Page 15 - WTP VOl. XI #1

way of mocking my English major.
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"We were five days into the mandatory week of no sleep. We were nearly finished with Woom! Ball, one more night, and I was left standing beside Calvin Clif- ford, who screamed Woom! like a sound could take the air out of me, neither of us knowing he would die in a war that was as small, that night, as our skirmish. Woom! I shouted, and nobody stepped between us until that circle broke for the road where we ran into the town that was sleeping, watching for lights in windows at quarter to four, guessing whether who- ever moved there was coming home from trouble or waking into a day that, starting this early, was pain.”
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It was very early in the Vietnam Era when we pledged. In 1967, by graduation, being drafted within months was nearly a certainty. For once, I envied fraternity brothers who were cursed with physical problems. One of my best friends, an excellent athlete suddenly limited by a ruined shoulder, received a deferment
as a belated consolation prize. We visited each other regularly for decades, the war fainter and fainter in our rear-view mirrors as a generation passed.
For seven months, each Monday in 1999, my friend flew from Hartford to Detroit, so little love in the work, his company paid women to sit with him and talk. “Always,” he said when I visited in December, “there’s another man, an hour of free drinks, televi- sion tuned to our common choice.”
“Less painful,” I said, new snow struggling to lay across his extensive driveway like a powerless politi- cal demand, the war we once disparaged called up again by the death of a fraternity brother who, in Vietnamese, once perfectly pronounced the names of six villages that could fit inside my friend’s property as context for the stories he was telling us about two tours he’d finished thirty years before.
Minutes after touching a traveling replica of the me- morial wall, that vet, we’d heard, had rolled his speeding Harley. Brain-damaged and comatose, he’d lasted a few days, but this night, neither of us consid- ered traveling hundreds of miles to publicly mourn. Outside, the snow began to melt from the maples, turning them stark again, their dark branches re- turned like some swath of defoliated dreams. The century in which we would grow old was about to welcome us for an overnight of decades if we were willing to ride as slowly as Popes.
Just then, I remembered how that fraternity brother, between tours, derided my deferment, claiming that
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Mike Rogers had a point. The seats in my English major literature classes were 90% filled with young women, most of them intending to be public school teachers. None of them, as far as I knew, dreamed of being a college professor or, even better, a full-time writer. I was well on my way to being compulsive about observing and using the lives of everyone around me. The woman who sent the email didn’t know that I’d already included her husband in other published work that might soon find its way into magazines, books, and online.
Years earlier, I’d described “Woom! Ball,” part of fra- ternity hazing, in a scene from a coming-of-age story. That time, because it was for “fiction,” I’d changed everyone’s name, accidentally not compounding her unhappiness with this scene that features her hus- band dubbed “Calvin Clifford”:
“We circled at three a.m., just before the two-mile run, fifteen pledges who slammed a football broad- side into our neighbors’ guts. Woom! we hollered, and cupped our hands like running backs to keep ourselves from harm. Woom! Soon there were pledges who moaned. Pledges who doubled up and wished this half hour gone.
"Woom! And there were some older brothers who joined, standing among the tough guys like Jim Ulsh and Dave Mazur and Calvin Clifford, the ones who never showed fear or pain. Woom! We fired back, driving that ball into the stomach of seniors just returned drunk from bars. Woom! Until Jim Ulsh took that football point first and came apart inside. Woom! Until Dave Mazur cracked a rib because that football thunked wide of the target area.
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