Second Chance (8 page)

Sharla
, on the other hand, looked unapproachable, but strong and passionate in her fatigues. She even still had the boots, those ankle-high steel-toes that modern skinheads would have killed for. The contrast was terrific between her and Judy, who wore the female equivalent of Alan's lurid threads, an ensemble of red and yellow paisley and bright green sandals, the whole of which was crowned by an orange headband that bound her blonde hair like a skullcap.

"Who's for brew?" Curly said loudly, entering the room with a glass half full of foam. "I've already drunk all the suds—only the good stuff left!"

They wandered a few at a time to the bathroom, drawing mugs, or went into the dining room for sangria, while the gentle tension of
Jimi
Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary" trembled beside the conversations, like faraway thunder beneath the cries of insects on a clear summer night. But the voices of the insects did not still.

~*~

They spoke of the past, drawn back there by the ambience, the music, sights, sounds, themselves. They spoke of courses they had laughed through or suffered through together, of professors living and dead. They sang the song that Curly had written about the ROTC Rangers, to the tune of "The Ballad of the Green Berets":

Fighting soldiers still in school—

Pink berets sure make 'em cool . . .

They nodded grudgingly when the subject of shows came up, recalling Judy as
Marsinah
in
Kismet
, Alan as
Volpone
, Curly as
Creon
in
Antigone
("Wasn't Keith in that?" asked Diane, and others nodded yes, but said no more).

They talked about the music even as they listened to it, quoting lyrics to Arthur Brown's "Fire," Donovan's "To Susan on the West Coast Waiting," The Band's "Tears of Rage," and others that never became standards, but whose lyrics, riffs, melodies, set them all down gently into that time they remembered more clearly with every note.

And they talked about politics, of the marches that had not gotten the sole radical
poli-sci
professor re-hired, the sit-ins that had caused the library only slight inconvenience, the rallies that had made the board of trustees waver only a jot in their views on minority recruitment.

"There's one thing, though," said Alan. "Our boycotts got the local pool integrated."

"For two years,"
Sharla
said.

"Huh?"

"It closed in 1971, Alan. It integrated all right, but the town fathers stopped supporting it, and it died."
Sharla
took a drag on the cigarette Alan had given her. "And you know how many blacks joined? Seven. One family of four and three students who never even bothered to go once they got their memberships. So all our weeks of picketing and shouting did was get four niggers wet for two years. Down south the honkies did better than that with fire hoses."

"So are you saying it was all worthless?"

"What are four wet brothers over twenty years ago worth?”

“We wasted a lot of time," Frank said, perched on the arm of the sofa.

"It was a waste of time to protest racial injustice?" Alan said. "Hey, in case you don't remember, we made things a
helluva
lot better for blacks—"

Sharla
snorted. "Thanks a heap."

"Well, we did, you know it. And what if we wouldn't have all spoken out about Nam? We'd still be over there now."

"I don't know," Frank said thoughtfully. "Yeah, we protested racial inequality and Nam, but we protested things like the food in the cafeteria, or because we wanted grass legalized, or because we didn't think female undergrads should have to room in Byers Hall in the summer . . . sometimes I think we protested just for the hell of it."

"Kids do that,"
Sharla
said. "Even my second graders. Part of growing up."

Frank nodded. "Yeah, but we've been congratulating ourselves for it for twenty-five years now, and things are a
helluva
lot worse as a result."

"What are you talking about?" Alan said.

"Drugs, AIDS, racial problems, the environment. We have to take responsibility for what's here now. We did it."

Judy came into the room and handed him a glass of beer. "Watch it, folks. He's gonna start on the farms," she said.

Alan frowned. "Huh?"

"Yeah, I am," Frank said. "Because it's important." He turned to the others and spoke in the low, passionate voice they all remembered.

"We visited my folks last month up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, where the Amish live. Best farmland east of the Mississippi. People I talked to from Canada said that land like that up there would be protected so nobody could build on it. And what's happening here? Developers buy up farmland
faster'n
hell, drop
crackerbox
buildings on it, call it Sequoia Acres or Village Square or some other fucking lie. And why? For the quick buck. And if we run out of farmland and have to start buying food abroad, that's just tough shit, they got theirs."

"So what are you
sayin
'?"
Sharla
said lazily. "We
shoulda
protested homebuilders instead of the cafeteria?"

"Not should've," said Frank, "but should. Things are worse now than they've ever been. It's not just a race or a generation, but the whole damn planet's at risk."

"Pennsylvania's not the whole planet," said Alan.

"It's indicative, that's all. My God, we've got acid rain from factory owners who don't give a shit if lakes and everything in them die, as long as they don't have to clean the crap coming out the smokestacks. We've got global warming, and nobody in business is gonna care until the ocean covers their
goddam
corporate headquarters—"

"You're preaching zealously again, dear," Judy said.

"You want me to ignore it, Jude?"

"It's a party, dear. Lighten the fuck up."

Frank laughed in spite of himself. "God, put a mini-skirt on her, and her mouth goes back to the sixties."

"Okay, Frank,"
Sharla
said. "You got a point. But what do we do about it, boycott Exxon?"

Frank smiled as if he were explaining to a child. "Blow up Exxon."

~*~

In the dining room, Curly Rider grinned as he looked over the bookshelves. "Wow, Woody, this is great. You kept all these?" Woody nodded, and Curly read the titles. "
The Teachings of Don Juan,
Che
Guevara Speaks
,
Quotations from Chairman Mao
. . . you read 'em all?"

Woody nodded. "The political stuff was kind of boring.”

“And the Don Juan stuff was kind of stupid," said Eddie, tapping the ash from his cigarette into his empty sangria glass.

Woody nodded at the glass. "We do have ash trays.”

“Where?"

"The beer cans?"

Eddie sighed, walked over to the sideboard where an empty can of Iron City sat, and dropped his butt into it. “Jesus, we were piss elegant, weren't we?"

"
Steppenwolf
," Curly said quietly. "That was Keith's favorite, wasn't it? He must've tried to get me to read it a hundred times, but I never did."

Curly wandered into the living room while Eddie flipped through a stack of
Rolling Stone
. He held up a black and white cover photo of Joe Cocker, unshaven, hair unkempt, howling mouth open to reveal crooked teeth, his blooming paunch cut off by the orange bottom border. "A perfect picture of American youth." Eddie weighed the yellowing pile of tabloids in his hand. "I can't believe you even kept these."

"My folks have a lot of storage room." Woody smiled, remembering. "I got those all from Dale. He bought them when the three of us roomed together that one summer before he got married."

Eddie stared into the glass, empty of everything but a tiny pile of ashes. "I still miss him. Dale."

"So do I," said Woody, sitting next to Eddie.

"He was . . . kind." Eddie paused for a minute. "Did you know that we kept corresponding?"

"No." Dale had written two letters a month to Woody, right up until the week he died, but never mentioned writing to Eddie.

"That's like him. He wouldn't have wanted you to know."

Woody felt a psychic stirring, as if about to learn something he should have always known. "Know what?"

Eddie gave a quick little laugh and shook his head. "I . . . think I've had too much sangria. The devil's brew."

"It was a long time ago," Woody said. "It can't hurt anyone now. What are you saying, that Dale was bisexual?"

"No," Eddie said. "I'm saying that Dale was gay."

"But . . . Karen. I mean, he was married . . ."

"We were lovers, Woody. Just once, but that was enough."

"Holy shit," Woody said, thinking that maybe he had had too much sangria too. This wasn't registering the way he felt it should. "When?"

"That summer the three of us roomed together. You were rehearsing with the musical one afternoon. It was hot as hell, and Dale and I were here alone, we had a few beers, listened to music, got a little drunk and giddy with the heat, and one thing led to another." He sat for a moment, then pushed himself to his feet. "Maybe I need a beer instead of more sangria."

Woody followed Eddie into the bathroom, where they drew two beers. The music, the other people, seemed far away. "It was all very natural," Eddie said. "I knew where his preferences lay. But afterward he begged me to forget it. He tried to blame it on too much drink, but it wasn't that." Eddie sipped his beer, licked his lips. "We didn't stay in touch after that summer. Nothing else happened either. He tried to avoid situations where he'd be alone with me, maybe you remember."

Woody didn't, but Dale would have gone to great lengths to keep from looking as if he were snubbing anyone.

"Anyway, after his divorce he wrote to me. I was in Denver then. We struck it off again through the mail. Oh, nothing explicit, just . . . kind, considerate. Like we wanted to see each other again. But we could never link up. All his money went to grad school, and I didn't have enough to fly to Pittsburgh. And before anything could happen he was dead." Eddie smiled. "And I still miss that dear man. I might have even loved him."

His face shifted from unaccustomed tenderness to its traditional cynicism as footsteps and chatter came nearer, so that only arched eyebrows and smirking lips met
Sharla
and Judy as they appeared at the bathroom door.

"Are we to assume that you ladies wish to utilize the facilities?"

"No," said Judy, "but you may assume that we wish to get a couple more beers."

"All right then, girls, grab your beers and let's all go in the living room and play Thumper, or Truth, or something equally nostalgic and stupid." Woody noticed that there was not a trace of softness remaining in Eddie's voice or face.

When the four of them carried their beers back into the living room, the others were all sitting on the sofas, chairs, or floor. Candles lit the room as before, but now the black light was turned on, someone had put a Judy Collins album on the stereo, and "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" filled the room with a sound sweeter than the incense that lifted strings of smoke into the air.

"My God, who died?" Eddie said.

They laughed at their own quietness, effectively killing it. "We all got serious," Frank said. "My fault."

"Yeah," Alan said. "Frank thinks we all
oughta
go out and bomb Exxon gas stations and kidnap coal company executives and assassinate people who drive
Cadillacs
."

"It's going to happen," said Frank calmly. "I'm just surprised it hasn't started already."

"Oh crap," Alan said. "Haven't we all seen what terrorism can do? And I mean,
really
seen it. Anybody remember Keith? Tracy?"

The room was silent except for the final chorus of the song on the stereo and the soft whisper of
Sharla
exhaling her cigarette smoke.

"Well," said Alan, "when you talk like that, or when you hear other people talk like that, don't forget them."

The silence came back then, thickening like fog, until Curly broke it, as if anxious to change the subject. "Hey," he said, "how many of us still smoke? Come on, let's see hands. Or butts."

"Not
showin
' you my butt, turkey,"
Sharla
said, but put up her hand, as did Alan and Eddie.

"My, we've gotten pure in our old age, haven't we?" said Eddie.

"And how many
used
to?" Curly said, raising his own hand, as did everyone else but Judy. "Well," Curly went on, "since this is a re-creation, I always used to bum my smokes from Alan, so . . ." He put on a sheepish look, shuffled over to Alan, and put out his hand as if he expected to have it slapped.

"Once a mooch . . .” Alan said, but extended his pack to Curly who took a cigarette.

"
Kents
," he said. "I could always count on you, Alan.”

“Who else?" said Alan, holding out the nearly full pack.