Shooting the Moon (6 page)

And then my eyes drifted up to the wounded soldier. There was a lot of blood coming through the bandages wrapped around his chest. Did TJ know whether or not he made it to the hospital alive? Was he alive now? Back in the States? Or back in a combat zone?

I spent an hour printing the picture, trying it again and again until I felt I had it right. I brought it out to show Private Hollister. “Isn't this amazing?” I asked him, feeling excited about the work I'd done. “I mean, it's a picture of somebody who's actually been hit by the enemy. It's the real war.”

“It's real, all right.” Private Hollister looked awkward, like he didn't quite know what to say to me. “I mean, it's definitely a real war. Don't know
if I want to look at pictures of the people who are getting killed over there, though. I've seen enough of that on TV, I guess. Heard enough about it on a day-to-day basis over the last few years.”

“Did you ever know anyone who got killed there?”

Private Hollister was quiet for a minute. I wondered if he was going through a list of buddies, trying to remember if everybody was still accounted for. He cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, well, my brother Barney did. Right at the beginning, back in '65. Hardly anybody knew there was a war then, not like the way it is now, with protesters and hippies and everything.”

“Your brother
died?”
For some reason, I found this answer nearly unacceptable. Private Hollister wasn't the sort of person who had a dead brother. He wasn't the least bit tragic. “Did you cry?”

He laughed and looked up in the air, like he didn't know how to answer that question and was hoping the ceiling might have some advice for him.

“I don't know why I asked that,” I said quickly. “It's just if TJ died in Vietnam, I'd cry, but I'm a girl.”

“My mom cried,” Private Hollister said, sounding more comfortable all of a sudden, like the topic of girls crying was a lot easier one for him to handle. “Man, she cried a whole river. The doctor finally had to give her some pills.”

“My mom has these pills the doctor gave her for bad headaches. She takes one, she sleeps for twenty-four hours straight.”

“Huh,” Private Hollister said, like I'd just told him something very interesting and worthwhile.

Right about then we ran out of conversation.

I put the picture down on Private Hollister's desk, picked it up again. “Well, I guess I'll go clean up in the back. I'll do some more printing tomorrow. After work, that is. Don't forget, I'm here to work.”

“You're here to play cards is more like it.” Private Hollister grinned.

“That, too,” I agreed. Then I walked back to the darkroom to clean up the mess I'd made. I pinned the picture of the soldier back up on the line and leaned over to pick up some scraps of cut negatives off the floor. As I tossed them into the trash can, a shiver zipped down my arms to the tips of
my fingers, the way it did whenever I was lying in bed in the dark and got convinced there was a ghost watching me from the corner of the room. But when I looked around the darkroom, all I saw was the picture of the soldier on the stretcher, his face peering down at me from the clothesline.

Later, when I looked at that picture again, I stared for a long time at the soldier, imagining what I would do differently if I decided to print it again. I wished I could see the soldier's face. I thought about the fact that he might have been somebody's brother. Somebody who was waiting for him to come home.

I knew that was one picture I wasn't going to show to my mother.

In the weeks before TJ left to join the Army, things around our house got loud and very quiet at the same time. The loudness came from TJ yelling, “Hey, have you seen the lock to my footlocker?” from upstairs when everybody else was downstairs, or from me yelling across the hall, “Hey, TJ, I'm going to the PX, you want me to get anything on your list?” It also came from my mother, who, despite a certain talent for keeping a stiff upper lip during trying times, kept having minor emotional outbursts, like when she was doing dishes by herself in the kitchen and suddenly cried out to no one, “Whose idea was it to have
this war, anyway? Whose idiotic idea was it?”

The quiet came from the Colonel.

All spring, the big mystery had been why the Colonel was so against TJ enlisting. At first I thought it was my mother who made him say all those things to TJ about how fun college would be and how it would be a shame to miss it. My mother is a former Southern belle debutante, very flowery and chock-full of good manners, but she generally gets what she wants. Only she hardly ever comes right out and forces things to happen. She's more subtle than that. It wouldn't be at all unlike her to work behind the scenes, making little suggestions to the Colonel about what he should say to TJ to get him to change his mind about enlisting.

Add that to the fact that the Colonel is 100 percent gung-ho Army,
hoo-ah,
yes sir, the last person on Earth you'd think would try to keep someone from joining up. How many times had I heard the Colonel talk about the honor of sacrifice? When we were stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, he'd driven me and TJ to the veterans' hospital over in Durham one Christmas just to pay our respects
to the soldiers there, a lot of whom had fought in World War II.
We owe them our gratitude and respect,
the Colonel had said.
The very least we can do is wish them a Merry Christmas.
This was a man who didn't want his son to enlist?

So it had to be my mother making the Colonel try to convince TJ to break his enlistment contract, I was sure of it. But one night, when we were sitting at the dining-room table playing Scrabble after dinner, the Colonel said, “You won't have two seconds to play tic-tac-toe where you're going, son.” And my mother sighed and said, “Would you please stop, Tom? This has gone on long enough. Please honor TJ's decision.”

Well, that rocked me right back in my chair. It was clear from my mother's tone of voice that the Colonel had been getting on her nerves for some time now, only up until this point she'd been too much of a lady to let it show. But if it wasn't my mother behind the Colonel's constant haranguing, what did that mean? That the Colonel himself didn't want TJ to enlist? This plain floored me. It was as if Thomas Jefferson had stood up in
the middle of writing the Declaration of Independence and declared he was against democracy. It was like Thomas Alva Edison saying, “Oh, heck, what's so great about electricity after all? Let's keep using candles.”

I decided to try to talk to him about it. I was at this time about nine months away from turning thirteen, and I felt I could speak to the Colonel as an equal. Also, I thought this might be an opportunity for me to make a good impression on him. Not that I thought the Colonel had a bad impression of me. He seemed to like me just fine on a day-to-day basis, and I assumed he loved me—not that anyone in my family went around saying, “I love you.” But the Colonel seemed to want me to be happy, and he seemed genuinely pleased when I was happy, and that struck me as a pretty good definition of love when you got right down to it.

But it's one thing to like somebody and to love your own child. It's a whole other thing to be impressed by someone. At age twelve and a quarter, I was not actually all that impressive. I was always spilling on myself at the dinner table, and my hair
never just laid down flat on my head and looked nice, and my grades were not stellar. Good in math, so-so in everything else. I did have a good arm and an ability to memorize football statistics. I was an excellent card player. But my clothes were always wrinkled and in disarray by ten in the morning. I hated extracurricular activities. There was no chance I was going to cure the common cold or rocket into outer space any time soon.

Still, I kept looking for ways to impress the Colonel. I mowed the lawn without being asked to. I babysat Cindy Lorenzo for free. I joined the junior high school pep club, even though I am not a naturally peppy person, and went to all sorts of boring junior high sports events and cheered and yelled like a person who has school spirit and a good attitude.

Why did I think it would impress the Colonel to have a man-to-man conversation about TJ, especially when I wasn't a man and what TJ did or didn't do wasn't actually my business? Well, I saw it as a taking-the-bull-by-the-horns opportunity. The Colonel was behaving in a mystifying way. I
would ask him why and have an adult conversation about the pros and cons of his behavior. He would be impressed because I was acting like such a grown-up person. And, with any luck, I'd find out why he couldn't bring himself to be happy about the fact that his number one and only son had joined the Army.

Most nights after dinner, especially in spring, the Colonel liked to work in the garden until it was too dark to see. Spring was the Colonel's favorite time of year. He was a man who liked to dig in the dirt, and in the spring that's what he spent most of his free time doing. “Five-cent plant, fifty-cent hole” was his motto, which is why he had two hundred pounds of cow manure delivered fresh from the farm the minute the last frost date had passed. He'd hoe up his garden beds and work that manure in, pausing every few minutes to sniff the air and holler out, “Nothing ever smelled better!”

It was early April, and since it was Texas, the frost date had long passed and he already had plants growing, tiny ones, so he was spending his
evenings patrolling for miniscule pests and the first bud of a weed that dared to show its face in his garden beds. He'd cuss them and then dispose of them. I was surprised he never hung up little dead slugs around the perimeters, just to show their friends what happened to trespassers.

“I heard if you put out bowls of beer, it'll draw the slugs away from your plants,” I told him as I walked out into the backyard from the kitchen. “They like the beer so much, they crawl into the bowl and drown.”

“You read that in
Time
magazine, Sport?” The Colonel looked up from where he was spraying pesticide on his baby tomato plants.

“Probably. I'd sure like to see a drunk slug, wouldn't you?”

“Only if it were a dead one.” The Colonel stood up and walked to get the hose. “Why don't you go on weed patrol? I can't believe how fast those suckers come up in Texas. Back east, you don't see your first serious weeds until May.”

I went over to the bed next to the one he was watering. “I was wondering something, sir,”
I started out, not sure exactly what I meant to ask him. “About TJ enlisting?”

“You're not thinking about enlisting too, are you?”

“I would if they'd let me, sir.”

He looked at me and grinned. “I don't doubt it.”

“I guess what I'm curious about is why you don't want TJ to enlist. I mean, you love the Army more than anybody I know.”

The Colonel wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “If TJ wants to join the Army when he's done with college, I'd be all for that. He might think about joining ROTC when he's in college. The Army can help him pay for medical school. But he needs to go to college first, before he joins. He needs to grow up some more. TJ's not ready for the Army.”

TJ needed to grow up? That was like saying the Eiffel Tower needed to get a little taller. TJ was more grown up than most adults I knew. And who had spent more time planning battles and executing strategies than TJ? Nobody except maybe Douglas A. MacArthur or General George Patton.

“Are you scared something might happen to
him?” This was the one explanation I'd been able to come up with on my own. Sure, the Colonel was a big, tough guy, but even big, tough guys don't want their sons to get killed.

“There's a weed to your left, looks like poke-weed.” The Colonel leaned across me and plucked it out. “You let pokeweed get too big, you'll never get it under control.”

End of conversation. Obviously, the Colonel wasn't telling the whole story about why he didn't want TJ to enlist. The only thing I knew for sure after that conversation was that he wasn't planning on telling it any time soon.

He still tried to try to talk TJ out of enlisting, though, using every one of his formidable talents of persuasion during the thirty-day window when TJ could have still ripped up his enlistment contract. He'd joked, cajoled, argued, offered bribes both material and monetary. He somehow got his hands on a recent University of Georgia yearbook and took to perusing it during dinner, making comments about all the interesting activities one might get involved in at college, and how
to his eyes it appeared that all the pretty girls headed to Athens, Georgia, in the fall for college. “You've heard of Georgia peaches, haven't you, son?” he'd ask. “I got me one”—and here he winked at my mother—“and you could get yourself one too.”

TJ, for his part, listened, laughed, nodded, argued, and rolled his eyes, but he did not budge and he did not change his mind. Then, one day, just like that, the window closed, and TJ was in the Army, no turning back. In two months, at the end of May, he'd report to an MEPS, a Military Entrance Processing Station, in San Antonio, where he would present all the necessary paperwork and take his physical, then choose his MOS, his Military Occupational Specialty, which he had already decided would be in the Medical Service Corps. He'd go through basic training, come home for a few days, and then, more than likely, get shipped off to Vietnam sometime in July.

So there wasn't much left for the Colonel to say. During those couple of months before TJ had to report, life mostly went on as normal, TJ getting
ready to graduate from high school, me dreading the end of seventh grade, when I'd have to say good-bye to my best friends and begin searching around for new ones. The only thing different was that the Colonel wasn't talking. Oh, he'd say the normal things, like, “Please pass the butter” or “Did you finish your homework?” but usually having the Colonel in the house was like having an opera going on. He was big, he was loud, he had a lot to talk about. So when he started getting quiet and stopped saying anything, well, it felt like we were living in a library. Or a morgue.