Ash Wednesday (5 page)

"Why do I have to?" The fear was leaving her now. The blow that had reddened her cheek had brought anger in its place. "I don't have to do what you say! I don't"—she gasped for breath—"don't
wanta
see out there!"

He smiled a smile edged with promises, grim with threats. "I really want you to, Chris," he said. "I want you to do this for me."

In the light of his tone, her anger slipped fearfully away, leaving only the red marks where his fingers had met flesh. Her lip quivered, and she looked at him like a beaten dog that would take the throat out of its master if it thought it could. "You . . . bastard," she said weakly.

"Will you do this for me, please?" His smile faded. "You will, won't you." There was no longer even the hint of a question.

"You bastard," she mouthed, but he could not hear the words.

"Look down there."

She turned her head toward the window. Her face trembled as though made of jelly, and she clamped her eyes shut. "
Look
," he said. "Open your goddamned eyes."

She did. Her head shook with the effort not to turn away, and he saw the veins in her neck press against the slightly chubby flesh above. Another few pounds, he thought, and she would have wattles. "You see that boy?" he asked her, unable to take his eyes off her face. "That's Andy
Koser
. I knew him when I was a kid. He's been dead twenty-five years."

She looked at him, disbelief in her glare. "Are you . . .” she began, then turned back to the window. Brad put his arm around her shoulders, and she shivered at his touch.

"Recognize anybody?" he said. "Any familiar faces for you out there?"

"What . . . are they, Brad?"

He shook his head and gave a short barking laugh. "How do I know?"

"Oh, G—" She brought a hand to her mouth.

"
What?
"

"There," she breathed, pointing to a worn green bench that sat under a streetlight. There was something on the bench that had once been human. But now the body from the sternum down looked like raw, oozing meat. Trunk and legs were indistinguishable from one another. The head and face, however, were untouched, and gleamed, as did the lower chaos of mortality, with the same cold blue light the other figures radiated.

"Oh, Jesus," said Brad, a plunging sadness in his tone. Tears welled up in his eyes, and his jaw tightened and trembled as he gritted his teeth, trying to force back the crying.

"You know him?" Christine asked in awe.

"Yeah," he managed to get out. "Yeah. You do too. It's Rorrie."

"Aw fuck, B. J., you really
like
that shit?"

"Yeah. Yeah, Rorrie, I think I'm gonna like it. I mean, it's a nice campus, and I liked school, so what the hell."

"I thought
you'da
had enough of school." Rorrie Weidman put his hands behind his head and sank lower onto the bright red bench. He took off his aviator sunglasses and let the warm rays bake his eyelids. "
I'm
ready to
do
something, you know?"

Brad snorted. "Like what?"

"I don't know." Rorrie shrugged. "Maybe Dad's garage for a while, maybe I'll just bum around the country, maybe—”

“Maybe the Army."

"Huh?"

"Man, are you nuts? You'll be drafted for sure if you don't go to school. Hell, Rorrie, you're smart enough. You could get into State easy. They take kids with some really low boards—
mine
were shitty."

"Yeah, but I'd need a scholarship. I don't have the bread.”

“You could get one."

"Bull
shit
. I'm not an orphan or a nigger."

"Don't say that, man."

"What, 'orphan'?"

"You know what I mean."

" 'Nigger'? That bother you? Hey, lighten up, B. J. I'm just
foolin
' around."

They sat for a while, watching the cars go by on Market Street, calling an occasional greeting to a friend, pulling in their legs when an adult walked past. Rorrie lit a cigarette. "What would you do," Brad said, unwrapping a stick of gum, "if you
did
get drafted?"

"I
dunno
. I guess I'd go. What about you?"

Brad shook his head. "I don't have anything against those people."

"That's got
nothin
' to do with it."

"It's got a lot to do with it," Brad answered.

"Crap. You been listening to too much folk-rock. You think they asked our dads in World War Two whether or not they had anything against Germans? 'Mr. Weidman, Mr. Meyers, you do hate Germans, don't you?' Hell, we are Germans. Our grandparents, great-grandparents anyway. I bet ninety percent of the people in Merridale got German blood."

"World War Two was different from Vietnam."

"My ass." Rorrie spat into the street. "You're dumb enough to get drafted, you go where they tell you and fight who they tell you to. Anyway, it doesn't matter. They're not gonna draft me."

"Why not?"

"I got a funny little toe on my left foot."

Brad laughed.

"No shit! I
do!
"

"Your little toe?" Brad was still chuckling.

"Okay, laugh. You think it's funny, go ahead and laugh. They don't take you if your feet are fucked up, because you can't
march
, dummy." Rorrie pulled off his left sneaker and propped his foot yoga-style on his thigh. "
Lookit
that."

Brad looked. The smallest toe curled under the fourth one so that the toenail was only partially visible. "Didn't keep you from playing football," Brad said, realizing that he was actually jealous of
Rorrie's
curly toe.

"Doesn't matter." He slipped the sneaker back on. "You ever check
your
toes?"

"There's nothing wrong with my toes."

"Too bad," Rorrie said, grinding out his Marlboro on the sidewalk.

As it turned out, there wasn't enough wrong with
Rorrie's
toes either. That August, while Brad was working at the A&P to make enough for his living expenses at Penn State, Rorrie Weidman was called for a pre-induction physical, which he easily passed. The examiners dismissed the turned-under toe, laughing gruffly and saying that Army boots would straighten it out. Rorrie was not even permitted to come home, but had to call his parents from Fort Indiantown Gap and tell them to bring the personal things he would need. He started basic training four days later. Through the remainder of August Brad always felt a twinge as he drove his Chevy past the bench by Western Auto and saw it empty, or occupied by kids other than Rorrie. That had been
Rorrie's
bench for the past three summers. He'd sat on it when he'd finished the workday at his father's garage during the week, wearing his greasy mechanic's jumpsuit, in the evenings with a work shirt and cuffed jeans, on bright steaming Saturdays in a tank top and cutoffs. It was Rorrie's bench, although he was more than willing to share it, especially with his friends and with older people, like Eddie Karl. Rorrie and Eddie would sit for hours on a Saturday afternoon or Friday night, talking, smoking, watching cars, Eddie telling Rorrie (and Brad, when he was there) about old days and old friends, none of whom had ever died in Eddie's mind.

But through the rest of August the bench, though often occupied, seemed strangely empty.
Rorrie's
presence was gone.

In September Brad went off to State. He found his freshman year difficult, not because of the course material but rather because of the hundred distractions he had never had to overcome when he lived at home. Loud roommates, Saturday night dances, football games (he tried out for the team with no luck), the letters he'd write every two or three days to Bonnie back in Merridale, the dates he had when he was able to forget about her—all these resulted in a 1.68 grade point average his first semester. Instead of trying to correct that semester's flaws, his studies became even more secondary in the spring. He joined the campus civil rights group, one of the two established (and feuding) antiwar organizations, and auditioned for and got a small speaking part in an off-campus production of
Lysistrata
. In June he learned his average had dropped another half point and found himself on probation for his sophomore year, even though he had not actually failed a course.

During that freshman year he received two pieces of correspondence from Rorrie Weidman. The first was a postcard that his parents brought up to campus one Saturday afternoon in October. It was postmarked Fort Bragg, and was dated three weeks previously. It read:

B. J.—Greetings from beautiful Fort Bragg. The Army food isn't all that bad, and we get to hear a lot of rock. May be heading over to the big V in a month or two, so wish me luck. I'll see you in two years (I hope). Give Bonnie a squeeze for me—not too many ladies here.

Rorrie

Brad hadn't answered. He'd intended to, and had stuck the postcard to the wall above his desk with a piece of
Plasti-Tak
. The color photo of a row of recruits in front of green-gray barracks under an impossibly blue sky hung there for two months before he finally took it down when he went home for Christmas vacation. He intended to answer it over the holidays, but used it as a bookmark in a library book and so lost it.

He received the letter in April. It had an APO postmark.

B. J.—Don't come here. Stay in school. Work at it. Don't lose your deferment. It's bad. It's really
bad
.

That was all. Rorrie had underlined "bad" three times.

That night, after getting back to his dorm at 1:00 A.M. after an antiwar candlelight vigil, he wrote a letter to Rorrie, telling him to hang in there, see it through, not to give up hope, and every other comforting and inane cliché he could think of. At the end, he told him to desert if it got too bad. He mailed it the next morning and received no reply.

That summer he worked at the A&P again for $1.85 an hour. His parents had naturally been concerned about his grades, and he felt an unspoken need on their part for him to play the dutiful son. So he took Bonnie out only on Friday and Saturday nights, and spent the other evenings at home watching the Phillies on TV with his father, and reading
Abbie
Hoffman, Mao, and
Che
Guevara in bed late at night. He read over a dozen volumes before he decided that he found politics dull and communism heartless. He filled the rest of the summer with William Goldman novels, Grove Press Victoriana (he was one hundred pages into
My Secret Life
before he got bored), and Doc Savage paperbacks, which he devoured like popcorn.

He also managed to lose his (and
Bonnie's
) virginity on a blanket in the middle of a Sunday afternoon. There was a small clearing a half mile into the woods in back of the town park. They'd gone there before to make out, a process that consisted of French kissing, hand exploration, and dry-humping that had up to that time produced no more than a lasting erection and dime-sized stains in Brad's underpants that he hoped his mother wouldn't notice on laundry day.

But this time more happened. Bonnie knew that Brad had been dating at State, though
she
had chosen to "stay faithful," as she put it rather accusingly. So when she opened her legs a little wider than usual, and actually unzipped his fly to touch him, he knew why. It was to keep him, as if sex would lock them to each other not only temporarily but permanently. Although he thought he might love Bonnie, there was no way he could reciprocate the unthinking devotion with which she tried to claim him.