Shooting the Moon (10 page)

I left them all on the Colonel's desk, fanned out like a hand of cards, where he would find them in the morning when he sat down to drink his coffee.

School started the Tuesday after Labor Day. If I'd had any big dreams about the eighth grade being some kind of promised land, they fell flat pretty quick. Eighth grade was just like seventh grade, but even more so. Math was good, English was boring, and in history we were studying the Greeks and Romans, just like we had in seventh grade and sixth grade, too.

The one bright spot of my day was newspaper. Sixth period, Mrs. Ronco's room, second floor. Originally my elective had been Music Appreciation, but I'd met a new girl in first period pre-algebra class, Alice Freeman, who complained that she couldn't
be a staff photographer for the paper because she didn't know how to develop film.

“Why don't you learn?” I'd asked her. “I could teach you.”

“I'm allergic to the chemicals,” Alice told me. “At least I assume I am. I'm allergic to almost everything else. Anyway, my mom won't let me get near a darkroom, just in case.”

So we hatched a plan. She could take pictures, I would develop them. And wonder of wonders, Mrs. Ronco liked our plan just fine. The only catch was, I'd have to write articles for the paper too.

“I can't write,” I told Mrs. Ronco. “Just ask every English teacher I've ever had.”

“It takes practice, like anything else,” Mrs. Ronco insisted. “Besides, the beauty of newspaper writing is that there's a formula to it. Just follow the rules and you'll be fine.”

Well, rules I could do. So I wrote my first article, which was about a new teacher who had been teaching in India for the last three years, and it turned out okay. Alice took the pictures, and they turned out even better.

“Look at this, it's got my byline,” I told Private Hollister, slapping down the paper on his desk. He was still at the rec center, still waiting to hear if he'd be shipped out to Vietnam, but so far, nobody in his unit had gone as far as the Dairy Queen in Harker Heights. The new guy from Fort Sill had yet to arrive to take over the rec center. So Private Hollister stayed put, mopping up and reading comic books.

“I didn't know you were a writer,” he said after he'd finished the article. “This is real good.”

“I'm not a writer,” I insisted. “I couldn't write my way out of a paper bag. But newspaper reporting is different. You just put down the who, the when, the how, the where, and the why, and you've got it licked. There's nothing fancy to it.”

“It's still real good.” Private Hollister pulled a deck of cards out from his top drawer and waved them at me. “What do you say?”

“I don't know. I'd hate for you to get ahead of me.”

Private Hollister pulled a pad of paper out of the drawer. “Look, a whole new record-keeping device. The notebook's retired. Nothing can ever change about how things ended this summer.”

One game. August 29, 1969, the Friday before Labor Day. We'd started playing the minute I walked in, and we kept playing until five p.m., taking a fifteen-minute break for lunch. The day began with Private Hollister two games ahead of me, but by midafternoon we traded the lead with every hand.

“You got him right where you want him, now show him where the door is,” Sgt. Byrd cheered from the pool table, where he was going through a stack of papers. He held one up to examine it more closely, and I realized he was looking at a photograph.

“Is that one of yours?” I asked him. Ever since he started helping me in the darkroom, I'd wanted to see some of Sgt. Byrd's photographs, but he never printed any. He only developed the film.

I put down my cards and walked over to where he was. “Can I see one?”

“Nothing to see, really,” Sgt. Byrd said, but he handed me the picture all the same. It was of a soldier sitting in front of a hootch, clearly somewhere in Vietnam.

“I shot three hundred rolls of film over there,” Sgt. Byrd explained. “And now it's all developed. So I thought I'd try printing some.”

“This one came out good,” I told him, admiring how the print's graininess gave it a sort of moody feel.

“Yeah, it's okay. But I don't know how many more I can do.”

“How come?”

He let out a deep breath. “Too many memories. I look at all my negatives and I ask myself, why do I want to remember that?”

“Maybe you don't have a choice.”

“Exactly, my dear Watson. That's the very conclusion I've drawn myself. I'm between the proverbial rock and hard place, memory-wise.”

“You giving up on the game, Jamie?” Private Hollister called. “Because I'm still ahead, and that's fine by me.”

I sat back down. And by four forty-five we were racing through the final hands. The person who reached one hundred points won the game, the set, the match, the whole enchilada.

My last hand was a beauty. I was dealt two pairs off the bat and a run of three spades, the three, four and five. Every turn I picked up something I could use, discarded what I didn't need. But when I looked up at Private Hollister, I could tell the same thing was happening for him. Should I go ahead and knock? If I waited too long, he might get that last card he needed, might rid himself of all deadwood and get gin.

I knocked.

It was close. Very close. I spread out my cards on the desk. I had one unmatched card.

Private Hollister laid out his hand. Three pairs. The jack and queen of hearts. And two pieces of deadwood, cards that didn't match anything.

I'd won. By a card. On the last day of summer.

“Man, oh man,” Private Hollister said, shaking his head. “You whupped me.”

He wrote the points down in the notebook. And then, at the very bottom of all our scores, he signed his name and handed the notebook to me to do the same.

“You keep it,” he said, when I tried to hand it
back to him. “Just so you remember all the good times we had playing. That's about the most fun I've ever had playing cards. It ain't fun unless you're playing with somebody who knows what they're doing.”

I could have cried. I didn't, but I could have.

Now I eyed the deck of cards, wondering if it would spoil things to ever play gin rummy with Private Hollister again. Maybe I should leave the memory of my amazing victory in pristine condition, unmuddied by any later losses.

Oh, what the heck. I took a seat across from Private Hollister. “Deal ‘em,” I ordered.

For a while I checked in at the rec center two or three times a week, sometimes hanging around to play cards, other times just stopping in to wave and then heading on to somewhere else. School was running me ragged. Mrs. Ronco kept assigning me newspaper articles, and it seemed like I was doing everybody's darkroom work for them. Alice Freeman said she bet our newspaper would win some sort of prize for photography, I
did such a great job making the pictures look good.

At first, every time I stopped by the rec center, my heart beat a couple beats faster right before I walked in. Would Private Hollister still be there? The Colonel had never given me a direct yes or no about helping him, and I knew I shouldn't ask. It went against protocol to ask about a soldier's orders, and I'd done it once. I couldn't do it again.

But after a few weeks, I relaxed. It seemed clear that Private Hollister wasn't going anywhere. I relaxed so much, sometimes I went for a week without checking on him. Alice had started teaching me to take pictures using her camera. She thought it was crazy that I knew so much about developing and printing film and not a thing in the world about photography, which she informed me was the art of writing with light. We'd stay after school and take pictures of the football team, the lockers, the janitorial staff, all kinds of different stuff, just to see how interesting we could make it look.

One afternoon when I got home from school
there was a roll of film from TJ waiting for me. “Any letter?” I asked my mom, who was writing out a grocery list on the kitchen table.

“I don't know if he wrote you one. He sent a short one to Daddy and me. Not much news. He says he wants to learn to fly a helicopter.”

Of course there was no letter in the envelope he sent me, just the film. I decided to go ahead and develop it that afternoon, and if I didn't have time to print it, I could take the negatives to school with me the next day and work in the darkroom there.

“Don't even ask me to play cards,” I called out as I walked into the rec center. “I don't have the time. I've got a roll of a film to develop and a history test to study for. It's all about Greek columns, if you can believe it. Like anybody needs to know that stuff.”

“I'm sorry, I'm not sure I follow you.”

The soldier sitting at Private Hollister's desk was not Private Hollister. He didn't bear the least resemblance to Private Hollister. He was heavy-set and bifocaled and had a five o'clock shadow.
I wasn't sure if Private Hollister actually shaved more than once a week.

“Where's Private Hollister?” I asked, realizing it had been over a week since I'd seen him, maybe two. “He's supposed to be working here.”

“Reassigned. I'm Private Grenier. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Reassigned where?”

“1st Signal.”

“Here? At Fort Hood?”

“Not sure. He might have been with one of the units that shipped out to the Third Corps Tactical Zone last week.”

“Vietnam?”

“Saigon or thereabouts. Place called the Parrot's Beak. Buddy of mine at Fort Sill was there. Said it was pretty grim.”

Panic rocked me like a hurricane wind. I'd stopped paying attention and now Private Hollister was gone. I ran from the rec center and looked around wildly, as though maybe it wasn't too late, maybe there was still time to find him. But there was nothing to see, just the blank-faced buildings
that lined Battalion Avenue, typical Army architecture, nothing there to give you a plan for what to do next, nothing to give you one single answer.

There was only one place I could go for answers, and that was the chief of staff's office. If I wanted to know what happened to Private Hollister, I'd have to ask the Colonel.

“He can't see you right now, honey. He's on an important phone call.”

Miss Murlene, the Colonel's secretary, smiled at me and held out a plate of cookies. “Mama made these last night, special for Col. Dexter. She thinks the world of him. Take one; they're snicker-doodles.”

I took a cookie and munched on it without actually tasting it. How could I have let Private Hollister get away from me? I counted back the days since I'd seen him last. Ten. Ten days. Anything could have happened in that amount of time. He could have been shipped out to Vietnam,
killed, and returned to the States in a body bag in ten days, easy.

“You want to sit down, sweetheart?” Miss Murlene pointed to a row of hardbacked chairs lined up against the wall outside of the Colonel's office. “I don't know what his phone call's about, so I can't tell you how long he's going to be.”

I sat down on the middle chair, taking another cookie from Miss Murlene. I immediately started fidgeting. “Are you sure you can't interrupt him?”

Miss Murlene shook her head sadly. “Oh, no, honey, you know how your daddy is. That's the number one rule around here: no interrupting Col. Dexter when he's on the phone.”

“What if it was an emergency?”

“What's your emergency, honey? Did something awful happen at school? Awful things were always happening to me at school. One time I spilt orangeade all over my new skirt at lunch, and I just cried and cried. My sister had to call Mama and tell her to come bring me a clean skirt, or else I'd just have to come home. Did you spill something on your clothes at school, darlin'?”

“No, ma'am. There's just something I need to know.”

Miss Murlene smiled at me. “That's sweet, coming all this way to ask your daddy a question. You children really look up to him, don't you?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Miss Murlene turned back to her desk and began typing at machine-gun speed. Every few minutes she turned to see if the phone's red light was still blinking, and when she saw that it was she'd turn to me and make a big sad-clown frown. I liked Miss Murlene, but I realized that she was not necessarily the best person to have around in a crisis. Especially since she apparently couldn't recognize a person in a crisis situation when she saw one.

“He's off the phone!” Miss Murlene cried after I'd been sitting in that chair long enough for my rear end to go numb. She picked up the receiver and pressed a button. “Colonel? Jamie's here to see you, sir. Yes, sir. I'll send her in.”

She turned to me and smiled like she'd just gotten me a date with Santa Claus. “Go on in, honey. He'll see you now.”

When I opened the door, the Colonel was getting up from his desk, which was the size of a small car. On the wall behind him hung plaques in neat rows announcing his various awards and honors, and directly over his head was the 1st Cavalry insignia, needlepointed and framed by my mother, a shield with a black horse's head on the upper right-hand side, a black diagonal slash running beneath it, the background a yellow-gold. She made one for every post we were assigned. It was like having an embroidered history of the Colonel's career.

The Colonel didn't bother with any small talk or niceties when he saw me. “I'll take you home,” he said, reaching for his briefcase. “Your mother is waiting.”

“I didn't come here for a ride.” I walked in and closed the door behind me. “I needed to ask you something…. It's about Private Hollister.”

“It can wait,” the Colonel said, coming around to the front of his desk and taking his cap from the coat rack. “We need to get going.”

You can get to a breaking point with some people, and I had reached it with the Colonel. I had
spent my entire life loving him better than anybody else in the world, and looking up to him and admiring him, but I'd just about had it. I'd tried not to hold it against him that all my life he'd told me the Army way was the best way, but when it came down to it, he hadn't done things the Army way at all. He'd done things the way everybody else did them: When he'd had a problem, he tried to take the cheater's way out. I'd done my best to overlook this fact once I'd learned it, but I'd had enough, now that he was giving me the runaround with Private Hollister. Like he actually cared about protocol. Like he actually cared about the Army way of doing things so much he couldn't tell me one way or another what had happened to my friend.