Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

September was neither here nor there.

On October 1, my birthday, Tina baked a cake. There were candles and songs, and it was a happy occasion until I felt the grief. I excused myself and went out to the back patio and watched the sun go down.

Later, at twilight, Ned Rafferty joined me. He was still wearing his party hat. He smiled and showed me a bottle of rum and two glasses. For some time we just watched the dark. Ocean smells, and a breeze, and we drank the rum and listened to the crickets and tree frogs.

“Anyway,” he said.

But then he shrugged and fell silent.

Behind us, in the kitchen, Sarah and Tina were doing dishes. I could hear a radio somewhere. When the moon came up, Rafferty took off his party hat.

“You know,” he said softly, “we’ve always had this tension between us, you and me, but I wish—I mean, it’s too bad—I wish we could be friends. A treaty or something. Here we are.”

“Wherever here is,” I said.

Rafferty stirred his drink with a thumb. He seemed pensive.

“I know the feeling. Hard to connect sometimes, but you shouldn’t think—you know—you shouldn’t feel alone or anything. You shouldn’t. The Benedict Arnold disease, it’s one of the hazards. We all grew up saying the Pledge of Allegiance.”

“I’ll live,” I told him.

He nodded. “No doubt. But if you need to talk, I’m not such a terrible guy.”

“You’re not.”

“Just a fuzzball,” he said, and smiled.

He filled my glass.

A nice person, I thought. I wanted to tell him that, but instead I shifted weight and examined the sky. The radio seemed closer now, and louder, and for a while Rafferty hummed along with the Stones… just no place for a street fighting man .

Then he stopped and looked at me.

“You’ll learn to live with it,” he said. “Guaranteed. At first you get the jumps, that’s normal. You feel like J. Edgar Hoover’s on your tail, Feds and G-men and all that, but after a while you realize, shit, it’s a huge country—a free country, right?—and they can’t track down every Tom, Dick, and Harry. They just can’t. Not if you follow the rules of the road.”

“Don’t jaywalk,” I said.

Rafferty smiled at me.

“That’s one rule. Don’t jaywalk. Don’t ask a cop for directions. Not all that difficult. If a guy wants to get lost, he gets lost. Easy.”

I contemplated this. The rum was doing helpful things.

“Fine,” I said. “Lost-wise, I’m shipshape.”

“It gets better.”

“Sure it does.” I looked at him. “What about you? How’s your lostness?”

Rafferty laughed. “So-so,” he said. He picked up the party hat and put it on his head. “A goof, man. What do I know? Dumb jock. Long line of fuzzballs.”

“Not so dumb.”

“Dumb,” he said, and rubbed his eyes. “Hick. Grew up on a ranch. Like where the buffalo roam. All I ever wanted—that old home on the range. Deer and antelope. Dumb, you know? And now this.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Here,” I said. “How come?”

He was silent. He stood up and moved over to his garden, peeing with his back to me, then turned and came back slowly and lifted the bottle and said, “Motives. Who knows? Real jumbled.”

“Sarah?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Sarah. Classy lady. Much love, but that’s not… This rad shit, it’s not me. Politics, I hate it. Humphrey, Nixon—who cares? But here I am. Sarah, sure. The right thing, I guess. The war. Not a nice war. Very tangled. So do the right thing… Dumb jock. The right thing, I think. Dumb. So what’s the right thing? Down inside I’m all red, white, and blue. Fucking Republican, you believe that? True. Many misgivings. What’s right? Motives, man, I don’t know. I walk away. Real brave, real dumb. No more home on the range. My dad says, ‘Hey, where you going?’ so I tell him, I tell him it’s the right thing, and my dad gives me this long look—he’s got these eyes you wouldn’t believe, like Gary Cooper or somebody, these no-bullshit eyes—he looks at me and he says, ‘Pussy.’ That’s all he says. My old man, he wasn’t pleased. Didn’t think it was the right thing.”

“Parents,” I said.

Rafferty rolled his shoulders. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “parents.”

We proposed a toast to parents. I told him how my mother kept packing socks and towels, how we couldn’t really talk about it, not straight on, just the logistics, socks and towels and haircuts. Like a game, I told him. Like it wasn’t real.

“Right,” Rafferty said, “like that.”

“Parents.”

“Unreal. That’s the thing.”

The radio was playing calypso now. We drank to our parents and birthdays and the right thing. Rafferty told me to stay loose. So far, he said, so good. Then he grinned and said, “Like the army, sort of. Hurry up and wait.” For the time being, he told me, no need to worry. Sarah had resources. There was no shortage of wherewithal.

Vaguely, a little drunk, he talked about the competing factions within the movement, how scrambled it was, the cliques and cabals and petty conspiracies.

“The political thicket,” he said, and shook his head. “Tangled, you know? Classic worm can. Slimy creatures, very messy. Panthers here, Weather guys there. Shades of red—like with blood, all types, you need a goddamn flow chart—SDSers and Quakers and the CPA and the PLP and God knows what all—let me think—the People’s Coalition for Peace, Dwarfs for a Nonviolent Solution. You name it. Lots of moral hairs to split. Head-smashers, ass-kickers. Hard-core weirdos. Liberation fronts. The League of Concerned Dieticians. If I had my way, I’d wipe out the whole rat’s nest. There it is, though. The famous network.”

There was a pause, then Rafferty shrugged and raised his glass.

“Screw it,” he said, “let’s drink. To the nonviolent dwarfs.”

We drank and refilled our glasses.

It wasn’t friendship, exactly, but it was something. We drank to moral hairs and split ends.

“Anyway, that’s the gist,” he said. “Where we fit in, I don’t know. Unaffiliated, I guess. Sarah wants to run her own little show. A ma and pa operation, whatever that means. Big dreams.”

“Franchise,” I said. “Kentucky Fried Terror.”

“Yeah, well. Forget the terror part. I’m not in this to bust skulls. Just a nice little subway system for guys like you and me. Fast and efficient.”

“Crack-ups?” I said.

Rafferty smiled. “No crack-ups. One thing about draft-dodging, it’s hardly ever fatal.”

“I meant—”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “Mental hygiene. Go with the shuffle, that’s all. Just flat-fuck live with it. Pretend it’s the right thing.”

“I suppose,” I said. “But sometimes—”

“Lost, right?”

“Pretty lost.”

We were quiet for a few moments.

“All right, then, lost,” Rafferty said. He smiled. “I guess we’d best drink to it.”

There were mobile shapes in the dark, rustlings and penetrations. We drank to the League of Concerned Dieticians. Later, after Sarah and Tina had gone to bed, we went inside and ate birthday cake and proposed toasts to mental hygiene and low profiles and safe houses and reformed fuzzballs and treaties of peace. We drank to Crazy Horse and Custer.

“To Herb Philbrick,” I said.

Rafferty seemed puzzled. Apparently the name didn’t ring a bell, but he shrugged and drank anyway.

By mid-October the cure was solid. Flat on my back, I basked away the daylight hours, staring up at a huge blue sky, alert to contrails and the whine of passing jets. There was an alternating current at work. A kind of giddiness at times, almost elation, and I’d hear myself laughing at the unlikely melodrama. Jesse James, I’d think. I could imagine my hometown draft board saddling up for the chase; that hide-and-go-seek feeling, fully revved, like a little kid playing grown-up games—slip under the bed and cover your eyes and giggle. Other times, though, it was grim. Shipwrecked, I’d think. Lying there, watching the sky, I’d seem to drift outside myself, outside everything. The law and history and the precedents of my own life. It wasn’t anything fanciful—I wasn’t ill—it was just disengagement. How much, I wondered, was real? I’d sometimes find myself hovering at thirty thousand feet. I’d contemplate the flight patterns and violet sunsets over Hudson Bay. I’d study Martian Travel for hidden meanings, sniffing the dried grass, smiling as I visualized the Trans World possibilities.