for Dorcey Wingo
AT SIX A.M., the sergeant ordered us to board the bus. He spit a lot, called us pansies, ladies, queerbait. He wore his garrison cap like a hoodlum, was built like a hammer, and had the whitewall haircut Uncle Sam preferred. He took away our lunches and radios, told us to shut up; this was the Army’s day.
“For the next twenty hours,” he shouted at us, “you’re mine.” I looked out the window. We would be going from Lordsburg through Deming and Las Cruces to Fort Bliss, in El Paso, almost two hundred miles of desert, lonely and stark as the moon. “Do nothing, girls, abso-goddamn-lutely nothing to make me mad. Am I clear?”
This guy is a joke, I was thinking. He is John Wayne, Sergeant Rock, a doofus.
We were twelve, all Chicanos except for my pal Ray Reed, me, and Cooter Brown, a kid we knew from high school. For some, me among them, this was only “preinduction,” but for others, including Ray Reed and Brown, this was induction itself; we were all IA, which in 1969, the year some of this takes place, meant what Cooter called “Veetnam.”
“I ain’t going,” he said. “No way.”
He sat in front of us, and Ray asked what made him so special. The sergeant—Krebs was his name—sat by the driver, drinking coffee from a thermos.
“I got a note,” Cooter said. He unfolded a square of paper—from a Big Chief tablet, I think—and I took a peek. “Dear United States Army,” it read. “Please excuse Master Wm. A. Brown from his draft physical. He has ringworm, tetanus, and a little polio. Yours sincerely, Dr. August T. Weems, M.D., Esq.” It read like a tardy note at school.
“You wrote this,” I said.
His was the smile of a first-time father.
“Damn straight,” he said. “Pretty good, huh?”
Ray Reed and I were a lot alike, often excellent in the subjects we liked, and handsome enough to be in love every year, but this boy Cooter was what we called a dweeze, a word for which we knew no synonym in the English that teachers ask for. One month he was fat (put you in mind of the Pillsbury Doughboy); another, he was skinny. He’d graduated a year before us and worked sometimes as a night irrigator for my father, Avis Buell, who’s the pro at our country club. I had also seen Cooter a few times at the Elks Lodge, playing drums for Uncle Roy and the Red Creek Wranglers. Cooter had the singing voice of a chicken.
“Between you and me,” he was saying, “I gotta know.”
“What’s that?” I said.
“You scared?”
I’d been reclassified for two months, but this was my first physical and I had a back problem. Besides, I was going to college.
“What about him?”
Ray Reed was asleep, his mouth open. He had the expression of a man dreaming about money. Or women. Ray weighed about two hundred, All District (AA) outside linebacker, and had fist-fought Coach Mirmanian during two-a-days last September. He rode cycles—motocross, mostly—and I could think of nothing that frightened him.
“What about you, Cooter? You scared?”
“Hell, no,” he said. “This is political, man. I’m a peacenik, honest. What about you, dove or hawk?”
In those days, I’ll admit now, I was nothing but a semi-grown teenager, a B-minus student, fair in algebra and such world history as we had, a reader of books that made the brain race, and, best of all, a recipient of a full golf scholarship to the University of Houston. I was a lot like the fourteen-year-old son I have now: nice-minded as, say, your first barber and unable to see farther than the hundred miles I knew here in my desert. I had a love of the game, a girlfriend named Sally Whittles, a brand-new set of Arnold Palmer irons, and no larger desire than to be one of those tanned sportsmen you see on our country’s most famous links.
“I’m conscientious,” Cooter was telling me. “I’m tapped in the SDS, the Venceremos Brigade, Yippie Defense Front, the whole works. This is protest, Buell. Jimi Hendrix, Country Joe, Abbie Hoffman, the Chicago thing—it’s a collective, man. We have a common soul.”
Sergeant Krebs had turned around.
“Brown,” he yelled.
Cooter waved his hand. “Back here.”
“Shut your face.”
In Las Cruces, the bus pulled into the 70-80 truck stop near the Palms Motel.
“You may use the latrine,” Krebs told us. “You may smoke, you may shoot the breeze. You have fifteen minutes.”
In the men’s room, Cooter described us as meat, fodder, dog leavings. He mentioned Che Guevara, Emerson, and Thoreau, a California professor named Marcuse. We heard language like “proletariat” and “serving class,” and listened to what Cooter knew about crime and about the dread DuPont was doing to us.
“Where’d you get all this?” Ray Reed asked.
“Books,” Cooter said. “The New York Times. I’m radical, man, an objector.”
“Cooter Brown,” Ray said, “you’re a dipstick.”
In the toilet, I could hear Cooter telling a couple of the Chicanos about “the heritage of the oppressed.” Like them, he said, he was disenfranchised, fit for consuming only, a 3-D thing that ate, slept, and lived in debt. “I’m displaced,” he said. “Dispossessed, too.” His older sister, Francine, was a waitress at the Ramada Inn—“a victim of sexual politics!” His father, Tully, was a working stiff, a mechanic at Ellis Lincoln-Ford. “No profit-sharing,” he said. “We’re the underkind, boys. We want peace, am I right?”
In the next few minutes, I learned his mother had died of cancer two years before. He’d had a dog once, a pound breed named Fuzzy, part collie, maybe part sheep—“a big sucker.”
After I washed my hands, he dropped his jeans.
“Holy Christ,” I said, “what’s that?”
The two Chicanos were backing out the door, flabbergasted. Outside, Sergeant Krebs was telling Ray Reed a war story that seemed to take place in a Baltimore slum.
“These, my friend,” Cooter was saying, “are one hundred percent pure India silk, hand-sewn, reinforced-crotch ladies’ bikini underpants.”
Here it was that two thoughts came to me and I took one step backward. Indeed, Cooter Brown was scared; he was frightened for his life—and, Jesus H., I liked him. There, in one of America’s nasty men’s rooms, a kid with the high forehead of a comic-book egghead and the pinched lips of a milk snake, he had seen something—himself, I guess—in a vision, in a nightmare. He had seen himself, I believe, as a smear of blasted flesh, a crawling, drooling, weeping thing; and I had this question: If he’s scared, why aren’t I?
“Those Army medics,” Cooter told me, “are going to take one look at me and throw me out as 4F, count on it. I’m twenty million F, Buell. They’re gonna put me in the Z category, as positively undesirable as a human can be.”
Back on the bus, Ray Reed sat by himself on the seat behind Krebs. They were having a conversation that involved rope and what man is.
“What’s his problem?” Cooter asked me.
“He’s a patriot.” I remember trying to make the word sound sensible. “He wants to get out of town, see other places. His recruiter told him he could go to Germany, Greece.”
Just south of Las Cruces, where I-10 lay out flat and straight on the mesa above the Mesilla Valley, Cooter asked if I smoked reefer.
“Sure,” I said. “A little Mexican weed.”
“I had some this morning,” he said. “Pure Colombian. Really screws up the coordination.”
Up front, Ray Reed was laughing with Krebs, so I told Cooter about my back, how I’d had five vertebrae fused when I was in the ninth grade. I’d been in a car wreck on the way to the Phoenix Open with my father.
“I did some speed, too,” Cooter whispered. “That’s why I’m blabbing so much. My blood pressure’s gonna ring bells.”
I was thinking about my girlfriend, Sally Whittles, and where we might be in ten years, when Cooter told me what was in his overnight bag. Candy, he said. M&M’s, Mars bars, Three Musketeers.
“Gets the blood sugar up,” he said. “They’ll think I’m diabetic. A certified vampire.”
I’d heard they kept you overnight, I said.
“I’ll be blind,” he told me, rolling his head and slapping the seat. “I won’t talk. I’ll French-kiss somebody, a general.”
For the next hour, Cooter went on about the things he’d do—spit in his urine sample, masturbate, grab ass—but I was watching the landscape, the scrub-covered Franklin Mountains on the left and that part of my world on the right that went on parched and white and lit up forever. I couldn’t imagine Vietnam. The TV I watched made it seem unbelievably lush—too green and wet and noisy. It was Oz, I thought. It was old, and full of murder. Mr. Cronkite said its people believed in tree spirits. It rained, plants had souls, and in it were 500,000 young people like me that I was glad I would not join.
About nine-thirty, we reached the outskirts of Fort Bliss, and Cooter rose up in his seat. Outside stood ranks and ranks of barracks, wooden and identical, no place at all to live. We could see signs with official lettering that made no sense as language folks ought to use. We rolled by an obstacle course—hurdles, tires, barbed wire—and Cooter tapped me on the shoulder.
“I don’t think I can do it, Archie.”
He might have been ready to cry, and I knew what he was talking about.
“I know what’s going to happen,” he said. “They’re going to tell me to jump and I’m going to say, ‘How high?’ I ain’t political, Archie. I’m a wuss.”
Sweat was running down his temples, a lot of it.
“What about the panties?”
He shook his head. “Took ’em off,” he said. “They’re Francine’s, my sister’s.”
We turned a corner, and a group of recruits—a platoon, maybe—came into view, marching and chanting about gore and how happy they were to be sons of bitches.
“Jerks,” Cooter sighed.
He uttered it the way you and I say “Amen” in church, half swallowed and not at all encouraged; but I didn’t hear any more until the bus stopped and Krebs, calling us females, told us to grab our gear and get the hell out of his limousine.
You could say my day turned out fine. A doctor with freckles named Finkel took one look at me, told me go away. I was putting on my sneakers when Ray Reed found me.
“I’m in,” he said.
“What about Brown?”
Ray didn’t know. I’d heard Cooter’s voice a couple times. He had been saying “Yes, sir” with real enthusiasm.
“Here,” Ray Reed said, a key in his hand. “You take my bike. I’m staying, they can have me now.”
And that was it. I went home that evening, me and a few Chicanos who were missing fingers or had the misfortune to be deeply ignorant, and in time I put aside most of the foregoing. That fall, I left for Houston, playing three years on the golf team, then went to Florida for PGA school. I took a month qualifying; but got my A card, played on what was then the satellite tour in Honduras and Guatemala, twice in Mexico City. Only once did I hear from Ray Reed. In his letter, he spoke of Army Mickey Mouse and where he wanted to be in the next life. “Every day,” he wrote, “is as lousy as the last.”
As everyone expected, Sally Whittles and I married, and after my dad put together a syndicate of club men—Dr. Weems, Buzz King, Freddy Newell—I spent two years trying to make a living as a professional. At the Tallahassee Open, I won enough for a new Buick and real meal money; in 1973, I qualified for the U.S. Open at Winged Foot but didn’t make the cut. Then, following my father’s heart attack, I came back here, to Lordsburg, to be the assistant pro. I sold cardigans, NuTonic spikes, gave lessons, bought a house near the course, and thought little about Ray Reed and Cooter Brown.
Ray must have been back about a month when I saw him at the Labor Day party at the club. He was working for his dad on their ranch north of town.
“Still got the Yamaha?” he asked me.
He was thinner, losing hair at the temples, no lines at all in his face to say what he’d seen, what he’d done.
“Yes,” I told him. I hadn’t ridden much but kept the cycle in good repair. “It’s in my garage. When you gonna come by?”
“Soon,” he said, “real soon.”
He didn’t turn up, of course. A year went by. And another. And sometimes I’d go out in the garage, start up his cycle, lose myself in the racket it made. In high school, we’d been best friends. We’d partied together, cruised Main Street, even lost our cherries to the same Juarez whore. One summer we’d gone to Pacific Beach in San Diego, took Ray’s old Nash. We had known each other since first grade, and now that was all gone. So one Saturday I bought a helmet, gloves, and steel-toed boots for my son, Eric, and took him into the desert to show him how to ride fast and not get hurt.
Then Cooter Brown appeared.
I was on the practice tee, trying to keep Mrs. Baird’s right elbow from flying out on her backswing, when I saw a guy by the door to the men’s locker. It was late afternoon, the sunlight sharp and white enough for the hell a terrible God might have made, and for a time, while Mrs. Baird flung herself at a bucket of balls, I kept my mouth shut and wondered who it was.
I thought about my wife, Sally, and how she looks waking up, sleep-soaked and radiant. I listened to the wind, studied the contrail of a plane miles overhead, and wondered if I was cold and only alone.
Who are you? I asked myself. Who are you now?
I told Mrs. Baird she could finish by herself—“head down,” I said, “tuck that elbow”—and walked toward that man in the sunlight.
“Cooter Brown,” I said. “Long time.”
He had the well-cut hair and square shoulders of someone who is very proud now.
“William,” he said. “I’m called William now, or Will.”
I had my hand out for a shake and he took it.
“Ray Reed said you’d be out here. You’re doing all right, he says.”
There were fifteen cars in the lot and I could hear Casper Lutz in the pro shop singing a ballad he liked. I felt awkward, stupid as a cow, and wanted to apologize for the too-colorful clothes I wore.
“I’m in Hollywood now,” he said, “flying choppers.”
The Army had made him a warrant officer, given him a million jobs to do in the air. He had the touch, he said. The aptitude, the facility. A superior sense of equilibrium, good eyes, poise. Now he was flying stunts for the movies. TV and commercials, too.
“You ever see Reruns? Or Going Away?”
I said no, then he told me Ray Reed was going to meet us at the Grange, a bar on Ormond.
“You knew Ray over there?”
“Some,” he said. “Ray was at Tay Ninh for a time. We were tight.”
At the bar, I called Sally, said I’d be home late.
“What’s wrong, Archie? You sound weird.”
Except for Cooter, me and the bartender, Jimmy Sample, the place was empty, and I had nothing to look at but the scribbling on the wall by the pay phone. I saw the names of some I knew, and I felt as I had when I stood over a five-foot birdie putt I knew I would not sink.
“You remember Cooter Brown?” I asked.
“The guy in the panties?”
He was standing by the jukebox. He would play something twangy, I thought. A tune a Nashville cowboy had invented about bad love.
“I’m having a drink with him now.”
“Oh,” she said, and that was all until I said goodbye.
Ray Reed walked in about eight, and he and Cooter made a little war noise saying hello. We had a table in the corner, from which we could see the Grange fill up and grow smoky.
“How’s your dad?” Ray wondered.
“Good,” Cooter told him. “Retiring in three years. Francine’s in Albuquerque married to a guy named Wilson. Got two kids.”
We drank to that and to several other things in the next hour—good health, money, having women—then they told Vietnam stories. I heard about a black corporal named Philly Dog and a place called LZ Thelma. Some names I recognized: DMZ, Westmoreland, Saigon. But most were unfamiliar, private: First Corinthians, the Battle of Bob Hope, Firebase Maggie. Ray Reed told about life in II Corps, how the land lay, what you sweated when you heard the wrong sound in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cooter Brown told about his remarkable life in the skies—descent, rotor wash, skids, China Beach. Once they toasted a woman named Madam Q.
“Right on,” Ray Reed said.
“You bet your ass,” Cooter said.
Many beers later I told them I’d been a rabbit.
“What’s that?” Cooter asked.
It was a golfer, I said, who showed up on Monday to qualify for the few open spots in the tournament that began on Thursday. “I played with Jack Nicklaus once,” I said, “at the Kemper.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Cooter said, and I went on.
I liked being married, I said, being a father. And for a time, as I talked and in a way I can’t explain, I felt the years had fallen away between them and me. It was practically spiritual, I think now, as if, as kids do, I could say anything and wishing would make it so. I felt dumb, too—dumb as are lucky men when the jackpot comes their way for the second time.
Then Ray Reed said he was going home.
“Take care,” Cooter told him.
“You, too,” Ray said. “Good to see you.”
Cooter’s Chrysler was large and had every gadget he could afford—power windows, automatic door locks, and a computer that figured how far you could go on the gas you had. On the way to my house, he played the tape deck, rock ’n’ roll, particularly a song that rhymed, in a manner I thought wonderful, docket and rocket. Cooter told me he knew lots of actors—Lee Majors, Fess Parker, the guy who played Batman.
“California,” he said. “Party state, Arch. You ought to come out.”
He was nervous, embarrassed, and I didn’t want to say much until I said adios.
“Turn here,” I told him, and in a few minutes we stopped outside my house. A light was on in the garage.
“I did the right thing,” Cooter said. A few doors down the block, the Risners were having a party, and for an instant I wanted to be there with the two men on the porch. They held drinks and were looking eastward with smiles.
“You want to come in?” I asked. “Say hello?”
He held a cigarette he didn’t seem to enjoy.
“Your wife’s Sally, right?”
The two men on the porch were joined by another who looked just as content.
“I remember her,” Cooter said. “You’re lucky, Arch.”
He had more he wanted me to know, and for the longest time, while the men went inside, I waited to hear it. I aimed to count stars and attend to what my heart was doing, but for some reason—perhaps because of the moon we had and the blackness everywhere—I thought about Sergeant Krebs and the war he’d be fighting next.
“I’m a prole, Archie,” Cooter told me at last. “I do what I’m told.”
Then he left, and I had my familiar indoors to look forward to.
There is a moment in golf, as there must be in other sports, or what in life sports stand for, when you strike the ball with such authority and accuracy that you know it will be where you planned it to be. I have described it to Sally as a moment of purest intelligence—poetry, if you will—when nothing at all stands between you and what you imagine. It is more mystic than what gurus practice, and often more religious than the state of mind Baptists have. More than luck, it is a peacefulness—whole as we think love to be—and, for a time, it is able to spread its shine to all you do thereafter. It is the way I felt, in the year this occurs, when I walked down the hall in my house to find my son, Eric, in the garage.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
Spread out, in a pattern that would make you say a Buell had done it, were dozens of parts from Ray Reed’s motorcycle.
“It was misfiring pretty bad today,” Eric said. “Besides, it needed cleaning.”
“Kind of late, don’t you think?”
He was scrubbing part of the clutch assembly with an old toothbrush and turpentine, and doing a good job.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll put this away.”
“Never mind,” I told him. “I’ll do it.”
I waited until he went inside before I sat in the midst of the parts of Ray Reed’s motorcycle. The party at the Risners’ was breaking up, nothing would be on TV, and it seemed suddenly that I had a lot of time. Working the rest of the night, I believed I could get the Yamaha back together. Then tomorrow—or the next day, or the day after that—I could take it south in the desert, toward Hatchita, maybe twenty miles. I’d have a helmet, work boots, a jacket, and I’d see how fast I could go getting back.