Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

“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.

Rafferty dipped some of my hair into a bowl of ketchup.

“Careful now,” he said. He gave me a long look. “Like your poster says. A violent world, white man.”

I nodded and edged away.

Jocks, I thought. Linebackers and bacteria. Try, but you couldn’t escape them.

Up at the far end of the gym, a band was playing Stranger on the Shore . The place was dark and noisy. Like a cattle show—everybody sweating and swaying and grinding up against each other. Right then I nearly called it a night. No dignity, I thought, but I moved over to the punch bowl and stood around drinking scalp for the next half hour. No knowledge, no vision. Wall-to-wall morons. At one point I spotted Ollie and Tina out on the dance floor. They were snuggled up close, like lovers, and in a way I envied them. Just the closeness. They weren’t my kind, though, and when Ollie waved at me I turned away and watched the band.

I could feel my stomach cramping up. Maybe it was the punch, maybe loneliness, but I was on the verge of walking out when the circuits connected.

Partly luck, partly circumstance.

It began as a silly party game called Pevee Pair-Off. The idea was for the women to line up in a single long row at one end of the gym, all the men at the other, and then when the signal was given, the two rows were supposed to march toward each other like opposing skirmish lines in old-fashioned warfare. A lottery of sorts. Whoever you bumped into became your partner for the evening. Again, for me, it was one of those mysterious either-ors—I could’ve headed for the door—but for some reason I took the risk.

Once the rules had been explained, and once we’d lined up in our parallel formations, the band struck up a jazzy version of Moon River and someone blew a whistle and we started out across the floor. It was a ticklish experience. Exciting, I suppose, but scary. The lights had been turned off to prevent people from taking aim, and there was the strange, somewhat dizzy sensation of moving blindfolded toward a steep drop-off. Finally I closed my eyes and let the momentum take over.

I almost knocked her down.

When the lights came on, she was bent forward at the waist, drawing shallow little breaths. It took a few seconds before she recognized me.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “You.”

It was not instant love. We danced a few numbers, watched the limbo contest, then sat at one of the tables near the bandstand. She seemed a little sullen. But gorgeous—the body of a gymnast, like hardwood, and black eyes and black eyebrows and black-brown hair. And the skin. Miracle skin, I thought. Even there, in winter, it had a rich walnut gloss, smooth and flawless against a white blouse and a crisp white skirt.

For some time nothing much was said. She kept fidgeting, very ill at ease, so finally I began chattering away about various cheerleading matters, megaphones and culottes, whatever I could dream up.

“Culottes?” she said absently. “What about them?”

I glanced over at Custer. “Nothing, really. Mysterious. Tantalizing, I guess.”

“Tacky,” Sarah mumbled.

“Exactly right.”

“You, I mean.”

I smiled. “Maybe so,” I said, “but I always thought you looked fabulous in culottes. Super kneecaps. Culottes and kneecaps, they go together.”

“No shit?” she said. Her eyes shifted out toward the dance floor.

It was not going well, I knew that, but I couldn’t seem to settle down. I told her how I used to sit up in the bleachers during high school football games, how much I admired her cartwheels and backflips. Stunning, I said. A real athlete. I even confessed that I’d always been somewhat in awe of her—in awe of cheerleaders in general.

Sarah nodded and looked at her wristwatch.

“Well,” she said, “I can understand that. We’re special people.”