Mickey's Wars

by Dave McDonald

  “Like a piece of their soul is missing.” She started walking again.

  I stood frozen for a second, her words mixed with Dad’s had finally penetrated and for the second time today made me question enlisting.

  Eight o’clock was late for normal Blufftonians to dine on a weeknight. And Debbie’s Diner only had a few patrons finishing their meals.

  We sat in a booth in the back and ordered coffee.

  Sara lit another cigarette. “Don’t let me forget to give you your friend’s lighter,” she said, snapping the lid closed. “Carl Henry was it, a first name for a last name?”

  “I won’t forget. His name is Carl Henry Taylor, but everyone calls him Carl Henry.” I watched her dainty hand tap the cigarette on the ashtray, a nervous habit. I wanted to ask her a bunch of questions, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers.

  I cleared my throat. “Does your fiancé know you go to bars alone? And aren’t you worried he might see you, ah, us?”

  She stared at me for a few seconds. “Yes to the first question and no to the second.”

  “Why would he—”

  “Johnny has TB and has been in and out of an iron lung over the past year.”

  I looked down. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  She nodded.

  “Who takes care of him?”

  “He has a live-in nurse.”

  “How long have you been together?”

  She took a deep drag on the cigarette. “Long enough. Can we change the subject?”

  “Sure.”

  The coffee came, and we took turns exchanging the cream and sugar. And she chuckled when she watched how much sugar I added.

  “I don’t know how anyone can drink this stuff without sugar,” I said. “It’s so bitter.”

  “It’s an age thing.”

  “You talk like you’re an old lady. And I’d bet you’re only a year or two older than me.”

  “I’m twenty-two.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Close.”

  She smiled, igniting her eyes, and excavating her dimples. Her smile warmed me and was contagious.

  “So tell me about Sara Wiggs. Where’d you grow up? Do you work? What are your hobbies? What do you like to do for fun? Do you read books? What kind of music do you like? Do you—”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What is this, Twenty Questions? An interrogation?” She took another drag as if buying time to think. “I grew up in Ohio . . . Wilmington, a small town northeast of Cincinnati. My dad was a mathematics professor at Wilmington College.” She watched as her thumb and forefinger rolled the cigarette back and forth.

  I could sense a change in her demeanor. The remnants of her smile disappeared. It was as if a cold front had just rolled in consuming all her warmth.

  “I was enrolled there in pre-med when I met,” she glanced up at me, “met Johnny. He was in med-school.” She glanced away. “That seems like a different life ago.” She stubbed out the smoke and took a sip of coffee. “I’d better go.”

  “You barely touched your coffee,” I said, though my mind was still stuck on both her and her fiancé studying to become doctors. They were so beyond me, in both age and ambition. I wanted a plan but didn’t have one. I was lost in indecision.

  “A whole cup at this time of day will keep me up all night.”

  “Stay just a little longer,” I pleaded.

  “Don’t you have a girlfriend, Mick?”

  “You did say twenty-two, didn’t you?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “Cause you sound like my mom. No, I don’t have a girlfriend. I dated a little in high school, but nothing serious, just sock-hops and stuff like that.”

  “Do you have any aspirations other than playing soldier?”

  “You are sounding more and more like my mom.”

  She cocked her head and stared at me.

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “I made pretty good grades in math and science. But I’m not sure college is for me, at least not right now.” I didn’t want to admit to this rich girl that I couldn’t afford it. “I need to buy a little time to decide. Joining the service should help me find my niche.”

  “There’s a war going on, Mick. Didn’t your dad tell you that people, particularly Marines, get killed in wars? And getting killed doesn’t buy you anything but being dead.”

  “My dad made it through four years of war.”

  “He was lucky.”

  I rubbed my chin. “That’s strange. That’s what he said.”

  “Do yourself a favor and don’t join the Marines.” She shoved Carl Henry’s Zippo across the table. “I do have to go.”

  My mind panicked. I didn’t want her to leave. I had never felt this compelled to get to know anyone, especially a female. “Sara, I know this sounds goofy, but is there any way we can see each other again?”

  Her chin tucked inward, and she gave me a questioning look.

  “I, ah, don’t mean like a date,” I hastily added. “Just to talk and maybe have more drinks. Like maybe tomorrow or the next day. I . . . I had a blast just talking with you.”

  She played with her pack of Pall Malls as if I weren’t at the table. Seconds ticked. Finally, she dropped the pack in her purse and looked at me.

  She stood. “Don’t get up. I can see myself to my car. It’s parked out front. Plus it’d look—”she dug into her purse until she finally found her car keys, then she looked at me—”never mind. How about day after tomorrow at Goodman’s Store, say seven o’clock?”

  Chapter Seven

  The next morning, I sat in the office of Clarence’s Sinclair Station, lights on, radio blaring, and johns cleaned. I was doodling on a pad of paper with a pen, and then I wrote ‘Sara Wiggs’. I had fallen asleep thinking about her and had woken up still thinking about her. How silly. Sara was from a different world than me. We had nothing in common. Her car probably cost more than my parents house. She’d been to college. She drank whiskey. She was engaged. How silly.

  I had a much more pressing issue; what to do about my friends and joining the USMC. I glanced around. The decision seemed as simple as choosing between working at a place like Clarence’s for the rest of my life or joining the Marines and hopefully using the GI Bill to go to college.

  But both my dad and Sara had influenced my thinking. And the choice was anything but simple.

  I tore off the paper, wadded it up, and threw it away. I needed something to do, something to occupy my mind.

  Though the gas pumps glistened in the overhead lights, I decided to wash and wax them.

  I didn’t go home after work. I went back to my high school and waited in the hall until the last bell.

  When Mr. Burns, the history teacher and my favorite teacher, exited his classroom carrying his worn leather satchel. I approached him.

  “Mick, Mick Mackenzie, good to see you.”

  “Thank you, sir.” I walked next to him as he headed down the hall. “It’s great to see you as well. I can’t believe you remember me, let alone my name. You must have had several hundred students since being here.”

  “Oh, I definitely remember you, Mick.” Mr. Burns stopped. ““Let’s see if I can get this right. “Studying history makes absolutely no sense to me. What am I learning from memorizing a bunch of names and dates?””

  I smiled and nodded. “Yeah, that was me. At least until you brought those names to life, making me realize that they were real people like me with feelings and emotions. And that we all should learn from history, hopefully not repeating the mistakes of the past.”

  “You were a great student, Mick. I wish you’d had come an hour earlier and repeated those words to my last class. I think half of them were asleep by the ending bell.” He started walking again. “So what brings you here, Mick?”

  “I . . . I want to know if you think Korea is worth dying for?”

  He stopped, eyebrows arched. “Hmmm. I don’t think I can or should answer that, son.”

  “Could you at least tell me your t
houghts on why we are militarily supporting South Korea?”

  He nodded. “Now that’s something I can respond to,” he turned around, “let’s go back to my classroom where we can talk.”

  Sitting at one of those old scarred desks in Mr. Burns’ classroom with him standing at the chalkboard was like deja vu.

  “Korea became divided during World War Two,” Mr. Burns said. “Japan occupied the entire peninsula. In 1945, our then allies, the Russians, invaded from the north and drove the Japanese out. We, fearing Russia would take over the country, invaded from the south. The Soviets created a communist government in the North, and we backed the Syngman Rhee Republic of Korea government in the south, separated at the thirty-eight parallel.”

  He turned to the board and picked up a piece of chalk and wrote:

  Soviet intervention in post-war Turkey and Greece

  The Truman Doctrine and the Marshal Plan

  1949 Russia explodes atomic bomb

  1949 China revolution results in a communist victory, allying with the Soviet Union

  At home criticism of Truman over

  losing China and also over McCarthyism

  Invasion of South Korea by the Russian and Chinese backed North Koreans.

  “To simply summarize these events, Truman along with the other democratic world leaders believe we have to try to stop the spread of communism without starting another world war with Russia. Hence the UN selected term for the Korean invasion of ‘Police Action’.”

  “So if we fail, communism will most likely take over Asia. And if we succeed, we could provoke an atomic war.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “That’s where we are.”

  I stood. “Thank you, sir.”

  Mr. Burns approached and offered his hand.

  I shook it.

  “Good luck in whatever you decide to do, Mick. And come back and see me anytime. And may God bless America and you.”

  I responded to my parents’ inquisitive looks at dinner time by telling them I hadn’t made up my mind yet about joining the Marines. And I went to my room right after the meal and read a pseudo-history book I had started after graduation, Caesar and Cleopatra, by George Bernard Shaw. And although Caesar was one of my favorite men to study, I had trouble concentrating.

  I slept most of the rest of the next day, and held off announcing my plans of going out until that night after supper.

  “You can’t be serious?” Mom asked; her eyes wide with disbelief.

  She and Dad had just returned from having dinner with the neighbors. Mom had let her long brown hair down, and added a little make-up, and, despite her attitude, I thought she was beautiful.

  “It’s just Goodman’s Store, Mom, right down the street. And I’ll only be gone an hour or two.”

  “Mickey, I know where you’re going, and who you’ll be with. And I don’t want you going. Those boys are a bad influence.” She touched my arm. Her eyes softened. “Please listen to me, son. I went through four years of hell after your father left for the war. I don’t need a minute more of that kind of anguish. Please, stay home tonight. For me.” She turned away, shook her bowed head, and covered her mouth.

  “Let the boy go out, Marion,” my dad said. “He’s going to have a beer with his friends. It’s not like he’s going to the moon, or Korea for that matter.” He gave me one of those demanding-assurance looks.

  I glanced away.

  Chapter Eight

  All my Goodman’s Store buddies were sitting at a table when I walked in. Carl Henry saw me first and let out a “That’s sure looks like a Marine coming in the door.”

  And the rest stood and raised their glasses.

  Frieda came out from behind the bar dressed like she had just come from church. Now I understood why my friends were at a table. She spread her arms. “So it’s true; all y’all are joinin’ the Marines?”

  I shook my head, stopped next to Frieda, and pointed at my friends. “I’m reading this book about Caesar, and you guys remind me of his friends. The ones who wanted to kill him.”

  “You’re reading a book about who?” Sam asked.

  “And they did kill him,” quiet Bob said. The slender, bespectacled guy never ceased to surprise me. Of the four of us, he was the one who should be going to college, not the Marines. But he would probably baffle all of us again and make the best Marine.

  “And I always thought you slept through Mr. Burns’ history class,” Jerry, the short fire plug, said to Bob.

  “Speaking of Mr. Burns, I saw him today.” I said.

  “Is he the one that gave you this book about Caesar?” Carl Henry asked.

  Frieda looked up at me. “This is all too confusin’ for me. Can I get you a Knickerbocker beer, Mick?”

  “Sure, Frieda.” I leaned an elbow on the make-shift bar and waited for her, as I eyed my friends.

  “Ya know, Mick, that ain’t a bad analogy, you being Caesar, and we being your friends, ‘cause joining the Marines could sure get you killed,” Bob said. “Now what me and your friends want to know is that little sweetie you met in here the other night your Cleopatra?”

  “I didn’t roll out of a carpet, but it would have made for an interesting entrance,” the coarse and yet soft voice, I knew to be Sara’s, said from behind me.

  I pivoted around to see her standing in the doorway. She wore a white dress with large red polka dots. The snug dress was sleeveless with the bodice fastened around her neck. She had more curves than a mountain road.

  Her black hair was down and flipped, like it was riding her shoulders.

  My involuntary functions, my heart rate, my breathing, my blinking, all responded abnormally. I thought my knees would buckle as well. I had expected her to arrive, but I hadn’t prepared for Sara.

  Maybe Bob was right, maybe I was Caesar and the Queen of the Nile had just rolled in.

  Chapter Nine

  I dragged two chairs, one a ladder-back and the other a weaved-back, from another table and wedged them between my seated friends. “Listen up. There won’t be any ‘by invitation only’ dart games tonight. We’re all going to sit together and enjoy what time we have left in this town.”

  With her blue eyes locked on mine, Sara raised her shot glass and said, “I’ll second the motion.”

  “Here, here,” Sam said, as he clicked glasses with everyone. “And while we have these glasses together, I’d like to toast the United States Marines Corp.”

  “Here, here,” we chorused, our male voices attempting to sound deeper than usual. We all took a drink.

  “And speaking of time left,” Sam said. “I enlisted in the Marines yesterday.”

  Jabbed by his words, I shook my head in disbelief. “What? I thought we were gonna do this together?”

  The big young man flipped his hands palms up. “I got tired of waiting. Besides, they won’t keep us together anyway. I asked.” He took a swig of beer and then pointed the top of the bottle at me. “Plus none of us are sure you’re going to join, Mick. If you ask me, I’d say you’re a fence rider.”

  I could feel all their eyes on me. I took a deep breath and looked down. I didn’t have an answer.

  “And if Mickey decides not to join, so be it,” Sara said. “All the young men can’t go overseas. Some of them have to stay here and keep this country growing. Plus ‘Give’em Hell Harry’ along with General MacArthur will probably end this little conflict before you get out of Basic.” She took a sip of whiskey. “So have any of you heard the new Sinatra hit?”

  I wanted to hug her for her attempt to divert the awkward moment, but I knew I had to respond. I looked at Sam, his bulging muscles stretching the sleeves of his T-shirt and his blue eyes assessing me. “You’re right,” I finally responded. “I am on the fence. But I still wish you hadn’t enlisted by yourself.” I scanned the rest of my friends. “My parents are dead set against it. And . . . I don’t know. I’ve got a lot of questions.”

  “Forget all that stuff, man, and just do it,” Jerry said. “You’l
l probably never find the answers to most of those questions anyway.”

  I couldn’t recall Jerry ever saying anything insightful, ever. I was cornered.

  Bob reached over and clicked his beer bottle against mine. “My dad was a Marine too; and I’ll bet we both got the same talk. I totally understand your indecision.”

  Thank God, my buddy, Bob, had brought the cavalry to rescue me.

  “So, Bob, you’re not enlisting either?” Carl Henry asked.

  “I didn’t say that,” Bob said as sternly as I’d ever heard him speak. “I’m enlisting.”

  Now I was not only cornered, I was surrounded; trapped. Should I just do it; enlist?

  “I say the rest of us enlist tomorrow then,” Jerry said. “Are you with us, Mick?”

  I started to speak, and Sara, for the first time, touched me, my arm.

  “He’ll answer you after he gets back from driving my new car,” Sara said and stood, pulling me to my feet.

  Chapter Ten

  “Faster, Mickey, faster!” Sara’s long black hair whipped in the torrent inside the top-down convertible.

  I didn’t have a lot of car driving experience, and none at these speeds. The last thing I wanted to do was to wreck her new Packard convertible. But my hunger for the thrill of speed along with Sara’s encouragement ruled the moment; I floored the accelerator. Route 46, sliding under the bright red hood, along with the speedometer, smoothly advanced. The car was a dream-come-true; beautiful and instantly responsive. Not unlike Sara, herself.

  I glanced down at the speedometer, and we were rocketing above eighty. I had crossed over to the wild side and loved it.

  “Slow down and take the next left,” Sara yelled.

  I eased the big shiny car onto a dirt road and shortly thereafter drove across a one-lane wooden bridge over Stoney Creek. A few dusty miles later, the road ended at the ruins of a once large mansion. Unconnected porch steps and stubs of columns stuck in the air; decades old remnants of decadence stark against the deep blue of the late evening sky.