by Rob Rufus
Bad Bruce lives!
-Bruce
“That was four days before he died,” I muttered. “The letter took longer than usual to come in. By then we knew . . . I mean, shit, they’d told us, but still. When Momma found it in the mail she thought maybe there had been a mistake, maybe he wasn’t really dead. You remember that, Milo?”
“I remember,” he whispered.
I folded the letter. I wiped my eyes.
For the first and only time, our record club was a cone of silence. No one made eye contact. No one took a drink. No one lit a smoke. The stillness seemed thick enough to muffle my words, to cut them off mid-air before anyone heard. Maybe that’s why I said what I said out loud.
“I can’t let it happen to me.”
Instantly, I felt their eyes.
“Not dying,” I stammered, “I don’t mean that. I mean how they changed him. They twisted him up. Jesus, it doesn’t even sound like he wrote this! It sounds . . . it sounds broken. It just sounds like he’s broken. I can’t let ʼem do that to me. Bruce would hate me if I let ʼem. So fuck that. Fuck them! Fuck Vietnam, man!”
“Fuck Vietnam.” Hana nodded.
Milo squeezed my shoulder. It was an act of camaraderie as much as relief. “I just needed you to say it first,” he admitted. “If you’re out, I’m out. Fuck this war. Fuck the fucking draft!”
I put my hand on top of his and peered into all four of his eyes.
“We’ll figure a way out of it,” I swore, trying to sound confident.
“But we’re prime, man, and no colleges have accepted us . . . so. Shit,” Milo said.
Hana put a finger to her lips and stood up.
She took the 45 off the turntable and grabbed the first record she saw—Milo’s Songs of Leonard Cohen. She put it on and turned the volume low.
She sat back down. She motioned us in.
The circle tightened.
“Listen,” she whispered, “I can get you guys out of it.”
“How?” Milo asked.
“First, we go to Chicago. I have friends in the underground that can get you papers, fake IDs, that sorta stuff. Once we get those, we take a Greyhound to Detroit. I’ve got people there that can get us outside of the city, where you can cross the St. Clair River. From there, I should be able to score you a ride to Toronto, where you can get set—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Milo said, holding up his hands. His eyes were blinking manically, and it looked like he might overheat. “You’re saying we should go to Canada?”
She nodded.
“Hana,” I said calmly, “we can’t do that.”
“Why?”
“Draft dodging is one thing. But deserting to Canada . . . that’s somethin’ else entirely. My family would disown me, if Dad didn’t find me and kill me first. We’d be pariahs even after the war was over. We’d have no home here anymore, ever.”
“Well I don’t give a shit what your parents think,” she groaned, “when I give a shit about saving your stupid life!”
“There’s another way,” Lewis said.
We all looked at him.
“Deferment.”
“We can’t get one if we’re not in college,” Milo said.
“Sure you can,” he said, matter-of-factly, “I did.”
“How?” I asked.
“By bustin’ my ass to fail,” he said, “and to fail convincingly. It took effort to flunk . . . last year’s the first time I ever got so much as a D in school. But I did it. So the draft board had to give me a deferment.”
A sheepish grin spread across his face.
“You’re a genius!” I said.
Milo bowed toward him, and clapped reverently.
“Pretty slick,” Hana said, “but what are you gonna do now? You just told us you screwed yourself out of an athletic scholarship by failing. No college means no deferment for you this time around.”
“You’re right,” he admitted.
“A deferment won’t be enough, anyway,” she said, “not if the war keeps going this way. LBJ is sending more troops to Vietnam right now. You might buy yourself a year with a deferment, maybe two, but unless one of you has an uncle in the senate or something, you’ll go eventually.”
“What if we become priests?” I spat out. “We could get ordained by one of those backwoods revivals in the Everglades, and then—”
“That’s a 4-D classification,” Hana said. “Right now, they’d still make you go.”
“What about . . . what’s it called? Being a conscientious objector?” I asked.
“1-O, man,” she said, shaking her head. “You’d go, just without a weapon.”
“Jesus Christ,” Milo sighed. “Tell me there’s something behind door number three.”
Hana leaned in closer. We leaned in, too.
“Door number three is getting you guys classified 4-F, permanently disqualified for military service. That’s the only guarantee that you’ll be safe.”
“How?” I asked. “You mean like shootin’ ourselves in the foot?”
“A few years ago, maybe. That shit won’t fly now. Too many kids have done it, and the Man catches on quick. I’ve read a dozen articles about boys getting charged with dereliction of duty. Poor suckers avoided four years in the jungle, just to spend twenty in jail.”
“But something like that, right?”
“Yeah,” she nodded, “something like that.”
“OK,” I said, “OK . . . OK . . . OK . . . there must be other ways . . . there must be tons of random ways to get disqualified for military service.”
“Yeah,” Lewis nodded, “there must be.”
“Sure,” Milo squeaked, “we’re OK, we’re cool. We’ve got time to figure it out.”
“But how much?” Hana asked.
She looked from Lewis, to Milo, to me, and back to Lewis.
“I don’t report back until this summer,” he said.
“What about you? Do either of you take the draft exam before graduation?”
Milo nodded in my direction.
The beer in my stomach turned sour. I felt like I might puke.
“When?” Hana asked.
“The day after my birthday,” I mumbled. “March 16th. A Saturday.”
She patted my hand. The touch was reassuring-ish.
“Then we have a month to figure it out,” Lewis said. “We can do that.”
“Yeah,” Milo said, grabbing my other hand. “That’s an eternity!”
I smiled the unconvincing smile I’d perfected over the last few months.
She held my hand then—I mean really held it. I looked into her dark eyes.
“Don’t worry, Ronnie,” she said, “I won’t let those fuckers take you. I swear to God I’ll kill you myself before I let you die over there.”
“Oh Hana,” I rasped, “you say the sweetest things.”
She laughed and Milo laughed and Ramrod laughed.
But I didn’t.
seven
Riding the Universal High of Defiance
Two weeks flew by, but not a single one of our ideas survived incubation—walking into the draft exam and drooling like I was a zombie, pretending to have gone blind, sticking peanut butter up my butt to fake some horrible gut rot—in the end, none of the ideas would play.
Those scams might trick the examiners at first, but as soon as they checked my medical records they’d know it was pure fiction. The paper trail of pediatric checkups haunted us worse than our permanent records.
I was starting to panic. One restless night, I seriously considered lobbing off my trigger finger with a steak knife, consequences be damned. I began to wonder how long it would take me to learn to speak Canadian, or whatever the language of pacifism was. But I kept my defeatist thoughts to myself.
Whe
n I was with The Vinyl Underground, I displayed as much confidence as possible. They needed to believe that I believed we’d find a way to beat the draft. So every Thursday night, I put on the best face I could—but behind that mask of sanity, I was a blubbering, nervous wreck.
The county wrestling finals were a week away, which only added to my stress. Dad was determined to push our team to victory by any means necessary. He stretched our practices an hour longer and made half the guys wear trash bags over their clothes to drop down in weight. The only reason he started speaking to me again was so he could yell at me when I was on the mat.
The one wrestler who seemed to enjoy Dad’s end-of-season suicide sets was Stink Wilson. He began showing up to practice early and staying late. I often saw him doing push-ups in the hall between classes. While Dad’s intense workouts felt like a punishment to me, Stink took it as a gospel in brutality—and he was a true believer if there ever was one.
I put in more effort than usual at practice as an olive branch to Dad, but upping my game put a physical strain on my already-tense mental state. Two weeks of that torture was all it took for my body to give out. I had to call off work after Friday’s practice—my back and legs hurt too bad to stand at the ticket counter. I spent most of the weekend in Bruce’s bedroom, listening to records while I straightened out my spine on the hardwood floor.
Sunday afternoon I lay there on the floor with Wolfman curled beside me, and I twisted my torso while Sam Cooke sang “Cupid” on the stereo.
“I always liked this song,” Momma said from the hallway. She’d just put Roy down for his nap, which she did every afternoon at the exact same time. When he was born, my unexpected little brother had put a noticeable strain on Momma. But after Bruce died, tending to Roy seemed like the only thing that gave her peace. I don’t mean to say that he was a replacement; it was more like his presence offered her a bird’s-eye view of motherhood, both the terrible and the beautiful, and this vantage point required a small dose of acceptance to truly grasp the scope.
I saw that peace rise into dimples at the edges of her mouth as she smiled and walked into the room. Wolfman wagged his tail while she ran her finger down the shelf of Bruce’s records.
“Your brother had quite the record collection.”
“Best in the state, I’d bet.”
She picked up a 45, but put it down. Picked up another. Put it down. Then she sat on the edge of his bed, and Wolfman jumped up beside her. She petted him idly.
“Do you collect things, Ronnie?” she asked.
“Nah, not really.”
“What about your little book display?”
She meant the handful of books above the desk in my bedroom. I mostly got books from the library, because I only read them once. Unlike records, they never seemed as good the second time. I purchased only a handful, and for no other reason than appreciation of their pure righteousness—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Heart of Darkness, Tropic of Capricorn, On the Road, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Day of the Guns.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess the books count. What about you, Momma?”
“Heavens, no.” She laughed. “I can’t stand the clutter in this house as it is! But your father, he was quite the stamp collector when we first met. Had books full of ʼem.”
I sat up. When I looked at her, she peered out the window. “Dad collected postage stamps? I can’t imagine.”
“Well,” she mused, “it was a long time ago, before he went to Korea . . .”
Her voice trailed off. I thought about my brother’s last letter, about how different he sounded. Momma scratched Wolfie’s neck until his leg began to twitch.
“Was Dad different after the war?”
“You know better than to ask,” she snapped.
“But it’s just us. Come on, tell me.”
“Honey,” she sighed, “who wouldn’t change after something like that?”
“Yeah,” I said, “but what was different about him?”
“He had lots of nightmares—screamed himself awake a few nights. He’d wake up sometimes, those first years back, and not know where he was, and . . . his laugh. His laugh was different, too.”
“How?”
“I don’t know how to put it,” she said. “It was hollow. Like an echo.”
“You think he wishes he didn’t enlist?”
She thought about it for a good long moment.
“Today,” she said, “no, I don’t imagine he regrets it. But if you were to ask him when he was over there fighting? Well, it’s not my place to speak on it.”
“Momma,” I asked softly, “why does he want me to go? After everything he’s been put through, that we’ve been put through—“
KnockKnockKnock!
KnockKnockKnockKnockKnock! KnockKnock!
The banging on the front door pounded an end to our conversation.
I forced myself to my feet.
“I’ll get it, Momma.”
The knocking continued as my sore legs descended the stairs. I opened the door to find Milo in his work uniform, breathless with excitement.
“Ronnie!” he panted, “Tonight . . . emergency record club . . . meeting.”
I stepped onto the porch and shut the door behind me.
“What’s going on?”
He took a deep breath, and tried to explain again. “I’m calling an emergency meeting . . . I told Hana. Can you give Lewis a ring?”
“Sure,” I nodded, “but what’s up?”
“What do you think?” he said, shaking my forearms enthusiastically.
“You . . . wait, you figured it out? You figured out how to beat the draft?”
A proud smile spread across his face.
“Let’s just say your birthday present will be one for the books, ’cause when—”
He gasped mid-sentence as I knocked the air out of him.
It was an accident. I’d just never hugged anyone that hard before.
―
I couldn’t tell you what record was spinning. It was just something to muffle our voices from any perked parental ears. There were no beers to drink that night, no stashboxes or cigarettes needed. The four of us were already riding the universal high of defiance.
The circle was tighter than ever. Hana, Lewis, and I sat close enough for our knees to touch. The three of us leaned toward Milo like petals reaching for the sun.
“So,” he started, “this morning, Mr. Dori and I recalibrated the speakers in all three viewing rooms of the theater. We do it every two weeks. The speakers in Viewing Room 1, the biggest room, are supposed to be set at 85 dB.”
“What’s dB mean?” Hana asked.
“Decibel,” he said. “It’s a way to measure sound. But it’s complicated, ’cause it measures in multiples of ten. So if silence is 0 dB, a sound ten times louder would be 10 dB, but a sound a thousand times louder is only 30 dB, and—”
“Come on, man,” I said anxiously, “get to it.”
“My point is”—he nodded—“movies in Viewing Room 1 are shown at 85 dB, which is loud, but not crazy loud. You get it?”
“Sure,” Hana said.
“So I calibrated the system to 85 dB, but when I looked at the volume dial I realized I could crank it twice as loud if I wanted to.”
“Which means?” Lewis asked.
“Dig this,” he said. “It’s from a speaker manual in the supply room. Just look.”
He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and flattened it between us. The three of us leaned down toward it, trying to grasp the chart.
I strained my eyes harder, but I didn’t understand.
All I saw were numbers and figures.
I was looking for salvation.
“Milo!” I finally snapped. “Just tell us what it means!”
Milo nodded again, and stood up. He took a deep breath, which made me nervous, because I could see he expected whatever this plan was to be a hard sell.
“What the chart means,” he said, “is that if we turn the speakers all the way up they’ll be louder than the ‘threshold of pain,’ which would be loud enough to—”
“To what,” I snapped, “make me go deaf?”
“Not deaf,” he said, “not exactly. But if we can cause temporary hearing loss, that’s our ticket outta the draft! There’s no way a draft examiner will be able to tell the difference between permanent and temporary hearing problems.”
“Temporary,” Hana said, “like when you go to a concert, then your ears ring for days?”
“Exactly! A controlled version of that.”
I ran my hand through my hair, disheveling the Steve McQueen perfection. My hand shook slightly. I looked back at the chart, but my eyes were out of focus.
“Your draft exam’s the day after your birthday, right?” Milo asked.
“Right. Saturday morning.”
“OK,” he said, “that’s perfect. We’ll work our normal night shift on your birthday, and then offer to stay late for cleanup. Once the theater’s empty, we’ll sneak these two in. All you’ll have to do is sit in Viewing Room 1, and I’ll do the rest.”
“Which is what?” I asked.
“Well, I’ll hook up my turntable and put a record on, then calibrate the volume and max it all the way up. I just need to figure out how long you’ll need to be exposed to the sound for it to work.”
“Jesus Christ,” I sighed. “Won’t that, like, hurt?”
“Don’t be a bitch about it,” Hana goaded. “Don’t you think it hurts to shoot yourself in the foot? Don’t you think it hurts to cut off your trigger finger?”
“Yeah, man,” Ramrod nodded, “freedom hurts either way.”
I sat in silence, breathing heavily, staring at the chart.
“Unlike cutting off a finger,” Milo added, “this damage will be temporary. Your hearing will go back to normal a few days later—a few weeks, tops. I mean, this is the perfect plan! Have any of y’all had a hearing exam before?”
We all shook our heads no.
“Exactly,” he continued, “so there are no medical records to compare these test results to. All you’re gonna have to do is show up and fail.”
