by Thomas Thonson

(image c/o californiabeachesdotcom)

There are people you have a relationship with that you don’t have a relationship with. People you know by sight, by reputation, and by the influence they have on your life without ever really getting to know them. Not uncommon, but more likely to happen in a small town, because in that small population pond one person’s business is everybody’s business, even if you’ve never actually said hello. When you’re a kid growing up around them, these strangers can mark you for life in ways that can surprise you. Become an adult, move away, and chart out your lifepath––tragic, triumphant, or middlingly passable, as is usually the case––they are still there.

This is a story about these familiar strangers. About two of them, anyway, the ones whose histories and troubling fates define me more than I want to admit. I say troubling, because they are troubling to me. In truth, one, by all outward indications, was short, sad, and tragic, and the other long-lived and  triumphant. 

Who are you when you’re 14 years old? Mysteries abound. Everything about you is taking shape, except for those core modes, those indelible genetic markers that can bring you shining talents along with boorish compulsions that you can’t quit. The primordial stew, the swamp that we slither from, and then painfully learn to walk. At 14 I could walk, but I didn’t move or act like a normal human being––I lunged and thrashed, gawked and geeked, caught in an avalanche of hormonal forces. My mind raced with impossible plans, outlandish scenarios, and unresolved longings. Girls, of course, but at its core it was about adventure and thrills and accumulating experience––to push things to the limit on the odd chance that you might be immortal. What if…? What would happen then? No stopping it.

It was in that spirit that my summertime friend, Marcel, and I decided to take a late-night sail across Big Lagoon in the middle of a storm. 

We pushed off in complete blackness––no stars, no moon––the wind just starting to whistle over the long sandy isthmus that separated the lagoon from the vast Pacific Ocean. The boat was his father’s Sunfish, a glorified surfboard with a sail. You climbed aboard and hung on for your life in the best of weather––this wasn’t the best of weather. The only thing that separated you from the water was a couple of inches of a slick fiberglass hull. Life jackets––yeah, right––who needs those? I dropped in the daggerboard, Marcel cinched up the line on the sail and we were off.  Just ahead, a pintail duck and her brood hydroplaned away and into the reeds, the only witness to this madness. The sound of thunder and a lightning strike off in the distance introduced a fleeting cautionary thought into my speeding brain, but it was gone before the light faded on the dark water ahead.

Marcel let out a beguiling cackle, and then a banshee scream as the wind caught us and our tiny craft heeled up on one side, the bow submarining into the chop and sending sheets of water across us. My trunks were soaking wet in seconds.

“The gods are throwing down the gauntlet, old man!” he shrieked, “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I tell you it would be great. How fucking wonderful is this?”

“Pretty fucking wonderful,” I screamed over the sound of the wind, trying to will the terror out of my voice. 

“Talk to me mama! Talk to me, you wicked bitch.” (What kind of kid says stuff like that? But it was the way he talked, which also had something to do with his Frenchie sounding name  ––more on that later.) 

We were heeled over hard now, the little Sunfish shuddering with the power of the wind, the sail stretched tight. Across the lagoon I could see the lights of the yacht club faintly glimmering through the patch of dense redwood trees on the other shore. All their boats were tethered sensibly to the dock. We were way out now, past any easy swim to shore if we went over. Plus, it was getting cold. I shivered, looked back at Marcel, and the madman was standing, balancing on the bucking sunfish, the rudder in one hand and the mainsail line in the other. He howled as it started raining. 

“Marcel,” I shouted. “Marcel. Sit down, you’re going to tip us over. Marcel!”

His eyes blazed, yes, even in the pitch dark, there was a light in them, a frisson of energy that made him seem demonic. We were past the halfway point now, the yacht club looming ahead.

 “You big pussy, Sam, this is my chariot. We’re not going to tip over––fly maybe. I’m pretty damn sure we’re going to fly.”

In that instant the wind came up even higher, a gust that rolled us to the side, and for a few seconds, as we karoomed off a breaking swell, it did seem like we had taken flight. I clutched the mast, hunkered down, and screamed––

“Let the sail out. We’re going over…”

Going out in that storm was the kind of idea only Marcel would’ve come up with. He was the daredevil, and I was his willing accomplice. He was also a talker––a voluminous, non-stop, wildly imaginative talker. His words could fill you with a sense of expectation, of worlds you hadn’t even dreamed of. 

“Where’s you sense of adventure, dear boy?” he’d say (yes at the age of 14 he used words like that, an affectation from his poet father and his brittlely sophisticated mother). He would use words like great peril, unforeseen circumstances, a tragedy of our own making, cataclysmic, horrific, lively escapade, do go on, I digress, disastrous. Intrepid. 

I paid attention. 

Even if you’re gripped in a powerful hormonal tsunami, you can still be observant, if you’re bent that way. I guess I was. I remember the way his little finger twitched while he talked. The light in his hazel eyes when he was hatching some scheme. His loping, leonine walk, and the delicately animated way he used his hands and would then try to tame by holding them by his side. He was strong and agile and coordinated, but lacked any kind of manly bluster. Was he gay? Perhaps. Beyond my purview at that age. But I loved his uniqueness, his otherworldliness, his cynical and cutting wit, his wise-beyond years attitude. I’d never met anyone like him, and even though he only came up to our remote neck of the woods for a short time every summer, I looked forward to his visits.

His whole life was as different from mine as one could get. I came from a blue-collar family. My dad was a custodian (janitor to my jeering non-friends, and the custodian at the high school I was going to attend in the fall––something I dreaded) who had never recovered from his time in Korea. PTSD is what you’d call it now, but in those days, he was just weak and damaged and sad. My mother was a long-suffering country club kind of gal from the suburban Bay Area, whose downfall from her upper middle-class life came when she went to our small college, met a townie, and got pregnant in the cab of my dad’s ‘53 Chevy pickup. She now lived a kind of colorless purgatory, tending to my dad and dreaming about better times not likely to come. Both of my parents were kind, if not loving. My mom was held back by her basic resentment and unhappiness, and my dad by the burden of pain he couldn’t seem to shake––a bad dream one never wakes up from. Dad would retire to his room for days at a time, and my mother would smoke her cigarettes and glare at the door. Despite these rare glimpses of desperation, on the surface they were mostly quiet and calm––giggled at Topo Gigio on the Ed Sullivan show, listened to Walter Cronkite like he was a god, and rooted for Jack Lalanne to make it across the San Francisco bay while handcuffed and towing a boat. Everything important in them was going on deep below. 

By contrast, Marcel’s parents were people you’d expect to fall out of windows with confetti in their hair. Beatniks from San Francisco. His mother, Renata, was a  delicate French waif, thin, beautiful, with a dusky voice and tragic eyes. A slightly insane Edith Piaf, whose only talent was her ability to antagonize everyone around her with her superior air. His dad, Oscar, a wooly-haired, darkly bearded, North Beach poet, was an American barbarian. Heedless in his interactions, he could inflame any situation like a B52 bomber dropping napalm, something we saw every night on TV in those days, flying over the green paradise of Vietnam. 

Two people that should never be together. 

Oscar scared me in every way, and I was always terrified when Marcel would talk back to him––talk to him with scathing contempt. How could he get away with it? But he did. His father’s bluster was all intellectual. He’d bludgeon you, but it was verbal, a brutal mind game that was vicious and wounding. If something like that had happened in my household, the world would cease to exist, or someone would be dead. Cross this threshold and it was routine. 

They were also savage drinkers and prodigious fuckers, which went hand in hand (ha!). No sooner had a fight ended, when Marcel, his younger sister and I would be sent running from the house so we wouldn’t have to hear their screams and moans. The Big Lagoon house was supposed to be a sylvian setting where the great man could write poetry in relative peace, after a semester of guiding young poets past their masturbatory first verses and into a bit of mature artistry. It was never thus. Three summers in a row and their marriage just got stranger and more volatile. To work off the tension, and after a few gin and tonics, Oscar took to body surfing in the brutal waves along the ocean side of the Big Lagoon shore. Nobody swam in those, chiefly because the beach was so steep that the waves simply came rolling in and then broke right on the sand. A perfect back breaker. Oscar had a unique approach. He didn’t even bother sticking out his arms, he just leaped into the wall of water,  just beneath the cresting lip, with his head. He’d pierce it momentarily only to be dragged back and slammed to the sand. He’d stagger up, shake the water from his shaggy head, and then with the sand running off his beard in rivulets, and a demented look, try another one. It was a wonder he survived. 

This was the crucible of Marcel’s emotional upbringing. All this to explain why he would not let out the sail.

“Marcel, let out the sail!”

He did not let out the sail and we flipped. It happened fast. Suddenly I was airborne like a cartoon character––Wile E. Coyote, legs pumping in midair, then a smack-down plunge into the dark water. Out of one corner of my eye I glimpsed Marcel flying over the tipped sail, a flash of lightning pixilating his fall. I tried to surface and ran into the wet sail, sucking down around me, and I  panicked. Air, I need air! I thrashed and frog-kicked to the side and emerged next to the hull, turned on its side. 

“Marcel,” I screamed. “Marcel!” His head bobbed up beside me his face a mask of fear, arms thrashing. “We need to swim in,” I shouted. “We can’t right it, not in this wind.”  

“Help me,”  he screamed. “Help me.”

“Help you?” I blurted. 

“I can’t swim.”

“You can’t swim?” It seemed impossible. 

“No.” 

“Fuck,” I said. “Now you tell me.” His head went under, I hooked him under the arms and snatched him back. His mouth was open, eyes wild. 

“Help!”

I remembered my water safety training that my father had made me learn before he’d let me sail. “Lay back against me,” I said. “Don’t struggle, I won’t let you drown.” 

With his head against my shoulder, I started swimming backward slowly, the bobbing dock,  hulls, and masts of the yacht club outlined behind us. It seemed an endless distance––a desperate, lung bursting slog. We hit the dock and hauled ourselves upon it. I kneeled, gasping for breath, my skinny arms trembling beneath me. Marcel was on his back next to me. The rain was still falling hard, the wind shrieking in the rigging. Up on the shore we could  hear music––some kind of event must’ve been going on. 

We were both shivering violently. I leaned in close and shouted in his ear above the roar of the rain and wind.

“They might have a phone we can use. We need to call someone to come and get us.” Marcel nodded, all bravado drained from him.

Our bare feet made their way across the slick wood of the dock and up the flagstone walkway that led to the club house. Through the trees we could see the glowing light from the towering windows. The building was made of heavy timber and had an expansive porch––a classic California craftsman that felt moneyed and exclusive even in the dark. I’d never seen it up close and often wondered what it looked like. 

As we approached the parking area, the music came through more clearly, the rain and lashing wind buffered by the tree cover. It wasn’t what you’d expect; it was the kind of music you’d hear at a strip club––the bump and grind of the beat, the torchy, slow tease of the sax. Brazenly sexual. Just as we stepped out onto the asphalt, I saw movement––a figure darting between several parked cars and running towards the entrance to the parking lot. 

“Hello…,” I called out. 

The figure slowed, turned, came towards us––two skinny dudes in swimsuits, matted wet hair, and goosed-bumped pale white flesh. 

“Sam.” A girls voice, “Sam is that you?”

The voice had a choked, fraught quality, yet sounded familiar. The figure came into a shaft of light from the windows. I recognized her immediately; it was Kori, but something wasn’t right about everything I was seeing. She was wrapped in a man’s trench coat, bare legs, and feet below. And her face was heavily made up, in a way I’d never seen before––flaming red lipstick, Cleopatra eyes, glitter on one broad brown cheek. She was a full-blooded Yurok Indian, somewhat older than I, maybe 18 by then. 

“Kori!” I said again. 

She stumbled towards us and I could see the tears on her cheeks, black from the mascara, the lipstick smudged downward at the edges like a grieving clown. She fell against me and pulled me tight, burying her face in my neck. She sobbed out my name.

 “Sam, Sam, Sammy…”

Hot tears tracked down my neck and across chilled flesh and one clavicle. “Kori,” I said, “Kori, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

Her hands clutched me tight and the trench coat fell away. She was completely naked, except for some tasseled pasties on her breasts. I could feel her body against mine. Marcel seemed frozen in place, his mouth agape, completely spooked. 

She spun away from me quickly, pulled the trench coat around her and ran towards the entrance, her bare feet splashing through the puddles. She disappeared in the trees, the light no longer able to reach her. 

Marcel, gasped. “What in god’s name was that? She was naked, old man, completely naked.”

I nodded. I could still feel her tears, her mouth against my neck, her clutching fingers. “Let’s go,” I said, “before we freeze to death.”

The entranceway was open. The dining area and offices dark, the music coming from a private banquet room towards the back. An edge of light from beneath the broad double doors. I pushed it open, Marcel just behind me. The room was mostly dark except for a spotlight on a small stage set up in the middle of it. Cocktail tables, loaded with bottles, circled it. Some figures seated at a few of those tables. A pall of cigarette smoke shrouding everything.

A voice––loud and angry: “Take off that damn music!”

A man lifted the needle off a turntable in the corner as the overhead lights went on, faces turning and finding us standing in the doorway. I gaped––a hazy tableau before us that my 14-year-old mind refused to process. Seven or eight men in suits, some seated, some standing. A man lying on the floor, obviously drunk, his pants around his ankles, his exposed parts mashed against the floor. Several other men wearing no pants, crisp ties in place, with the yacht club insignia on them, dress shirts dangling, hiding the engorged bits. Florid faces, eyes staring, frozen––the way you’d gaze at an alien from another planet. A twitchy energy buzzing through the room and through those portly bodies that seemed dangerous––like a pack of wolves or coyotes in the full-blown frenzy of the hunt. Heads turned. Eyes pinned us in the doorway. The guy who shouted was slow to swivel and, when he did, I recognized him––Bob Turner, the richest man in town.

At first Bob acted like he’d seen a ghost. His mouth opened, but nothing came out. He was also pants-less. His big hands pawed the air as if he was trying to clear away the smoke to see more clearly.

“What are you doing here? This is a private event!” he snarled.

I could hardly get any words out. I stammered, made odd noises and then, with a kind of breathless formality, said, “Excuse us, but our boat capsized and we need to make a call.”

Bob staggered and stepped closer as if he had to make sure we weren’t a chimera caused by  his almost blind-drunk state. 

“What do we have here? Two little sailors?” He laughed then choked it off as he saw everyone around him scrambling for their pants and shrinking back into the shadows. “What in the hell were you doing sailing in this kind of weather?”

Marcel piped up, a tremor in his voice. “An error in judgement, sir. We won’t do it again.” 

“I’ll say you won’t do it again. You come on this property again and I’ll have you shot.”

“Yes, sir,” Marcel said.

Bob peered at me. “Aren’t you Sammy, the Continetti brat?”

“Yes,” I said. “We just want to make a call so someone can pick us up, and then we’ll be gone.”

Bob staggered a little and seemed to realize that he wasn’t wearing his pants. He pulled his shirttails closed, demurely, and cleared his throat. 

“The phone’s in the front office, make your call and then wait outside the gate.” 

“Okay,” I said.

“Get out,” he grunted. 

And we hustled out.

We were picked up by Oscar in the family station wagon. He didn’t ask about the boat, or what we were doing, or give any lectures. And he actually seemed sober. He simply told us to get in and drove away. Later he glanced in the rearview mirror at Marcel and said––

“Your mother’s hysterical. I’m beginning to believe that she might really love you.” And then, “Marcel, if you plan on pulling any more of these toweringly stupid stunts in the future you should probably learn to swim.” 

There was no smart-alecky retort from Marcel. Nothing about how smart it might be to jump into breaking waves headfirst while drunk. Nothing. I glanced at him and he was staring out the window. The fear was still in his eyes––a fear I’d never seen before. I could tell he hated it, hated being afraid, and something told me this was a lesson that would go unheeded. 

I started out talking about two people that changed my life even though I had no real relationship with them. I guess you figured out that one of them was Bob Turner. Big Bob reminded everyone of Hoss (Dan Blocker) from Bonanza. I knew him because he was always in the local paper––his great grinning mug, shovel in hand as they broke ground on the new hospital, or on a redevelopment, all of them with a backchannel to his pocket. He drove a noisy El Camino with straight pipes, as if he were still a teenager. Hailed people on the street, clamped a big hand on their shoulders and squeezed––an LBJ move––and you knew they were getting an earful about something that was dear to Bob’s wallet. Not a bootstrap guy––not by a longshot. Heir to a lumber empire that his grandfather started at the turn of the century. That was still going, but Bob had expanded this empire into real estate and development. He bought up all the land around the town figuring it had to expand, and if it did, he’d cash in. His wheeling and dealing were legendary: He wanted to develop a mall on the wetlands and mudflats of the upper bay and tried to get the county to backfill it under the pretext that the wetlands were a breeding ground for mosquitos and disease. That one was stalled after the local paper started writing about it. 

Then he became mayor and tried to sell the city his land for another development of his right off the main square. That one he rammed through chiefly because he bought the paper and hired a new editor. He was also a driving force in slowing down and limiting all initiatives to save the last remaining redwoods. He lobbied politicians, gave away money, and harassed anyone that opposed him. Rumor had it that he hired some lumberjacks who worked for his company to beat up a popular botany professor at the college who had championed the idea of expanding Redwood National park. I’d seen the professor around town, he’d been clubbed and kicked in the face. He doddered around for a few weeks after with his cheekbone caved in below his right eye. I think he recovered, but not much later he took a job at another school.

Big Bob wasn’t mayor anymore, but with a bit of  outsized campaign spending, he installed someone that did his bidding. We all mocked Bob, the kids, and parents too, but the difference was the old folks respected him. Money and status still held sway in the Sixties for the silent majority. They just weren’t used to asking the right questions. I could see it in my dad, the way he accepted his fate, the way he kowtowed to people he thought were more successful than him. He’d get down on his knees and shine Bob’s shoes if he asked him––this I knew and it’s just one of reasons I held the big man in contempt. Still, I had never talked to Bob before that night at the club. 

Kori, the other familiar stranger,  I had talked to many times. I didn’t know her, didn’t have a relationship, but she was a presence that was more immediate and firsthand than Bob’s. As I said, she was older than I and from the Yurok tribe, just up the coast. She moved to town from the reservation when her father drowned in a fishing accident on the Klamath River. She went to our local high school and dropped out her junior year. Started running with a rough crowd––some other Yuroks, a couple of Portuguese toughs, and some tattooed country boys that had aspirations of starting a renegade biker gang. But their Harleys were pathetic, almost never ran, and were often substituted with Honda 90s with rusting racks. They looked extra pathetic in their leather jackets, engineer boots and drooping key chains with their asses pinned to some pathetic Japanese putt-putts.

Dropouts all, and drugsters of the first order. 

Sometimes they hung with a group of muscle-car meatheads––guys with souped up Camaros, Chargers, and sleek Stingrays. Bought them in their teens and were slaves to the monthly payments, guaranteeing a ticket to grueling mill work for the foreseeable future. They used to run informal drag races at the old airport in the dead of night. The story that got around to teenyboppers like me was that Kori had famously started the race, stark naked, standing between two cars, headlights illuminating her, two flashlights in her hands, which she raised above her head and then dropped.

I saw that scenario clearly in my mind for the next couple of years, an indelible image that seemed to signify something beyond even sex––something quite revolutionary. What exactly, I wasn’t sure.

With that image stuck in my head, my encounters with her were filled with drama. She knew me by sight, knew my name, and knew that her cheekbones, witchy dark eyes, and womanly body were all she needed to destroy my ability to think, talk, or even move like a normal human being. She’d tease and flirt when I walked home from school, books under my arm. I was a diligent student in those days––an avid reader. A picture of a goody-two-shoes, even as I cultivated lurid fantasies about her.

“Hey, big man,” she’d say as she pushed herself off the fender of some delinquent’s ride.  “Hey, Sammy, where you going? You wanna go down by the river with me and drink some wine? 

“You wanna go on a date?”

“You wanna take me home to your mother?”

“Hey, Sammy, how come you’re so cute?”

And if I had just gotten some terrible haircut, she’d say––

“Wow, Sammy boy that’s one gorgeous haircut. Can I run my hands through your hair?”

Usually, I could barely form words. I just sort of grinned, bobbed my head, and hurried off, followed by derisive laughter from the crew. But her teasing had a tenderness to it, a recognition of my youthful inexperience and, dare I imagine it, a fondness, too. She never made jokes about my dad the janitor, never called out my bookish ways, my follow-the-rules status. She seemed to know that being a dark-skinned, native American put her on a low rung in that town, and was loath to kick down. 

What I did see in her as the years passed was a sort of desperateness. Tougher guys around her. She seemed high or drunk more often. Her mother had thrown her out of the house, she lost her job waitressing at a truck stop, and someone told me she was couch surfing from up at the reservation in Big Lagoon all the way down south to Mendocino.  

Did I tell you she was beautiful? Does it matter? Was it the thing that drew me to her, made me feel almost worshipful about her? Yes and no. It was something else, something in my world view, even at that young age, which gravitated towards tragedy. She was a wounded soul and it took my heart away. I wanted to save her, to rescue her from those hoodlums, to be able to make her smile. To really smile. To look at me and smile––a smile of happiness that would save us both. 

I imagined her, but I never knew her.

“Mr. Continetti, you say that this is a religious belief, but you’ve never been to church, and it looks like, from the statements we have from your friends and neighbors, that even your parents weren’t regular churchgoers.”

They were sitting in front of me. Fat middle-aged boys, short sleeve white shirts, striped ties, bellies pushing against taut buttons. A trio of small-town businessmen who made up the county draft board––well fed, not yet fifty, their jowls erasing their jawlines. I recognized them all: good citizens like this went to church, attended meetings at the Chamber of Commerce and, of course, were ex members of the Big Lagoon yacht club. Bob Turner was talking: 

“And it also looks like”––he shuffled some papers on a desk nearby and glanced at piece of paper––“your father committed suicide back in ‘65.” He raised his eyes, propped his reading glasses up on his head and gazed at me. “Hardly something a good Catholic would do; it’s a mortal sin in that religion if I’m not mistaken.”

The knife blade of those words cut deep, even through the shimmering high. Yes, I was high, as high on weed as a Sunfish cresting a swell on a stormy night on Big Lagoon. I took a breath, composed myself:

“Yes, that’s right, sir. I am not a member of an established religion, but my claim of conscientious objector status, by law, does not have to be religious in nature, it simply has to be a deeply held moral or ethical belief. I think I’ve proved that in my application.”

“Your application was denied, that’s why you’re here at this appeal,” said one of the other good citizens, his eyes squinting with open contempt. He didn’t like what he was looking at. What was he looking at?––a long-haired hippie, a deviant, a drug-taking, unpatriotic, tear-it- down, hate America freak. Not far off the mark, really. “And in your appeal,” he waved my stapled, three page, poorly-typed appeal, “you offered no evidence to support this idea of a deeply held belief.”

Turner chimed in, with a smug glimmer in his eye, “And your supporting letters are pretty sketchy to say the least. They generally testify to your good character, but only one, a young man about your same age, seems to verify your so-called pacifism.”

I smiled. “Marcel Pratt.  He’s dead now. You sent him off to war and he’s dead.”

“He fought for his country. He died a hero.”

“Yeah, okay, I’ll buy that,” I said. “Sort of the opposite of you and the Korean war, isn’t that right, Mr. Turner? I heard you got yourself a deferment––something about a herniated disc?”  

This was not wise, antagonizing the man that was to pass judgement on me. Marcel would’ve had the talent to lay waste to this trio’s pretenses and fictions. Yet he let himself get drafted. It made no sense.

Turner’s mouth got tight. “We all serve in our own ways.” 

“Okay, well, his way got him dead. Dead and gone, and since my beliefs have nothing to do with the political implications of this war, I will say no more. By the way, his father Oscar Pratt is a semi-famous poet. I think he wrote a letter, too, said I had a “peaceful and lyrical soul. You should have seen the way he used to bodysurf in the ocean up at the Big Lagoon. Utterly fearless, like his son.” That “utterly” was a bit of Marcel coming though. “He’s still alive, but it seems like he’s pretty determined to drink himself to death. Not a great way to go, but by all accounts, not that much worse than drowning in the Mekong River after your boat’s been blown out of the water by the Vietcong.”  

By the look in their eyes, I was guessing that sarcasm was also the wrong approach. 

Bob shifted his eyes and shared looks with the other two executioners. “About this deeply held belief…”

I was too high; I was floating away. I had to stay in the room and focus and give answers and buttress my appeal with some strong words about my pacifism and non-violence. The trouble was that I was feeling anything but non-violent at the moment––more like a vengeful angel, a dark ray of atonement aimed at these good citizens. I was thinking of what they did to Kori––and of what happened to her after that night at the yacht club. I saw her around town a couple of times after that, but she was mostly alone, and wouldn’t meet my eyes. She looked strung out, the light in her eyes gone, the face worn and slack. She walked like a zombie, head down. About a month later they found her curled up in a doorway, dead, a paper bag with model-airplane glue in it.

The good news was that I was still alive, but not much else had gone well for me since that fateful day. I lost touch with Marcel––his family stopped coming up for the summer––and I started high school. I had a fairly uneventful journey into the land of romance and heartbreak, was introduced to a band of disaffected outcasts that became my refuge, plunged headfirst into the drug culture of the moment, and lasted until my junior year when they found my dad hanging from the still rings in the gym. I could not go back ever again. My mom fled to live with her spinster sister in the suburbs of the Bay Area, and I became officially adrift.

I was 17 years old. 

I worked odd jobs and partied with my high school friends. I turned 18, and thinking I had to do something with my life, I made a stab at getting away, with a short stint working as a carpenter in Denver, but came right back, aching with loneliness and despair. My dad’s death was a blow, but it was learning about Marcel that pretty much finished me. It seems like he daredeviled himself right into the army, even though he must’ve known it wasn’t for him, and didn’t believe in any of it. I saw it as a move aimed squarely at his father––a wounding blow that old Oscar, with all his arty pretense, would never recover from. 

Bob, on the other hand, was doing quite well. His score card was mixed, but definitely on the winning side. He suffered a couple losses: the yacht club was closed and torn down when the state decided to designate Big Lagoon as a wildlife refuge. Chalk that one up as a post mortem win for Kori. It was the Yurok tribe whose reservation abutted one side that lobbied for that change, and used their influence against the money and power Bob tried to exert. He also couldn’t get his shopping mall approved on the bay wetlands. But on the bright side he rammed through two pulp mills on property he owned out on the peninsula that created the bay. They promised to bring lots of jobs, but all-in-all they created perhaps only 300, while sending up a plume of stink from their stacks that wafted across the town every time the wind came out of the north/west which was just about always. I could smell it now. A smell of evil, not brimstone exactly, but death just the same.

I blinked and saw them staring at me. Had they asked me a question?

“Excuse me,” I said.

“This deeply held belief,” Bob said, “since it’s not based on any religious objections, how exactly are we to know that it’s not something you just made up to keep from being drafted?”

“I guess by the way I live my life,” I said. “By my actions.”

“Okay, let’s take a look at that,” said the last of the trio, a short, brutish man with a military buzz cut and tiny eyes. “Since you can’t give us any examples of these ‘Christ-like’ impulses, let me propose some scenarios. “What if––”

“We’re going to do what ifs? Is that fair?”

Bob chimed in, rubbing his hands with true alacrity. “Completely fair, Mr. Continetti. By the book in fact.”

My inquisitor continued: “What if someone was trying to kill you? Would you try to stop him any way you could?’

“Of course. I would defend myself.”

“You wouldn’t turn the other cheek?”

“You said he was trying to kill me. Turning the other cheek wouldn’t apply, because I’d be dead already.”

His eyes lit up, like he’d caught me. “So, you’d fight?’

“I’d try to stop him, but I’d try to do it in a way that wasn’t lethal.”

“But what if you couldn’t, what then?”

“I’d turn the other cheek.” And then I laughed. “This is stupid,” I said. But that laugh gave me away. It was a scared shitless laugh, a losing laugh, a timorous cry for help. I was falling apart, my heart pounding, flop sweat across my brow, my hands trembling. 

Bob slid up on the edge of his seat, you could feel the “hunt” in him––a predator with the scent. 

“You think it’s stupid, is that right? Okay so let’s take it a step further. You mother…”

“What about my mother?” I chirped.

“If someone was trying to kill her, would you kill them first? Everyone loves their mother, even someone like you. You’d want to be the good son; you’d want to stop this maniac from killing her. A man defends the things he loves, right? He fights for the things he loves like his country and family. Does one sick individual deserve to live and your mother deserve to die? No!” 

But Bob had taken it too far, made it too much like a speech instead of an interrogation. He could have had me, but his words actually helped me regain my footing. My cunning. My adventurous spirit. I met his eyes and smiled, a smile that was genuine, a smile simmered in about five years of sorrow and regret.

 “How about this,” I said. “What about if there were three men about to rape my sister? What should I do? Should I kill all of them, kill only one, to see if the rest ran away, or let her get raped?”

Bob sat back. He glanced at the other two men. Their eyes slid away. His voice was raspy with tension: “I think we’re done here, Mr. Continetti. We will inform you of our decision in two weeks.” 

I was awarded my C.O. status. Did I buy their silence?––I’m not sure, but the experience broke the spell that I seemed to be under for several years. I was spared from the killing fields of Vietnam and I took that as an omen to change things in my life. I got out of town. I went back to school and got a degree. I fell in love with Lydia Pratt, married, and had two children. Does that name sound familiar? It should––Lydia was Marcel’s younger sister. I  gave her short shrift earlier––a level-headed, bookish girl that wanted no part of her brother’s escapades. Somehow, she was able to navigate to a saner place as an adult. I ran into her in Golden Gate park during the Summer of Love in San Francisco. She had written me through the years and had filled me in on what happened to Marcel and the Pratt family––how Marcel, after that summer, became emotionally withdrawn and angry, his spirit crushed by his fear of not living up to his unruly and prodigious gifts. And, yes, he was gay, but not out of the closet––the whole joining the army gambit a sort of headlong sprint away from himself. 

I live in northern New Mexico now and teach history (a good profession for someone that can’t seem to forget anything), not far from the Shiprock Natural Landmark––a foreboding rock formation that rises from the high desert plain like the hull of a ship. I’ve never been back to my home town, not even for a visit. I heard Bob Turner lived a long and happy life, died peacefully in his sleep, and that there’s even a statue of him in the square. Oscar and Renata drank themselves to death 20 years ago, and Lydia died just last year. I’ve started dating again at the age of 70 and am now seeing a fellow professor who’s a full-blooded Navaho. I’m quite sure her resemblance to Kori––those broad cheeks and dark eyes––brought all this back like someone turning a switch on inside me. 

Why so far away from the fecund wetness of the great Pacific Northwest, you might ask? Is it equivalent to running away from something––and if, yes, what? Let’s leave it at this: I like the dry as dust feel out here, the open sky, the parched landscape. Water moves and changes; it looks different according to the weather and the color of the sky. I guess I’m looking for something more solid––unchangeable. A place where memories go to die, bleached like bones in the sun. 

Wish me luck. 

Didn’t work, did it? We can’t leave it at that, can we? You’re not going to let me get away with anything, I can see. O.K., what part don’t you believe? Perhaps if I let you ask the questions. 

DID YOU REALLY LEAVE AFTER THE DRAFT BOARD MEETING?

No. It was some time after that. 

HOW LONG AND WHAT WERE YOU DOING?

I hung around another nine months. It was not a good time for me. I spiraled into drugs and alcohol––speed to wake me up, marijuana to take away the jitters, alcohol to go to sleep. My few friends abandoned me and my mother was pressing me to sell the house because she needed the money. I was about to be homeless. What was I doing besides destroying myself? Well, I did take to following Bob Turner around. 

WHY WERE YOU FOLLOWING BOB TURNER AROUND?

I wasn’t sure at the time, but I got to know all his daily and weekly routines. He was a man of habit. 

DID BOB TURNER REALLY LIVE A LONG AND HAPPY LIFE?

Happy, I can’t vouch for, but as for the “long part,” he was brutally murdered nine months after my draft board meeting. So that was a lie.

HOW DID HE DIE?

I was following him down by the waterfront one night. He kept a girlfriend there and usually visited her about twice a week. I was leaning against the railing in the shadows when I saw him come out, walk out to the end of the pier and light up a cigar, in a kind of fat-boy, post coital glow. In front of me was a garbage can with an empty bottle of Thunderbird fortified wine. I picked it up. Mind you, I was drunk and high, and barely able to recognize my own hand. It seemed to have a life of its own. I gripped the bottle by the neck, and like a malfunctioning robot I staggered towards Bob. He turned, looked up, the cigar ember glowing in his eyes, recognized me, and said only one thing––

“Oh, god no!”

––as if he knew this was coming and had waited for it all this time. And then I hit him with the bottle. It shattered in my hand, cut my palm deeply and left a gash across Bob’s forehead. Blood gushed, his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped forward. I caught him under the arms, and with a kind of adrenalized, super human strength, flung him over the rail and into the bay.

They found him the next day on those mudflats he was looking to sell. It was after that that I left. And, yes, I was running from something. I think it’s safe to say I’m not a pacifist. Satisfied?

ONE MORE THING: IF YOU WERE WHO YOU ARE NOW––OLDER, SOBER, AND NOT ON DRUGS, WOULD YOU DO IT AGAIN?

I am staring at the scar on my hand now and then out at the massive Shiprock formation in the distance, wishing there were things I did not know. But the scar tells me that I do know. The rock tells me my time here is short. There will be no statues, no monument, no edifice to my passing. Gone like the dust. My edifice is the scar. Kori and Marcel and even Bob are marked on my body. It’s enough for now. The answer is yes.

Yes, I would.

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Thomas Thonson is a screenwriter and writer, living in Los Angeles (the belly of the beast). He has three self-published books on Amazon and has published seven short stories in Madcap Review, Spotlong Review, Broadkill Review, Open Ceilings Magazine, and Pipeline Artists among others. Also a shit-ton of screenplays to pay the bills.