Send Down the Rain(32)

In the first month, I had a dozen offers to sell.


BY THE EARLY 1970s the nightly news was filled with images of American boys returning home in flag-laden boxes. Like the rest of the country, my mom watched Cronkite at six thirty with religious regularity, and when she tucked me in she’d kiss me with tearstained lips.

“Mom, why are you crying?”

Bobby was two years older. Thick glasses. Loved history. He raised chickens in our backyard and spent his egg money on books. One night, with the moon shining through our window, Mom glanced at my brother’s bed. His sandy-blond hair was spread across the pillow. His eyes were darting back and forth beneath his lids. Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples lay next to his head.

She wiped her nose on my sheet, kissed my forehead, and closed our door quietly behind her. After that I started paying attention to what Cronkite said, and one word he kept saying over and over. “Draft.” I thought it had to do with a poorly built house, so I asked the boys down at the auto shop. They explained the numbers to me and what they meant. Didn’t take me long to figure out why Mom was crying.

Bobby’s number was getting closer.

It was just a matter of time. He was in junior college, working at the restaurant full time, constantly looking over his shoulder. I had started doing the same.

On the first day of our senior year, Allie sat down in the front seat of my Corvette. Mrs. Eleanor placed her hand on my forearm, both holding and squeezing it. “Joseph?” She rarely called me by my real name.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You see who’s in this car with you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And she’s my only child?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And you understand she’s my whole world?”

I could barely hear her over the hum and glorious lope of the engine. “Yes, ma’am.”

“And you understand that she tells me everything, and I do mean everything.”

I nodded.

“And you understand what those black numbers mean on those white signs alongside the road?”

I gave her a confident, knowing look. “They tell you what highway you’re on.”

She squeezed my arm tighter. “Those are not the numbers I’m talking about.”

I knew that. I smiled. I revved the engine to about 5,000 rpms. For the exhaust, I’d run straight pipes with thin mufflers. I hollered over the noise. “We’ll be just fine.”

She stood back and crossed her arms. “Joseph?”

In the fourteen miles one way to school, I never—with God as my witness—broke the speed limit. Not once. Although every day, without fail, Allie propped her feet on the dash and we rode with the top down while she screamed at the clouds and sang CCR’s “Fortunate Son” at the top of her lungs.

Then came the day the world changed.





18

I crawled out from beneath the car, and Mom met me at the door. She’d been crying. “Let’s go for a ride.”

She didn’t like riding in my car, so I knew something was wrong. We drove to the north end of the island. Slowly. Windows down. We parked up on a small rise looking out over the ocean.

Mom’s hand was trembling. She was clutching a piece of paper. It was wrinkled. Tearstained. Too heavy for her heart to hold.


THE NEXT DAY, I found Allie on the beach. It was after sundown. Her hand was full of sharks’ teeth. She was smiling. Breeze tugging at her hair. Bathed in a golden light. Bronze skin. Cutoff jeans and a white tank top. Her brunette hair streaked blond from a summer in the sun. In the difficult years ahead, I would hold on to that picture in my mind.

“Hey . . .”

She could tell from the look on my face. Tears welled.

I thumbed her hair out of her eyes. “I’ve got to go away for a while.”

She dropped the sharks’ teeth, scattering them in pieces on the ground.

I knew nothing I could say would make it hurt any less. “I’m going to California. Taking Bobby with me. Maybe cross into Canada. Try and outrun the war.”

I held her as tight as I could, but I knew that no matter how tightly I held her, I could not stop the pain. Allie was cracking down the middle.

She sobbed on my shoulder.

Around midnight I walked her to her door and stood at the base of her steps. The screen door was open. She was holding my hand, looking up at me. Big blue eyes pleading. Her heart was breaking. “Come back to me?”

The pain in my heart was indescribable. I could barely breathe. “Yes.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ll come back to you.”

She pressed her forehead to my chest and spoke through sobs. “You promise?”

I stared out across the Gulf, took her hand in mine, and gave her the keys to the thing I valued most in this world. “I promise.”





19

Nine o’clock found me with my radio on my lap, staring at the ocean. While Suzy entertained us, Rosco and I studied the water. North of us, a bonfire lit the beach. Black shadows sat around it. Every few moments a candle-lit balloon, three feet tall, would rise off the beach, where the breeze would catch it and carry it west out across the Gulf toward Texas. I followed them through my binoculars, losing sight about five miles out.