by Tim O'Brien
I drifted away for a time. Just hovering, on hold, and when I looked up I was alone.
To what extent, I wondered, was it real?
A hard landing—too much torque. There was again the problem of gravity.
At the ramp, I waited for the plane to empty out. She was gone. But when I put my coat on, I found a poem pinned to the pocket—Martian Travel—and it was signed Bobbi. That much was real. The words didn’t matter. It had to do with flight and fantasy and pale green skin, which was hard to follow, but it seemed meaningful despite the absence of meaning. There was some grass tucked into the fold. Plain dried grass, yet fragrant, and a postscript which explained that the grass expressed her deepest feelings for me.
We spent two days in a motel on the outskirts of Miami. The grass, I kept thinking. I couldn’t match it to the real world. When I was well enough to travel, Sarah rented a van and fixed up a bed in back, pillows and blankets.
“Home free,” she said.
We made Key West in just under four hours. There was blue water and sickness and jungly greens and a fierce sun that made my eyes burn. What did it mean? The pieces wouldn’t fit. A white stucco house, I remember, and Ned Rafferty said, “Hang tight,” and he helped me inside, where it was cool, and then I felt the disease. Chills turning to fever. It was true illness. Emotional burnout, too, but the rest was physical. I remember a ceiling fan spinning over my bed. A heavy rain, then dense humidity; faces bobbing up—Tina Roebuck peeling an orange, Ned Rafferty wringing out a washcloth and folding it across my forehead. There were voices, too. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. And cooking smells. And intense heat, and doors swinging open, and a radio at low volume in another room. The smells were tropical. At times I’d seem to float away on one of those leisurely space walks. Nowhere to land, I’d think, and I’d be circling over the Everglades, airborne, all flight and fantasy.
“It’s done,” Sarah kept telling me.
She was patient. At night, when the chills came, she would come close and whisper, “End of the road.”
Key Wasted, Tina called it. There was no war here, and no clamor, just the tropical numbs.
Over that first month we took things slow. Hour by hour, quiet meals and quiet conversation. The patterns were entirely domestic. Tina did the shopping and cooking, Rafferty tended a small garden out back. For me, it was recovery. Safe, I’d think. A safe house, a safe neighborhood, and the underground seemed tidy and languid. There were no choices to make; the killing was elsewhere. Our little bungalow was situated at the edge of Old Town, near the cemetery, on a narrow, dead-end lane that was prosperous with window boxes and sunlight. No one talked politics. If this was the movement, I decided, the movement was fine, because nothing moved. Our neighbors were property owners and retired naval officers and widows and watercolorists. The houses were painted in pastels. In the yards were many flowers and pruned shrubs. During the day, from my bedroom window, I’d watch people passing by in their bright clothes, and at night I could hear radios tuned to the Voice of Havana.
I’d hear myself thinking: Where am I?
On the lam, I’d think. Then I’d smile. What, I wondered, was a lam? And why did it sound so corny and sad?
“There now,” Sarah would say. “Sleep it off.”
But my dreams were unwholesome. Criminal and outlandish. One night I was Custer. Another night I was chased through a forest by men with torches and silver badges—“Shame!” they were yelling—but I put my head down and ran. I dreamed of dishonor. I dreamed of dragnets and posses and box canyons and dead ends. “Shame!” my father yelled, but I couldn’t stop running. And then, dreaming, but also awake, I came to a country where there was great quiet and peace. It was a country without language, without names for shame and dishonor. Here, there was nothing worth dying for, not liberty or justice or national sovereignty, and nothing worth killing for. It was a country peopled by apostates and mutineers, those who had dropped their arms in battle, runaways and deserters and turncoats and men with faint hearts.
Just a dream, like everything, but the nights were disjointed.
I’d wake up dizzy—uncertain whereabouts. A malfunction of compass. I couldn’t get my bearings; I felt open to injury.
“Easy,” Sarah would say, “give it time.”
She was tender with me. Uncommonly careful, and caring. In the mornings, before the heat set in, she would often lead me on long winding strolls through Old Town. The pace was slow. She was tactful, never pushing. Along the way she pointed out the local flora and fauna, many gulls and flowers, exotic trees, fish bones bleaching on white sand. We’d go arm in arm down Margaret Street, then left on Caroline, past Cuban restaurants and conch houses, then right on Duval, where there were crowds and drinking establishments and young girls in halters and headbands and young boys with long hair and bruised arms, then down to the waterfront, just walking, often resting, watching the shrimp boats and fishermen and tourists. Mildew smells, I remember. And salt and gasoline. There were jugglers and magicians at Mallory Square. There was an old man with an iguana on a leather leash. There was no war here, but there was bright sunlight and water, so we’d walk until we were hungry, then we’d stop for fish cakes at one of the outdoor cafés. We’d hold hands under the table. We’d be silent, mostly, or else talk around things, admiring the temperature and the shadings of color in the sky. Later, at the house, we’d nap or read, then take a swim, then oil up our bodies and hide behind sunglasses and spend the late afternoon soaking our toes in the Gulf of Mexico.
On the surface, at least, it was a holiday. R&R, Sarah called it, but she skirted the hard topics. She did not mention her new friends. She did not venture information as to why we were here or what her plans might be or where the trends might take us. Except for a few late-night phone calls, there were no contacts with any outside network. There was an odd passivity to it all, an absence of endeavor. Too lush, I thought. Too remote. The immense quiet and the afternoon heat and the slow island tempo. Where, I wondered, was the resistance? And why Key West? And what next? There were these questions, and others, but I was not yet prepared to frame them.
I concentrated on convalescence. Day to day, just idling. A good time, mostly—a family feeling.
Tina Roebuck performed home economics, toiling over casseroles and desserts that flamed. “Health begins with nutrition,” she’d say. Then she’d chuckle and tap her belly: “Balanced diets make balanced minds.” So we’d sit down to nutritious meals, Tina in a brightly colored muumuu, Rafferty in gym shorts, Sarah in almost nothing. The talk was family talk—Tina told McCarthy stories, Rafferty went on at length about his garden. After supper we’d play Scrabble or Monopoly, or watch television, or go dancing down on Duval Street, and although I’d sometimes feel myself slipping away, space walking, the others were always there to give comfort.
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.
I’d tease the name, saying “Bobbi.”
Bobbi who? I’d wonder.
And there was Sarah, too, whose love and ministrations speeded recovery.
In the evenings, before bed, she gave me long professional back rubs, attending the vertebrae one by one, taking each toe to her mouth and sucking out the poisons and wickedness. There was some guilt, of course. There were unsaid things. Our lovemaking was often quick and formal. Bobbi, I’d be thinking, which was silly, and Sarah would regard me with flat eyes, just waiting, and eventually I’d find reason to look away. But even
then she showed patience. Quietly, without sarcasm, she said she was proud of me. I’d done the proper thing. She knew how difficult it was, she knew about the pain.
“We all want to be heroes,” she said one afternoon. “That’s the constant. Nobody wants a bad rep. Ducking out, the big blush, I know. But I’ll tell you a true fact—you can’t die of embarrassment. Doesn’t happen that way.”
I watched the clouds.
A seashore scene, and we were beached up side by side. The blues were startling. It was an afternoon of repose, just the wide-open stratosphere and those long rhyming wavelengths of water and light.
For a time Sarah watched me through her sunglasses. There was a hesitation, then she reached into her beach bag and pulled out a new leather wallet.
“Yours,” she said, and passed it over.
Inside, under clear plastic, was a Social Security card made out in the name of Leonard B. Johnson. There was a driver’s license, too, in the same name, with my face affixed, and two credit cards, and a snapshot of Sarah in her Peverson cheerleading outfit. At the bottom of the photograph, in black ink, she’d written: With high fidelity, Sarah.
“The credit cards,” she said. “Don’t use them. ID stuff, just for show.”
“Leonard?” I said.
“You don’t like it?”
“Not much.”
Sarah sat up and massaged cocoa oil into her calves and thighs. Her skin was deep brown with good muscle definition. A hard act, I thought, in a hard world.
She laughed.
“Ah, well,” she said brightly, “what’s in a name? No real meaning. Know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Names and names, William. Meanings. Names don’t matter.” She rolled onto her stomach. Overhead there were sea gulls and wispy white clouds. “Anyway,” she said, “I hope it’s not an identity crisis. Leonard, I mean, it’ll grow on you. Very wishy-washy as names go. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, I’ll have your passport.”
