“I still have every one of those letters. Stacked and organized by date and rubber-banded in shoeboxes in my closet.”
My head fills with a very clear, very painful image. It’s taking me off in a different direction in my head. And I go with it. And I retell it.
“I watched the fall of Saigon from the TV room in the county jail,” I say. “I watched those helicopters teetering on rooftops, trying to take off with too many people loading them down. I watched people try to hang on to the bottom of them, desperate to get out of there. I saw how many never made it out.
“The war is over, I thought in the back of my head while I watched. But I knew my jail sentence wasn’t.
“I remember I wondered how Roy felt, watching that on TV. Or Joe, from the NA meeting. Or Darren Weller. It just seemed like everything they’d gone through added up to nothing—at least, nothing anybody got to keep.
“Next time he visited, I asked Roy what he was feeling when he saw that.
“He said he hadn’t been able to bring himself to watch.”
I let a beat fall after that statement. In my mind, it warrants a beat.
“What about my grandpa?” Harris asks, his face open with awe. His mother is trying to get his attention from over at the cars, and he’s studiously ignoring her. “Was he okay with what you did?”
“Funny thing about that,” I say. “We actually only talked about it once. He came to the county jail to pick me up on my release day, your granddad, because Roy had to work. He took me out for that ice cream, just the way he’d promised.
“‘Chocolate ice cream with chocolate coating,’ he told me while we waited in line. ‘That still seems like an awful lot of chocolate.’
“I said, ‘You still don’t say that like it’s a good thing.’
“When we’d gotten our cones, I purposely led us to a table right by the front window. Because the whole point of not going to Canada was to be able to hold my head up and feel like I had nothing to hide.
“We licked our ice cream in silence and just sort of watched the town go by. Some of the locals waved at me, like they were glad to see me back. Others looked away like I was invisible. Except . . . if I’d been invisible, they wouldn’t have needed to look away.
“I did better with the mothers than the fathers, and better with the young women than the young men. But that was just a generality. Somebody will always come along and break the mold.
“After a while I said to your granddad, ‘I never could bring myself to ask you this. I purposely never asked. But I’m going to ask you right now. Do you think I did the right thing?’
“He said, ‘I think you did the right thing for you.’
“After that we never spoke about it again. Probably not because we didn’t feel we could. Probably because we never needed to.”
“Oh,” he says. “Good.”
He’s not saying a lot, but he’s deeply invested. I can tell. I’m sure this isn’t all new information to him. He must’ve heard bits and pieces. He probably never heard my side of the thing.
His mother is trying to flag me down now. And now I’m studiously ignoring her. Because I’m telling this kid the truth. If there’s one thing I learned growing up, it’s that you have to talk to kids a lot, and you have to tell them the damn truth.
“But you said people still call you a draft dodger,” he says.
“Some. Not all. Different people have different opinions. My dad was right about one thing, though. It does follow you around, all through your life, that time in jail. I’m not saying nobody would hire me after that, but the pickings got slimmer. I had to look at that same decision that faced Grandma Zoe after the accident. Should I just get out of this town and go someplace where nobody knew me? But I didn’t think that would work well in my situation, because the arrest record follows you wherever you go. Anywhere I lived, when I applied for a job, a simple background check would turn up that conviction. I figured I was better off staying close to home, where people had a fair shot at knowing it was my version of a principled stand. I say ‘fair shot’ because I knew not everybody was destined to see it that way. You can’t change the way a person’s going to see a thing. If there’s only one thing I’ve learned in my sixty-four years on the planet, it would be that.
“But some people understood it.” I end on that. Or try to, anyway.
“But you were doing what you thought was right,” he says.
“Yeah. But some people don’t want you to do what you think is right. Some people want you to do what they think is right. Anyway, it all shook out okay. I ended up working a pretty menial job at the hardware store. The owner had lost his son in Vietnam. You’d think that would’ve pitted him against me, but it was just the opposite. He was burned by what I guess he felt was the pointlessness of the whole thing, and wishing his son had taken jail time instead. So he hired me, and he treated me with respect.
“I worked hard, lived over the store, and put away every cent I didn’t need to live on. And on the other side of town your uncle Roy was doing the same thing. And we weren’t even talking to each other about it. It wasn’t even a plan.
“Now the old owner is deceased, and we own that store.”
“I knew that,” he says. “I didn’t know all of this, but I know something.”
“Of course you do.”
His mother is waving to me
