I stood up and opened a window. The room had a stale, dirty-sock smell.
“Like with electricity,” Ollie said. “Power lines, I mean. One person can’t hog the amps and volts. Power, that’s where it’s at, we got to spread it around equal. The troika idea. Equal horsepower.” He paused to let this concept take shape, then massaged his toes and went on to talk about the virtues of shared leadership, how we had to be a democracy.
I slapped the table.
“Democracy’s fine,” I said. “Put your goddamn boots on.”
Ollie blinked.
“A case in point,” he said.
There was laughter at the end of the table. Tina Roebuck reached into her purse and pulled out a giant-sized Mars bar and placed it on the table directly in front of her.
She folded her hands and stared at it.
“Democracy,” Ollie sighed, “a lost art.”
“Next item,” I said.
Ollie hesitated. “Well, hey. Can’t we at least assign jobs, sort of? Like sergeant at arms. Where’s the fun if you don’t get special jobs?”
“Sergeant at arms,” I said. “You’re elected.”
“We didn’t vote.”
“One-zip, a landslide.”
“But we got to—”
“Unanimous. Congratulations.”
He grinned and tipped back his cowboy hat. “Sergeant at arms, it’s right up my alley. Jeez, maybe I should get myself an armband or something—I saw that on TV once, they always wear these nifty black armbands. Like a symbol, you know?”
“Fine,” I murmured.
“Armband. Write it down, man.”
“What?”
“On paper. Armband, put it in writing.”
I jotted a quick note to myself.
There was a disconcerting absence of dignity in the room. Shallow, I thought. Sad and stupid. Across the table, Tina Roebuck was still examining her Mars bar, hands folded. It was a test of willpower, apparently, a curious exercise in temptation and denial. At one point she reached out and nudged the candy with a thumb and then shuddered and quickly folded her hands again.
The world, I realized, was a frail and desperate place.
“Tina,” I said gently, “eat it.”
She frowned and looked up.
“Eat?” she whispered.
“Don’t be bashful.”
“But I’m not… I mean, I’m not hungry.”
“Go ahead, though,” I said. “Treat yourself.”
She glanced at the Mars bar. “No, I just like to look at it. Window-shop, sort of.” She swallowed. Her voice was soft, almost sexy, a surprising Deep South lilt to the vowels. “Anyway, I’m not hungry.”
“Well, good.”
“I’m not.”
“But if you get the urge—”
“Fuck off!” she yelled. The softness was gone. She shifted weight and stared at me. “All this bullshit! The war, that’s why I’m here. People getting killed.”
Ollie smiled.
“Give it to him,” he said. “Open up, kid—both barrels.”
“Killed dead!” said Tina.
“More.”
“Dead,” she repeated. She poked the candy bar. “Talk-talk, no action. When do we start raising hell?”
Again, Ollie smiled at her, fondly.
“There’s the question,” he said. “When?”
Strange people, I thought. The incongruities were beguiling. I couldn’t help but take notice of Tina’s white ballet slippers, Ollie’s cowboy shirt with its fancy embroidery and brass studs. Here was the new order. A midget in the White House, a Mars bar on every plate. Almost funny, except there was some emotion in the room.
“Shock waves,” Ollie was saying. “We cut out this pussyfoot stuff. Apply some heat, that’s my vote.”
I shook my head.
“We’ve been over this,” I said. “No bombs.”
“I’m not talking bombs. Noisemakers. Don’t hurt nobody, just decibels. Sit there, thumb up your ass, but sooner or later it’s smash time. The chef and the terrorist, remember?”
“I do.”
“And you know the moral? The moral’s this. Heat. You bring it to bear. And if you can’t stand the heat… Understand me?”
Tina Roebuck chuckled.
“The frying pan,” she said softly.
“That’s it exactly,” said Ollie. He smiled at me, but it was a grim smile. “Fuckin’ sizzle. That’s what the chef says. He says you better learn to tolerate extremes.”
I’d had enough.
I stacked my papers, stood up, and moved to the door.
“Carry on,” I said. I nodded at Tina. “Let me know how it turns out with that candy bar.”
At the time it all seemed hopeless, but in the end that meeting represented a pivot of sorts, a classic confrontation between the either-ors. The choice was there. I could’ve backed out with honor. Shrug and walk away—I could’ve dismissed the complications. Was it a correct war? Was it a civil war? Was Ho Chi Minh a nationalist or a Communist, or both, and to what degree, and what about the Geneva Accords, and what about SEATO, and what is worth killing for, if anything, and what is worth dying for, and who decides? I could’ve done without these riddles. I could’ve pursued my studies and graduated with distinction and spent the next decade lying low. Hedged my bets. Closed my eyes. Nothing to it, a slight change of course. Let the gravediggers do their work, I could’ve managed quite nicely. A snug mountain retreat. Or a cave, or a hole. No armies, no social milieu, no drafts to dodge, no underground strife. True, you can’t rewind history, but if I’d recognized the pivot for what it was, things might’ve followed a different track. I could’ve avoided some funerals. A choice, and I chose, but I could’ve avoided the rest of my life.
Amazing, how the circuits connect. One minute you’re all alone and then suddenly it just happens. The wires touch. A Friday evening, February 1967, and Sarah glared at me.
“You,” she said.
It was an affair called Winter Carnival. Like a prom, basically: an all-night party to ward off the midterm blahs. First a dance, then a buffet, then a movie, then finally a dawn breakfast. I’m not sure what made me go—premonition sounds phony—but around eight o’clock I put on a clean shirt and hiked over to the gymnasium.
For a while I just stood at the doorway letting my eyes adjust. Pitiful, I thought. Penny loafers and spiffy sweaters. No one knew. The theme for that year’s Carnival was “Custer’s Last Stand,” and the gym had been decorated to resemble a large and very gory battlefield, a mock-up of the Little Bighorn, with cardboard cutouts of dead horses and burning wagons and arrows and tomahawks and wild-eyed Indians and mutilated soldiers. At the center of the dance floor was a big papier-mâché dummy of Custer himself—very lifelike, except he was obviously dead. The body had been propped up against a wagon wheel. It was shot full of arrows and the hair was gone and the whole corpse was wet with ketchup-blood. The idea, no doubt, was to make everyone feel a swell of state pride, or a sense of history, but for me it was the creeps. Especially the scalps. Greasy and convincing—scalps everywhere—dangling from the basketball hoops, floating in the punch bowl.
Custer’s Last Stand, it was insane and juvenile. It was Montana, 1967.
At the front door a kid dressed up as Crazy Horse used a scissors to perform a symbolic scalping. Ned Rafferty, a big-shit line-backer—I recognized him through his war paint. Dumb as bread, of course, but very presentable in the muscle department.