27.

“What’s the matter?” It’s Jenny, and she comes over to me. “Is something wrong with your mother?”

“No. They got me. I’m a goner.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have to report for my draft physical.”

“What’s wrong, Ryan? Ain’t life agreeing with you?” White-head asks me at one of the writing program parties that seem to be held every weekend.

“I’m getting drafted.”

“What’s wrong with you, man? You don’t see anyone else here getting drafted.”

What’s happened to me, I wonder. Someone has picked me out, I think. I’m standing in a kind of howling tunnel, being sucked somewhere I don’t want to go. Why is this happening to me alone? What have I done?

“What’s the matter, man? You don’t look so good.” It’s Rex Harrison. A neat, older guy with carefully ironed button-down collar shirts and an improbable name.

“I’m getting drafted.”

“That’s too bad. Happened to me once. Once was enough.”

“Really.”

“I ended up enlisted in the air force. Pushed papers around for four years. It wasn’t a bad life, actually. I traveled all over the world.”

This is like a shaft of light in the howling tunnel. An escape hatch. A ladder dangling down.

“The only trouble,” Rex Harrison tells me, “is that they sometimes ask you to die for them. What a drag that is. You know what, Ryan?”

“No,” I say, a little desperate for a clever angle on this.

“I’d be careful if I were you.”

He tips his beer bottle toward me, a kind of salute. Then he takes a sip and walks away.

“Yeah, I’d be real careful.”

The days passed in the slurry of that cold around me. I went to a draft board in Fayetteville and filled out a form to transfer my physical to Arkansas. That change delayed the date of my physical. It bought me a few more weeks of freedom.

The clerk was about five feet tall and almost as round as he was tall. He had henna-dyed hair and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He could cough and puff on that cigarette at the same time.

“Going to serve your country, eh, boy?” he said through coughing puffs of smoke. “Not like those hippies out there. Good for you.”

My new date was September eleventh. 9/11. It wasn’t such an important number back then. Just another Wednesday.

That April, in an announcement I never saw back then, the Defense Department said that 48,000 men would be drafted for military service in April. “Of those drafted, approximately 4,000 will go to the marines corps, which has not been able to fill a higher quota with volunteers.”

Once more, I realize that I’m sitting before my computer no longer writing this. No, I’ve got my elbows on the desk, and my forehead rests on my clasped hands, as if I’m praying again. Sometimes my eyes are closed as I try to remember what happened, sometimes I stare into the slightly flickering white-blue of the computer screen, into some middle distance out there over the heads of Judy Stryker, John Rogers, Ron Moriarty, and little Rickie Ryan. Sometimes I wonder if any of it happened. I’m also looking for another way out of this. Even now, decades later, I don’t want to go into the army. Even now, I’m praying that I won’t have to go.

“Have you heard any way to get out of this?”

That’s me calling my old high school friend Steve Agard in Madison. I didn’t know who else to call. When I told my fellow students about the notice for my physical, they looked at their shoes, and John Edwards started crying.

“Aren’t you a little late?” Agard asked. “I mean, shouldn’t you have done something about this before you got the notice for your physical?”

He was right, of course.

“Look, Ryan. Contact these people. Just a minute.”

I could hear him shuffling through papers.

“The Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union. They’ll tell you what to do. When’s your physical?”

“September.”

“You better get on this.”

But I didn’t get on it, no. The country buried another Kennedy, and Jenny and I drove to her family cottage in Minnesota, outside of Brainerd, on North Long Lake, where I hoped to forget about my pending army physical. Jenny wanted to see her childhood friend John Breitbart. John had dropped out of college and just been drafted into the army, but he seemed almost excited in a strange way, happy that his life would have focus and physical training.

“I’ll get in shape and learn to finish things.”

We water-skied behind John’s red and white speedboat, making circular arcs through the flat and reflective dark water in the hour before sunset. The lake had a glass-like calm. It was perfect skiing water. When I wasn’t skiing, I sat in the back of the boat, suddenly noticing the beautiful little pearls of spray thrown up by the boat. It was all a kind of paradise. At night, Jenny and I snuggled away from the chill down under the old cotton blankets that smelled of soap and mildew. Jenny decorated a canoe paddle for me that hung beside the door, and I joined this family tradition of summers at the lake.

The only thing strange about those weeks were the big artillery guns at nearby Camp Ripley—their boom, boom, boom echoed all day long. The windows in the cabin vibrated from the shock waves of their explosions. It felt as though a military attack were beginning a few short miles away.

“Are they triangulating those shots?” I asked.

“What’s that?” Jenny asked back.

“Oh, it’s trigonometry, something my father knew about. It’s a way to be accurate. Never mind. I guess I mean those things scare me. It’s like they’re aimed at us.”

“Don’t worry. They’re just practicing. You’ll get used to them,” she said.