Billy didn’t fail the first semester of his freshman year at the state University, but his grades weren’t good. He quit school on the day of his nineteenth birthday, before grades were ever sent home. Billy didn’t feel very involved in college, and he wouldn’t let them grade him. As he pointed out, grades would not have saved him from the lottery anyway. He didn’t resist the fall of the numbers the way I might have, but he evaluated things on a personal scale. I realize now that Billy was one of the more decisive souls in Bellington: he would not be moved. He made his own definitions. I finally begin to understand some of Billy’s definitions, but I’m a slow learner. It seems as though Billy, whom I always tried to instruct, is instructing me. And he isn’t even here, not right now.
The morning of December 3rd, 1969, the day after the lottery drawing for the draft, I went down to Aunt Bess’s to talk to my father. Billy had already refused my suggestion that he resist the draft and go to Canada, but I was still plotting. Bess and Mitch had just finished breakfast. My cousin Katie, Bess’s daughter, had stayed the night but had already left for Winfield. Katie is in her mid-thirties, married and childless, delicate; I was sorry she’d gone. In her quiet way, Katie would have agreed with me. Bess stayed in the kitchen as I followed my father into his bedroom; she knew I wanted to talk to him alone.
“Dad,” I said, “aren’t you worried about Billy?” I stood on one side of the perfectly made double bed. My father stood on the other.
He looked down at the ribbed bedspread and touched the foot of the wooden frame with one hand. “Course I’m worried. We don’t have any damn business over there.”
“Dad, I borrowed some money from Student Loans. It’s money for Billy to go to Canada, and I have information about places for him to go, people to contact. There are organizations that will help. I want him to go soon, and I would drive up with him.”
My father looked across the room and made a sound with his mouth. A click of his teeth, a sighing of air through his pursed lips. Scowling, he shook his head. “That’s not right either. He’d never even be able to come back here.”
“He doesn’t have to live here. It’s possible to live somewhere else besides Bellington.”
“I’m not talking about Bellington, now you know that. He couldn’t live anywhere in this country.”
“Does that matter?”
“Well, hell yes it matters.”
I touched the surface of the bed. The spread was so smooth, the pillows so perfectly covered, I didn’t see how anyone could have slept there the night before. “Dad,” I said, “I think we should all talk to Billy about going to Canada. Someday he’d be able to come back, surely.” I waited, my father made no reply. “If we let them get hold of him, there won’t be anything we can do later to help him.”
Silently, my father nodded. Then he said, “I don’t know, Miss. We’ll have to hope they don’t send him there.”
“Don’t send him? Of course they’ll send him. Why do you think they want him?”
My voice had taken on a strident tone, and my father leaned a little toward me across the bed. “The government has troops all over the world, they don’t just send everyone to Vietnam. Besides, this is Billy’s decision. If he’s old enough to be drafted, he’s old enough to decide what he wants to do.”
“Daddy, he’s just a kid.”
Mitch put his hands in his pockets and shifted his weight to one foot. “So are you.” He looked at me straight on. “You know what you think. Don’t you think he knows what he thinks?”
I was frightened. Suddenly it all seemed real. “What do you think he should do?” I asked.
My father frowned and shook his head. When he frowned so gravely his blue eyes were nearly hidden in his creased eyelids. “I don’t know, Danner. Whatever he decides, I will stand with him.”
“Does Billy know that?”
“Yes, I think he knows.”
“What would you do if it were you?”
“Why, I guess I’d go in. I did before. Most of us did. Anyone who could.”
“But this isn’t even a declared war.”
“Neither was Korea. Lot of boys went to Korea. Lot of boys from around here.”
“But not Billy,” I said. “Billy is ours.” My voice was shaking, so I whispered, “They weren’t.”
We heard water running from the tap in the kitchen. Bess, the sleeves of her sweater pulled up, was washing the breakfast dishes. She washed dishes in a tin basin in the deep enamel sink, then put them in the drainer and poured scalding rinse water over them. The water would be heating now in the teapot.
“Godammit it to hell,” my father said quietly.
Before he went to Vietnam, Billy had a seventeen-day leave home. Once, late at night, we came back from the Tap Room and sat in his Camaro out in front of our mother’s house. We listened to the tape deck, shared a bottle of beer, and smoked a joint.
“This dope isn’t bad,” I said. “Where did you get it?”
“Kato and I bought an ounce in Winfield.”
“Billy, you want to hear my latest idea on how you don’t go to Nam?” I took a drag on the joint.
He smiled amiably. “Sure.”
“You get busted, like I did, only worse. They hold you here for trial. You’re found guilty, of course, and they put you in some nice safe jail for first offenders for a couple of years. By the time you get out, Vietnam is over.”
He laughed. The car held a fragrant smoke and the town seemed empty, quiet. Street lamps lit up the leaves of the big trees. Early May, and there was a faint green stirring in the leaves, a gradual wind. “You really think they’d let me off the hook on a drugs charge, after they spent sixteen weeks training my ass?” His voice was soft and easy in the dark. “How was jail, anyway? I never asked you.”
I heard him draw in, a sound like a calm gasp. “Not much fun,” I said, “but calling Mom long distance to get bail was worse.”
A silence, then he exhaled as he passed me the joint. “Telling him was no picnic either. New Year’s Eve day, snowing like hell, and I went down to the house. We were in the kitchen with Bess, and I told him.” Billy tipped the bottle of beer to his mouth, his throat working in the amber dark of the car. He swallowed. “That man went through some changes. You know that blue and white tablecloth with the little squares? He sat there looking at the tablecloth, with his eyes so wet that tears ran down his face.” Billy raised his brows and looked at me. “Changes.”
I sighed. The joint was gone and I put the roach in the ash tray. “Billy, if you get in trouble over there, you won’t be able to call home.” I leaned against the door on my side so I could see him.
He pointed upward. “I’ll call the Big Guy.”
“Do they have a Big Guy? They’re Buddhists. They have Buddha.”
“Yeah. I believe someone mentioned Buddha at Fort Dix or somewhere.” He smiled. He looked younger with his hair shaved so close his head; I hadn’t seen him with such short hair since junior high. “Well,” he said slowly, “Buddha is a big guy, isn’t he? A short, fat, big guy. Besides, Danner, Big Guy is everywhere, like Santa Claus. Isn’t that what they always told us?”
“But look what happened to Santa Claus.”
“What happened to him?” Billy was laughing, stoned; we were both laughing.
“He kind of disappeared, didn’t he?”
“No, sister, he didn’t disappear. He just isn’t favoring you with his presence lately. He’s got urgent calls elsewhere.”
“Urgent calls on the phantom phone. The air zone phone. The phone the faithful talk on.”
He nodded, seriously, and passed me the beer. “That’s right, absolutely.”
The beer bottle was cold, beautifully cold on such a balmy spring night. “You get in trouble, is that the phone you’ll call me on? Is the Big Guy going to get you through to me?”
“Exactly,” Billy said. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”
We shook on it. Billy executed a modest salute, two fi
ngers to his forehead; then we sat silently, looking out the windows of the Camaro at our mother’s house. The house was pretty and perfect, white curtains behind the panes of the dormer windows, a white trellis by the red stoop of the wide entrance. The flagstone sidewalk along the hedge to the door was breaking up, and pale grass seeded between the stones and the cracked mortar. Along the walk was the bed of yellow marguerites Mom had planted so carefully. She knelt on these spring evenings and picked beetles off the blossoms, then dusted the plants with fertilizer until the fernish, lacey leaves were pale.
“I’ve been taking a good look at all these houses,” Billy said. “Last night I drove around late after I left Kato’s; I parked across from Bess’s house on East Main and looked for a long time. Then I drove out Brush Fork and looked at our house. You seen it lately?”
I nodded.
“I don’t know who owns it now, but they’ve got a bunch of junk cars parked in the backyard, down near the field. Parts of motors sitting around.”
“I know. Mitch kept it all spotless—the yard. In the home movies, he used to take as much footage of the yard and the house as of us. We’d be standing there with the Easter baskets or whatever, holding up some chocolate rabbit according to Mom’s directions, and Mitch would be doing a long pan of the driveway.”
Billy grinned. “And the fence. He filmed the fence all the way around the field so you could see the boundaries of the lot.” My brother took the bottle from me and drank the last of the beer. “Last night, the house was all dark except for one light, in the back bedroom, their room. The swing set is still in the backyard, and the trees are getting big.”
Near Lai Khe in Vietnam, there are rubber plantations still owned by the Michelin Company of France. The rubber trees are forty feet tall and planted in even rows. The light-colored bark is scarred with diagonal cuts on one side; the slashes begin at about the level of a man’s chest. If GIs damage any of the trees in maneuvers, the Michelin Company has to be reimbursed by the US government.
Billy never got around to writing me the facts about trees in Vietnam, but maybe he never took a really good look at Asian trees. Not from ground level the way grunts, the foot soldiers, did. Guys in the Veterans’ Caucus at the University talked to me about trees, about Lai Khe, about choppers. They would answer any question and their answers were detailed. The leafy branches of cultivated rubber trees start at about twenty feet up the thick trunks; the leaves are long and shiny, a waxen, glossy green.
Trees in Bellington are oaks, elms, chestnuts, maples. Birches, evergreens. These trees are the green world of Bellington, of the county surrounding the town, of the mountainous state. In California, I live way up north, near the sea. The trees are different there. The land—the beautiful cliffs, the ocean, and the waves of the surf—seems foreign. When I think of home, I think of a two-lane road densely overhung with the deciduous trees of a more familiar world. The real world. I come back two or three times a year, always at Christmas, always late in June, most of July. Both are bad times for my family because Billy’s absence is so immediate and felt.
The two bedrooms in the upstairs of my mother’s house remain just as they were in 1969, except that the beds are covered with handmade cross-stitched quilts. My mother makes quilts in the long evenings when she is alone with the television set. It gives me something to do with my hands and keeps me from thinking, she says. This is the second summer Billy has been gone: I do want to think. Weekdays when Mom is at work, I sit in Billy’s room and think. I sit on Billy’s bed and don’t disturb anything, but I open the windows as far as they will go—to get some air circulating, some ventilation. It is late June now and summer is taking hold in Bellington. Most of the upstairs windows have worn-out screens, and my mother advises me not to open them at all; flies get in the house. Better not stand on the little balcony porch off the upstairs landing; the roof is weak and the cracks in the plaster ceiling of the dining room below might widen. Wipe up the water that seeps out around the bathtub; it rots the flooring. Dry the tiles with a towel after you take a shower; they’ll last longer. Don’t sit on the quilts or put books on them; you’ll break the stitches. And don’t use them for cover; use the old blankets. Her admonishments are low-key and continuous, as though a war is coming, rationing, proud impoverishment, or a death: something requiring fortitude. Except that a thing more continual than death has already happened, and fortitude is an ongoing process. My mother was ready for anything but this. She lived in fear for months before it happened: then it happened.
My mother can’t talk about Billy in the present. Her emotions concerning the present are shaky. She doesn’t want to join the National League of Families, as I have in California; she says she can’t yet be of help to an organization if she hasn’t managed to help herself. Perhaps later. Meanwhile, I am the family representative in a league founded to lobby for government support of MIAs and POWs, to remind the general populace that they exist. My mother can’t think of Billy as Missing In Action. She thinks of Billy as himself. Often, with constancy and fidelity. She talks about him in letters to me and on the phone; we talk about him when I visit. Maybe she’s working her way into the present, questioning and concluding slowly. Last night she talked about taking Billy and me to the doctor as kids. Billy hated shots. Remember those wide dark steps to Reb’s office above the hardware store, the medicinal smell as you got halfway up? On Saturdays half the County was there, poured in from the country. That big glass frame on the wall was filled with hundreds of snapshots, all the babies Reb had delivered, whole families. I’d try to get Billy interested in the pictures. He was so scared of needles, but he wouldn’t give in to being afraid until the last minute. He’d scream and it took two adults to hold him. Afterward I’d have to get him into the hallway before he’d seem himself again. Her stories about the past seem to comfort her, but they sadden me. After all, I’m in the stories. I’m here, relating the stories to the present and to the future, and I’m always looking for hints. You’d come trailing after us, having watched Billy and then taken your own shots in rigid silence while I got him out of the office. Reb kept a drawerful of candy suckers for kids and you brought Billy’s out to him. Once he got the candy in his mouth, he’d stop shivering. We’d walk down those dim steps to the glass street door. Light shone through in that shape in the dark. Billy strained toward it and you walked down stiffly, holding to the bannister. I could never figure out why you always seemed afraid when everything was already over with.
Even with all the windows open, it is too hot in Billy’s room. I lower the windows, then walk out onto the carpeted upstairs landing, open the screen door to the forbidden porch balcony. It is a summer afternoon and much later, in the dark, it will rain. The warm air smells of the promise of rain. I lock my arms around myself and prop my feet on the railing, memorizing one angle of vision: the slope of the shingled roof to my mother’s square backyard, clean garbage cans sentinel by the alley, the vacant lot with its one scrawny birch. Across the lot are the empty sidewalks, the street, and St. Clair funeral home. The house sits squarely on its wide, banked lawn, waiting. St. Clair Home is one of the few Quality Hill mansions left completely intact; most of the other old homes have been chopped into apartments or defiled by fraternities. The mortuary trade sign, discreet, glassed-in like a portrait, stands on two legs in the center of the lawn. The large round clock attached to the railing of the third-floor balcony is a commercial touch, illuminated at night, but the black numerals and their constant information are easily visible: a service to the community. The peaked slate roof rises over windows framed in blue glass. The glass is densely blue, like the blue of old medicine bottles, and murky.
Billy would never sit and stare at St. Clair Home. He was as uninvolved with undertakers as he was with grades. But I remember coming home from parking at the concrete plant on weekends when I was in high school. Senior year especially, riding past the funeral home with one of the two boyfriends of my high school career. The big St. Clair cl
ock hung as always in its circle of blue neon from the high balcony. The blue ring glowed around the moonish face of the clock. The minute hand moved with a discernible jerk, accurate, later than I’d thought. Late, I fumbled to button my blouse, straighten my stockings. Then whispering, easing of the car to the curb. Winter: patches of ice in the dark. Kisses, good-byes, picking my way up the broken stone walk to the side door as the boyfriend coasted his car down the hill, soundlessly away. Billy was never home yet; he and Kato slept together in her bed and he seldom came in until one or two. I was female, due in at midnight. Inside, glow of the kitchen night-light and again, the tick of a clock loud in the sleeping house. Moving into the hallway, I saw my face in the small mirror above the message board. The apparition of my own image welled up from shadows and startled me. I would think, Billy’s not here, I’m the only one. In the bedroom my father snored, the sheets turned down to his waist. From her bed in the basement came my mother’s voice, her words angry, afraid, and indistinct. I couldn’t answer her. What journey was this, and where were we all going?
Billy got to Vietnam in May of 1970. He said it was so hot there you could barely breathe. I had a job that summer in Bellington, teacher’s aide at Project Headstart. It was hot in Bellington, too. Billy was in the air and I was in the ground-floor classroom of the old Central Grade School with Mrs. Smith and twenty poor kids. We kept all the windows open; flies buzzed in and out, but the air never moved. Mrs. Smith was teaching all summer for the money; she was nice, she was patient, but she had no illusions about head starts. I had illusions. I had nightmares, too, about Billy’s letters, but I waited for every one of them and wrote to him twice a week. I even started hanging out with his friends, kids who’d been two years behind me in school and so were just finishing a first year of college or a first year working for the gas company, or whatever. We’d have a few beers at the Tap Room, and I’d write Billy about funny things they said, how they looked, who they were going out with. He mentioned Kato in his letters, but I never mentioned her to him. I knew she was spending time again with the cop she’d stopped seeing for the few months before Billy went into the army, that the cop’s name was Buck. I felt an unreasonable dislike for Kato and Buck, whoever he was. Even Billy said I was being unreasonable; he didn’t seem to dislike either of them. But I disliked nearly everyone at times. I liked being with Billy’s friends down at the Tap Room, but occasionally the music would be on loud and the lights would be down and people would be dancing, crowding up the crummy dance floor; we’d all be slightly drunk and I’d feel a flash of hatred, like someone switching on a light. Why should they be sitting here, when he was there and I couldn’t find him anymore? Mostly, I disliked people my age, anyone privileged with possibility and liberty. I didn’t realize how much I disliked myself, my liberty and my helplessness.
Machine Dreams Page 30