by Anne Degrace
MYRA CAME BACK from New York charged by the experience. “Everybody was there. Hippies. Old people. People in suits, doctors, and lawyers and things. Little kids. There were a hundred thousand people, James!”
They were sitting in the warm, late-afternoon sunshine of Queen’s Park in roughly the same place they had taken the LSD. Myra played with a new blade of grass while she described the protest. “A whole bunch of draft cards were burned. Oh — hey, I brought you something.” She sat up and rummaged in her bag, then pinned a peace button to his shirt. “There,” Myra said. “Makes you look less straight.” She ran her hand across his growing hair and smiled. “There was this one guy on crutches, a vet. He said some stuff about what he’d seen and — everyone just shut up and listened. I mean, he’d really been there, James. He was speaking the truth about what it’s really like.”
“I have a buddy who’s a veteran,” James told her. “He was in the action at Ia Drang, got a bullet in his spine. He came back in a wheelchair.” Billy had opened up to James one night in the bar. He’d been graphic in his description of the villages they’d entered, the silence. The grimace of death, when, in a burned-out shack, he’d come across the body of a girl who could not have been older than himself. The memory of their conversation settled on him now, a hard and smoky weight. “Eleven guys from my grad class came back in boxes — that I know of. There were three funerals the week Billy came home.”
“Maybe you should speak out, too, James,” said Myra. “Come out to one of the rallies.”
James lay back down. He turned his head to look at Myra, backlit by the sun. “I wish I could say I’m brave, or principled,” he said. “I mean, I know it’s an unjust war. I know it’s morally wrong. But you know what?” He gazed up at the perfect, empty sky above him, thinking of Billy, and a dead girl in a burned-out shack. “I’m twenty-one, and I just want to live my life.”
“But you care about the war,” she said. It was a statement, not a question. “Agent Orange. Napalm bombing. Villages. Grandmothers. Babies.”
In James’s mind was the voice of Billy’s father Jim, who had invited all of the neighbours for a homecoming all-American barbecue. “Civilians? Bullshit. They’re all hiding VC commie spies. Our boys gotta protect themselves,” he’d said, flipping steaks, while Billy, in his wheelchair, said nothing but knocked back beer after beer.
“Yes,” James said to the sky.
WARM WEATHER CAME, and James found a room in a boarding house — clean, relatively cheap, and with a laid-back landlady. Hanging around the print shop led to some part-time work, which helped since Ken had let him go. But the sense of disconnection, the loneliness, continued. Myra was often busy, working with Fig on the campaign to end the war, and when she and James worked together, it was all she talked about. James felt the implied rebuke.
“When I’m landed,” he told her, “I’ll get more involved. If I get deported —” The thought terrified him. Once, after most of a bottle of cheap red wine, he’d suggested to Fig and Myra and a few others that his father might even turn him in, something he had not wanted to admit to himself.
“Man, those American warmongers are really something,” Fig had said, and James had felt absurdly defensive.
In the print shop, Myra told James she’d been thinking of heading west. “Vancouver is really happening,” she told him. “And the winters aren’t as cold.” It was quiet, between jobs, and they were the only people in the shop. Sunlight filtered through the macramé hanging, with its asparagus fern, in the window. “I think I’m going to go,” she said.
“What about Fig?” James asked.
Myra didn’t look up from the papers she was folding. “I think you’re my best friend, James. I’m so glad I met you.”
James didn’t press the point. Instead, he picked up the broom from the corner. Myra began stacking a pile of the pamphlets they had printed and folded that day, about the rally to “take Vietnam to Expo” in Montreal.
“Did I tell you we’re going?” she said, tapping the top of the pile. “A whole bunch of us. Fig’s got a bus rented.”
With the broom, James nudged the sweepings towards the dustpan, bright bits of coloured paper trimmed from posters designed to change the world.
THE MORNING FIG and Myra were to leave for Montreal, James awoke late to a grey day. He was hung over; the three had been at the Riverboat the night before, where he’d felt like the odd man out. He’d spent the evening pressed to the pine wall under the brass porthole window smoking and listening to a blonde girl sing about clouds. He wanted to hear her words, he realized, but they fought for space with the fervent political discussions and heady plans for the rally. As he gazed at the stage through the smoky air, Fig’s voice cut through the buzz of sound.
“We’ll say hi to your buddy for you,” he said.
“My buddy?”
“Yeah. At the U.S. Pavilion. Your buddy Lyndon. ’Course, you left. So he’s got nothing to say to you, eh? You got a message for your president you want us to deliver?”
James wasn’t sure what threat or criticism might be implied in Fig’s words, or what expectation they held. There was a new hostility there, and James wondered if it had something to do with the time he was spending, lately, with Myra.
“Tell him to go fuck himself,” he said, finally — the only thing he could think of through his beery haze. Who he’d meant, he realized, was Fig.
Fig laughed and pounded the table. “Right on, brother,” he said, and delivered a punch to the shoulder that James could still feel this morning, as he lay on a rumpled sheet, feeling down. Outside, crows called.
In the fridge James found an egg and two pieces of stale bread. He fried the egg, toasted the bread, and put it all together in a greasy sandwich that seemed to James to hold the same approximate texture as the day. Although almost May, the air had turned cool again, and James remembered what Myra had said about Vancouver. By the time he’d washed down breakfast with the dregs from the coffeepot, he’d decided: he’d go to Vancouver, where the weather was warmer, and where Myra and Fig were not. He’d settle with the landlady, put out his thumb, and just go. But first, he’d leave Myra a note.
He took the bus to Scollard Street. He’d worked hard to assemble the words on the paper folded into a sealed envelope in his back pocket, attempting a tone of free-spirit carelessness while at the same time letting Myra know that he’d welcome her company if she cared to join him later. Alone. But as he steadied himself against the door while he slipped the envelope underneath, it swung open. A muffled sound came from inside.
“Hello?” James took a tentative step inside.
The sound continued; someone was crying. “Hello?” he called again.
“James?”
Myra lay curled on the bed, wrapped in a crocheted afghan. The room, which had looked tantalizing when he’d seen it in candlelight, looked shabby in the light of day. Plaster buckled and cracked on the walls, as if held together with layers of paint. There were clothes strewn across a scarred dresser. James stood in the doorway, frozen. Then, from the form on the bed came a wrenching sob, and James found himself on his knees, one hand hovering over her back.
“I lost the baby,” she told him, her voice muffled by the afghan.
The day tilted. “What?”
“I had a miscarriage.”
“Shouldn’t — shouldn’t you see a doctor?”
“No,” Myra said. “Just lie here and hold me.”
James pulled off his shoes and lay down, a tentative arm around her, as if she might be made of glass. They lay together not speaking, a hundred questions in James’s mind. After a quarter of an hour he heard her breathing change, and knew she’d fallen asleep. He lay, afraid to disturb anything, for a full hour more, watching the light change in the room, listening to the sounds of the street below, footsteps on the apartment fl
oor above, and Myra’s gentle exhale.
Later, he made tea and they sat in her bed, backs to the wall, facing the window and watching the waning afternoon light.
“I told him I couldn’t go to Montreal because I was puking all night,” Myra said. “He thinks I have the ’flu.”
“He doesn’t know?”
“No. And don’t tell him.” She began to cry again. “You know, I wasn’t even sure I was pregnant, not a hundred per cent. I thought —”
James didn’t want to hear the rest. “Shhhh,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”
Myra rested her head on his shoulder. “I love you, James,” she said. “It’s like you’re my brother. I can trust you.”
TOWARDS THE END of July, all anyone talked about was the Detroit Riots — five days, forty-three dead, more than a thousand injured, seven thousand arrested, and all because of an after-hours bar raid in a predominantly black neighbourhood that escalated into full scale vandalism and looting.
“You should hear the stories Fig’s been getting at the TADP office,” Myra told James at work. “Once the National Guard joined the regular pigs, sounds like law enforcement had a police brutality field day.” She looked at James as if he might be somehow responsible, by virtue of being American. “How could something like that happen?”
“It’s more complicated in the U.S.,” he said. How to explain in a country where race and social unrest didn’t seem to be such a big issue?
In August, the Village planned a sit-in to take back the street. Attempts to get City Hall to agree to close Yorkville to traffic met with no success, but the residents felt that, this being their community, they should get to make the call. The plan was to disrupt traffic. “You should come,” Myra told James.
At the print shop, Lou, the boss, let them print flyers for the sit-in after hours, just for the cost of paper. It was hot, humidity making the flyers limp, their underarms damp. While they worked they listened to The Beatles new album on Lou’s turntable, the sounds of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” a psychedelic backdrop to their work.
“It’s going to be far out,” Myra told him now. “Just people sitting together peacefully on the street. A be-in. Like San Francisco, or Greenwich.”
As far as James knew, Myra had never told Fig about the miscarriage. He couldn’t fathom why she didn’t, but she had been adamant. “He’s got so much on his mind,” she had told James. “In Vietnam, babies are dying every minute.”
Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone, sang Lennon. James watched Myra’s fluid grace as she worked, heard the enthusiasm in her voice as she chattered on about the sit-in, her laugh a slash of sunlight, and felt her slipping away from him. He couldn’t see how the sit-in was going to make a statement about the war, and he told her this as the flyers rolled off the press.
“It’s not about the war,” Myra told him. “It’s making a point. So they don’t think they can push us around, like in Detroit. Fig says —”
“I don’t want to know what Fig says.”
James walked Myra towards Spadina, and the streetcar. Waves of heat rose from the pavement, causing small mirages. On the street, they would already be gathering for the sit-in. “James, you should come,” she told him. “Did you hear about the guy who led the city hall protest last week? He’s a U.S. Army deserter!”
“Good for him. He’s probably landed. And anyway, I heard they picked a guy up the next day and threatened to deport him, just because he had some weed on him.”
“So? They weren’t going to actually do anything. Come with us. James, you need to take a stand.”
“Who says?”
“Fig says.”
Fig. “Says what?” It irked James that Fig had been talking about him with Myra.
“It’s like, all these people are working to help you guys. You need to do your part, too. You need to get political.”
James heard Fig’s voice in Myra’s words. “See you later,” he told her.
IN THE END, James found himself standing at the corner of Bay and Cumberland as dusk fell and people gathered. The heat hadn’t really abated, and it hung in the air, an invisible, malevolent presence. James couldn’t see Myra or Fig, but then, there were a lot of people. The street was full of hippies, and James saw a number of burly guys with Vagabonds logos on their jackets. Outside the Riverboat he’d seen bikes parked, chrome gleaming. They didn’t seem like people all about peace and love, and James felt uneasy, thinking about what happened in Detroit, aware of how quickly a scene could turn. A slight, bearded guy was speaking through a microphone, reminding people that there should be no violence and no drugs, but James smelled weed in the air. There must have been two hundred people sitting — even lying — on the street, chatting, laughing, smoking, playing guitar. On the sidewalks, hundreds more. He could hear car horns in the distance; clearly, no one would be driving down these streets.
“Damn hippies,” said a man standing in a doorway. He spotted James. “Get a goddamn job,” he muttered.
A commotion at the far end of the street, and James craned to see over the crowd, now several deep on the sidewalk. He heard shouts, and a scream. Cherry lights flashed on the sides of the buildings that flanked the street. He saw himself caught up in it, thrown in a wagon, deported. Heart pounding, James turned and pushed through the crowd, walking fast, willing himself not to run.
BY FALL, JAMES had been in Toronto for six months. One of the dodgers on the street, Gordon, was heading for a commune in northern Quebec with his girlfriend Cindy. “Come with us, man,” he said. “They’ll never find you.”
They were standing outside Grossman’s Tavern, where a sign in the window told James he could buy a hot hamburger plate for forty-five cents. With a beer, that’d be seventy. He was hungry, his under-the-table work not enough to cover rent as it was.
“You look like shit, you know? Come to Quebec, man. There’s a few people there already, bought some big old farmhouse. Gonna get some crops in before winter.”
“It’s almost winter now.”
“Suit yourself.” Gordon wandered off to find Cindy.
James stood in front of Grossman’s, hands in his pockets, hoping someone he knew would stand him a beer. Gordon had said he looked like shit, and the truth was, he felt like shit. Lost; empty.
He’d sent a postcard home the week he’d arrived, but of course he’d given no return address. What would his sister be doing now? Had his father cooled down? Did he regret his words? What about his mother? And here he was, in a different country altogether. He decided to go for a walk, think about things. He crossed Spadina and turned down an alley, head down, looking for solace in solitude. Five minutes with nobody telling him what he should do, where he should go, what he should say. A memory came to him: a day at the lake, fishing with his dad when he was twelve. When did everything become so complicated? He closed his eyes, saw the twist of a trout in the evening light, the brilliant arc of water, heard the whir of the reel as it spun. His father’s easy laugh, paternal hand on his shoulder.
A horn, a squeal of tires, and a car bore down on him, a screaming blur of chrome and fins. There was nowhere to go in the narrow alley, brick walls on both sides, garbage cans. James leapt for a doorway.
“Fucking hippie!” someone shouted, and as he came up from his roll James saw a car full of leering faces, heard whooping and raucous laughter.
They had been aiming for him.
The car swerved, knocking over a garbage can before exiting. James leaned against the wall, gasping, sick. The palms of his hands were shredded from landing on glass and gravel, and his shoulder ached from where he’d fallen hard into the doorway of a loading dock. He stifled a sob. He had to pull himself together.
WHEN JAMES FOUND Fig and Myra sometime later at Grossman’s, he’d resolved not to mention the incident
in the alley. He felt pathetic. It didn’t matter; they didn’t notice his appearance, deep as they were in conversation, shouting over the din of people and music. Myra wore round tinted glasses James hadn’t seen before, and he wondered briefly how she could see in the dim bar. She leaned in close to Fig, an occasional hand on his arm as they talked. James was too hungry to care; he asked Fig for a loan and Fig, distracted, had pushed a couple of bills across the table at him. James took them and went to the bar to order some food. If he could just sit for a while, feel the solid surface of a chair beneath him, eat a meal, and have people around him, he’d be okay. As he handed the barman the money, he saw that his hand shook.
After sopping up the last of the coldly congealing gravy with a piece of bread, James drained his glass and refilled it from the pitcher Fig had bought. Fig and Myra were talking animatedly about the next mobilization, organized by the Committee to End the War. Fig was planning to speak on behalf of SAEWV. As they talked, the two rattled off acronyms. James downed his beer and poured another.
“What’s with that? SAEWV. SUPA. TADP, TCC . . . TCCEWV? Is this the ABCs of political activism or something? How the fuck do you keep them all straight?” James laughed, a half-sneer.
Myra glared at him; Fig looked unimpressed. “This is important, James,” Myra told him. “We’re doing this for you.”
“We’re doing this for Vietnamese civilians,” Fig corrected. “They’re the victims. They’re why the war is immoral. You —”
Myra put her hand on Fig’s arm, and James saw this as an intimate, exclusive gesture. “What about me?” he said.
Fig leaned across the table. “You’re white. You’re an American. You’re so fucking privileged, you don’t have a clue. What are you going to do to stop the war?” Fig’s face was inches from James’s.
A hundred possible retorts volleyed in James’s brain, but what came out of his mouth was: “What’s with the nickname, anyway, Fig? Are you some kind of fruit?”
The air was thick with tension, and then, abruptly, Fig leaned back. “You’re not even worth it, man. Useless piece of American crap.”
