Forever

by Jeff Holmes

  Forever…

  By Jeff Holmes

  Published by Jeff Holmes at Smashwords

  Copyright 2013 Jeff Holmes

  For Sage, who inspired me.

  For Steve, who started me.

  For Miranda who guided me.

  For Angie, for all of the above and more -- especially for forever.

  And for everyone -- over the last 36 years -- who gave me Roni.

  Cover art by Jeff Sasek

  In loving memory of Donald K. Holmes (1931-2013)

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  CHAPTER 1

  Staring into the latrine mirror, Private First Class Scott Mitchell splashed water on his face and realized, “This is what I’ve become…fuck.”

  He had just puked up the three dozen chocolate chip cookies his Grandma Hanna wasn’t supposed to send him. His Mom, Donna, his friends, and even the girls at Rocco’s Pizza back in Wild Horse, Colorado, had all been warned not to send packages, especially food. It was Army policy and was supposed to cut down on roaches and mice in the barracks.

  On this rainy March night, as the letters were distributed to the boys of Second Platoon in U.S. Army Basic Combat Training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, what appeared to be a shoe box emerged from the mail bag. It was carefully wrapped in brown paper and everyone in the room groaned. It usually meant food, or someone was trying to sneak in contraband (porn, usually). Whenever someone received a package, they had to open it, up front. If it was porn or something, it would get confiscated on the spot (or so they were told). But if it was food, the lucky recipient of the package was required to eat the contents in front of everyone.

  Drill Sgt. Alexander (who reminded Scott a lot of his high school football coach, except Sgt. Alexander said motherfucker a lot more) picked up the box. He had a huge wad of plug tobacco in his mouth, and his Smoky hat was tilted down over his eyes. He leaned his chair back against the wall on its back legs. He reached down and picked up the box.

  “Mitchell!” Sgt. Alexander barked. “Get your dumb ass up here, boy!”

  Scott’s shoulders drooped. This isn’t going to end well, he thought, as he climbed to his feet and walked to the front of the room, to the hooting and hollering of his barracks-mates.

  “Trainee Mitchell,” said Alexander, “it would appear that despite warnings to the contrary, someone has sent you a package, which means you must open said package in front of me, your barracks and God Almighty. There had better be a good motherfucking reason, Private.”

  Scott looked at the box. It was addressed to him in his Grandma Hanna’s unmistakable handwriting, with the “Mon-Dak” Mobile Retirement Village (trailer park) address in Mesa, Ariz., in the corner. As he opened the box, he hoped for t-shirts, socks, even one of those dumb cardigan sweaters she always buys him for Christmas which he always takes back. No such luck.

  Wrapped in the previous Saturday’s edition of the Arizona Republic were four dozen of her classic chocolate chip cookies. They had taken him from childhood snack through college munchies and back again, but now they were the enemy. Sgt. Alexander looked in the box and smiled. “Whatcha got in that box, Trainee?”

  “Uh, four dozen chocolate chip cookies, drill sergeant,” Scott mumbled.

  “Well, you know what that means, boy,” Alexander responded.

  “Yes, drill sergeant,” Scott sighed.

  “You’re going to eat every motherfucking one of those things, boy,” Alexander said.

  “Yes, drill sergeant,” Scott conceded.

  He hammered down the first dozen, no problem. Then the second…piece of cake. But halfway through the third, the sugar, chocolate and supper were all conspiring against him. He gulped down the last of the third, but was feeling queasy.

  “Drill Sergeant Alexander! Trainee Mitchell reports he can’t eat one more of these goddamn things,” Scott said to peals of laughter around him. Alexander paused for a moment.

  “Are you saying you can’t follow the order, boy?”

  “The trainee is saying he did his best, but he can’t eat any more. Would the drill sergeant like them?” Scott was hoping for a miracle.

  “Are they any good, boy?”

  “Yes, drill sergeant, they are the best,” Scott said.

  “Make sure it doesn’t happen again,” Alexander said with a sly smile.

  “It never will, Drill Sergeant, you have my word.” Those final words came as Scott tossed the box of cookies to the drill instructor and barreled out the barracks door to the latrine. The cookies came up faster than they went down.

  Flushing the toilet and stumbling back to his feet, Scott turned back to the sink. He peered into the mirror. His shoulder-length brown hair was gone. He was wearing olive drab green Army fatigues, exactly like everyone around him wore. He was standing in a latrine which amounted to two long rows of toilets down the middle of the room with two rows of sinks along the wall. In the back was a huge community shower.

  Over the last year-and-a-half, Scott Mitchell, like Humpty Dumpty, had suffered a great fall. Even though he’d missed half his high school senior season because of an injury, “Footer” (as his best friend, Rick Weber, called him) was the placekicker for the football team at Wild Horse High School. He missed the first four games of his senior season because of an injury, but in the final five games, he made a perfect seven-of-seven field goals and was 10-for-10 on extra points, as the Stampeders narrowly missed the state playoffs. The University of Northern Colorado offered him a chance to walk-on the team, and he jumped at it.

  At UNC, Scott picked up where he’d left off at Wild Horse, making 13 of 13 field-goal attempts and 40 extra points, as the Bears won the 1975 North Central Conference championship and entered the NCAA playoffs with a perfect 11-0 mark.

  In the first round of the playoffs in front of crowd of 9,000 at Memorial Stadium in Greeley, with a howling Colorado blizzard coming down off the Front Range, Scott hit a field goal as time expired and UNC beat Western Kentucky, 15-14. The front page of every paper in the state had a picture of Scott and his holder, Danny Jo Reuter, leaping in the air, their navy blue jerseys and golden helmets glowing through the driving snow.

  After beating New Hampshire on the road a week later, the Bears went to Sacramento for the Camellia Bowl (the Division II championship game) against Northern Michigan. Scott booted three field goals, including the game-winner (this time a 52-yarder) and the Bears won the national championship, 16-14. And again, he and Danny Jo graced the front page of every newspaper in Colorado. For three weeks in the land of the Broncos and Buffalos, the Bears were the lead story.

  At the age of 18, Scott Mitchell was the toast of the state. He was signing autographs and even took at bow at the governor’s Condition of the State speech in Denver. Bronco kicker Jim Turner extended his congratulations. John Denver even called him up on stage at a concert at McNichols Arena in Denver. He was a star.

  Back in Greeley, he wanted for nothing. He didn’t have to buy a drink or a bag of weed, and it seemed as if every girl on campus wanted to wake up with him. And, quite a few did.

  He was loving life; a little too much. The adulation and attention drew him away from class and even from football. His grades started to slip and in the Spring Game in 1976, he made just one of four field-goal attempts, as well as missing the first extra-point he’d ever missed in his life. The coaches an
d his older teammates jumped all over him. In the final few weeks of the school year, he managed to get it together in class enough to barely stay eligible. He went back to Wild Horse to run the swimming pool with Rick, but little had changed.

  Rick was a bigger partier than Scott. He was the one who introduced Scott to pot, and as a member of UNC’s track team, he always had a ready supply. Rick was engaged to Maggie Jackson, the beautiful daughter of the Mitchell family’s minister. She and Scott had been friends since elementary school, part of the gang who always hung around Mitchell’s house playing baseball and “Ditch ‘Em” around the neighborhood. About the time he realized Maggie was not just a neighbor kid but also a stunning blonde with long, beautiful hair, Rick had already figured it out, and they were serious by 10th grade.

  Not that it stopped Rick. Even though he and Maggie were both at UNC with Scott, Rick was a player; as he put it, he “got his share of strange.” But, he felt he was entitled; he and Maggie weren’t married, yet. It pissed Scott off, but guys stuck together and while, deep inside, he’d always wanted to just tell Maggie, he didn’t. Guy code.

  Maggie’s dad was transferred to a church in Denver during the kids’ freshman year at UNC while she stayed in Greeley, working for the newspaper there. She came down to Wild Horse a few weekends, where Rick and Scott led the party community, and the pool was the center of the social universe. At least once a week there were parties at the pool. Usually, it was the staff with a select group of other invitees, mostly high school girls. Rick, Scott and some of the other guys had their pick, as booze and weed weakened everyone’s inhibitions.

  On weekends, there were parties at the Sandbar; it was one of those parties that turned Scott Mitchell’s downward spiral into a nosedive. After a little blanket time in the woods with Liz Logan, one of the lifeguards, he was drunkenly fishing around for his clothes when his left foot slipped into an exposed tree root. He twisted his ankle, hard, and went down. But in his drunken condition, it barely hurt. He and Liz dressed and stumbled back to the fire.

  It was only then that Scott’s sister, Amy, who was at the party with her boyfriend (and Rick and Scott’s longtime friend), Mark Carson, noticed his injury.

  “Oh my God, Scott, what did you do?” she screamed. In the firelight, he could see his left ankle was swollen and bleeding. Immediately, it began to hurt, quickly sobering him up. Instead of thinking how he’d just nailed Liz Logan, he was suddenly terrified about his whole future. It wasn’t his magic right kicking foot, but it was his plant foot, which was just about as important.

  His friends packed his ankle in ice and carried him to Rick’s station wagon and hurried back to town. They took him to the Cheyenne County Hospital emergency room. While Amy called their parents, Scott was wheeled into X-ray. He suffered a hairline fracture of the end of his tibia, and he tore three ligaments. It wouldn’t require surgery, but he wouldn’t be ready for the UNC football season.

  The “official” story was that Scott was injured while out for a training run and he was granted a redshirt year. He’d have a year off to rehab, hopefully in more ways than one.

  But it didn’t go down that way. Redshirts can be the lost souls of the college football world, and as Scott’s ankle healed, his quest for fun rose to new heights. And the coaching staff and athletic department just kind of forgot about him. If he had spent half the time in class that he spent waking up in strange girls’ dorm rooms, cleaning seeds out of quarter pounds of pot, or just sitting in his room playing guitar, he would have been fine.

  For the last four months of 1976, Scott Mitchell vanished from class, from football (the team started strong but lost three in a row late in the year and missed the playoffs) and even from his family and most of his friends.

  By the time Thanksgiving rolled around, the writing was on the wall. Scott spent an uncomfortable weekend at home and vowed to his parents to try his best in the final few weeks of the semester, but it was too late. He actually forgot he was taking one class and was failing all but one of the others. He finished the semester with a 0.8 grade point average, and just one year after being the hero of a national championship team, he lost his scholarship and was academically suspended from school. He was finished at the University of Northern Colorado.

  A week later, after a heated argument with his father, he went to see a recruiter. On Dec. 30, 1976, just a day before President Ford ended the G.I. Bill, Scott enlisted in the Army. He spent January and February helping coach the Wild Horse High School’s wrestling team, then left for basic training on March 15, 1977.

  And now, here he was. From being the King of Colorado, he’d become just another faceless guy in green fatigues in the middle of Missouri, puking up his grandmother’s chocolate chip cookies. “Fucking pathetic, Mitchell. Pretty fucking pathetic,” he thought.

  Dejected, he trudged out of the latrine onto the gravel street and looked up and down the rows of one-story steel buildings. The first time he saw it, he thought it resembled a set of outbuildings on a farm. Twenty-four guys to a barrack, two barracks to a platoon, four platoons made up the company known as Delta-Five-Two. It was a sad landing spot from the green, tree-lined campus at Greeley.

  Scott walked back into his building. As assistant squad leader, he had one of the front bunks. As he passed the office door at the front entrance, his absent thoughts were broken by Sgt. Alexander.

  “Mitchell!” he barked. “Get your ass in here!”

  Scott entered the office, shut the door and snapped to parade rest.

  “At ease, boy,” Sgt. Alexander said. “You alright?”

  “Yes, drill sergeant. I feel kind of stupid, but other than that, I’m fine, thank you,” Scott said.

  “Well, the cookies were good,” the DI said with slight wink. “Tell you grandma Bobby Alexander said so.”

  “Thank you, Drill Sergeant, I will,” Scott said.

  “You’re dismissed, Mitchell. Get some sack. 0430 comes early,” Sgt. Alexander said.

  Scott thanked him and turned to leave, but the sergeant stopped him.

  “Almost forgot why I called you in here,” he said. “You had one more piece of mail.”

  “Drill sergeant, please don’t tell me it’s another package,” Scott pleaded. “I just don’t think I could take that.”

  Alexander laughed. “No, boy, it’s not more cookies for you to lose. Actually, unless I miss my guess, it’s from a young lady.”

  Scott was surprised by the statement. Amy and his other sister, 14-year old Kimmy, had already written this week. He expected one from Maggie anytime, but outside of the guys on the wrestling team, hardly anyone knew for sure where he was.

  He took the white and pink envelope from Sgt. Alexander and looked at the back. On the flap was the hand drawing of a pony, holding up a sign happily saying, “Hi!”

  “It can’t be,” Scott thought as he flipped the envelope over and stared at the return address in stunned surprise:

  RRMI

  University of Northern Colorado

  18 Wilson Hall

  Greeley, Colorado 80639

  It was from Roni.

  ****

  CHAPTER 2

  It was one of those bizarre coincidences in life. From Mrs. McMasters’ class in second grade on through Scott’s dad’s physiology class as seniors, Roni McIntyre had always been there. She had been in every class as Scott from second grade through ninth grade, and in at least two or three classes all three years of high school. Scott had figured out she was the only person of 110 members of the WHHS Class of ’75 who held that distinction.

  And, for the majority of that time, Scott was deeply in “crush” with Roni. And for the majority of that same time, she thought he was kind of a dork.

  At Christmas time in fifth grade, Scott gave her a very sweet card. She took it, looked at it, let out an annoyed sigh and grabbed a random piece of cardboard off a table and scrawled:

  “Merry Christmas Scott. I hate you. Love, Roni”

  As
he sat in the middle of the barracks on this rainy March night nine years later, that piece of cardboard still sat in a box in his closet back in Wild Horse. Another time, he gave her a little ring with her ruby birthstone for her birthday. He later found the box in the trash. But he also found out she kept the ring.

  Roni had beautiful, long, light brown hair, a softly perfect figure, and those eyes. It took until probably seventh grade until Scott really put his finger on just what it was that drew him to her. Roni had the most striking baby blue eyes; they were like nothing he’d ever seen. It seemed she could look right into his soul with those eyes and read him to the core.

  Roni’s family members were direct descendants of the McIntyre brothers who helped found Wild Horse back in 1878. Her dad and grandpa owned the biggest Pontiac-Olds-GMC dealership east of Denver and her family lived on 40-acre spread north of town. Their huge classic house had wrap-around porches on both levels. Roni and her sister, Brooke, had horses and the family were all avid skiers.

  Roni was one of the most attractive girls in school; she always hung out with the “cool-crowd” in elementary and junior high school. She participated in sports and choir and never missed a class party; but then in ninth-grade she discovered two other interests: sex and older guys.

  Ironically, Mark Carson had been her first – of all the guys to lose his virginity first, Mark was the last person anyone thought it would be. But thereafter, it seemed Roni was more drawn to guys with cars and money. And, of course, for this attention, those guys expected sex.

  It really wasn’t as if Roni drifted away from the rest of the crowd (which was also Rick and Maggie and Mark and Scott’s crowd), but she stopped playing sports as a sophomore, and dumped most of her clubs by her senior year. Other than her horses, her main interest was her art. Roni was the best artist in school.

  She painted, drew and sketched. When they were juniors, riding in the back of Chris Ohrt’s station wagon on the way to Denver to see James Taylor in concert, she sat silently scribbling on a notebook page for about 60 miles. Just as they hit the city, she looked up at Scott and said, “Yeah, you are kind of cute sometimes.”