64.

On June 1, 1972, the sky over Germany is blue, and it would be hard to believe there’s trouble anywhere in the world. I’m back in uniform. Good Sergeant Ryan, carrying my duffel bag with its silver-painted identification across the parade grounds at Gutleut Kaserne, where I’d once scrubbed the cobblestones with my toothbrush. I’ve got my ARCOM and a Good Conduct Medal they handed me at headquarters. Most importantly I’ve got my separation orders.

“Ryan, huh?” the clerk says. “I got a call this morning, and they want you out of this man’s army pretty pronto. Here.” He looks at a folder of plane schedules. “Is tonight soon enough?”

And then I’m going through the Twenty-Second MP Customs Unit line and getting on a plane and looking over my manila folders and seeing the picture of me and Jenny taking ski lessons at Berchtesgaden and then I’m getting on a bus at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, for the airport near Columbia.

And then Carol and I are talking. It’s decades later. Jenny and I divorced in 1977. I married Carol in 1979. She wasn’t there, in my MP days.

“You really shot her didn’t you?” Carol asks.

“Shot her?”

“The pregnant woman.”

“Oh you’re back to that.”

“How could I forget?”

“This is just a story.”

“But I want to know.”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I don’t know. This is just a story. I get lost in it myself.”

“Let’s start at the beginning. How about Mr. Niederman? Is he true?”

“That’s not his real name, but the story is mostly true.”

“But how about Sergeant Perkins and Mrs. Downy and Minor Memories and all that?”

“The Sergeant Perkins story is true, and so’s Mrs. Downy, though her real name is Mrs. Davies, and we never had an Algebra Squad. The real name of my junior high yearbook is Young ’Uns. I never liked that title. I think Minor Memories is better.”

“And the pregnant woman, Rick. What about the pregnant woman? The shooting? What about her?”

I didn’t want to hear that question.

“And Grimes Poznik,” I said. “Don’t forget about him. The trumpet player. He’s real. He became The Human Jukebox at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Dead on the streets of alcohol poisoning. Steve Unger’s real, too. One of the most talented people I ever knew. They made him a door gunner in Vietnam.”

Boom, boom, snare.

Boom, boom, snare.