If we called the police, Donny would get busted. I was so pissed at him for not letting one of us drive, I didn’t care. Except I did care. I could not let him wake up and drive again and possibly kill someone. I leaned back inside the car, turned off the engine, and removed the car keys. I was about to throw them into the tall grass, but Billy stopped me. “Give them to me,” he said. “Donny will call me in the morning when he wakes up. I’ll tell him what happened and that I have his keys.”
“Billy, I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have gotten in the car.”
Billy shook his head. “They’d be dead if we hadn’t. We did the right thing.”
We jogged down Skyline Boulevard and split at Hillside. When I reached the top of the steep hill leading down to my house, I paced back and forth, fingers interlaced atop my head, my chest heaving and in pain, struggling to suck in air. I couldn’t catch my wind. I couldn’t breathe. I sat down on the pavement along the edge of the road and lowered my head between my knees, thinking I might pass out or throw up. I kept seeing Forecheck hanging in the trees, only it wasn’t Forecheck. I didn’t know Forecheck. The person in the trees was me.
Bad luck.
That’s what kills most guys. Just bad luck.
Fifty-eight thousand young men.
What each would have given to have had just one more day, I thought. What their parents and their families would have given to have them come home, for just one more day. I thought of William in the garage on the Castillo remodel. Growing old is a privilege, not a right.
I knew now what he meant.
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked myself. “What the hell are you doing?”
I thought of my mother and father getting a bag with just pieces of me to bury, what that would do to them. This wasn’t funny anymore. This wasn’t a story to repeat at school the next day so we all could share a good laugh.
This had been beyond idiotic.
We all could have died.
Worse, far worse, we could have killed innocent people who had just happened to get in their car and, unbeknownst to them, driven straight toward a bunch of drunk high school kids.
Just bad luck.
“Bullshit,” I said. It wasn’t bad luck. It was complete and total selfishness.
I choked back sobs. I didn’t know if I cried because I had somehow managed to survive and had made it home, or because I now truly understood what William meant when he said so many would have given anything to be in my position. I wept bitter tears at the top of the hill. I wept until I had no more tears to shed. I did not want to die. And I did not want my stupidity to be the cause of anyone else’s death.
When I calmed, I stood, took a few deep breaths, and walked down the hill to my home. At the bottom of the hill I looked up at the second-story balcony, at the darkened french doors and the bedroom windows, and I thought of my parents, sound asleep, getting a phone call in the middle of the night and knowing before the police officer on the other end said a word that I had died. I thought of my mother. I thought of the mothers of all those marines William had told me about.
Would my mother ever recover?
It was time to put Peter Pan away, forever.
It was time to grow up.
I didn’t turn the deadbolt with stealth, as I had done earlier that summer when I drove home from Ed’s graduation party. I didn’t try to be quiet or trick my mother into believing I was in bed, asleep. I never had. My brother had told me my mother knew I’d come home past my curfew and had snuck into bed. I hadn’t fooled her. I had just been foolish to think I had. With four older siblings, I could try few things she hadn’t already experienced. She likely kept quiet because it was enough that I was home, safe.
I’d only fooled myself that night.
I stepped inside and shut the door. My mother’s bedroom door opened at the top of the stairs and she stepped onto the landing. “What are you doing?” she asked. “Do you know what time it is?”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said. “I’m so very sorry.”
December 12, 1968
Cruz is a short-timer, which means I’m a short-timer, if Captain Martinez keeps the clerk’s position open.
Cruz has less than a month in the bush. Then, we’ll both get on a Huey back to Da Nang. He’ll process out, and I’ll turn in my M-16 and my Pentax for a typewriter, or maybe I’ll shoot dignitaries posing and pretending like we’re winning this war. We ain’t. We’re just existing, some of us, anyway.
After I get home to New Jersey, I’ll meet Cruz in Spanish Harlem. New York isn’t going to know what hit it.