The Secrets on Chicory Lane: A Novel(25)

“Yeah. Sorry. It was nice to meet you.”

“Sure, okay. Sorry. It was nice to meet you, too.” He nodded sheepishly, smiled, and backed away. Maybe I was too harsh, but I didn’t want to talk to any men that night. My visit to the Oil Derrick was really for anthropological purposes. And to get a drink. A full five minutes passed, and I was halfway done with my screwdriver. It was a weak drink, so I figured I’d stay just long enough to have a second one; after that it would be back to the castle.

Then another young man walked up to me from the shadows and spoke. “Shelby?”

The fact that he knew my name got my attention real fast. I turned and looked at him. Time stopped for a second or two, and then a lightning bolt hit me.

Unbelievable. He was the last person I expected to see.

Eddie Newcott.





10


He had changed quite a bit. Actually, his face looked pretty much the same as it was the last time I saw him at school in ’71—only he looked older than twenty-one. Harder, darker. He wore his coal-black hair long to his shoulders, and his face was framed with full, shiny facial hair. And those dark brown eyes—they were so soulful and pained and gorgeous. I swear he looked like Jesus.

And his physique—my God, he had bulked out. The military must have done a transformation number on him. He had put on pounds, but in all the right places. His shoulders were broader, and I could see the muscles bulge in his arms and pectoral areas. Plus, he had on tight blue jeans that were like a second skin, with special emphasis on his crotch. He wore a black shirt and black shoes.

Holy mackerel, I now believe Eddie Newcott became the model for the guy embracing Patricia Harlow on the covers of the romance novels I would later write—subconsciously, in my head.

He was an Adonis.

“Eddie? Eddie Newcott?”

His eyes twinkled warmly when he smiled. “It is you!”

“Oh my gosh, Eddie, I can’t believe this. Gosh, how are you?” I was flustered and surprised and completely giddy from the alcohol and the sight of the beautiful man standing in front of me.

“I’m good. How about you?”

“Good, good.”

It was discomforting. I was tongue-tied, until he suggested that we sit down in a booth and have a drink together. I said okay, lifted my nearly empty glass, and indicated I’d have another screwdriver. He got something hard for himself, probably a Scotch whiskey. On the way over to our seats, I caught that guy, Jack, checking us out. He must have been ticked off that it was Eddie I’d been “expecting.”

We sat across from each other, talking loudly to be heard over the mid-seventies soundtrack that was blasting over the sound system. I suggested moving to another part of the nightclub where it wasn’t so loud. We found a new booth, where we had to sit closer together, at a right angle to each other.

Of course, I can’t remember everything we said or even how we skipped past the awkwardness into having a very nice conversation. I told him about graduating with a BFA in acting, and that I’d just finished my first semester of graduate school in Evanston. It was probably one of the first times I said aloud that I was thinking of switching my creative focus from drama to literature. There were the excuses about my bad first novel, but I said that I wanted to try again. Other than that, my life wasn’t anything remarkable. My parents were still living in the same house, my father still worked for the bank, blah blah blah. I didn’t mention that my mother was not herself.

Then it was his turn. Eddie told me that he had hated school and that he and his father hadn’t gotten along. “I dropped out. Simple as that. I did it to piss off my dad,” he said.

“How old were you?”

“Sixteen.”

“Oh, right. I remember.”

“I was a pretty angry kid. I needed to take out a lot of frustration, so I joined the army.”

“I heard that. Gosh, you never seemed like the soldier type growing up.”

He laughed. “I used to draw bloody battle scenes, remember that?”

That made me laugh, too. “Yes.”

“I also did it to get away from my father. A friend of mine got me an ID that said I was eighteen. So I went to Vietnam.”

His eyes darkened when he said the name of the country. Eddie proceeded to tell me how he was put right in the thick of it at the end of ’71, after boot camp. The whole thing was madness, in my opinion. Especially now, in retrospect, I think it was a huge blunder.

I asked the inevitable question. “Did you see, uh, action?”

Eddie nodded. “Quite a bit.”

My voice dropped. “Did you kill anyone?” He swallowed and his eyes darted past me, before he shrugged. “I guess that means you did?”

He nodded. “It drove me a little nuts toward the end.”

“I heard … my dad told me you’d gone AWOL?”

Eddie told me the whole story. It was summer of ’72. His unit was about to be brought back to the US—but he stayed. He had met a Vietnamese girl named Mai and had gone to live with her at her home in the country, some eighty miles from Saigon. He purposely didn’t tell anyone where he was going. “I wanted to hide from the world,” he said. “It was a crazy thing to do.”

“So what happened?”

“I was thinking of marrying her and bringing her back to the US. We were together about a year, and then I guess I came to my senses. It was a real mess over there, and we didn’t do much to clean it up. If you ask me, it was hell on earth. Finally, I just got out and came home. Dishonorable discharge, but what the hell.”