
“It’s all right,” Dad says, patting the top of Rudi’s head. “I relish the opportunity to educate. Wounded Knee was the battle that represented the effective end of the Indian Wars. The end of that whole period of history when the native peoples still had a fighting chance to retain their land. And it was set off by the killing of Sitting Bull.”
In silence then, my father starts cutting Rudi’s hair.
“I wasn’t even close then, was I?” Rudi says, and Dad just keeps on cutting.
The first cut takes no more than five or six minutes. I jump in next, and that takes maybe three. Caesar, not due for a trim for a solid week yet, jumps in and out just as quick. Then Morris gets his de-hippifying.
Dad gestures at the chair, dusting it off for the last appointment of the day.
“No, sir. But thank you, sir,” Beck says. And if respect were smoke we would all be choking now. Beck is not challenging my Dad here.
All the same I wish he would just get in the chair.
“You don’t want a free haircut?” asks The Captain, formal as you please.
“Ah, get a free haircut for cryin’ out loud,” Morris says. Just go along to get along is what he’d like to say.
“Look, feel mine,” Rudi says, pausing from feeling it himself just long enough to shove his dome in Beck’s face. Beck rubs the dome, kisses it, then shoves it away again.
“You’re just gonna lose it in a few days anyway,” I say wearily. Beck is an exceptional guy who can be very hard to talk to sometimes.
“I know that,” he says. Then he turns back toward the evening’s host. “And I appreciate and respect your offer, sir. But I just feel like I need to fly my freak flag for just these few more days.”
Ah … why? Why did he have to do that? He meant it as a joke, I know. He meant it to be playful, in a way that would get a fake-angry response, a challenge. Delivered in a way that said he was different from my father’s world but not necessarily opposed to it.
In a way that my father could never, ever appreciate.
Caesar looks straight up in the air, then slinks into the house like he’s doing the limbo under an invisible crossbar.
“Is that the flag you want to fly, young man?” Dad says, clearly working to maintain composure.
“Dad, Beck was just —”
He holds an index finger up in my direction. “Out of turn,” is all he says.
“I am very sorry if I was out of line, sir,” Beck says. He looks, for the moment, as he basically never looks — uncertain and nervous. “I did not in any way mean to offend you. You are a great man and a great host. I apologize for my lapse in manners.”
The harmful electricity in the air starts buzzing just a little bit less now.
“Well, young man,” Dad says, “you do deliver a quality apology, I’ll give you that.”
“Thank you,” Beck says. “With my mouth, I’ve had to learn.”
Dad bows, then gestures to the chair again.
Sheesh. No cease-fire yet.
“Sir, I just want to wear my hair a few more days. I want to wear it through the doors of induction and pledge my allegiance. I want to say my small piece for freedom of speech, which we Americans hold dear. Let’s call this my First Amendment hair.”
Holy smokes, do we have the two superpowers of blowhard going at it here?
Then suddenly Dad steps away from his barber chair. He walks, stern as Cochise, right up to Beck’s face. Beck’s face doesn’t go anywhere, but I see the shakes on the inside of him threatening to come trickling out his eyes. I feel unable to move a muscle, and I am the toughest nonveteran here by some ways.
“Sir,” Dad breathes into Beck’s face. Never thought I’d feel like feeling sorry for Beck but, yup.
“Sssir?” Beck responds, clearly pronouncing those extra S’s.
“First Amendment Hair certainly has a better ring than freak flag.” Beck definitely catches a bit of the spittle of contempt on the end bit there.
We do a group exhale.
“Thank you, sir.”
“And you have got a certain amount of courage. You will most definitely need it.”
“Yes, sir,” Beck says.
Dad extends his hand, Beck takes it. Dad holds him in his famous manly military death shake for several seconds.
Then the sound of the electric clippers, like a tiny little fighter plane, as Dad swings his left hand from behind his back, over his shoulder, swooping down on Beck.
Beck breaks away and stumbles toward the door and back into the kitchen.
I laugh, and Morris and Rudi join me as Dad proceeds to sweep up. It is mostly the laugh of relief, but it feels good.
“Go ahead in, boys,” Dad says. “I’ll clean up.”
Morris holds the screen door open as Rudi goes in, then me. He puts a hand on my shoulder, pushing me in.
“Who says your dad doesn’t have a sense of humor?” he says.
“Who says he was joking?” I say.
For the record, he wasn’t.
Off the record, I’m ready. I’ve got my orders and I’ve got my baldy cut and I’ve got my head of steam. I want Boston in the rearview mirror and Vietnam in my sights. I want to get on with it.
I want to get these guys out of my house.
Rotten, right? I can’t help it. This phase is over. This moment is over, and the moment I know that is when Rudi gets up off my couch, trailing oatmeal-raisin crumbs across my mother’s nice carpet, and rubs Morris’s head and makes a wish for the sixth time tonight. Everybody laughs. Again. Mom whips out her trusty carpet sweeper and cheerfully collects crumbs before they get ground in. Again. Dad addresses the troops, again, on one more of the many indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia and what we had better be on the lookout for. The guys hang on every word like they all add up to one greasy pole of dear life. Yes, for sure, The Captain has done his homework, but come on now.
“Do you see any parallels between any of these tribes, sir, and the ones you know well among the American Indians?”
That question could come only from Beck.
And it could only bring me to one conclusion, as this is the only time in my knowledge that anyone has had to prod my father into more of this kind of thing.
They don’t want to leave.
I should have seen it earlier, and I should be understanding about it now, and sure it makes some kind of sense, and yes these are my best pals in the world, but jeez, like I was saying, I am ready.
“Right,” I say, standing up and clapping my hands twice, crisply. “I don’t know what any of you are doing tomorrow, but I for one have an early and long day ahead. So …”
No rude boys here, I have to say. Crybabies and mama’s boys, maybe, but the manners are grade A. Everyone is standing, milling, preparing to leave before
the echo of my clap is even dead. Both Mom and Dad scramble out of the room with a sense of purpose.
We see that purpose when we tromp to the front hallway and find a small honor guard: Mom and Dad, on either side of the doorway, waiting to see the boys through. First through is Morris.
Dad shakes his hand so hard I can feel it five feet away. He winces just a bit.
“Bring the maximum of death to the minimum of people,” Dad says. Morris then turns around to face my mother, who kisses him, hugs him, and hangs a scapular around his neck. It’s like a fabric necklace with a sort of postage-stamp Jesus face hanging off it.
Beck steps up, and it feels a whole lot like Mass because my mother is all kinds of Catholic.
“… maximum of death to the minimum of people.”
It is a variation, anyway, on the Mass.
“Rudi,” Dad says, his first diversion from the script. “Follow orders. Follow every single last order, son, and follow it all the way.”
“Ow,” Rudi says.
Mom kisses him, scapularizes him, hugs him for an extra-long time — about the time of the other guys combined.
My parents have done their thing and nod at me as they melt away. They are nodding that they know this is our moment. Me and my boys, finally … no, not finally, but for now having our farewell. Our time. When my parents go, I stand in the doorway, the three other stooges on my porch, under a yellow light and a squadron of moths.
We stare in silence. This is our big moment, apparently.
“See ya,” I say.
Beck laughs out loud, waves me off, and starts down the stairs. Morris shakes his head in amazement, slaps me five, and follows. Rudi stands there, staring at me.
I stare back. “Follow orders,” I say. “Go.”
I snap off the light right over his head.
He stares.
They call for him to come, already pulling away.
I close the door on Rudi.
After a sleep slashed open with excitement, I am up with the crickets, still at it. I skip my parents’ bedroom altogether just like I told them I would. I grab my bag and I head to my new life, my always life, my destiny.
I open the door to Rudi.
“Oh, man,” I say.
No indication either way if he has been frozen in that spot all night or just managed to hit his spot precisely, but I don’t care.
“I don’t care,” I say, sweeping right past him.
“I wanna talk,” he says.
“Rude, y’know, I got something kind of important to do this morning.”
He’s at my heels like a puppy as I make my way down the street toward the bus station.
“I wanna talk,” he says. “I can’t believe you don’t wanna talk.”
“I don’t wanna talk.”
“I wanna talk.”
“I don’t wanna.”
“I wanna.”
Rudi loses at absolutely everything. Except this. He can do this forever.
“I don’t wanna.”
“You can’t do that.”
“I can do that.”
“You can’t.”
I stop in my tracks, and he bangs right into the back of me. We converse just like this.
“There is nothing to talk about, Rudi. We’re soldiers now. Fighters. We don’t talk, we do.”
He is pressed against the back of me, breathing on the spot where my brain stem meets my spinal cord.
“This is getting kind of weird, Rudi.”
He continues doing what he’s doing.
“Are you trying to communicate directly with my central nervous system? If you are, knock it off.”
“I wanna go with you,” he says, shaky. “I should just go with you.”
I spin on him, somewhere between horrified and homicidal. I could choke him now, which may be the best thing for everybody.
I am even looking at his neck as I spin around, so I must mean it.
Then I see. He is wearing three scapulars.
“What’s this all about?” I ask, reaching and fingering the Jesus Three.
“Beck and Morris decided these would make me a little more invincible,” he says somberly.
“Well,” I say, shrugging, “couldn’t hurt, right?”
“Are you gonna give me yours now?” he asks.
“No, dodo, I’m not gonna give you mine. This was from my own mother, ya barbarian. How could I give that away? Anyhow, you got three Jesuses looking after you already. Just like you got the three of us looking after you already. Beck will be up in the sky, Morris will be floating off the coast, and I will be right there in the hills and jungles keeping an eye peeled for you every second. Anybody trying to shoot at you gets shot by me.”
He pauses for thought. It’s quick.
“I’ve been thinking about Canada a lot lately, Ivan.”
My pause is even shorter. “Try and go to Canada and I’ll shoot ya myself.”
“At least that’ll be quicker,” he says.
I shake my head, knowing he would never run. I don’t believe he would ever do that to his country. Or to Canada.
But even more, I know he wouldn’t do it to me.
I check my watch. “I gotta go, man,” I say, pulling him by his collar. “Come on and walk me to the station. I’ll give you a big kiss good-bye for luck.”
“Really?”
We walk, but I look back at him at the same time. His voice was alarmingly upbeat with that Really? so I try and read more of an explanation off his face. But his face is all over the place. He is delighted, scared, confused, lost, hopeful, and dejected.
We are right in front of the bus station.
“Oh, for the love of —” I say, and interrupt myself in order to stop, grab his pathetic, sad little face, and kiss him demented and hard on his cheek. “There ya go,” I scold. “I will never do that again for as long as I live, so you better just cherish it. Be smart. Keep safe. Shoot the right guys, try not to shoot the wrong guys. Keep in touch. And come home to me with lots of great stories.”
I shove him away from me, unable to carry my old friend anymore because jeez, I have got to do my own big thing now.
I spin on my way to the entrance and run right into this big biff of a local 4-F fatso frat boy who has been kicking around this town probably since my dad took this very bus trip. Toby.
“Move, Toby,” I say.
“Can I have one?” Toby says, tapping his cheek and making kissy lips.
“If you mean one of these,” I say, giving him a prime look at my big right hand.
He fakes a laugh and walks around me as I walk around him. Before I can enter the bus station I hear him again. “Can I have one?”
“No?” Rudi says, practically asking permission to not kiss the big stink of a guy. “Lemme go. Get off me….”
I drop my bag, turn around.
“You know,” I say, stomping back big-boy style, “I’m going to be late for the war.”
Toby squares on me, making that infuriating little move, the come on, bring it on gesture with the waving fingers of both upturned hands. Sometimes I swear my own mother could coax me into a punch-up if she did that.
Good thing this ain’t Mom.
I greet him with my full weight thrown behind a straight left hand. I have never landed a cleaner punch. My hips feel the aftershock. He straightens, and I punch him even harder with my right. Rudi is yelling something but I have no time for Rudi or words. I grab Toby with my left hand, hold his shirt tight while I shake him left-right-back-front ’til he is so off balance he doesn’t know where he is going and can’t land a punch.
But I know where he is going. And everywhere he goes he finds my knuckles. I punch him, mouth, mouth, eye, nose, mouth, until I drive him straight back, down, and over the top of Rudi himself.
I stand over the two of them, Toby holding his face together with his hands and Rudi half underneath him and smiling up at me like a dope.
“Dope,” I say, offering Rudi a hand up. �
��You gotta learn to get out of the way. You really gotta learn to get out of the way.”
He is still smiling.
I have to laugh a little, despite how much he’s worrying me at the moment.
“What’s up with you, numbskull?” I ask.
“Nothing. I just … feel a little safer all of a sudden. I feel good, Ivan.”
“That’s swell. I feel like we are right back where we started a million years ago, with me fighting battles for you.”
“Yeah,” he says, still beaming. “Cool.”
I can’t get away from him fast enough now.
“I gotta hurry,” I say, scooping up my bag and opening the door to the bus station. “I gotta go kill everybody in Vietnam before you get there.”
“Thanks,” he calls, and I don’t dare look back.
Not to be bragging or anything, but for about six and a half of the eight weeks of Army basic training, I could have run the whole show myself.
They opened us up with the same “challenge” we ended up with, the Physical Combat Proficiency Test. This starts with the hand-over-hand ladder test, where you have to carry yourself from rung to rung, doing thirty-six of them within sixty seconds. Then there is an obstacle course that is an insult to obstacles. Then there is the fun part, where you have to crawl on your belly through the dirt, from one end of the field to the other, in the allotted time. And last there is the mile run. They didn’t tell me, but I am pretty sure I did the belly crawl faster than several guys did the run.
Anyway, while it might not have been backbreaking stuff, it was at least interesting and it was exercise and it got us all closer to the important stage: fighting the enemy. Well, not all of us. If you don’t make enough points in the final round of tests, you don’t graduate from boot camp with the rest of the platoon, and that means you get recycled. Right back to the beginning of camp to give the whole thing another shot.
There were five of those guys out of our platoon. I hope I never have to fight alongside any of them, ever.
The reward, after day five of week eight of doing everything the Army wants us to do, is we get to see our MOS posting — that’s Military Occupational Specialty — to find out what the next stage of military life will bring our way. OJT, on-the-job training, is where we separate the desk jockeys from the grunts, the brainboxes from the cannon fodder. And not a minute too soon.