by Tim O'Brien
I wasn’t a fortune-teller.
Vision, nothing more. Dim previews of coming attractions. The rest was trial and error.
In the first week of February, we set up a formal organization on campus. The Committee, we called it. We took out an ad in the Pevee Weekly, calling for volunteers, and three days later, on a Saturday afternoon, we convened our first meeting in a small conference room in the basement of Old Main.
I presided, Ollie sat to my immediate left. At two o’clock, when I called the meeting to order, it was clear that we had a severe manpower problem. The only other body in the room belonged to a large, tent-shaped coed who brooded in total silence at the far end of the table.
“This is Tina,” Ollie said, “I’ll vouch for her.”
The girl gazed fixedly at her own stomach; she seemed fascinated by it, a little overwhelmed.
Tina Roebuck: two hundred pounds of stolid mediocrity. A home-ec major. A chronic overeater. She was not obese, exactly, just well spread out. Generous hips and sturdy thighs and big utilitarian breasts. Like a Russian hammer-thrower, I decided—the poor girl obviously could not tell day from night without a sundial.
I smiled and shuffled some papers.
“Floor’s open,” I said, and shrugged. “I think we can dispense with parliamentary procedure.”
Then I settled back.
Ollie Winkler did most of the talking. For ten minutes the discussion revolved around petty organizational matters. Ollie slipped his boots off, resting a foot on the edge of the table. “What we got here,” he was saying, “is a troika situation, like in the USS of R, three horses pulling the same big sled. Which means we best divvy up the power, keep the reins straight so to speak, that way we don’t get tangled up or nothing … Like with—”
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’c
lock 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.”
She paused and massaged her temples. When she spoke again, her voice had a plaintive quality, mournful and bleak.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Fluffhead. All beauty, no brains. People think we’re just glitz and glitter, nobody realizes how much crap we have to put up with. Christ, if—” She stopped and stared at me. Complex things were happening in her eyes. “I mean, just think about it. You ever see a cheerleader with fat thighs? All that cruddy cottage cheese—God, I hate cottage cheese, it’s like eating chalk—but do you hear me complaining? No way, because I care. Because I’ll go that extra mile.”
“A martyr,” I said.
She gave her head a quick, violent shake.
“Don’t mock me, man. Straight A’s, you can check it out. I’m smart. Body and brains, the whole package.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Smart,” she said.
There was a silence.
“What I despise,” she said quietly, “is condescension. I’m a human being.”
“For sure,” I said. “A smart one.”
“Yes?”
“It’s very clear.”
Sarah frowned at me. For the first time there was some warmth in the eyes, tiny flecks of orange and silver floating in the deep blackness.
The band was playing My Girl.
“Well,” she said, still frowning, her voice cool and wary, “maybe you’re not such a creep after all.”
“Maybe not.”
“But still—”
Again, there was that softening. She looked at her hands.
“Anyway, this is strictly a one-night shot. We’re stuck with each other—c’est la vie, et cetera—but to be perfectly honest I’d rather be down in Brazil munching on maggots. No offense. Just so we have an understanding.”
I nodded, then Sarah stood up and hooked a thumb toward the dance floor.
“All right, let’s jiggle it,” she said. “Hands off, though. I know every gimmick in the book.”
She looked like a starlet. Sleek and lean and smart. She danced with her eyes closed, ignoring the crowd and the music, ignoring me. Luck, I kept thinking. Between dances we talked about the old days at Fort Derry High, the time I’d passed out in geometry class, the way she’d cradled my head and fanned me with her notebook. “Bizarre,” Sarah said, and I smiled at her and admitted that I’d gone through a rough period back then. I described the headaches and constipation, that out-of-synch sensation, my sessions with Chuck Adamson.
Sarah listened carefully.
“In other words—” She waited a moment. “Bats? Breakdown?”
“Not quite. Ancient history, back to normal.”
“Right,” she grunted. All around us people were dancing hard to drums. “And this thing at the cafeteria? The bomb scare—that’s normal?”
“No,” I said. “Necessary.”
“Which means?”
“Nothing. Just necessary.”
Sarah made a vague motion with her shoulders.
“Maybe so, but it seems a little—what’s the word?—pretentious. Mr. Prophet.”
“War,” I said. “Vietnam. In case you haven’t—”
She stepped back. “I told you, I’m not stupid, so you can cut out the condescending crap. The prophet with his poster, it’s all very cute, I suppose, but very half-assed.”
“Just a symbol,” I said.
“Oh, lovely.” Sarah snorted and shook her head. “Take a look around. You think these idiots care about symbols? Fireworks, that’s all they understand. Bang for the buck. It’s a bad new age—symbols don’t make it.”
“And you could do better?”
“No worse. At least you’d see some pyrotechnics. Not that I’d ever get involved.”
Her eyes moved sideways. She started to add something, then thought better of it.
The music had gone mellow.
“Symbols,” she muttered, then reached out and slipped her arms around me and came in close. There was a new openness in her posture: legs separated, a subtle tilt to the pelvis.
For the next hour things were fine. No talking, just motion. It all seemed appropriate. The scalps and arrows and twinkling lights, and the way she moved, athletic but graceful, and the mood, and the romantic expression in Custer’s wide blue eyes. I recognized the compatibilities. When we danced slow, I could feel her breasts against me, the give and take. There were skin smells, too, and a perfume of roses sprinkled with spice—clove or cinnamon.
The perfume was what did it to me.
