And Life Went On (standard:humor, 3189 words)
Author: mackey	Added: Sep 15 2000	Views/Reads: 4712/2580	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Three teen-aged boys deal with their first separations from loved ones in this coming of age story.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

victim of the long gone Indians who'd occasionally burned someone at 
the stake.  Jay Schroeder, the school idiot, walked up, took a look at 
Woody's face, and mimed running his finger down his throat. 

"What's wrong with your face, Boy?"  "Boy" was in way before "Bubba". 
Ask any native Texan. 

"Nothin'." 

"What d'you mean, 'nothin'?  Looks like you got shot with a whole herd
of needles.  I ain't seen nothing like that since I fell off my bike in 
the street and lost all the hide off my leg." 

Woody just looked a little embarrassed, but didn't say anything, a sign
that Jay took as aqcuiescence to his attack, and doubled down.  " No 
lie, I ain't seen a face that bad since... " 

THUNK! Enter Ricky.  Ricky had played drums to AM radio for a couple of
years, and usually carried his sticks in his notebook.  Being somewhat 
hyperactive himself, he was usually drumming on his books, his desk, 
your books, your desk, or, as now with Jay, occasionally on someone's 
head. 

"Crap, Ricky!  Crap!  What'd you do that for?  That hurts, Man!  I
wasn't bothering you!" 

Jay's feet tattooed a rhythm on the graveled schoolyard as he danced in
pain.  Woody continued to look embarrassed, and everyone else began to 
snicker at Jay's situation.  Although he was an idiot, Jay was fairly 
big, and wasn't adverse to nailing you just for the fun of it.  It was 
nice to see him get some of his own, although Ricky hadn't previously 
been known either for taking the part of the downtrodden or for 
capriciously engaging in physical retaliation.  His tongue could cut 
you to ribbons, but his tendency toward being physical was heretofore 
unknown.  This was a new development in the hierarchy of our social 
structure. 

Ricky advanced on Jay innocently.  "Oh, I'm sorry, Jay. Is that your
dog?" he asked, pointing to the ground behind where Jay's feet were 
slowing to a stop.  Jay, distracted by Ricky's non sequitur, turned and 
looked where Ricky had pointed.  Ricky whacked him again with a Buddy 
Rich Special Balanced Stick, which cost almost a dollar back then, and, 
when Jay roared and grabbed his head, Ricky poked him in the stomach 
with the end of the stick.  Jay showed us his lunch just as Mr. Jordan, 
the dean of boys, came barging in to break things up.  Since Jay was no 
stranger to the dean's office, Mr. Jordan gingerly grabbed his arm, 
avoiding any stray chunks of haute cuisine, and hustled him off to the 
office to add more time to his already legendary detention status 
without bothering to ask what had happened or who was at fault. 
Sometimes being an idiot is its own reward. 

The bell rang, and we all headed back to class.  Woody waited on the
edge of the crowd till Ricky walked by, and mumbled a shy thanks.  
Ricky looked at me, grinned, and, looking back at Woody, said, "Shoot, 
Boy, I didn't do that for you.  Jay wrote a dirty poem on the wall in 
the girls' bathroom and signed my name to it.  I owed him one.  Besides 
that, Mac doesn't like him.  Far as that goes," he mused, "nobody else 
likes him either."  That was the day the infamous "Is that your dog?" 
expression became a standard part of our verbal exchanges. 

Drawn to each other through mutual misery and an abiding distrust of
those who couldn't speak in complete sentences with words of more than 
two syllables, Ricky, Woody, and I became inseparable.  Since our 
school and town were too small for anyone to specialize in 
anything(even the local M.D. doubled as a vet, which made for 
interesting speculation when he gave you free samples of various pills 
and ointments), we participated in many of the same sports, classes, 
and activities.  Particularly extracurricular activities.  Particularly 
extracurricular activities which were not, shall  we say, school 
affiliated. 

We didn't change a lot over the next few years.  Ricky turned out to be
a pretty good athlete.  I found a smoldering talent for music.  Woody 
was everybody's buddy, a man liked and admired by all.  His face had 
scarred over so evenly that he  wound up with a rugged, wind-burned 
look, kind of like the Marlboro Man.  He turned out to be a lady 
killer.  Who would've believed it?  Our families had remained 
relatively stable, or what passes for stable in the oil fields, meaning 
nobody shot anybody else or spent extended periods of time in jail.  
We'd had loves and fights and adventures and heartbreaks.  And we'd 
survived all of that, until that day in June of 1969. 

We'd just got off work, servicing oil wells for Buster's Downhole
Services, and had swung by the post office to see if Ricky had received 
a letter from Ginny, his sometimes love who was away aspiring to be a 
dental hygienist.  We'd picked up a six pack of cokes, being careful to 
drink them in Budweiser coolers so nodoby would realize we didn't like 
the taste of beer (a situation that could seriously damage your rep as 
a cool head), and planned to go to our respective homes, shower, grab a 
pizza, and then move on to high stakes miniature golf.  We played for 
$1.00 a hole, plus fifty cents for every hole in one.  You could make 
fifteen bucks on a good night. 

Woody and I had stayed home after high school that first year to commute
to the local junior college.  Ricky had finagled a partial basketball 
scholarship to East Texas State, but had returned home after the first 
semester.  I later learned that he'd been going into Dallas, donning a 
coat and tie, buying a dozen eggs, and going door to door.  He'd ring 
the bell, put on his best country boy manners, and tell the lady of the 
house that his fraternity was selling eggs to raise money to send to 
the starving kids in Biafra. He'd sell the egg for a dollar, and would 
usually be told to keep the egg and resell it.  He could normally clear 
about thirty bucks for a dozen eggs.  The closest the money got to 
Biafra was in his conversation. 

Unfortunately, he forgot where he'd been, and tried the same trick in
the same neighborhood twice in one month, claiming the second time that 
the money was for the tornado-ravaged First Baptist Church in McAllen.  
Turned out one of the ladies had a sister who attended that church.  
She paid Ricky a dollar, shut the door, called the cops, and giggled as 
they picked up Ricky in the middle of his act further down the road.  
The judge, having spent some time in the oil fields around Kilgore, had 
pity on Ricky, and sentenced him to thirty-five hours of community 
service at the Commerce Home for the Mentally Infirm, suggesting that 
Ricky could best repay the public by applying his outgoing nature to 
helping care for the unfortunate.  After his thirty-five hours was up, 
Ricky dropped out and came home.  He didn't say much about the 
experience, but did comment once that most of the patients made more 
sense than his professors at East Texas. 

Anyway, on that day at the post office, Ricky came out of the building
with a funny look on his face.  I figured Ginny'd told him she'd fallen 
hopelessly in love with a wonderful man who just happened to be a rich 
dentist, but it was even worse.  Ricky got in the car, slumped back 
against the seat, and flipped the letter into my lap.  It began, 
"Greetings."  Ricky had been drafted. 

We all just sat there in sticky silence for a few minutes.  The
possibility of this occurrence had always been there.  Ricky's draft 
lottery number was 17, mine was 30, and Woody's was 246.  Woody didn't 
have to worry, and Ricky and I were, of course, bulletproof, so slick 
that boogers wouldn't stick to us, and didn't really worry about 
something that was as alien to our experience as Shakespeare was to 
Buster.  You didn't worry about what didn't affect you. 

"What're you gonna do?" Woody asked quietly.  In the several seconds of
silence that followed, we all reviewed in our minds the possibilities: 
conscientious objector, Canada, psychotic infirmities, cross dressing.  
Neither Woody nor I even considered the one possibility that Ricky 
chose. 

"I'm going," he said evenly. 

"Going where?" I asked stupidly. "Montreal?" 

"Mexico?" Woody queried.  Mexico was only four hours away and had been
the locale of several of our more regaled excursions.  Mexico was warm, 
and you could do things there that you could be imprisoned for thinking 
about at home.  But that's yet another story. 

"'Nam," Ricky replied.  He looked at us and repeated it. "'Nam.  I'm
gonna do it.  I've been thinking about it all summer.  I knew my 
deferment would run out once I dropped out, and I figured I'd get 
drafted.  I don't feel that strongly about what's happening there.  I'm 
not even sure I understand it.  But I'm not gonna cut and run.  I'm 
gonna make the best out of it." 

"Are you crazy?" I asked.  "The best of it is doing office work at the
pentagon, where the honchos are.  That's the only place you can be sure 
won't see any bullets.  Those jerks aren't gonna put themselves in 
harm's way.  And those spots go to the sons of congressmen.  I don't 
remember your old man winning any elections." 

"I'm serious.  I've got enough on the ball to stick out like a gold coin
in a bin full of washers at basic training. I'll apply for all the 
special schools they offer.  I'm bound to get into one of them.  With 
any luck, I can stretch it out for two years, and then I'll be out with 
full GI benefits.  I'll never get back to school any other way." 

He was right.  There wasn't any spare cash floating around his house. 
His mom was so poor that the Baptists left them food baskets at the 
holidays.  The protestants used to fight over whose turn it was to feed 
them.  The Catholics gave them rosary beads, but Ricky said they were 
stale and tasted like paste.  He said they'd constipate you quicker 
than mesquite beans. 

We skipped miniature golf that night, and got together at Ricky's house.
 His mom was working, and his brother was doing midnights on a high 
pressure rig, so nobody was there except us and the roaches.  We talked 
about old times, old triumphs, and future conquests.  We laughed a lot. 
Only the odd, brief moments of awkward silence reminded us of our 
mortality.  The party broke up early. 

Ricky's induction was scheduled for late August.  We spent the rest of
the summer furiously pretending that nothing was wrong.  We laughed 
louder, partied harder, and drove more recklessly than ever before.  We 
worked every available shift, pulled more overtime than a union 
negotiator.  Our miniature golf course time was replaced in hustling 
pool at the local beer joints.  More than once we were saved from our 
own mouths by Woody's unfailing good judgment, and we arrived at the 
night before we were to put Ricky on the train to basic alive and 
relatively well. 

We'd dined on a final sumptuous banquet of chicken fried steak, fries,
and cream gravy, and polished it off with pecan pie.  None of our 
parents were kitchen virtuosos, and pie was a rare treat.  We weren't 
sure exactly what was going to happen from that point on, but for the 
first time since the eighth grade, we couldn't see our next meeting 
with certainty. 

We drove out to the country club, to which we'd had access only for the
senior dance in high school, and drove with the lights out to the 
access road to the seventeenth hole.  There was a boggy water hazard 
there that was fed with a hose, and you could even hear frogs 
sometimes.  It was a common meeting spot for drinking, fights, and 
fooling around.  There was no moon, and the night enveloped us.  We got 
out and sat on the hood of Rick's car, cokes in hand.  We sat quietly, 
listening to the static sounds of KOMA, Oklahoma City, discernable from 
over 300 miles away.  Hit it, Wolfman. 

"I'm going to miss you guys."  Not "gonna miss you," but "going to miss
you."  His normal aggressive accent was lessened by the gravity of the 
atmosphere.  "It'll probably be at least a year before I get enough 
leave to get back, but we'll stay in touch," he said softly. 

"Yeah, we'll stay in touch,"  Woody agreed.  "Why, we might even come
out to California to see you, when you finish basic."  He knew it'd 
never happen, but it sounded good. 

"Rick."  The tone of my voice made him look at me. "Don't.  Don't do
anything stupid.  People are dying over there.  Crap, they're killing 
people in basic by mistake.  Be careful. Come back."  Things got even 
quieter.  Everyone pulled on their drinks and studied the night. 

In the still of the moment, Woody laughed softly, a sound that seemed
out of place, considering the portent of the evening.  Ricky and I 
looked at him, and we could see his eyes glistening in the light 
reflected from the headlights of a passing car. "You guys," he said, 
and then stopped.  "You guys - man, I can't believe we're sitting here 
and this is actually happening.  Rick, you're going off to maybe die, 
and Mac, you're going off to school to get educated, and me - I'm 
staying here with the oil field and the roaches and the retards. 
Jiminy, our lives are changing, guys. What if we never see each other 
again?" 

We considered Woody's words, each wrapped in our own blankets of
insecurity.  No brothers had ever been closer than we had,had ever 
shared the miseries that we had shared. Nobody had ever depended on 
each other as we had.  No one had ever lived as we had, families 
incomplete, money scarce, opportunities even more so. Nobody had cared 
for us as we cared for each other, and now it was all changing. 

Ricky walked slowly over to Woody, and put a hand on his shoulder.  I
walked to where they stood, and put an arm around Woody's waist.  We 
stood there, three clones, locked in the emotion of the first rending 
of lives, and considered our futures, each without the others. 

Ricky held his coke out in a toast.  "Brothers," he said. "Forever." 

My eyes misted over. "Brothers. Forever," I choked. Woody was shaking so
badly he could hardly touch his can to ours without spilling them all. 

"Brothers," he said softly. 

Ricky looked down at the ground for a long moment. Then he grinned,
winked at me, pointed at a spot directly behind Woody, and said, "Is 
that your dog?" 

And life went on. 

the end jmcafee3@msn.com 


Tweet