Christmas Presents and Past. Janice Johnson Kay
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him on the back, congratulating him.
Richie Johansen wasn’t as lucky. Number 103. The chances were pretty good he’d get drafted, but probably not right away. Richie would spend the year waiting, his heart pounding every time the mail came. Some said anyone with a number around one hundred would probably get an induction notice by late summer of 1970.
A couple of guys got back to work, hammering studs on an interior wall of the house they were roughing in.
The announcer reached August, and Will shouted, “Will you shut up?”
Silence. Even though he was sweating, a chill crept over Will’s skin. If not for the audience, he’d have vomited.
He could be celebrating in a couple of minutes, like Jose. Yeah. It could happen. Two hundred or above. That’s all he asked.
August 29th, number 61. August 30th, number 333.
A raw sound escaped his throat. Here it was. His future.
“August thirty-first, number eleven.”
He stood, unmoving, slow to comprehend.
“Bummer,” one of the guys whispered.
“September first, two hundred twenty-five.”
Eleven? One day different either way, and he’d have been safe, but because his mother went into labor on August 31st, he was screwed?
When at last he looked around, gazes slid away from him.
“Get back to work!” the foreman yelled. He set a hand on Will’s shoulder. “You need to take the rest of the day off, kid?”
Will shook his head. “I’m okay.”
It was a lie. Later, he couldn’t remember a single thing he did. When they laid off at five, he felt like a husk of himself, as if he’d died inside. He got in his car and drove home, and he didn’t remember that, either.
Dinah’s car was in front of his house. His mom’s was in the driveway, even though she didn’t usually get home from her job at the assessor’s office until closer to six.
Will didn’t even wonder if they knew. He just parked and trudged up the driveway and the front steps.
The moment he opened the door, Dinah flew to wrap her arms around him.
“Will, I heard! Thank goodness you’ll have a student deferment.”
He just stood there, unable to lift his arms to respond to her embrace, not even wondering if she’d just stood up and walked out of class.
His mother hovered behind his girlfriend, her expression anxious. “Is it true? You’re number eleven?”
It took enormous effort to nod his head. The effect was peculiar, as if he were outside himself, watching.
“Someone at work told me she’d heard rumors they’re thinking of ending student deferment,” his mom said. “But I can’t believe, once you’re in school…”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I never applied.”
Talking right over him, his mother continued, “Ending the deferment for kids to be drafted next year is one thing, but it’s unlikely the government would let boys start and then yank them out of class. If you concentrate on getting tip-top grades…”
But Dinah, she’d heard. He could tell, because she went so still, she had to have quit breathing.
At last, she pushed back and interrupted his mother as if she weren’t talking. “You what?”
His voice was completely dull. “I didn’t want to go to college. I never turned in my application.”
“But I gave you a check for the fee!” His mother stared at him in complete bewilderment. “I assumed they just didn’t cash it until they sent out acceptance letters.” Her face crinkled. “But you were accepted. I’m sure you said…”
He just kept shaking his head. “I let you think whatever you wanted.”
The expression of shock and horror on the two women’s faces might have seemed comical under other circumstances, so alike did they momentarily look.
But Dinah’s transformed to outrage, and she crossed her arms in front of her. “How could you?”
“It was my decision,” he said stubbornly.
“But you’re not the only one affected. How do you think I feel? And your mom and dad?”
He heard himself give an ugly laugh. “Dad’ll be proud if I go to Vietnam. He served, so I should, too. He’d probably have been embarrassed to admit to his friends that his kid was hiding behind a student deferment.”
“That’s not true!” his mother protested. “He loves you.”
Tears spurting in her eyes, Dinah cried, “I thought you loved me! But you lied to me!”
“I never lied….”
“You let me think you’d applied to S.F. State, too. Why?”
“Because you took my parents’ side!” Will yelled. “You refused to understand!”
She looked at him as if he was incredibly stupid. “That you could die? Yeah, I got that. Only, now I’m starting to see that maybe you want to die so we all feel guilty. Well, I’m not going to!”
Sobbing, she raced past him and out the door. He turned to take a step after her, but the door slammed in his face and within moments, he heard the roar of her car’s engine.
Behind him, his mother said, “Dinah is absolutely right, Will O’Keefe!” Her voice sounded thick, and he turned to see tears welling from her eyes. “How could you?”
She walked away from him, too, closing her bedroom door firmly shut behind her.
Will no longer felt like a husk hollowed out by despair. Too many emotions raged in him now, including anger that they didn’t feel sorry for him. Him! He was the one who would be shipped halfway around the world to become a soldier in a war he didn’t believe in.
But mostly, he felt shock. Because he’d never really believed he would be drafted. The odds were two to one against it, and he’d always been lucky. He’d thought his parents were using the threat of the draft to pressure him into doing what they thought he should do with his life.
Alone in the living room, he grappled with the concept that maybe they really had been scared. That maybe Dinah had been, too.
And that maybe she was right, and he’d been too wrapped in self-pity to think about anyone but himself.
Two days later, Will was waiting outside when Dinah got off work, and of course she had to forgive him right away.
He sat there in the car, face ravaged, and said, “This sounds unbelievably stupid, but I really thought I’d get a high number.” His self-mocking tone could have scored glass. “Nothing really bad could happen to me, right? I talked about being scared of the draft, but I wasn’t. Not down deep.” He touched a fist to his stomach. “I was convinced my parents were using the threat of the draft to make me go to college.”
“But what about me?” Dinah asked. She couldn’t tear her gaze from his hands, which were locked around the steering wheel of the car although he hadn’t even turned the engine on. They were tanned. Scabs, new and healing, made them the hands of a working man. But what got to her was that his knuckles were white, he was gripping that wheel so tight. As if…as if he was holding on to the wheel of his old Chevy for dear life.
He didn’t answer for a long minute. When he did, he spoke haltingly. “I knew that…well, that you were scared. So I just…pretended, you know, that you were just way more establishment than you talked, and you wanted your boyfriend in college. Because if I hadn’t believed that…” He stopped.
“You