The World Played Chess (14)

Cruz shrugged like that’s the end of it. My name, what everyone will call me from here on out, had been decided.

I spent the rest of the afternoon doing a PMCS (preventive maintenance check) of my camera, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, and eating steak.

The sun lowered, a brilliant orange ball I photographed just before it slipped below the tree line. I put away my camera. It wasn’t the beauty that struck me, it was the silence the sunset brought. Everyone and everything got quiet, tense, like something was about to happen. The bush outside the wire shimmered and buzzed; I swear I could hear it breathing, billions of insects beating their wings. The tree leaves shook, but I didn’t feel a breeze. Eerie.

As darkness fell, I sat outside the bunker with the others shooting the shit. In the distance we could hear the boom of artillery fire and the occasional pop of M-60 machine gun fire. Cruz said it was likely another firebase probing their perimeter. As I started to relax, I heard a whistle, and in the time it took me to turn toward the sound, Cruz had yelled “Incoming” and shoved me into the bunker as the first loud explosion detonated. The ground rocked and shuddered, like an earthquake. Inside the bunker, dust fell from the ceiling beams. My adrenaline spiked. My breathing quickened. My joints tingled with anticipation.

“You just got another lesson, Shutter,” Cruz said, smiling. I could barely hear him. It felt like my ears were plugged with water.

He spoke louder. “Charlie comes at night.”





Chapter 4


June 4, 1979

High school had been a crucible of eight hundred young men from different cities, different socioeconomic backgrounds, different cultures, and different races competing to wear the blue-and-gold uniform and earn the right to fight side by side against our perceived enemies. Those of us who did not make the athletic cut became rear support. We learned instead the intricacies of each cheer and each fight song, and we shouted them out to our brothers on the battlefields, believing those cheers mattered not just to us, but to the rest of the world.

They didn’t.

And in a few months, I was sure they would not matter to me, or to many of the young men I had gone to school with. I’d watched my brother John drift apart from his high school friends; and guys in the class ahead of me, who swore they’d be best friends for life, did not even speak. My friends and I were also going our separate ways, some of us to college, some into the workforce, a few into the military. We would make new friends, get jobs, get married, have kids, move away. We would all invariably change. Some of us for the worse. Some for the better. But all certainly different. It seemed odd to think that the guys I’d spent every day with for the past four years, guys I’d studied with, taken tests with, played some sports with, and worked with on the newspaper, would soon be only a memory.

It was why, when I returned home from work, I allowed my friends to talk me into going to the drive-in theater in Burlingame. I was dog tired from the concrete work, and I had initially rejected the idea, but they hounded me until I relented.

“It’s our last summer together,” Mif said, in a tacit admission that he, too, recognized change was coming. “Come on, you’ll be home by midnight.”

I doubted the veracity of that last statement, but Mif was earnest. Eric Capitola, who we called Cap, wasn’t so diplomatic. He called and questioned my manhood, my gender, and my sexuality, which was how we usually attacked one another.

In the end, I figured sitting in a car watching a movie wasn’t much different than sitting at home watching TV. Plus, I could drink beer. Billy Holland lived close by, and since the Pinto was a hatchback and prevented us from hiding anyone, I didn’t have to drive. Billy picked me up in his parents’ station wagon. We met Mif and Cap, along with Ed and Mickey, each with a carload of our friends, in the parking lot behind a warehouse on the road weaving along San Francisco Bay. We met for two reasons. One was to hide as many guys as we could. The second was to meet Scotty, a graduate who worked in a liquor store and had purchased beer for us. We settled with Scotty, then Mif and Cap hid under the tarp in the back of the station wagon.

Who got to hide was always hotly debated. Ideally, we were to split the cost of the movie four ways, but it was never that simple getting restitution from unemployed young men. Someone always owed someone for beer bought a prior weekend, or for the cost of a burger at a drive-through. The minutiae got ridiculous, and some nights the argument would continue throughout the movie. The only real leverage we had if someone refused to pay his share was to not let him out of the trunk of the car, which could be a problem when you’re trying to be sneaky and a loud voice is screaming from the trunk.

We usually just ended up eating the difference and taking turns hiding.

We had also argued over seeing Alien or some film called The Prisoner of Zenda. I voted for Zenda, knowing that Alien would lose much of its tension playing on a mammoth outdoor screen, the sound nasal and faint through a squawk box, while four of us argued over inane subjects—our stupidity a direct correlation to the number of beers we drank. This night, I drank slowly, the self-inflicted punishment I had endured at work still vivid. I also had to be at the job by seven. If I still had a job. I figured I’d have a few beers, watch The Prisoner of Zenda, which did not start off very good, go home, and go to sleep. I’d bring the leftover beer and put it in William’s cooler, which I hoped would both ingratiate me with the guys and make them see me as more than just Mike’s kid brother.