Chapter 1
David arrived at the In-n-Out Burger with his best friend Rick at the beginning of the lunch rush beneath a clear blue sky, a light breeze tousling their hair. Dressed in button-down short-sleeve shirts, tan slacks, Beatle boots, and wraparound sunglasses, they carried their orders out to a red and white patio table, and were eating their way through the double-double combo burgers of two beef patties, two slices of cheese, lettuce, slice of onion, slice of tomato, special sauce, and baskets of fresh-cut French fries. David sipped his Dr. Pepper, and Rick was taking his time with his strawberry shake.
David said, “How is it with Janet?”
“Steady and going forward.”
“Are you going to marry her?”
“What else? We’ve been together since seventh grade.”
David shrugged. “Soon?”
“We talk about it. Busboy pay isn’t good enough for that so we have to wait until my dad’s friend has a job for me.”
David grinned. “So, the Hungry Coyote Café isn’t going to be your life’s work?”
“That’s not a life,” said Rick. “Heard from Anne?”
“Not since she left to visit relatives for the summer.”
Rick called out, “Lydia!” and waved.
Lydia and Marie, twins who took care that their clothes and hair matched, came to the table, black miniskirts, white sleeveless blouses, white knee-high boots, long straight brown hair, and heavy on the blue eyeliner.
Rick said, “Haven’t seen you in the restaurant lately.”
Marie said, “Since we broke up, it’s a waste to come in.”
David said, “Who broke up with who?”
Marie said, “Didn’t they tell you?”
Lydia said, “They wanted to have more fun before they leave, and I guess we weren’t fun anymore.”
“There’s a mob of people coming,” said Marie. “I better hop on,” and she hurried to the end of the line of about ten or so people waiting to go inside.
David and Rick look at one another.
Rick said, “Where are they going?”
“Oh, so they didn’t lay the big news on you?”
Marie was calling Lydia, and looking over they saw she was about to enter the doorway. Lydia said, “See you later alligator,” and hurried to join her.
David said, “Did they say anything to you about leaving?”
“No.”
“Me either.”
“If they’re leaving, they have to give two weeks’ notice.”
“Maybe Russ doesn’t want to say anything until he finds replacements.”
David said, “Maybe they were drafted.”
Rick laughed. “They are such idiots the army would throw them out before they finish basic training.”
“Are they old enough to be drafted?”
“They are both nineteen.”
“They don’t act it.”
“Like I said, they are idiots.”
David ate the last of his fries, and glanced around, thinking about where they were and what they were doing and how everything is the same, and how the newsreels show soldiers walking on the dikes of rice paddies, down dusty roads, and single-file on narrow trails through the jungle with their rifles at the ready and ready to fight, and trying to picture Tom and Bobby among them.
“I wonder if they are,” said David.
“Are what?”
“Having more fun without the twins.”
Rick said, “I hope I’m not drafted.”
“We don’t have to worry until we turn nineteen.”
“Nineteen plus thirty days is what I’ve been told.”
“If all goes well, I’ll be in my freshman year in college.”
“And you’ll be safe for four years if you are full-time and don’t flunk out.”
David laughed. “Flunking out is not possible, that I promise.”
“And I should be in some classified job and married by then.”
David sipped Dr. Pepper. “But I still don’t have my enrollment confirmation and registration appointment.”
“Shouldn’t they have sent that already?”
“I called admissions, and they are going to look for my paperwork.”
“Yeah,” said Rick, shaking his head. “We know where we want to be, but we have to rely on someone else to get us there.”
“At least we have jobs while we wait.”
Rick nodded. “Just so we don’t have to make the Hungry Coyote Café our life’s work.”
The laughed, but not heartily.
“I wonder if Randy made it to Canada.”
“Was he drafted or taking off before they did?”
“I think taking off before they got to him.”
They said nothing for a while, and then Rick said, “I wonder what it would be like, you know, leaving everything behind, going through training, and sent to Vietnam.”
David glanced around again, the people and their clothes, the parking lot full of nice cars. He said, “It’s definitely better to be here.”
Rick said, “I don’t understand why we’re over there, why we are fighting a war half-way around the world in a country that is so different from ours.”
“To stop a communist takeover is what they say. Well, not just that country, but to stop the communists from taking over Southeast Asia.”
Rick said, “Is that possible?”
“I don’t know, but the geographic difference between America and Vietnam has to be a logistical nightmare.”
“I just don’t understand it.”
David sighed. “We, as young men, are not required to understand. When drafted, we are to report, and the Army will do what they want with us, send us where they want us, and we are to do our duty to God and Country until sent home.”
“Hopefully, walking on our own two legs.”
“This conversation has become too morbid to go on.”
Lydia and Marie came out with their food and looked around for an empty table and seeing they were all full, eagerly came over when David motioned to them.
“So cool of you,” said Marie. They put their food on the table and sat down.
“Lucky you came out,” said Rick, “Because we were just about to leave.”
David said, “When did you do the make-overs? I mean, you look great in those clothes.”
“We shed a few tears, and then we said, why the hell were we wasting time on those idiots?”
“You wouldn’t believe how many parties we’ve been hitting,” said Marie.
Lydia said, “And meeting real men!” and they both laughed.
They exchanged polite goodbyes, and David and Rick dumped their lunch leavings into a bin, and walked to their Scramblers parked rakishly on the side stands along the edge of the asphalt. They straddled their steeds, keys in the ignitions, and kick-started the engines into life. A few minutes later they shifted into first gear and zig-zagged through the traffic in the parking lot and out onto the street, accelerating modestly side-by-side as they shifted up through the gears.
They rode on, and entering their neighborhood, turned onto a residential street and seeing no traffic, accelerated to 40 mph. A big mustard-yellow Oldsmobile backed out of a driveway. The driver—David saw at once he was elderly—was so goggled-eyed by their rapid approach, that he stopped broadside in the middle of the street. They rolled off the throttles and braked hard but were too close for a full stop, so they split, Rick going left toward the front of the car, and David going right toward the rear. David was completely focused, aiming for the impossibly narrow space between car and curb, still braking, knees pressed tight against the ribbed pads on the gas tank, and only just able to pass between the prominent tail of the car and the gray concrete curb, the toe of his left boot brushing the big chrome bumper.
“I damn near ended up a hood ornament!” said Rick when he came back together with David. His heart pounding over the near pileup, David glanced over his shoulder at the receding image of the Oldsmobile still idling in the middle of the street.
Rick yelled, “Jesus H. Christ!” and they braked and downshifted to turn at the next corner, riding on sedately beneath orderly spaced elm trees bordering the quiet street of one-story tract homes David knew so well, the street he had lived on since his parents had bought the house new when he was eight years old.
*
David parked his Scrambler in the garage and brought in the mail, Skipper barking from the backyard. He put the mail on the side table, greeted his dog while letting him in, and went to the bathroom. Then he sorted the mail expectantly, setting aside the advertisements, the newspaper renewal notice. There was no letter from the college, but there was a letter written to him in a familiar hand, postmarked in Bend, Oregon three days before.
David put the Beatles Rubber Soul record album on the turntable and set the needle on the platter with care, and the song In My Life began to play through the matching speakers. He carried the letter into his study and sat in the squeaky oak chair and laid the envelope on the desk. The handwriting was Anne’s, his high school girlfriend who was in the class a year behind his, and had called him two days after his graduation to tell him she was leaving with her family that afternoon for a long summer vacation.
David took a miniature stiletto from the side drawer of the desk and slit open the envelope and unfolded the letter from Anne, his cherished date for the Senior Prom.
Bebe, I don’t really quite know what to say under the circumstances (understand?) I mean things have been changing between us . . . and I doubt they’ll ever be as they were before. You’re really a bitchin guy . . . and at one time I was really “crazy” about you . . . but I just don’t think we were meant for each other. I hope you stay as sweet & bitchin as you are now (I really mean it!). I’m going to miss you, but then everyone has to leave sometime. We’ve done a lot of things together . . . and I’ll always remember them. Sure hope we can always stay close friends. Well, Babe, good luck in the future . . . because you really deserve it!!! I hope someday you’ll meet the right girl that will treat you as good as I should have!! Lots of love always, be good always, P.T.
Prick Tease. David smiled, as she surely had been. He sensed, as the school year was coming to an end, that she did not care for him as she once had, and her good-bye that afternoon was dispassionate although he had the impression that she was struggling with it. He had held out hope that she would feel differently when she came home, but now it was certain that she would not. In any number of breakups people said they wanted to remain friends, but how many of those were simply an attempt to lessen the pain, to allow some preservation of dignity? He felt that pain now, as piercing as an arrow, for he knew that when she said a thing with such conviction there was no way to change her mind. He had loved her passionately, not his first love but his first serious love, and deep in his soul he knew she would always be his longest lasting love. As his mother had said upon seeing their Senior Prom photograph posed beneath a flowered arch, he looked as if he held the whole world in his arms. He knew there would be others over the years, others he would like and love to varying degrees, but she would always, always be his one and only.
He read the letter once more, then folded it into the envelope, and weighing it in his hands for a few moments, he opened the bottom drawer and laid it on top of the framed photographs of him and Anne in happier times.
The familiar sound of Skipper’s red rubber ball bouncing on the carpet caused David to turn around. Skipper rose and put his paws on David’s leg and licked his chops.
David said, “Time to play ball?”
Skipper dropped to the floor and barked and wagged his tail, and when David rose from the creaky oak chair, Skipper picked up his ball and trotted out and David followed him to the backyard to play their favorite game.
Chapter 2
David had early on mastered the necessary tasks of his job, such as they were, and after applying himself whole-heartedly the grumbles of waitresses and cooks dwindled to the extent that if he heard complaints at all they were more likely from nit-picking crab-pot customers of which there seemed always to be one undesirable specimen per shift.
The days of summer passed at a not unsatisfactory rate, tables bussed and swabbed and setup, coffee and tea refills, restocking table essentials, customers whining about this or that to waitresses, and sometimes to the manager. There were a few subtle and not so subtle advances from younger girls, one rather odd man who lisped compliments in whispers, and a surprising number of older women, particularly women of the age of discontent who, long past youth bursting with sparkling dreams, imagined a rerun of sorts with a young man. And then, on a day starting out in an ordinary way, it happened.
He polished the copper on the double-swing door, the narrow strip along the wall, and the serving window surround and counter until it gleamed like precious metal. Stepping back to admire his work, and raising a forearm to dab the beads of sweat off his brow, he saw reflected in that gleam the blur of an approaching figure that disappeared behind his own imperfect reflection. He waited a moment or two, but the figure remained hidden. He turned to see who it was.
In the lull following the lunch rush a family of seven drifted in, just passing through, he heard the mother say, but as they were seated on another station, he turned his attention to pouring out the polish and started on the double-swing door. Standing before him now was the family’s teenage girl, hands clasped beneath her bowed head as if in prayer. “I, Lucinda Mae,” she said with a backwoods twang, “of noble Georgia birth, declare you my California Dream.” Raising her head slowly until her dark protruding eyes met his, her cheeks flush with engorged pimples at pointy attention, she flung her arms around his neck and mashed his lips with a ruby-red-lipstick blueberry-syrup-tasting kiss.
Ripping her lips from his lips, she pressed a plump cheek to his cheek, breathing heavily in and out, in and out, in and out, the heat of her plaid-clad heaving bosom steam-pressing the thin shirt of his official busboy uniform. And then, with sticky lips trembling against his captive ear, her voice low and twangy, she whispered, “If I wasn’t leaving’ this minute to ride all the lonely way home with my kinfolk, I’d get a waitressin’ job here and gobble you up like deep-fried catfish.” David, eyes blurry as though someone fired a flashbulb in his face uttered something that sounded like uh and duh, but what Lucinda Mae heard was, uh yuh!
Her declaration amorously delivered, Lucinda Mae uncoiled her embrace, eyes fluttering rapturously, and with long pigtails swaying suggestively across her ample back, ambled to the front door held open by her proud mama and went out. David shivered at a fleeting vision of hot humid afternoons spent in the land of congealing grits and fatty bacon, shooflies, and gnarly bare feet shuffling to endless banjo.
The door slammed closed, mercifully shattering the day-time night-mare, and freeing David to carry on with—he frowned—what was he doing? Oh, yes, and turned back to the burnished copper, the hand clutching the polishing cloth twitching autonomously as his mind grappled with the real or imagined feeling of something having leaked onto his love cheek. The cooks were leaning on folded arms on the serving counter, grinning at him, and pulled back when he pushed through the swing door and on into the kitchen.
Angelo, built like a refrigerator, and Frank, broad shoulders and muscular arms, both over six feet tall and even taller with their toque blanche chef hats, were waiting for him.
“Man, oh man,” said Angelo, “You are one hell of lover.”
“I did not kiss her—she kissed me, and I did not enjoy it!”
“How’d you do that?” said Frank.
“Do what?”
Frank said, “When your lips met, her pigtails flew straight up into the air!”
“That’s a fact,” said Angelo.
“A kiss from the greatest lover on earth could not make pigtails fly.”
“Hey, man,” said Angelo. “We know what we saw.”
“Right on,” said Frank. He nodded gravely. “Own it, you got the touch.”
David shook his head. “I work in a nut house.”
The cooks burst into laughter, Angelo banging his steel spatula on the grease channel and Frank hopping around pumping his fists at the absurd relief from the drudgery of polishing copper and scrubbing grease and burned bits of food off the smoking hot griddle.
David went to the corner sink and scrubbed the polish off his hands, and washed his cheek and ear, and the ruby-red blueberry-syrup-tasting lipstick off his mouth. Angelo passed him a towel. David dried his face, and when he dabbed his branded lips, the cooks cracked up anew. He tossed the towel into the canvas basket and pushed through the swing door.
“Is no problem for me,” said Juan, who was trying to persuade Russ to promote him to busboy. “I do, okay?”
David said, “Okay.”
Juan leaned in with a great show of energy and began to clear the dishes and stack them in the bin. A folded piece of paper was under one of the plates and Juan passed it to Maureen who opened it and read aloud: “We got a big old house with southern hospitality and little old lonely me. Lucinda Mae.” Maureen presented the note to David who saw the girl had written with grammar school printing an address and telephone number.
Maureen said, “Is it true that her pigtails shot straight up?”
“She kissed me and I did not kiss her back, and her damn pigtails did not fly!”
Maureen laughed and Juan laughed. David crumpled the paper and dropped it in a cup of cold coffee and left them to it.
He pushed through the swing door, ignoring the comic gesturing of Angelo and Frank, and passed the racks of drying dishes, the 35-gallon Hobart mixer on wheels, the walk-in refrigerator, the storage room with shelves of boxes of food and large cans of syrups and ground coffee and cooking oil, boxes of paper supplies, and folded table linens—all the things he expected to forget forever when he started college. He stopped to put his clip-on bow tie into his locker, change the white shirt for a button-down sport shirt, and stamped his time card in the black machine with the big clock face. Then he took out his Ray-Ban sunglasses and thin leather gloves, closed the dented metal door, and went out the back door of the restaurant and through the parking lot, passing Betty’s brown Buick on the way to his candy-apple red Scrambler. It started on the third kick, and while the air-cooled engine warmed its way to a smooth idle, David thought about Betty and Jerry’s surprise breakup.
Jerry was hawk-faced, one of the older guys with jellyroll haircuts, blue jeans with cuffs, black loafers, white T-shirts with a pack of cigarettes in one rolled-up sleeve and a book of matches in the other. He drove a much admired chopped and channeled 1932 Ford Model A, dark blue, black tuck and roll bucket seats, chrome rims with oversized tires at the rear, baby-moon hubcaps, the original 4-cylinder engine replaced with a flathead V-8. Betty was working toward a degree in accounting intending on doing the books for the thriving auto repair business Jerry had joined, and would eventually take over when his father retired. That had been Betty and Jerry’s dream, marriage, kids, and a reliable business they could build on. Jerry had smashed that dream, putting the brakes on a promising life with the devoted Betty to drive a dirt track racer. Dusty ovals in small towns, cheap motels with lumpy mattresses, meals in greasy-spoon diners, his crew his only companions. David had used the word insanity to describe Jerry’s desertion, and considering what Jerry had given up, it seemed an apt description. David revved the engine once, twice, three times, shifted into first gear, and rode out onto the street.