But then my novelty faded, and there I was just this Nam vet with the long hair and Mexican bandit mustache, and a little potbelly, and glasses as thick as Palomars, bad eyesight being a family curse. Forty-three years old, I was, time to get a real job, everybody said. But this was my real job, and it was likely to be my real job the rest of my life...
I’d hoped to catch a good glimpse of the hills on the drive up this late afternoon. The hills were where David and Susan and I liked to play. This was Carstairs, the town I grew up in and lived in till the year before they shipped me off to New Hope. Dad got the lung disease, and Mom felt it was safer to live in New Hope where they had better hospital facilities.
But in my heart, Carstairs would always be my hometown, the town square with the bandstand and the pigeons sitting atop the Civil War monuments, and the old men playing checkers while the little kids splashed in the hot summer wading pool. If I tried hard enough, I could even smell the creosote on the railroad ties as Susan and David and I ran along the tracks looking for something to do.
The three of us grew up in the same apartment house, an old stucco thing with a gnarled and rusty TV antenna on the roof and a brown faded front lawn mined with dog turds. We were six years old the first time we ever played with each other.
We had identical lives. Our fathers were laborers, our mothers took whatever kinds of jobs they could find — dime store clerking, mostly — and we had too many brothers and too many sisters, and sometimes between the liquor and the poverty, our fathers would beat on our mothers for a time, and the “rich” kids at school — anybody who lived in an actual house was rich — the rich kids shunned us. Or shunned David and me, anyway. By the time Susan was ten, she started working her way through all the rich boys, breaking their hearts one at a time with that sad but fetching little face of hers.
But Susan had no interest in those boys, not really. Her only interest was in David and me. And David and I were interested only in Susan.
I was jealous of David. He had all the things I did not, looks, poise, mischievous charm, and curly black hair that Susan always seemed to find an excuse to touch.
I guess I started thinking about that when I was eleven or so. You always saw the older kids start pairing off about the time they reached fourteen. But who was going to pair off with Susan when we got to be fifteen — David or me? Sometimes she seemed to like David a little more than me; other times she seemed to like me a little more than David.
Then one day, when we were thirteen, I came late up to Eagle’s Point, and when I got there, I saw them kissing. It looked kind of comic, actually, they didn’t kiss the way movie stars did, they just kind of groped each other awkwardly. But it was enough to make me run over and tear him from her and push him back to the edge of the cliff. The fall would have killed him, and right then that was what I wanted to do, take his life. I pushed him out over the cliff, so he could get a good look at the asphalt below. All that kept him from falling was the grip I had on the sleeve of his shirt.
But then Susan was there, crying and screaming and pounding on me to pull him back before it was too late.
I’d never seen her that upset. She looked crazed. I pulled him back.
I didn’t speak to either of them for a few months. I mostly stayed home and read science fiction novels. I’d discovered Ray Bradbury that spring.
School started again, and David could be seen in the halls with this cute new girl. I started hanging around Susan again. If she was sad about David, she never let on. She even asked me to go to the movies with her a couple of times. David kept hanging around the cute new girl.
In October, the jack-o’-lanterns on the porches already, I went to Susan’s house one day. I kind of wanted to surprise her, have her go over town with me. Nobody answered my knock. Both the truck and the car her folks drove were gone. I tried the kitchen door. It was open. I figured I’d go in and call out her name. She slept in some Saturday mornings.
That’s when I heard the noise. I guess I knew what it was, I mean it’s pretty unmistakable, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself.
I didn’t want to sneak up the stairs, but I knew I had to. I had to know for absolutely sure.
And that’s what happened. I found out. For absolutely sure.
They were making love. I tried not to think of it as “fucking” because I didn’t want to think of Susan that way. I loved her too much.
“Oh, David, I love you so much,” Susan said.
Susan’s bedroom was very near the top of the stairs. Their words and gasps echoed down the stairs to me and stayed in my ears all the time I ran across the road and into the woods. No matter how fast I ran, their voices stayed with me. I smelled creek water and deep damp forest shadow and the sweetness of pinecone. And then I came to a clearing, the sunlight suddenly blinding me, to the edge of Eagle’s Point. I watched the big hawks wheel down the sky. I wanted them to carry me away to the world Edgar Rice Burroughs described in his books, where beautiful princesses and fabled cities and fabulous caches of gold awaited me, and people like me were never brokenhearted.
What I’d always suspected, and had always feared, was true: she loved David, not me.
I stayed till dark, smoking one Pall Mall after another, feeling the chill of the dying day seep into my bones, and watching the birds sail down the tumbling vermilion clouds and the silver slice of moon just now coming clear.
In the coming days, I avoided them, and of course they were full of questions and hurt looks when I said I didn’t have time for them anymore.
Dad died the autumn I was sixteen, the concrete truck he was driving sliding off the road because of a flash flood and plunging a few hundred feet straight down into a ravine. Mom had to worry about the two younger ones, which meant getting a job as a checkout lady at Slocum’s Market and leaving me to worry about myself. I didn’t mind. Mom was only forty-six but looked sixty. Hers had not been an easy life, and she looked so worn and faded these days that I just kept hugging her so she wouldn’t collapse on the floor.
I saw Susan and David at school, of course, but they’d months ago given up trying to woo me back. Besides, a strange thing had happened. Even though they lived on the wrong side of town and had the wrong sort of parents, the wealthy kids in the class had sort of adopted them. I suppose they saw in Susan and David the sort of potential they’d soon enough realize, first at the state university, where they both graduated with honors, and then at law school, where honors were theirs once again.
I stayed around the house after college, working the part-time jobs I could get, hoping to work full-time eventually at the General Mills plant eighteen miles to the north. I dropped by the personnel department there a couple of times a month, just so they’d know how enthusiastic I was about working for them.
But by the time they were ready to hire me, Uncle Sam he was downright insistent about having me. So they gave me an M-16 and a whole bunch of information about how to save your ass in case of emergency and then shipped me off with a few hundred other reluctant warriors and set us down in a place called Dan Tieng, from where we would be dispatched to our bunkers.