Читать книгу Black and Gold: The End of the Sixties - Mike Jr. Trial - Страница 3

The high-backed wooden booths in the Heidelberg had filled early. Sorority girls in tee shirts emblazoned with greek letters mixed and mingled with fraternity guys. Mark stood at the bar, his hand on a glass of draft Hamm’s beer. It was the last Saturday night before classes began for the fall semester 1968.

“DGs, Pi Phis, Tri Delts,” someone said into his ear. It was Jeff Cooper smiling his wide, uncertain smile. He was dressed in a preppy uniform—blue blazer, rep tie, yellow shirt, gray slacks, and polished loafers.

“Working the orientation desk?” Mark said. He fumbled change out of his pocket. “We need music.”

“Play something good for a change,” Jeff called after him. “If I hear you play ‘Wild Thing’ one more time I’m going to pull the plug on that jukebox.”

After Mark returned and “Wild Thing” was playing, he and Jeff raised their glasses. “To senior year.” They toasted.

“Did you get moved into the trailer?” Mark, Jeff and Bill Whitten would be sharing a three-bedroom trailer this year.

“Yeah. Met Bill,” Jeff said. “Seems like a nice guy. He was already studying.”

“He is a nice guy. Studious type, unlike me. He’ll finish up his degree in three and a half years.”

Jeff raised his glass again and grinned. “Versus your four and a half years, right?”

“Good things should not be rushed.”

Dave sauntered over. “Going skydiving tomorrow?”

“Yeah,” Mark said. “You?” Dave nodded. He poured his glass full and stared at it. Jeff essayed, “No lecture tonight? Usually by now you’d be on about politics as expounded by the beautiful Carol.”

“I’m fed up.”

Mark swept the crowd with his hand. “Nonsense. Best time of the year and best year of our…”

“Fed up with Carol. I don’t know why I’ve spent so much time chasing her.”

“Because she’s beautiful, Dave,” Jeff said, incredulous. Dave had been pursing Carol since last spring, even to the point of taking a sublease on an apartment in the same apartment building where she lived. Mark assumed the Triumph TR3 he’d traded his old Chevy for a few months ago was part of the chase.

“I’m looking for something deeper.”

“Carol’s the smartest person on campus, profs included,” Jeff continued. “I read her stuff in the Columbia Free Press sometimes. She’s brilliant. And beautiful. And you’re going to give her up?”

“I never had her, certainly not in the carnal sense.” Dave wandered off into the crowd.

Jeff shook his head. “The brooding existentialist Zen philosopher. Have I forgotten any of the other philosophies he’s into this week?”

Over four years of college, Dave’s major had migrated from business through economics, into political science and now philosophy. Mark suspected Dave’s interest in jazz, the beat generation’s poetry, and Zen was a bit of a pose—a statement of depth in the face of Mark and Jeff’s engineering majors.

Jeff began chatting up a couple of doe-eyed freshman girls with clear eyes, creamy skin, slim bodies, and nervous laughs, whose very innocence exuded sensuality.

A girl materialized beside Mark. She was good-looking in a small town kind of way—short brown hair, a slim body in tight jeans and a plain white tee shirt, entirely different from the sorority look-alikes. She edged over beside Jeff and tried to get the bartender’s attention.

Jeff turned his attention to this new target. “Hi there.” She ignored him. The freshmen girls drifted off.

“What’s your major?” Jeff persisted. She looked around at him. “Mind your own business.”

Jeff turned to Mark. “I’m going to the Stephens mixer tonight. Why don’t you come along, unless Jennifer’s got you on a short leash.” Jeff grinned a knowing grin that Mark was beginning to resent.

“I’ll meet you there,” Mark countered. He didn’t really want to go, but he was getting tired of Jeff’s insinuations. Mark’s friend Grant served the pizza Mark had ordered and scurried off. Mark reached over the bar, filled a glass with beer, and set it in front of the girl beside Jeff.

She smiled at him—pretty, not beautiful, but wonderful big brown eyes.

Jeff slid the pizza tray an inch toward her. “Have some pizza.” She ignored him.

Jeff turned to Mark. “Neither you or Dave know how good you’ve got it, going steady with good-looking women.” Mark was secretly pleased.

“Don’t envy me too much,” Mark said, pointing across the crowd to a girl in a tight pink Tri Delt tee shirt surrounded by a knot of drooling guys. “That’s what we all want, right?”

“High maintenance,” Jeff said. “Like that Dodge 426 Hemi you and Tim Bryant were always lusting after in high school.”

Grant came over. “You want to do some relative work tomorrow?” Since he’d started skydiving two years before, Mark had found he had a natural talent for relative work, moving laterally through the air while free falling to link up with another skydiver falling at the same rate. “Yeah. Let’s do.”

“Well, I’m going to get going,” Jeff told Mark. “See you at the mixer.”

Once Jeff was out of earshot, the girl started in on the pizza. “I’m starving,” she said, talking with her mouth full. “My name’s Debbie.”

“I’m Mark.”

“What’s relative work?” Debbie asked.

“Skydiving,” Mark said. “I’m teaching Grant here the finer points of the sport.”

Grant snorted. “You’re teaching me? See you tomorrow at ten.” Somebody put The Turtles on the jukebox. “The MU skydiving club. It’s fun,” Mark told her.

She eyed him up and down. “Fun? I thought it was sort of macho. Death-defying.”

Mark laughed so long and loud that several of the nearer sorority girls eyed him critically. “Sport jumping is about speed and freedom; falling free through the air. It’s about life, not death.”

She nodded approvingly. “Good, I’m glad you’re not the gung-ho military type—I’ve met too many of those types already.” She finished her pizza.

Mark slid some change her way. “Play us some tunes.”

She made her way through the crowd to the jukebox and chose “Time Has Come Today.”

* * *

Mark looked out the open door of the Cessna at Columbia spread out five thousand feet below him. In the distance was a toy-like Jesse Hall dome on the MU campus, south of Highway 70 slicing the town in two, the shady suburbs, the farmland beyond stretching to the flat horizon. The skydivers sat cross-legged on the bare aluminum floor, swaddled in the meditative roar of the engine and the air rushing by.

At altitude the pilot throttled back, the plane settled into an expectant glide, and Mark followed Dave out into the airstream. They both pushed off and dropped away into silence, surrounded above by a hemisphere of blue and below by one of green. Mark rolled over on his back and contemplated the blue sky, the glare of the sun. He backflipped onto his belly and, guiding the air with his arms and legs, he let the airstream glide him closer to Dave. They linked hands for a moment, then drifted apart. Mark formed his body into an arrow, head down, and glided away. He stabilized just upwind of the orange circle of pea gravel that marked the target landing area. The ground was slowly spreading open to receive him, hypnotically engaging the eye as it expanded, imperceptibly increasing its speed.

Mark pulled the ripcord, his chute slid open and he hung in silence, two thousand feet of clear air below his boots. “Nice jump,” Dave said conversationally from above him. Dave had his toggles pulled down, spilling air to drop faster until he was even with Mark.

“Yeah. Perfect air.” They sat in silence admiring the unparalleled view of familiar streets lined with elms and oaks. “Our town. Our time,” Mark said to himself.

On the ground they tossed their chutes into their cars. Dave idled his TR3 over to Mark’s Chevy. “Let’s come out again next Sunday.”

Mark jumped in his car. The Ozark Airlines flight from St. Louis was just taxiing up to the terminal. “I’ve got to pick Jennifer up right now. Why don’t you meet us for a beer at the Heidelberg around seven?”

Dave and ran a hand through his shock of black hair. “No time for the Berg tonight. You and Jennifer going to live together this year?”

“No.”

Mark drove around the hangars to the little terminal’s parking lot just as the DC-3’s door opened. Jennifer was the third person out, dressed in a blue miniskirt, tanned and slim, long silky black hair parted in the middle. She came down the steps with coltish grace, burdened with a purse, a sweater, a huge red Carnaby Street shopping bag, and a small wooden box. He kissed her, breathing in Chantilly perfume. “Welcome back,” he said.

“I’ve missed you.” She handed him a small box containing six Florida oranges. “My parents insisted.”

Mark laughed, “Thank them for me. It’s thoughtful of them.” In the hot front seat of his car their kiss was passionate but familiar.

“I missed you this summer,” Mark said. The door closed on the Ozark DC-3, and it pivoted, glinting silver and green in the late afternoon light. “I should have come to visit you in Florida. I thought about you all the time.” He looked away. “I used to replay in my mind all the times we spent together, from our first blind date, to the first night we spent together, to…”

She blushed. “I was so…”

“...naïve, in the best sense of the word. We both were; we both are. We made love and we talked about love.”

She smiled. “Do we dare say the word ‘love’ right now, out in public, in daylight?”

He took a deep breath. “Yes. I love you.”

“I love you too,” she said. The DC-3 passed overhead, glinting in the golden light.

Mark started the car and they drove to Columbia College. “After you get settled into the dorm, let’s go get some food and a beer at the Berg.”

Jennifer put her hand on his arm. “Not tonight Mark, I have to be in the auditorium at seven for orientation and afterwards there’s a get-acquainted session from eight to nine, and I need to unpack my stuff. I should have come back yesterday, but I didn’t.”

Mark helped Jennifer get her things up to her room in North Hall. Girls filled the halls, meeting and greeting and unpacking.

“See you tomorrow night,” Mark said, exiting the chaos.

* * *

Car windows down, Hendrix on the radio, the balmy air rolling in, Mark couldn’t keep the grin off his face. What had Dave said? Our time, our turf. He told himself he should do some reading for his first classes tomorrow, but when the light turned green at Conley Street, he found himself turning toward campus, full of anticipation. This was the new age of enlightenment, the Age of Aquarius. Everything was acceptable, and the unexpected was expected. On the streets, students were everywhere. Mark jostled his way through the milling crowd in front of the green door of the Shack, through the boisterous crowd in front of the open door of the Italian Village bar. A jukebox blasted the street with Janis, furtive freshmen darted away from swaggering upperclassmen, foursomes of newly pledged fraternity guys eyed foursomes of newly pledged sorority girls, a miasma of Shalimar and English Leather hovering over them. Mark stepped into the Heidelberg and spotted Jeff. For Mark, and Dave and Jeff, the Berg was their turf, a safe haven for the few last months before they faced the working world, the draft, and the war. The Berg was a time capsule where they knew their undergraduate years would always exist.

And the Berg was also the home of cheap beer: draft Hamm’s in ten-ounce glasses for twenty-five cents, fifteen cents during happy hour. Mark poured some from the pitcher.

“Didn’t see you at the mixer last night,” Jeff said.

“I changed my mind, didn’t go,” Mark said. “”How’d you do?”

Jeff shook his head, and looked around the room. “Damn. Here comes Mitchell. That guy’s an obnoxious loud-mouth.”

Larry Mitchell elbowed through the crowd and shook hands with Jeff and Mark. “Hey guys,” too loud even in the noisy bar.

“What’s up?” Mark said, handing him a glass of beer. Mitchell was another townie. Loud and brash, he had always seemed to need to demonstrate that he knew more about whatever the subject of conversation was.

“Bad news,” he said, drawing up a chair.

Mark and Jeff exchanged glances.

“You guys remember Tim Bryant don’t you? Kind of a geeky guy, but nice.”

Mark nodded, “Sure. He was in Business and Public Administration, flunked out of MU but got accepted at some diploma mill in Nebraska I think. I knew him pretty well. We used to race slot cars together.”

Larry gave Mark a disdainful look.

“I remember Tim,” Jeff said. “Always wore black-framed glasses, still had braces on his teeth. Dated Diane what’s-her-name all through high school.”

Mark nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. What about him?”

Larry frowned at his beer. “Well, his parents and mine go to the same church. My parents were talking to them last Sunday. Tim got killed in Vietnam last month.”

The statement lay there between them and the bar seemed suddenly silent.

“He flunked out of that college in Nebraska,” Larry continued. “Got drafted, shipped to Vietnam…” He shrugged. “Only in-country a few weeks before he got it. Funeral’s Wednesday.”