Gail said, "I think we could, but Jeffrey is chicken."
Jeffrey defended himself. "The county sheriff is a little brighter than the Spencerville police chief, and he's keeping an eye on us. He thinks all this stuff is psychedelic."
Gail said, "Oh, Jeffrey, you have to treat the fuzz the way you grow mushrooms — keep them in the dark and feed them shit."
They all laughed.
Jeffrey said, apropos of the subject, "I have a source in Antioch. I make a run about once a month." He added, "I just made a run." He winked at Keith.
It was almost dark now, and they went inside. Gail put the herbs in a colander and washed them while Jeffrey stirred the contents of the pot, which looked like stew sans meat. Gail poured some of the Chianti into the pot and added the herbs. "Let that simmer awhile."
Keith had a strange feeling of deja vu, then recalled his first dinner with Jeffrey and Gail in their little apartment off campus. Not much had changed.
Gail poured the remainder of the Chianti into their glasses and said to Keith, "You probably think we're stuck in the sixties."
"No." Yes.
"Actually, we're selectively sixties people. There's good and bad in each era, each decade. We've totally rejected the new feminism, for instance, in favor of the old feminism. Yet we've adopted the new radical ecology."
Keith remarked dryly, "That's very astute."
Jeffrey laughed. "Same old wiseass."
Gail smiled. "We're weird."
Keith felt compelled to say something nice to his hosts, and offered, "I think we can be as weird as we want to be. We've earned it."
"You said it," Jeffrey agreed.
Keith continued, "And you've put your money where your mouth is by resigning as a matter of principle."
Gail nodded. "Partly principle. Partly, we felt uncomfortable there. Two old radicals who got laughed at behind our backs." She added, "These kids have no heroes, and we were heroes. Heroes of the revolution. But the kids think the history of the world began on their birthdays."
Jeffrey said, "Well, it wasn't that bad. But professionally we felt unfulfilled."
Keith pointed out, "That's not exactly what you said last night."
"Yeah, well, I was drunk last night." He thought a moment, then confessed, "But maybe I was closer to the truth last night. Anyway, here we are, tutoring high school dull normals."
Gail said to Keith, "Jeffrey tells me you were sacked."
"Yes, and none too soon."
"Were they laughing at you?"
"No, I don't think so. Old warriors are still honored within the imperialist military-intelligence community."
"Then why were you sacked?" Gail asked.
"Budget cuts, end of the Cold War... no, that's not the whole truth. I was sacked because I was tottering between burnout and epiphany. They can smell that a mile away, and they don't like either." He thought a moment and said, "I was starting to ask questions."
"Such as?"
"Well... I was at a White House briefing once... I was there to give answers, not ask questions." Keith smiled at the memory of what he was about to relate "...and I asked the secretary of state, 'Sir, could you explain to me this country's foreign policy, if any, so that I can figure out what you want?' " Keith added, "Well, you could have heard a pink slip drop in the room."
Jeffrey inquired, "Did he explain it to you?"
"Actually, he was polite enough to do so. I still didn't get it. Six months later, I got a letter on my desk explaining budget cuts and the joys of early retirement. There was a place for my signature. I signed."
They sipped their wine, Jeffrey turned his attention to the stew, which he stirred, and Gail took a platter of raw vegetables and bean dip out of the refrigerator and put it on the counter. They all nibbled on the vegetables.
Jeffrey said finally, "Sounds as if you resigned on principle, too."
"No, I was asked to accept an early retirement for budget reasons. That's what the press release and the internal memo said. So that's the way it was." Keith added, "My job was to discover objective truths, but the truth needs two people to make it work — the speaker and the listener. The listeners weren't listening. In fact, in the last two decades, they rarely did, but it took me a while to figure it out." He thought a moment, then said, "I'm happy to be out of there."
Gail nodded. "We can relate to that. So here we all are, back on the farm where the bullshit is good for the garden." She opened the refrigerator and took out the apple and the grape wine that Keith brought, saying to Jeffrey, "Remember this? Eighty-nine cents a bottle. What did you pay for these, Keith?"
"Oh, about four bucks each."
"Robbery," said Jeffrey. He unscrewed the cap of the apple wine and sniffed it. "It's ready." He emptied the bottle into three water tumblers, Gail added sprigs of peppermint, and they touched glasses. Jeffrey said, "To days past, to absent friends of our youth, to ideals and humanity."
Keith added, "And to a bright future without the nightmare of nuclear extinction."
They drained off the wine, put down their glasses, and made exaggerated smacking sounds of pleasure, then laughed. Jeffrey said to Keith, "Actually, not bad. You have any more?"
"No, but I have a source."
Gail said, "I'm getting a buzz." She went to the kitchen table, carrying the grape wine, and sat. Jeffrey brought over the vegetable platter and turned off the lights, then lit two candles on the table.
Keith sat and poured wine for them. They ate the raw vegetables and dip, and Keith praised their gardening abilities, which they took as a high compliment from a farmer's son.
They made small talk for a while, Jeffrey and Keith reminisced about high school, Gail told them they were boring her, and they switched to their senior year at Bowling Green. Gail found a jug of wine and put it on the table. Jeffrey was apparently in charge of stirring and got up now and then to perform this task while Gail kept glasses filled.
Keith was having a good enough time despite the fact that he had little in common with his hosts, except a shared experience in school, even then, he hadn't had much in common with skinny little Jeffrey Porter, though they always got along well in high school, probably because they were intellectual peers, and as teenagers, neither had any opinions about politics, war, or life.
In college, they'd been drawn together at first because they were from the same hometown and had the same problems adjusting to a new environment. In fact, Keith thought, though he wouldn't admit it afterward, they'd become friends.
But as the war radicalized and polarized the campus, they'd found they were on different sides of too many issues. Like the Civil War, the Vietnam War and its attendant upheavals pitted brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, and friend against friend. In retrospect, intelligent people of goodwill should have found common ground. But Keith, like many others, lost old friends that he'd cared for and made new ones that he didn't particularly want. He and Jeffrey had wound up exchanging punches in the middle of the student union building. In truth, Jeffrey wasn't much of a fighter, and Keith had knocked him down only as often as Jeffrey insisted on getting up. Finally, Keith had walked away, and Jeffrey was carried away.
About a year and a half later, Jeffrey had written to Keith in Vietnam, getting his address from Keith's mother, who was happy to give it to one of her son's old friends. Keith had expected the letter to be conciliatory and concerned about Keith's frontline duty, and Keith was preparing a congenial reply in his mind as he opened the letter. Then he read, "Dear Keith, Kill any babies today? Keep score of the women and children you murder. The Army will give you a medal." And so on.
Keith recalled that he hadn't been hurt so much as enraged, and, had Jeffrey been there, Keith would have killed him. Now, looking back, he realized how far along the road to insanity they'd all traveled.