by John Lawton
‘No. Put it like that and they’re not. Sam is mostly well-disposed towards the boy. Truth to tell he’s had an easier upbringing than you had. I don’t mean money neither. Sam had . . . kinda mellowed by the time Huey came along. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for Huey, but Huey won’t let him. However, there is one issue on which Sam is a stickler.’
‘Is it anything special?’
‘Huey got drafted. How special is that?’
Suddenly we were on my patch again. What didn’t I know about things that special?
‘It’s mundane. Happens to most families. It’s special. It rips them all apart in a different way.’
‘You know what it’s coming down to, Johnnie? It’s like a war between the generations. That’s got to be the worst kind.’
I knew what she meant. Of course it was war. I had been a believer in and on occasion a user of a particular guerrilla slogan of that war myself—‘Never trust anyone over thirty.’ The fact that I was over thirty did not diminish my belief in the words. But at the level Lois meant, this level, father to son, I had been a non-combatant. There was tension enough between me and the old man, but a war it wasn’t. I think things were eased for us. He’d lost Billy to something he’d never be able to figure out and it’s possible it made him back away from any confrontation with me. And neither he nor I had fought in the foreign wars that were on offer to our generations. We were both oblique to them. Sam was too young for the First World War and near-enough forty when the Second started. I might have scraped into Korea if I’d been a year older, but I was an asthmatic kid. The near-desert air around the farm was great for my lungs—the gasoline and lead air of cities wasn’t. I had no problem getting registered 4-F—exempt from all military service. Whatever skirmish we got ourselves into before Vietnam we got ourselves out of without my help. By the time Vietnam came along and we abandoned the fiction that our boys were ‘military advisors’—25,000 advisors, how much advice does one country need?—I was too old anyway. War was not an issue between me and Sam. He could not have, and never would have, pointed to his own service and urged the same on me. But he was picking a fight with Huey. And I had a deal of trouble figuring out why.
‘Huey makes it as hard as he can,’ Lois said as though she’d read my mind. ‘He doesn’t talk enough sense for Sam. It all begins calmly enough, then Huey will start spouting slogans at Sam, Sam’ll get mad, Huey’ll get madder and by then he’s just yelling at Sam that he won’t go and nothing Sam or anyone can do will make him. It’s not that Sam wants him to go. He wants what he calls an “honourable solution”. Accepting the draft is only one way to get it. He’d be happy if Huey would just consider the alternatives. But he won’t. Sam told him he could volunteer for the Navy or the Air Force. Stay out of the action. Huey just screamed at him. Sam told him he could join the National Guard and serve his time as a part-timer for however long it took. Huey laughed in his face. But worst of all—he could just take up his college place and see what happens when he graduates. Who knows, the war could be over by then?’
I doubted that. And I doubted that Huey would have the patience to serve six years in the National Guard.
‘So tell me about Huey and college. I’m not caught up.’
‘Well, Johnnie, maybe the two of you aren’t as close as you were. God knows, I’m his mother and I never felt more remote from him. Yep—he’s been accepted at U.T. Physical Sciences. He can start in the Fall. But to hear him talk you’d think it was a poor choice between Vietnam and college. They’re both “straight”—that’s another of his slogans, along with “Hell no, Huey won’t go”.’
‘There are other ways.’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘In fact there are how-to books written on how to dodge the draft. If I’ve seen one I’ve seen a dozen. Everything from faking a sports injury to french-kissing the recruiting officer.’
‘No kidding? What dodge would you suggest for your little brother? I don’t see him french-kissing nobody.’
‘Essential agricultural worker?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘That wouldn’t work. That would mean Sam lying. Huey doesn’t lift a finger on the ranch. And it’s not as if the ranch’s been our livelihood these last eighteen years. Sam wouldn’t tell that lie.’
‘Conscientious Objector?’
‘On what grounds? It’s not as if he’s a Mennonite or a Quaker. I should know. I brought him up in a religious nothin’, a vacuum. Blame me for that one.’
‘Principle. I deal a lot with kids who’d sooner burn their draft cards than go.’
‘Huey already did that. Round here there’s boys servin’ time for just that. Some boys burn ’em in front of the draft board or City Hall. Huey burned his at the dining table in front of my sister, her husband, their two little girls. Table cloth went up like brushwood, Sam threw coffee on the flames and threw Huey out the house. Makes you wonder what kind of a gesture it was. Against war or family? I’d have a hard time finding a principle in that, Johnnie.’
‘But all the same there is a principle. These kids believe in something. These kids believe in non-violence.’
‘I don’t doubt it. But we’d have a helluva time proving that with Huey’s record.’
One more thing no one had bothered to tell me.
‘He got busted when he was sixteen—smashed up a store, beat up on some kid and resisted arrest. If he’d not been Sam Raines’s boy he’d of been sent to reformatory. Sam made him pay for it all out of his own money. The damage, the fine. Didn’t help the father-son thing any—Huey being flat broke for a whole year while he works it off. And remember, Huey didn’t have the same childhood as you, just the same dad. Huey’s a rich kid. He’s used to having money.’
‘Or,’ I was nothing if not persistent, ‘he could see a sympathetic psychiatrist.’
‘A psychiatrist? Johnnie, you been away too long. A psychiatrist in West Texas? God knows there might even be such a critter—you look hard enough among the rocks and rattlers you might find one sympathetic or not—but the only recognisable psychiatric disorders in West Texas are being vegetarian or queer. Not liking beef or girls is about as crazy as it gets!’
‘OK. I give up. You’ve beaten me. I submit.’
She smiled. The pretense of the outraged cowgirl faded from her face. She got something close to wistful, that funny half-giggle creeping into her voice. She leant closer to me, a mock-confidential whisper no one else should hear.
‘Y’know, when Sam started asking “What is wrong with that boy?” I told him he should blame me. I was one of those mothers who read Dr Spock’s baby book. Sam said “sure” and changed the subject. He’d never heard of Spock—he didn’t know enough even to make the Star Trek gag everybody else makes. God, how Sam would blow his stack if Huey didn’t like beef ’n girls.’
‘What’s that about beef? I sure could use some.’
My father appeared in the doorway. I’d been so intent on Lois I had not heard him pull up. He kissed his wife, dutifully, a peck on the cheek. Hugged me, then held me at arm’s length with a silent ‘let me look at you’. I looked at him. I suppose he must have been sixty-five or so at that time. He was a few inches shorter than me. He had a beer belly rising, but most of him was still muscle, and while his hair was gray it was still thick and waved across his head the way my brother Billy’s used to.
He put an arm around Lois. Lois, smiling like she was really happy. Part of her adopted family put back together for however short a span.
‘How long d’you reckon on stayin’, son?’
‘I don’t know, Dad. Not more than a couple of days.’
Lois said, ‘I ate hours ago, why don’t you two come on in my kitchen and I’ll fix you something.’
We ate beef sandwiches. Drank more beer. And Sam ran through his roster of questions. How’s-business-son-Fine-Dad-You-know-t
here’s-always-a-place-for-you-here-Sure-Dad. It never varied. He’d always ask, and I never knew if the routine mechanics of it all was in any way an acceptance of the fact that I had gone for good or if he thought I might one day just say yes and come home.
We burned quickly down to sporadic exchanges and then silence. It was OK. I was relaxed and he seemed to be too. I caught my sunset. The three of us on the west-side deck watching heaven roll purple into puce, magenta into pink. Sam slunk off soon after ten.
‘What time does Huey get in?’ I asked Lois.
‘Often not at all. I’ve heard him roll in lately around dawn. But there’s times he’s gone two or three days.’
I went to bed without seeing him. ‘Bed’ was virtually a separate apartment. Sam’s millions had bought privacy. I’d grown up in a room with Billy. My mother and father on the other side of a planed timber wall three-quarters of an inch thick. As a teenager I had a room the size of a barn, my own bathroom. I still had. All my kidstuff still in place simply because there was no need ever to pack it away. The house had all the guest rooms a man could ever want. That said, my kidstuff was sparse. No team pennants, no old uniforms, no yearbooks. I had never played games. Baseball bored me—I’d never been able to see the flow—it was all stop and start. Basketball was strictly for the over-tall, and I’d blossomed—Good God, is that the word?—late. Football? Well, that was just guys in body armour crashing into each other. My kidstuff was books and records and torn Levi’s. The Wells and Verne books Billy had given me, Carl Sandburg’s Life of Lincoln and Vachel Lindsay’s poems—all about Johnny Appleseed. Old 78s of T-Bone Walker and Lightnin’ Hopkins. And early, great Little Richard (Sam: ‘Are you skinnin’ a cat up there, boy?’) And the Levi’s I had come on when Carolyn Tucker gave me my first hand-job when I was thirteen. I am nothing if not sentimental.
§
I slept in till past ten. A fitful night. Awake for hours wondering just who those guys in the tan Ford could be. I shuffled into the kitchen. Lois stuck black coffee, granola, and fresh fruit in front of me. It was a major concession. My father had started the day with ham ’n’ eggs ever since he was weaned. Lois gave me what I wanted. Sam usually just pulled a face and muttered. The one time Mel had come back to Texas with me, we—Sam, Lois, me, Mel and an eight-year-old Huey—had gone out to eat, Mel had ordered a vegetarian meal in a catfish bar. The waitress slapped down an undressed plain green salad in front of him with, ‘Here’s yore bowl of grass, boy.’ I thought Lois would die laughing. Now she just sat opposite me and talked while I ate what she probably took to be mule fodder.
‘When you’ve done . . .’
‘When I’ve done?’
‘Sam’s been up since six, just poking around the stables. He’d love it if you saddled up and went riding with him.’
So I did. There was no sign of Huey, and while I was out with Sam not a mention of him either. I am not a good horseman. And it had been so long since the last time that I was aching along the inner thigh muscles by the time we got back. In between we rode Raines country. We could have ridden all day and not seen the end of Raines country. And I got the male version of Lois’s hometown gossip. I learnt a lot about tractors and the endlessly fascinating life of the Texas longhorn—eat, shit, breed, riveting stuff—but Sam didn’t know who was screwing who either. And I watched windmills turn, derricks pump, and cattle roam. I saw not a glimpse of the deer and buffalo, but it was home, it was on the range, and if I ached it was all my own fault. I would not have missed it for the world.
Back at the house I put my feet up, stretched out and told myself I should find a stable in upstate New York and go riding more often or give it up for good. Lois appeared. I looked at her upside down.
‘Huey got back around noon,’ she said.
‘Good. We got things to talk about.’
‘Would you talk to him for me?’
‘What about?’
‘Just get him to see sense. Cool things a little between him and Sam.’
‘He won’t listen to me.’
‘You’re his brother. You could try.’
Of course I could.
Huey did not appear for dinner. I let him sleep and turned the handle of his door quietly about seven just to see if he was awake. He was. He was standing on a chair painting the back wall. One image was already complete. The logo of the Atlantic record company, right down to the 45rpm wording and the title, ‘Respect’—Aretha Franklin. The other one he was still at work on, deftly adding little white brush strokes to a five-foot portrait of the Track record label. Track was the English label Jimi Hendrix used to record for. It had mattered to Huey to have the authentic English singles, ‘Hey Joe’, ‘Purple Haze’ and the Bob Dylan number ‘All Along the Watchtower’. Rose had brought them back from England specially. I understood this. There were Elvis freaks for whom only the Sun singles would do. Forget RCA, forget reissues or compilation albums—only Sam Phillips’ one horse label was the McCoy.
‘Which will it be?’ I asked.
He turned sharply. A little look of surprise on his face.
‘Oh . . . I guess I haven’t made up my mind. “Hey Joe” would be simplest, but I’d really like “Watchtower” . . . but y’know, all those letters to do.’
I sat on the bed, a kingsize with the British flag as a counterpane, and looked at the contents of his bookcase while he inched in a long thin white line in silence. Huey’s reading was bang up to date, the bedside literature of your average American hippie, at least of the average American hippie who is fresh out of high school with a college place tucked under his belt and who still lives with his parents and has pocket money. Shiny paperbacks by Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg, Norman O. Brown, Herbert Marcuse, Lenny Bruce, The Tibetan Book of the Dead—all looking unread. Not a crack on the spine of any of them. The Whole Earth Catalogue—to me one of those books I saw ever after in used book stores that made me wonder, ‘What the fuck was that about?’ A book full of ads for things no teenager could possibly want. I had concluded it was some sort of McLuhanesque image explosion. Like take the pictures from The Mechanical Bride and forget the text. But I could be wrong. That and a couple of Herman Hesse novels were the only books that looked as though Huey might have read them. At the very least he should have read Bruce’s How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, not just because I gave it to him but because everybody should.
He leapt down from the chair, near-shoulder length hair flopping across his face. A small kid, by family standards. Eighteen and scarcely full-grown. Not really past that pocky stage kids get into at thirteen or fourteen.
‘You’re a hard man to find,’ I said.
‘I got my own shit to do, y’know. Besides, I hang around here I get hassled.’
‘So I heard.’
‘They been on at you too?’
‘They?’
‘OK. I mean the old man. It’s not Mom. It’s old Leatherbritches. You want a beer?’
‘Nah—let’s stay here a while.’
‘It’s OK. I got beer.’
He pulled open a closet door. It masked a big white icebox.
‘You have your own icebox?’
‘Sure—my own color TV and stereo. I got at least five stereos. I upgrade every time a new gadget comes along. You got Dolby yet?’
He stuck a beer in my hand. A cold, cold Rolling Rock. Stuck Hendrix on one of his stereos. ‘Purple Haze’ all in my mind, and way too loud. I realized I was talking to a rich kid, exactly as Lois had warned me. Maybe I was out of touch. Maybe every kid in America had his own closetful of chilled beer, a new stereo every six months and a kingsize bed.
‘Or I could roll up some dope. I got some Acapulco gold. Really good shit. This guy comes up from Juarez a couple of times a month.’
I sipped at the beer by way of answer and said, dogged and stupid to the last, ‘
Your mother just wants you to be civil to Sam. Give the old guy a hearing.’
‘Sure. I know that. She says that all the time. But there’s no talking to him. He just wants me to go to ’Nam and get my cojones shot off.’
Regardless of my gesture Huey stuck a hand under the mattress and pulled out a packet of honey-brown dope, tore open a cigarette, and proceeded to roll himself a joint. It occurred to me to remind him of the old axiom that smoking dope and drinking beer together is like pissing into the wind, but I didn’t.
I said, ‘Look, can we just talk about this? I kind of feel I haven’t quite got your attention.’
I got up and turned Hendrix down a notch, hoping to make my point.
‘What’s to talk about? If Dad just sent you here as his messenger then fuck you, Johnnie. That’s what I’d say to him. Fuck you.’
‘Jesus Christ, Huey. For once in your life will you just listen! Sam doesn’t want you to go . . .’
‘Good! ’cause I ain’t going.’
‘Huey—you got your papers, right? You got a draft card, a number and you’ve been asked to take a medical, right?’
Huey blew smoke at me. Sipped beer. Sneered. Looked like an asshole.
‘I can help you. This is my subject. My job. I’m hot on this. I can help you. It doesn’t compromise your moral stance just to think about ways around all this, does it?’
‘My “moral stance”? Are you for real, Johnnie?’
He laughed out loud at me.
‘Morals—morals are for the straights. There’s only one issue here. They want me to go. I ain’t going. That is that. Finito.’
‘They?’
‘They. Not just Mom and Dad. They. They . . . out there. The system. Fuck ’em.’
‘Huey. They can make you go. Believe me, they have the power. But if you’ll just think about it now, and decide on a course of action you won’t have to. Anyone with a modicum of sense and money can get out if it. The system, as you call it, is that unfair. Why else do you think ’Nam is full of poor white trash and black guys? The only people who go now are those who can’t get out of it.’
