Page 108 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

96 Jack Fritscher

someone on probation to get a permit for a handgun, but it’s no
way impossible for that same person to get a handgun, especially
when that person’s daddy dies and leaves it loaded in a bedroom
drawer. “Damn,” he said.
Floyd moved to the window, wiping his hands. “That your
Chevy?”
He admired the Chevrolet gleaming all red and white with
hardly a speck of any road grime Robert had wiped off every time
he stopped to gas up. He had bought it, restored and cherry, the
day he turned sixteen, paying for it with insurance money his mom
had given him as his share of his dad’s policy. Those had been the
days! The draft had been lenient to neglectful. By 1973, the draft
was carnivorous for red-blooded all-American boys. He told Lou-
ise Yavonovich, the gray-haired lady who ran the Green County
Selective Service Board, that she couldn’t draft him because he was
leaving for California.
“For school?” she asked.
“Yes, a school” he said, “for becoming a minister, a Quaker
minister,” but his yes revealed itself for the lie it had always been
before he had driven the first five hundred miles west. He knew
he’d never sit in another school in all his life. He knew enough to
get by in the world. And more. Even though he was no way, José,
one of those spineless conscientious objectors, he vowed he’d never
let anyone take him to some hellhole place like Vietnam, or even
to prison for dodging the draft.
By no more than impetuous instinct, he had hopped into his
car that day and worked out his plan about heading toward the
coast, with its beaches and sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, leaving
fat old ugly Louise, no more the wiser, and a little the worse for
wear, sitting on her cellulite in the sprawl of her manila alphabetical
files. Even before the fierce rainstorm he had sat out in his car west
of Omaha he had laughed. He was just another missing person out
of millions. The old bitch would never catch up with him. He had
no way of knowing that Louise had rather fancied him, and had let

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