Lots of guys went into the service from Roy’s neighborhood. Most of them got drafted into the army and were sent to Germany or Korea. This was during the 1950s, between World War II and the Vietnam War, after the cease-fire of the police action in Korea, so the only guys who got killed bought it by accident. Stuffy Foster drowned during basic training in South Carolina. Little Goose Wentworth’s older brother, Big Goose, went AWOL from Fort Polk, in Louisiana, and disappeared into a swamp; his body was found two weeks later covered with snake bites, his corpse half-devoured by varmints. Woody Crow drove a tank over a cliff while on maneuvers in Düsseldorf and broke his neck. The biggest success story came after Moe Israel stole a general’s jeep in Belgium and drove it to Monte Carlo where he was arrested in a casino and then sent to prison. Moe’s cousin Artie told Roy that Moe set up a book-making operation in the penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas, that was so successful he was able to send money to his mother every month.
When Phil Flynn told Roy that as soon as he could drop out of high school he was going to enlist in the navy, Roy asked him why. Both boys were eleven years old; they were sitting on upturned milk bottle crates in the alley behind Phil’s house swapping drags on a Lucky Strike. Phil lived with his parents and two older sisters in a one-bedroom apartment above a meat market. His sisters slept in the bedroom and their parents slept in a Murphy bed that came down from the living room wall. Phil slept on a cot in the apartment’s only hallway; every time someone had to use the bathroom during the night he or she invariably bumped into Phil’s cot and woke him up.
“I figure it’s the only way I’m gonna get to Tahiti,” Phil said. “If I let the army draft me, they’ll stick me up on the DMZ in Korea where I’ll fuckin’ freeze to death, or in Germany where I’ll also fuckin’ freeze to death.”
It was cold sitting outside in the alley. Brownish snow was piled up against garage doors and a thin layer of ice covered the cracked and potholed pavement. This was early March in Chicago and more bad weather was on the way.
“What’s the DMZ?” asked Roy.
“Demilitarized zone,” said Phil. “It’s supposed to be the scariest place on earth, where the commies and our guys stand day and night with their rifles pointed at each other.”
“Does the U.S. Navy go to Tahiti?”
“I went into the recruitin’ office upstairs of the currency exchange,” Phil said, “and the Chief Petty Officer in charge told me the navy would send me to the south seas if that’s where I wanted to go.”
“Why do you want to go there?”
Phil finished off the cigarette and flicked the butt away.
“Hot and breezy,” he said, “and fabulous brown babes with big tits and almost no clothes. I saw ’em in my sister Mary’s art book. Standin’ around with flowers in their long black hair and lyin’ down by a lagoon without tops on and nothin’ to do. You gotta be on a ship to get there.”
“You told your parents?”
“Nah. My old man wants me to go to college. He talks about it all the time, about how me and Mary and Wanda are all gonna graduate from college. It’s a big thing with him since he never went past the third or fourth grade and works in a bottle factory.”
“Was he in the service?”
“Uh-uh. He gets fits, so they wouldn’t take him. Wanda gets fits, too. Next time you’re around ask her to show you her tongue where she bit off part of it.”
Roy stood up. “I’m goin’,” he said.
Phil took a cigarette out of a pocket of his blue tanker jacket.
“I got another Lucky. You wanna share?”
Roy shook his head and put up his coat collar.
“You oughta join the navy with me,” said Phil.
He took out a book of matches and lit his cigarette.
“Warm breezes, naked women and no wars. Nobody would fight if they could lay by a lagoon all day with a girl with titties like coconuts and flowers behind her ears.”
Roy grinned and nodded his head then turned and started walking toward his house. His nose was running and he wiped it with the back of his left hand. Roy had seen Phil’s sister Wanda twice, once walking with another girl on Ojibway Boulevard, and once waiting for a bus on Blackhawk. Her skin, he recalled, was much darker than Phil’s, and her hair was black, not ginger colored like her brother’s or Mary’s, and her eyes were big and brown, theirs were small and blue. She was probably the prettiest girl Roy had ever seen.