by Anthology
The group bustled amongst themselves, gathering their things.
Angela’s mother clamped a hand onto Angela’s shoulder when they stood to leave. She marched them over to the kitten-faced girl. Gary tried to say something to them halfway, but they dodged him. His perpetual leer fell away, and he slunk out the door.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Angela’s mother said to the kitten-faced girl.
She peered up at Angela and her mother over the pointy tips of her knees. “Thank you Bella. Angie.” Her eyes flicked down to her stomach. “What do I do? If I’m pregnant, I mean?”
Angela felt her mother release her shoulder. “Why don’t you go ahead, sweetheart,” said her mother, in a flat tone.
Angela went.
Outside the church, Oliver tipped a cigarette to Angela, as the little girl’s shoes painted the sidewalk a neon red in time to her steps. “You never say anything in there, Angela.”
Angela peeked over her shoulder. Her mother must still be inside, talking about babies. “My mother doesn’t want me to. She says it might upset people.”
“Naturally.” Oliver took a deep puff from his cigarette. “You know, there’ve been Doxy meetings since they were using cuneiform tablets for sign-in sheets, Angela. And there have always been some who . . . don’t meet the criteria, no matter how much they might want to. You’ve never seen hate till you’ve seen the hate of the desperately counterfeit for the real article.”
He tapped away a pinkie-long flurry of ash and added, “Just between you and me of course, kiddo.” The smoke made his words thicker, and when he breathed, Angela could see something white and angry stretch in his lungs.
“What’s a Doxy, Oliver?” Angela had asked her mother once. Her mother had told her it was nothing a little girl needed to learn. But Oliver didn’t need to know that.
Oliver grinned. “The work of some enterprising punster, I imagine. We’re all paradoxes, you know . . . people who shouldn’t exist.” Another puff of smoke. “It was also a Middle English word for a mistre . . . for a peasant girl that an important man kept secret from his wife. Which is how we all got here, I suppose.”
“Angela!” Her mother clopped up behind her. “Honestly, running off like that! Excuse me, Andrea.” Andrea’s shadow waved goodbye and disappeared into a gloomy alley where the moonlight wasn’t.
“But Mom, you said—”
“Thank you for watching her, Oliver,” said Angela’s mother, fumbling with the buttons of her coat and making an utter mess of it.
“Night Bella. Angela.”
“Night, Oliver!” Angela called, as her mother dragged her by the arm down the crack-scarred sidewalk. Irritated, Angela stepped on every one of them she could.
“Mom, I’m tired. Can’t I now?”
“I bought you those awful shoes for a reason, Angela.”
“But Mom . . .”
“Oh, fine!” her mother snapped, glancing down both ends of the sidewalk.
Angela felt the slits in the back of her blouse fluttering open, and the tingle of night wind against her back.
She couldn’t understand why her mother was so funny about this. Her mother said it would upset the group, but her voice was green and twitchy when she said it.
Angela had her own ideas.
Maybe her mother was afraid Angela wasn’t old enough. Maybe she thought Angela would get lost and never come back. Maybe she thought Angela would forget to look both ways before crossing the sky and be hit by an airplane.
Or maybe Oliver was right.
Maybe they were just jealous of her wings.
DRAFT DODGER’S RAG
Jeff Hecht
“The grass is always greener . . .” can mean many things.
“So how bad you wanna get out, man?”
Tom was too stoned to focus his eyes on the guy. They’d been sitting in the fat hippie girl’s room all night, smoking her dope and listening to her records. The guy looked kind of Chinese in the dim red light. Straight long black hair and scraggly thin beard, like Ho Chi Minh’s but dark.
“Real bad,” Tom said. “Burned my induction notice. Would go to Canada, but don’t have the bread.”
“I’m goin’ to the moon, man. I’m gonna stay up there ‘til the war is over,” the kind-of-Chinese guy said, a stoned, round-faced Buddha.
Tom was too far down to be that high. “My best buddy Mike enlisted right outta high school. Damn fool in the Marines. Turned him into a monster. VC got him. My old man called today.”
“Oh, shit, man. Oh, shit.” The kind-of-Chinese guy groped in a little leather sack hanging from his belt and pulled out a card. “I think this is it, man.” He squinted at it. “I picked it up on campus. You need it, man.” He handed the card to Tom.
Words were printed on the card, but the light was too dim for Tom to read them. He moved it back and forth and breathed in the sweet marijuana smoke, and decided to look at it later.
The record changer dropped a new album on the turntable. The Grateful Dead. The kind-of-Chinese guy leaned back, listening. The fat hippie girl was on a mattress in the corner balling the bearded guy who had cooked dinner. Tom put the card in his pocket, and fished for a piece of Zig-Zag to roll another joint. He couldn’t find the paper and when he leaned back to relax on the old rolled floor mattress, he fell asleep.
The kind-of-Chinese guy was gone in the morning when Tom woke up, his head echoing from another dream of his father yelling “Get yourself out of that damn mess!” The fat hippie girl was snoring buck-ass naked on an open sleeping bag, her granny dress on the floor. The bearded guy lay beside her on the bare mattress, without his pants. Tom’s head hurt. The clinging odor of smoke couldn’t hide the foul smell of the dirty room. Allergies blocked his head solid. He looked for anything that might be his, patted his shirt pocket and felt the kind-of-Chinese guy’s card.
Tom read the poorly printed words in light seeping around the window shades. “SAVE YOUR ASS FROM TRICKY DICK’S DRAFT.” It gave an address on Telegraph. In the dim light, the apartment looked ugly. The war was uglier. Time to get up; time to do something. Tom found his old work shoes in the mess on the floor and slipped quietly out the door, toward Telegraph.
Tom wandered into a hole-in-the-wall lunch counter and looked at the prices on the board. The best he could get for his crumpled dollar bill was a cup of black coffee and two greasy donuts. The skinny girl behind the counter wished Tom “Peace.” A plastic flower was stuck in her greasy blonde hair.
“Peace,” Tom said as he picked up his tray, wishing it could happen. He sat in a booth and listened to two guys at the next table argue about Marx. Grad students. Philosophers. Philosophy had messed him up. The professor had kept asking questions he didn’t want to think about, not after Mike had come back from ‘Nam on summer leave to boast about killing Gooks. About firing a machine gun into the night and hearing them scream and die when the bullets hit. The nightmares came when Tom went back to school, messing his head up so bad he couldn’t think. Math gave him problems for the first time, and he couldn’t focus on astronomy. Smoked a lot of dope to ease the pain, and flunked flat out.
Hanging around Berkeley beat going back to the Chicago suburbs, and Tom had the money that was supposed to have paid for the rest of his sophomore year. When his father found out, he had called Tom an idiot for dropping out, and asked if he wanted to end up like his uncle Tom. When Tom called home after the money ran out in June, his smart-ass sister had said his draft notice had come and that he’d better get home or the FBI would come and get him. He had told her to go fuck herself and hung up. One of the guys who shared the apartment helped Tom find a part-time job in a bakery that paid for food, dope, and his share of the rent. Tom shuffled on, barely noticing Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon.
A newspaper in the seat said it was Wednesday. Maybe it was Thursday now. He found enough change in his pocket to buy another cup of coffee and asked the girl. She thought it was Wednesday because the owner always cleaned the booths
early in the morning.
Tom stared at the headlines about the war. It was an ugly machine, coming to crush him. He’d already passed the physical. Should have faked something, but he couldn’t work up the energy. The induction date had probably passed.
The wall clock said 11:15. He pushed the cold, half-empty cup of bitter liquid to the center of the table. The grad students were talking about Che Guevara and Phil Ochs, but the rebels, the singer, and the students couldn’t stop the war. Nobody could. Time to move, Tom thought, as he stood, tuning out the grad students’ words, and walked out the door, toward Telegraph.
The thick paint on the door was cracked and the window glass was dirty. Behind the lettering “Draft Aid Center” and “Crazy Haze Comix,” stairs led to the second floor over the run-down hardware store. Small letters on the glass invited him to “COME IN,” so he turned the knob and the door squeaked open. Worn black rubber mats covered creaky stair treads. The comix place was dark, but a light was on behind the “Draft Aid” door. Tom opened it and shuffled in.
A woman sat at a desk. A gray-haired woman, maybe his grandmother’s age. Small and straight and stern, like a teacher. “My name is Marie Hruska. May I help you?”
“Got a draft problem. Guy said you could help.” Tom reached into his pocket.
“That’s what I’m here for,” she said, motioning him to sit down.
“What’s your status?”
“I don’t know. Got an induction notice a while ago, but I burned it. Everything else is back home.”
“Where?”
It was taking a long time for the grass to wear off. “Back home. Back in Illinois. Chicago suburbs.”
The woman asked his name and address, and wrote something on a sheet of paper. “You’re not in school?”
“Flunked out of the university,” Tom said. “End of first term. Kinda lost track since then.”
“What have you done since then?”
“Hung around. Didn’t want to go back. Had some bread, found some crash space, worked a bit.” Tom looked at the woman. Her eyes drilled through him. The coffee hadn’t helped much. His mind still wasn’t working, like a car that wouldn’t catch when he cranked the starter. It was October now; getting toward a year.
She asked more questions. Had he passed the physical? Had he refused induction? Was he sure the induction date had passed?
Tom nodded, shook his head, and shrugged. “I don’t know. I just can’t face this. My best buddy, I grew up with him, and he went into the Marines and went over to ‘Nam and they made him a killer and now they killed him. I don’t want to fight their dirty war. I don’t want them to make me a murdering monster.”
“That’s sad,” she said, then asked him about his religion, and if he’d filed for conscientious objector status.
“Tried. Didn’t work,” he mumbled. “I’m no Quaker, just a stoned Methodist who flunked philosophy. You try to tell them war is wrong, and they say what about fighting Hitler?” He shook his head. “I tried to say killing is wrong, and they said why? I spent a week writing a five-page letter quoting the Bible and Gandhi on turning the other cheek and nonviolence. I said my conscience wouldn’t let me just follow orders like Adolf Eichmann. All they sent back was a form saying ‘no.’ Taught me the difference between law and justice.” Tom shivered, chilled though Berkeley autumn was not cold for a Chicago kid. He felt bitter and crushed, like a sharecropper doomed to a lifetime in debt. Too many more questions, and he was going to split.
The woman looked down at the paper. “You poor boy. They have you in a bad place. How bad do you want to get out?”
“Bad,” Tom said. “Real bad. Maybe I’ll split for Canada. Wouldn’t do any good to rot in jail as a draft resister. Nobody would listen.”
“Have you ever been arrested?”
“Nope.” Worried a couple of times when cops had walked by when he was stoned, but never got busted.
“Do you care if how you get out is legal?”
Nobody had ever asked Tom a question that way before. Was she an FBI agent trying to trap him? Talking to her was playing chess stoned and not knowing the rules. Were there women in the FBI? Did she have the shiny black shoes FBI agents always wore? He couldn’t see her feet behind the desk. He hadn’t done anything really illegal before. Just smoking dope, and everybody smoked dope. Maybe swiped a couple of highway flashers with some of the guys. He’d lifted some food from a store once, when he was hungry and broke. How honest could he be when he was trapped by a stupid, ugly system that wanted to send him to fight a stupid, evil war? “Not as long as I don’t have to hurt anybody.”
Her old teacher face tried to grin. “You won’t. It’s not really legal, but it’s not really bad, and it can get you out.”
“Okay.” Tom didn’t feel as relieved as he thought he should. This wasn’t like anything he’d ever heard. Guys went to Canada or Sweden. They went underground, put sugar in their urine, faked bad backs, got jobs in defense plants, or paid somebody off. “What?”
“We have someone replace you.”
“What?” he said again.
“Replace you. We can have someone go into the Army in your place, using your name.”
“Never heard of that.” Tom had heard of guys gaining fifty pounds or getting braces, plenty of other tricks.
“You’re not supposed to know about it. Nobody in 1969 is supposed to know about it.”
“Doesn’t make sense. Any fool can enlist under his own name.” The Army would pin a medal on the man.
“Suppose these men aren’t here legally. Suppose they shouldn’t be here at all, and don’t want anyone to know they are.”
“Wetbacks?” Tom couldn’t see why illegal Mexican immigrants would want to get into the Army.
She shook her head. “No, these men come from the future, a couple hundred years from now. It’s a better time, with no more wars. You have to believe that; it really can happen.” Her words had the fire of belief, like the Movement people.
She was crazy. You dropped a couple tabs of acid last night, grandma, and you’re still eight miles high. Nobody travels in time except in their head. Tom knew the paradoxes, but he kept quiet. Old lady probably was crazy, but he could hope. Men had walked on the moon, and that was supposed to be science fiction. With nothing left to lose and no other options, Tom was ready to try it. “Why?” he asked.
“They want to be heroes. They think war brings glory and makes them men. I think they’re crazy. Our society up then thinks they’re crazier than your society thinks you are. Sending them down now is a compromise, a way to let them do what they want to do, without hurting anyone up then. We hope they learn how bad war really is.”
Tom shuddered. Mike hadn’t said much about the war when he enlisted after high school. He said it was his duty, like their fathers fighting the Nazis, and Mike wanted to get it over with. Tom hadn’t understood that, and he couldn’t understand this. His father never talked about duty; he had said Hitler was evil and war was horrible. Men who wanted to go to ‘Nam had to be really crazy, not just strange like Berkeley people. “Okay, ma’am. If they want to go, they can get their heads blown off. May be stoned, but I’m not stupid.” He hoped she wouldn’t ask him for money.
“Good. We want to help boys like you who can’t get out any other way. You go see Juan. He arranges the substitutions.” She wrote a note on the paper before her. “Here’s his address. Usually he’s there from nine until six every day. Tell him you saw Marie at the Draft Aid Center. Tell him what you told me.”
Before she handed Tom the paper, she reached into her desk drawer. He was surprised when she handed him two dollars along with the note.
“Go get something to eat. You look like you need it.”
Shaken, Tom took the money. He wondered how bad he looked and how dumb he had sounded.
A note at the apartment said his father had called. Tom trashed it, and was glad the mail pile had nothing from his parents or the draft board.
A sh
ower helped clear his head; he stood under it until the water ran cold, then wrapped the towel around himself and walked down the dim hall to his room. He found clean underwear and a flannel shirt that wasn’t too dirty. He was eating crackers in the kitchen when the phone rang, and he answered it automatically.
“Tommy?” It was his father. “I called, and the draft board said if you enlist now they’ll put you behind a desk. They need men who can type. It will be three years, not two, but they won’t send you to Vietnam, and you won’t have to fight.”
“Fuck off!”
“Tommy, I don’t want you to end up like my brother. If they draft you, you’ll have to go—”
Tom slammed down the phone. He’d heard too many times about the dead brother his father had named him after. He wouldn’t be a part of their war machine, even if he could stay safe behind a desk shuffling papers. Leaving the cracker box on the counter and a knapsack of dirty clothes on the kitchen floor, he stalked out. He walked down the hill, toward the bay.
Juan’s address was an aging concrete block building behind a barber shop, with white paint flaking from worn gray cement. It had been an auto-repair shop, with two pairs of swinging garage doors, both locked shut, and a single white door marked “OFFICE.” Tom knocked, and turned the handle when a voice invited him in.
A round-faced man with very dark hair and brown skin sat behind a gray metal desk in a surprisingly neat little room. A copy ofLife magazine lay open before him. “Marie sent me to see Juan,” Tom announced.
“That’s me,” the man said. “You got draft trouble, kid?”
Tom felt uneasy; the man looked Mexican, but his accent wasn’t right. Maybe it was an FBI trap. He was glad he didn’t have any dope on him.
“Don’t be afraid, kid. Marie called and told me about you. She always does that.”
Tom nodded. “Yeah, got draft trouble.” Admitting it wouldn’t hurt. Almost everybody had draft trouble.
“Okay. We may be able to help.” His dark eyes appraised Tom. “Are you willing to vanish for two years? Just disappear? Nobody will be able to find you, and once you go, you can’t change your mind.”