“There’s a bunch of us,” he said. “We’ve got a place out there.”
He looked me in the eye suddenly.
“Why don’t you come out and visit us some time, Phil? See for yourself.”
For the first time, it sounded like what he was saying mattered to him. This made his complete lack of interest in my actual circumstances all the more maddening.
“I’ve got a job, Sam. I’ve got a wife and child. We go to see my parents once in a while and go camping in the summer. Vacation-wise, that’s about it.”
He didn’t seem to hear.
“Do you remember that night we went down to the Commercial Hotel and Larry and I got into that argument about God?”
He was speaking in a quiet, intense tone, leaning across the table as though he didn’t want to be overheard. I was afraid he was going to lay the whole story on me with some pseudophilosophical spin about Fate and Chance.
“Sure I do,” I replied. “It happened right here.”
Sam looked around at the Guinness posters, the Irish flags, the leprechaun figurines and all the other laboriously inauthentic decor, contrasting with the bustling team of attractive young waitpersons and the well- heeled, well-groomed clientele.
“Here?” he echoed.
I had the advantage for the first time, thanks to local knowledge, and I seized it.
“The Commercial’s long gone, of course, but this is what they put up on the same spot. That’s why I suggested we meet here.”
Sam nodded intently, as though I’d said something profound.
“That’s good, Phil. I’m real glad. Because this is where it all started.”
“Where what started?”
He looked down at his beer, which he’d hardly touched, and then back at me.
“You remember we scored all that shit, and then the cops stopped us on the way home and I ate the whole stash?”
“How could I ever forget?”
“Something happened to me that night. Something I’ve never told anyone.”
I groaned inwardly. Surely to God he wasn’t about to lay some wacko acid insight on me after all these years? Sam was still staring at me unblinkingly.
“You’re someone I could tell.”
Not if I can help it, I thought. Some hint of my feelings must have showed in my expression, because he suddenly backed off, drank some beer and went on in a normal tone of voice.
“I always really respected you, Phil. You were different than the others. You’d been in Europe and all. Plus there was that class we took together. That makes a big difference, the fact that you’ve read Blake.”
“What’s Blake got to do with it?”
It occurred to me for the first time that Sam might be slightly crazy. Maybe that year in Vietnam had taken its toll after all.
His next words seemed to confirm my suspicions.
“Blake is very important,” he whispered, as though confiding a great truth.
I shrugged.
“Try telling that to my students. Most of them don’t read anything except the funnies.”
Sam nodded.
“Do you ever get the feeling that some of them aren’t exactly real?”
I frowned. Once again he’d thrown me for a loop.
“What?”
“Don’t you ever feel that there are some of them who just don’t get it? Who never will get it? I’m sure you’re a great teacher, Phil. An inspirational teacher. But I’ll bet that when you look around the class, you see maybe five or ten people out there who just aren’t picking up the signals you’re sending. You know? They don’t get it, because they don’t
“Don’t have what?”
Sam gave me his meaningful look again.
“Soul,” he said.
It was the first time for years I had heard the word except in a religious context. “Soul” was one of those loose, capacious words we used so much, into which we could pour our feelings without having to analyze them at all. If you liked something, it had soul. If you didn’t, it hadn’t. A neat way of not thinking, but one which had also worn badly with the passing years. I felt slightly sickened by Sam’s hippie one-upmanship, with its unearned suggestions of superior insight and more radical consciousness.
“Some of my students are more gifted than others, of course,” I replied stiffly. “Some are going to get the credits they need to get into a four-year college, others will wind up delivering mail or driving a bus. My job is to educate them up to the level of their abilities, not pick out the brightest and best and stroke their egos.”
Sam smiled and shook his head.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?” I shot back.
He tossed his head slightly. The smile disappeared.
“It’s not something you can discuss over a beer. Words are such little things, Phil. You should know that.”
“Words happen to be my business,” I replied huffily.
Again he didn’t seem to hear me.
“All those nights we sat up tripping together,” he said, gazing dreamily at the tabletop. “What happened then was real, wasn’t it? Realer than anything you’d ever felt before. But you could never talk about it after, never describe what you’d seen and heard. You had to have been there. You had to have lived through it.”
I eyed him coldly.
“I don’t do drugs any more, Sam.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “I haven’t touched them since that night we were just talking about.”
Given what I’d heard about the dope intake of our boys in Vietnam, I found this hard to believe. But it was none of my business.
“OK,” I said, “so what was it that happened that night? You didn’t make a big deal of it at the time. In fact you hardly said anything about it.”
Sam smiled and nodded.
“Sure, I know. It took me months to come to terms with it at all. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t accept it. It was all too new, too overwhelming. It wasn’t till I got back from the war that I really mastered it.”
Our eyes met.
“Is that why you volunteered to become a rifleman?” I asked.
Sam grinned delightedly.
“That’s right, man! You understand!”
He spoke with such feeling that I was almost reluctant to disappoint him.
“I just figured that since you’d done two oddball things, they might be linked.”
He nodded, still grinning.
“I had to put it to the test.”
I stared at him.
“By risking your life?”
He nodded.
“If what I learned that night was true, you see, then I possessed a secret which would give me the power of life and death over every single person on the planet.”
So he was crazy after all. I felt slightly disappointed, but also relieved.
“That’s why it was important to make sure,” he went on in the same conversational tone, “and the only way to do that was to lay my own life on the line. If I survived, against all the odds, that would prove I was right.”
