Word now is Shutter is bad luck, not somebody to hang around or make deals with. They say death follows me.
After taking a few hours to calm himself, Cruz spoke to me. I told him what I had told Martinez. I told him that Martinez promised to hold the clerk’s job for me. I also told Cruz what the doctor said about Longhorn’s tin maybe being good luck.
“Maybe, Shutter,” he said. “Maybe. But next time, don’t take the chance. Don’t be a hero. Just keep your head down.”
Don’t be a hero.
I could see my mother with a clarity I had not allowed myself to experience since I stepped on that bus to boot camp at PI, South Carolina. I could see her standing in front of me, her hair pulled back in a clip, wearing her maroon dress, pearls strung around her neck. I could even hear her voice for the first time since I left for Vietnam.
Don’t stand out. Just blend in. Blend in and come home.
And it hit me. What the hell did I just do?
I turned down the clerk’s job and asked to come back here? Cruz was right. The war was over for me. I had survived. I had lived.
Oh my God. I felt a rush of anxiety and desperation. What the hell had I done? What the hell did I do? What the hell did I do?
I am going to die in the bush, and I had a chance to leave it for good, alive.
I wonder if all those things—being beside Kenny and EZ and Whippet, switching point with Forecheck—I wonder if all that wasn’t bad luck but good luck. I wonder if the God I no longer believe in used Longhorn’s Tiger tin to save my life.
Did you even think of that? Did you? No. No, you didn’t.
I took Kenny and spared you.
I had EZ step on that land mine and made the shrapnel fly past you.
I took Forecheck so you could live.
I had Longhorn give you the tin to protect you from that bullet.
You’re so bitter and angry, you missed all the signs.
What did you do? You threw it back in my face.
You came back.
What have I done? Oh, God, what have I done? I have a feeling, a premonition. My luck has run out.
I want to go home. Oh, God, I want to go home.
Too late. You had your chance.
Home. I thought about it. Truly thought about it for the first time since I arrived, and the thought scared me, more than any I have had since I arrived, because of what Cruz said.
You think about home, and you’re about to die.
Chapter 22
August 10, 1979
Friday night would be the final outing of the summer for our rat pack—me, Mif, Cap, and Billy. Then we’d leave for college and go our separate ways, though I wasn’t going anywhere, not for at least two years. Mif and two other high school friends had moved to Cal Berkeley for fraternity rush and freshman orientation. They all had pledged a fraternity previously pledged by Serra graduates we knew well. We were to drive to their apartment in Berkeley with Donny Keaster. Donny had graduated Serra the year before and was playing football at a local community college. I didn’t tell my parents I was headed to Berkeley to attend a fraternity party. I simply said I was going out and would spend the night at Billy’s.
As we drove through the city to the Bay Bridge, I noticed Donny drove with his hands in a weird position on the steering wheel, noon and six o’clock. I leaned forward from the back seat. “What’s wrong with the steering on your car?” I asked over the sound of Ted Nugent blasting so loud the speakers crackled. Nugent had achieved cult status with Serra guys. He claimed he deliberately failed his Vietnam draft physical by taking drugs, eating junk food for days, and crapping and pissing in his pants, earning a 4-F status.
“It’s all screwed up Vinny B.,” Donny shouted back at me. “I have no idea.”
“Can you drive like that?”
“You get used to it.”
Except it didn’t look like Donny had gotten used to it. It looked like he was fighting the steering wheel, and we kept inching from one side of the lane to the other. This was not good. We had stopped at Scotty’s liquor store and picked up a case of beer for the drive over, and a dozen empty cans already littered the car floor. I had nursed just one, but Donny had downed three.
We made it to Mif’s apartment in Berkeley. They sublet it from Serra guys who rented it the year before under rent control in liberal Berkeley. Mif and two other friends paid almost nothing for it, but free would have been too much. I had envied them having their own place, but after seeing the squalor, living at home was looking better and better.
We walked from the apartment to Greek Row. The streets, sidewalks, and lawns were packed with college students. Because we were with fraternity brothers, we got into Mif’s house, though only after doing Jell-O shots at the door, which were so strong they nearly made me puke.