Читать книгу Black and Gold: The End of the Sixties - Mike Jr. Trial - Страница 8

The plane lumbered over the grass, wings rocking, and paused in front of Grant, Mark, and Dave. They clambered in. It wheeled around, careful not to blow prop-wash over the other skydivers’ chutes stretched out on the grass, maneuvered onto the runway, and took off. The day was cool and sunny and perfect.

At altitude over the drop zone, the pilot settled the plane into a glide. The three jumpers stepped out onto the strut and fell away in quick succession. In free fall Dave was grabbing air, slowing to let Mark catch up. Mark kept his legs and arms pulled in until he was even with Dave, then spread out and they maneuvered toward each other.

Isolated in the roar of the air, the brilliant sunshine, the world spread out below him, Mark’s mind was fully absorbed and entirely relaxed. He and Dave drifted past each other just out of reach, then slowly drifted toward one another. Mark reached out; his hand brushed Dave’s jumpsuit but couldn’t grip. His reach caused him to tumble and fall faster as he angled away. He stabilized, laughing, and saw Dave too far away to reach in the time that remained. He angled his body to track upwind of the drop zone and watched the ground spreading out hypnotically as he fell. He was absolutely free. His altimeter said twenty-eight hundred feet, then twenty-six. He hooked his thumb in his ripcord ring, but waited another second. Twenty-four hundred. He pulled and his chute rippled open, the harness yanked him upward in a great swoop, and he was sitting in clear air two thousand feet above the ground.

“Why’d you go so low?” a voice above him said conversationally. Mark looked up and saw a shadow pass over the orange and white panels of his parachute. Dave floated out into his range of vision. Mark spread his hands. “Just enjoying the ride.”

“Better watch it.” Dave turned and used his toggle lines to maneuver toward the touchdown point.

Grant touched down, then Dave, both within ten feet of the center target. Mark touched down thirty feet away and sat on the ground for a moment, then gathered up his chute and took it over to the packing area.

He staked the top of his parachute down, straightened the spaghetti of white nylon risers, then smoothed the alternating orange and white leaves of the canopy one by one, going through the motions by rote, while he mind drifted.

His mother had cancer. No one had said anything, but Mark was certain it was terminal. The atmosphere in the house had changed.

Mark noticed a small tear in the nylon of one panel and taped four inches of rip-stop tape over it. Then he slid the shroud over the chute and laced the rope of risers into the big rubber loops set into the casing. He folded the chute in three folds in the green nylon case, compressed the pilot chute with his knee, and pulled both flaps of the case shut. He knelt on the closed case to hold the spring in the pilot chute compressed while he threaded the four stainless steel pins of the ripcord through the four cones that held the case closed. He pushed the ripcord handle into its pocket on the shoulder strap of the case, checked that the quick release Capewells on the shoulder straps were snapped closed, and set the packed chute on the grass by his helmet. He stretched out on the grass, head on his chute, eyes closed, and let the mild day clear his mind of gloom.

Overhead the plane inched across the sky. He opened his eyes, found the dot of black in the clear blue sky. A speck appeared beside it, then another and another, the distant engine noise went silent as the pilot turned the plane away from the jumpers and into a steep downward spiral.

“You going over to the Berg tonight?” Dave asked. “Rod wants to talk about the meet in Florida.”

“Maybe,” Mark said. He shaded his eyes at the sky. A few seconds later a white and orange chute bloomed, then a second one, then Rod’s black and red para-commander. Rod had founded the skydiving club, had the most advanced chute, and had taught them all skydiving. Despite being a former army sergeant, he was a likeable guy. He was pushing them to join him at the annual inter-collegiate skydiving competition in Florida. It would be the first time the University of Missouri had ever entered.

“I don’t think I’m going to the Berg tonight to hear Rod tell us why we need to enter the competition.”

“Thought you didn’t need to study anymore,” Mark said a little petulantly.

Dave put the top down on the little Triumph and put his gear in the space behind the seats.

“But, let me know what Rod says, okay?” Dave got in his car and started it up.

Mark picked up his gear and loaded it into the trunk of his car, “When’s the competition?”

“December. First week of Christmas break, some little town in Florida near Clearwater.”

The plane came idling up the runway and onto the grass shoulder. Overhead the three chutes drifted toward the pea gravel circle in silence. Rod swung the slotted red and black chute around, settling fast. Mark could see he had the toggles pulled way out, opening slots, letting the chute fall faster. Then he let up, the chute slowed, angled, and Rod came in to a gentle stand up landing and walked away.

“Rod,” Mark called. “Put me down to go with you guys in December to the jump meet. But I can’t make it to your meeting tonight.”

“Good,” Rod said, gathering up his chute. The two orange and white chutes drifted serenely toward the target, the jumpers keeping feet together, ready to touchdown. The first one touched the edge of the gravel circle and rolled smoothly, then the second. They stood up and began gathering in their chutes. Mark got in his car and drove to campus, his mind elsewhere.

* * *

In one of the dark phone booths in the lobby of the library, Mark phoned Jennifer and muttered some untruths at her, cancelling their date for the night. He hated the hurt tone in her voice. He wanted only to get the conversation over with, to hang up, to not speak, to not explain. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

He trudged up two flights of stairs to a row of study carrels under bleak fluorescent lights high overhead. Talk was meaningless, and so was sympathy. There were no words that would change anything. But if he concentrated, kept his mind always occupied, then he would be okay. He clicked on the desk lamp. It made a pool of light on the imitation wood Formica. He sat down and stared at the orange cover of his Thermodynamics book. Down the row of desks someone rustled papers.

I wish there were gods, Mark thought. Something to pray to. Or some mantra, some method of mind that could stop things from changing. Some way I could put everything back to the way it had been just a few months ago. And keep it that way forever. “Give us this day our daily lives,” he muttered with great sarcasm. He opened the Thermo book—entropy always increases, nothing can remain the same, order always deteriorates slowly to disorder. The hours pass, people change, nothing can be kept the same, no matter what we do or how hard we pray, he thought. I want things never to change, yet always be fresh and new, like the summer wind rippling the leaves of the trees on Dad’s farm. Always changing, but always the same.

Down the row of desks someone coughed. Mark slid the orange Thermodynamics book an inch toward him, opened it to chapter three, and began reading. Forcing his mind line by line into the words. He read two pages but comprehended nothing, so reread the same two pages. Then he turned to the problems at the end of the chapter. Number six, the pressure times the volume equals the Reynolds number times the temperature, for all processes, reversible or irreversible.

But life is not reversible, nor is death. He forced his mind into the problem, worked and reworked it until he had it right, then went to work on the next one and the next. He checked his watch periodically and when two hours had passed, he went to the trailer and went to bed.

* * *

The next day after class, Mark got on his Suzuki at the Engineering building and started down Sixth Street. The cool air and the leaves beginning to turn brown were surreal, a movie flowing past him with the sound turned off. The clarity he’d felt skydiving was gone. The blankness he’d felt working on problems from his textbook was gone. Now he felt only exhaustion.

Traffic had slowed to a stop on Sixth Street. With a flash of irritation, Mark wheeled the bike over the curb, across the sidewalk, and into Peace Park intending to cut through to Ninth Street. Past the shrubs at the other side of the park he could see red lights flashing. He cut off the engine of the bike and sat watching the ragtag crowd of students chanting and waving signs in the middle of Elm Street. In front of them was a row of campus cops augmented by city police. The loudspeaker on top of a patrol car was blaring something unintelligible. Several hotheads at the front of the crowd were chanting, “Stop the war now!” Mark saw Carol Bianchi trying to make herself heard with a bullhorn, but the crowd was more interested in sparking a confrontation with the blue-clad squad of police. Mark saw one of the cops talking on the radio in a squad car.

“March to the state capitol! Insist on a referendum!” Carol’s voice was becoming strident as the tumult escalated. “Don’t block the street. Don’t get arrested. It doesn’t help things,” she shouted, but the crowd in the street continued to heckle the cops, anticipation of confrontation thick in the air.

Two more squad cars pulled up and four cops piled out to join the row along the sidewalk. The crowd shuffled to a stop. Then from the back of the crowd of protestors, Mark heard a couple of pimply-faced longhairs start shouting, “FTA! FTA!” and the crowd took up the chant. A scrawny long-haired punk gave the cops the finger and shouted, “Fascist pigs!” Four blue uniforms snagged him, wrestled him to the ground. A hail of stones and empty beers cans rained down, the cops charged into the crowd swinging nightsticks. Mark ran back to his bike, got it started, and ripped across Peace Park between the azalea bushes and across a mulched flower bed. He reached Ninth Street, hopped the curb, and got into traffic before risking a look back. A gray cloud of tear gas was rising from the park and students were running.

Entertainment, he thought. Street theater. Despite what I told Dave and everybody last spring about my commitment to women’s rights and ending the war, at heart it was just entertainment. Abbie Hoffman’s “Revolution for the hell of it.”

Traffic inched forward. A guy in Haggar slacks and buttoned-down shirt was coming down the row of cars pushing a clipboard in the windows. He looked contemptuously at Mark on his motorcycle, but said, “Sign the referendum for visitation rights in the dorms?” Mark grinned. “Sure.” He noticed Carol coming his way accompanied by two serious-faced guys in preppy dress.

“What you said makes sense,” Mark told her when they came even with him.

“Didn’t have much effect.” She said, still walking. “Tomorrow’s papers will talk about a student riot.” She stopped and came back to him. “Nobody will have the slightest idea what it was all about, including those who were there.”

Traffic started moving. “What is it about?” Mark asked. He put the bike in gear and inched forward.

“About change, constructive change,” she said over her shoulder. “You should join us.”

* * *

Two blocks away on Broadway, Jeff spotted Jennifer walking with a friend in front of Barth’s Menswear. He elbowed through the dispersing crowd and caught up with them. “Thought I saw you in the crowd. Hello,” Jeff said.

“Hello, Jeff,” Jennifer’s smile drained away. “Stephanie, this is Jeff.” Jeff and Stephanie shook hands. The crowd flowed past, chattering about the protest and the cops. The three of them stood against the glass windows awkwardly, searching for something to say. Stephanie moved slowly along the display window, trying to get Jennifer to come along. Jennifer studied the manikins in tweed blazers and wool caps.

“Is Mark okay?” Jennifer said.

“Yeah, he’s fine.” Then Jeff caught her meaning. “Well, he’s keeping to himself a lot recently. He’s studying all the time, I think.” He didn’t notice he was leaning toward her, but she did and took a step away.

She nodded. “Well, do you think I should phone him?”

Jeff looked at his reflection in the glass and at her reflection beside his. “Well, yes.” The faint scent of tear gas came through the air, bringing a new burst of jokes and laughter from the crowd. Jennifer brightened. “Okay, I will. Well, we need to get back to campus.” She put her hand on Jeff’s arm. “Thanks. Now that you’ve met Stephanie, maybe the four of us can go out sometime.”

Jeff nodded. “I’d like that.”

Jennifer waved but Stephanie did not as they walked up Ninth Street toward Columbia College.

* * *

The police had University Avenue blocked, so Mark turned down Hitt and onto Paquin. He parked his bike in the gravel lot beside Dave’s TR3. As he came up the last flight of stairs he could hear Steve Griffin’s voice “…domino theory.”

Steve was a townie too, tall, and dark haired, conservative in view, who had elected to stay in ROTC after it stopped being mandatory. He could usually be relied on to spark Dave’s indignation with right wing remarks. Mark grinned. This should be interesting. Mark stepped through the open door and a stocky girl with a great halo of dark brown hair handed him a joint. Steve and Dave were sitting on the floor in candlelight, surrounded by empty Busch cans and full ashtrays. Mark stepped over a Stan Getz record album covered in pot and found some floor space near the bookshelf. There were three perfectly shaped joints on the record jacket. The girl put the arm back at the beginning of the record began rolling another joint. Beside her was a copy of Stanyan Street. A beer was pushed into his hand.

“Where’s Jennifer?” Dave said in a passable imitation of Jeff’s voice. He grinned, looking better than he had earlier and tilted his head at the girl. “Meet Allison.”

Allison nodded to Mark, licked one joint closed and started rolling another. Steve handed Mark a joint, he took a hit, then passed it to Dave. The candle on the end block of the makeshift bookcase flickered and steadied. So Dave’s gone from bright and ambitious Carol to this trailer bimbo. Mark took a long pull from his can of Busch and tried to keep from staring at Allison’s boobs, nipples dark against her white tee shirt. Mark took a hit on a joint that came his way and leaned back on a pillow, letting his eyes rest on a new Monterey Jazz Festival poster tacked to the slanted ceiling. Relaxed.

“Tet lost us the war, Steve,” Dave said in lecture mode. “It was all over the news.” He must be feeling better, Mark thought.

“Bullshit,” Steve interjected, “it was all over the news, and that’s what lost us public support. The news portrayed it as a defeat—VC on the American Embassy compound—all that hysteria. But the fact is that the North Vietnamese had planned Tet to be a countrywide uprising against the government and the Americans, but nothing happened. It failed. It’s back to business as usual.”

“Which isn’t saying much,” Dave said. “Eventually we’ll have our own little Dien Bien Phu, just like the French did.” Dave was in the place of honor next to the window fan and the record player. “Maybe we already have—the battle of Khe Sanh.” Allison sat beside him, knee to knee. She passed him a bottle of Lambrusco.

“Bullshit,” Steve repeated. He took a hit on a joint and passed it. “We won the battle of Khe Sanh. Massive air strikes called Operation Pegasus, then the Air Cav came in to relieve the Marines. There was no resemblance to Dien Bien Phu. The French had no air support, no relief forces, a tiny infantry force with no artillery. There’s no parallel between Dien Bien Phu and Khe Sanh.”

Mark felt a peaceful kind of melancholy. This familiar feeling—sitting with friends, drinking beer, smoking dope, talking—this is what’s important, this is what we’ll remember, not riots in the park. And all this will be gone soon. We can’t make it last forever.

“I’m thinking about registering for classes,” Allison said out of the blue. They turned her way. Embarrassed at this change of subject, Dave took a slug from the Lambrusco bottle and passed it on. “What program?” His skeptical look was not sympathetic. Allison’s face had a slightly defiant look that Mark thought made her very beautiful. “Journalism or maybe Creative Writing,” she said in a defensive tone. “I’ve got over thirty hours of credits at Moberly Junior College.” She took a generous pull from the wine bottle.

“Moberly,” Dave said, carefully neutral. “What’s your GPA?”

“Three point four.”

Mark and Steve laughed. “Hell of a lot better than my grade point,” Mark said. Maybe she isn’t trailer trash after all, he thought.

“Grades don’t matter,” Dave said piously. He took a deep drag on a joint.

“Yes they do,” Steve said. “If you want to get a job after college.”

“You won’t have to worry,” Dave said softly. “How long’s the Navy got you for?” Steve had stayed in Naval ROTC all four years of college even though it was no longer mandatory.

“Three years,” Steve said quietly.

Dave took a hit from the joint and leaned back into the shadow. “When do you report?”

“Fifteenth of February,” Steve said. He took another gargantuan hit from the joint and passed it to Allison. “It’s a citizen’s duty, and I’d just as soon get on with it,” he said around a lungful of smoke. “Maybe while I’m doing my time we’ll reach some kind of détente at the Paris peace talks.”

“Know where you’ll be stationed yet?” Dave said slowly to the floor in front of him. The record had stopped and a new kind of silence had come into the room.

“Oakland Navy Base until I get my ship assignment. Probably be there all summer. You guys should come out for a visit.” Allison put a Coltrane record on and let his sax smooth the smoky air in the room.

Steve finished his beer. “When I was in officer’s basic at Camp Lejeune last summer the old timers would talk. They’d been to Vietnam, some had been in Korea. They’d talk about it a little, not bragging, just talking. Vietnam is our generation’s war, whether we like it or not.”

“Our war,” Dave said quietly. “First war that will be won or lost on TV, by popularity vote. Revolution isn’t about political systems, or even rich and poor, it’s about media, about publicity, about style.” He looked at Allison. “The riots in Detroit and Watts, the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, the peace marchers, the SDS, SNCC, the communist demonstrators in Tokyo, the student riots in France, even the war in Vietnam, it’s all just entertainment.”

Steve got slowly to his feet. “Guess I’d better be going.” He seemed embarrassed. “Anyway. I’ll do my time, regardless of what TV says. Citizenship has a price and each of us is either willing to pay it or not.”

Mark looked up, “Heinlein, Starship Troopers,” he pronounced slowly. Then he grinned at Steve. “And Heinlein was right.”

While Coltrane’s saxophone stroked the night, Allison opened the apartment door wider to let more cool evening air in. Steve shook out a Marlboro and lit it. In some trick of candlelight, Steve and Dave and Allison’s faces all seemed both familiar and unfamiliar to Mark. They seemed both old and filled with wisdom, and young and naïve. The MFA calendar on the wall said September, 1968.

This is just a small room on the third floor of an old house on a side street in a small town in the Midwest, Mark thought. But it’s where friendship lives, where we are at this moment in time.

But nothing lasts forever. Mark said his goodbyes, made his way down the dim stairwell and out into the cold night air. He got on his motorcycle, shivering, and rode through the cold toward the trailer.

We’ll go our separate ways, the years will pass, times will change, we will change. Irreversible processes.