It was the kind of rumor that was necessary in an age when everything else seemed to be spinning deeper and deeper into despair. It was the kind of rumor that tried to speak of love without saying the word love, and it was the kind of story, however fragmented and varied it became, that retained a core of validity that its hearers could taste even if they weren’t sure what they were tasting, and left an aftertaste of some eternal forward future when that which was lost was regained in the words that were shared. That was it. That was the tale spun from the mouths of hopeful vets, twisted not only by intentional additions and subtractions, subplots that reflected the lives of the tellers, omissions of details found wanting, but also by the weakening signal, the inevitable depletion of the story’s punch as it passed from mind to mind through time.
In some versions it would be clear that Singleton and Wendy had been duped by the Corps, sent out as part of a conspiracy, an elaborate form of treatment, a curative solution. Men who believed fully, or wanted to believe fully, in the Corps would tell that version, altering it slightly as they passed it along, until the structure of the conspiracy became tight and believable. But the ones who most cherished the rumor, the ones who passed it on with the greatest care, believed that in the end hope could be found only in the impossible made possible by pure chance. In the version that lasted longest, the blue pill came into play outside the camp, on a beach along the shore of Minnesota, or in a cabin up in the Canadian forest, and the Corps had little or nothing to do with the four hooking up. In this version, Wendy and Singleton fell in love by chance, went AWOL of their own free will, and were saved not by a conspiracy but by the grace of God. The durability of this version lay in the way chance related to landscape and memory — life itself. Chance put them together, necessity emerging only in retrospect, just as soldiers looking back at their lives saw their survival reduced to moments of luck in which one person happened to live and another, no less afraid or skilled or brave, died. A story of chance and grace spared the teller from having to explain the damn thing — hey, it’s a fucking rumor, it means what it means and that’s all I can say, make of it what you want and pass it along if you see fit. If you don’t believe it, don’t believe it. If you do, take it with you and share it when the time feels right.
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The End
AUTHOR’S NOTE
It is sometimes claimed that the second great riots were sparked by the assassination of JFK on September 17, 1970—the Genuine Assassination, as it came to be known. (Even now there is significant confusion over the identity of the real shooter[s]: Identical twins, Utah B. Stanton and Stan B. Stanton, both of Springfield, Illinois, claimed responsibility.) But the third burn of Flint and Detroit, along with the Canada Spillover (in which gasoline cans were hauled across the Freedom Bridge from Port Huron and used to ignite portions of Sarnia, Ontario) and the great Thumb inferno, cannot be definitively linked to Kennedy’s death. Anger had reached a boiling point; factors included the devaluation of the blue-collar worker, the destruction of factory infrastructure, and large numbers of wayward vets and minorities seeking justice. (Howard Harper in his study, Black Despair, New Slavery, the Burning of Detroit (Again) and the Way Talk Has Talked Itself into Talk, has pointed to an avoidance of clear analytic approaches in the assessment of the so-called riot sparks in the state of Michigan.)
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[Author’s Note: Accompany the main body of the story with author’s notes, editor’s notes, and interviews. When writing it go ahead and use real names and change them later if necessary. EA]
FURTHER INTERVIEWS
Ned Bycoff
He went over and served and came back and started right to work on his book. When he came out of the house he was wearing his combat fatigues most of the time. He’d just come out and look around the yard and then up at the sky and shake his head and go back in. We knew he was writing something because you could hear his typewriter going day and night. I’d come home from my shift — I was working the night shift as an electrician at Allied Paper — and he’d be up there typing. His desk was in the window and I could see his head bowed.
Molly Stam
Eugene’s sister had a breakdown. I remember that the Allen house got suddenly quiet that summer. You had the sound of his typewriter but otherwise it was silent. The summer before, it was doors banging, shouts, and cars roaring up and down in front of the house. Eugene mentioned something about that. He didn’t like these guys who came in to hang with his sister after Billy was gone. He told me once, I mean we were hanging out and he said: At night these guys come and pick her up, or drop her off, and I watch them out the window. That’s all he said, but it was the way he said it.
John Burns
Perhaps the true history, without enfolding, without JFK miraculously alive and in his highly improbable third term, was simply too painful for Allen. Not that I care. Like I said, I was weirdly happy to see that he offed himself after he got back from Vietnam. He bugged me. I beat the shit out of him one time when he was a kid. His sister was a slut. I mean, she was a slut when she was about fourteen, starting then, and went around asking for it. You know what I mean? Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this. But that’s the truth, man. I can say that. [Prison noise in background.] Biggest mistake I made was not killing him before I landed in here. I mean, what difference did it make to me if it was this guy or that guy; I knew if I got caught I’d be in for life. Go ahead. Put it in your tape machine.
Eugene Allen
Billy Thomas came up to my room to talk. He was back from his first tour and came into my room and sat on my bed. He called me “son” that afternoon. He poked around my room and lifted my mattress and found a magazine and gave it a look, flicked through the pages, held up the centerfold, and then put it back and gave me a smirk and said: Good, son, you’re a normal guy. Then he sat down again on the bed and began to tell me what he wanted from me. “You gotta let the world know if I don’t come back what’s what, man,” he said. He told me once I’d been over there and finished my tour of duty, I’d understand, and then he left.