Death Coming Up the Hill (4 page)

to Sadie Hawkins

 

with you Saturday

night. I'm gonna need you to

cheer me up, okay?”

★  ★  ★

When Angela picked

me up that night, Mom was gone

and Dad was watching

 

Lawrence Welk. He just

waved at me when I told him

I was going out

 

with some friends. Before

we even got to her car,

Angela stopped, threw

 

her long arms around

me, and planted a wet kiss

right on my mouth. We

 

stood in the shadows

of my garage, holding and

kissing like I was

 

going off to war

the next morning. Then she sighed.

“I needed that, Ashe.

 

God knows, I really

needed that.” She felt soft and

strong and smelled faintly

 

of cinnamon. I

struggled to steady my voice—

“Happy to oblige”—

 

and kissed her again.

We finally drove to the

dance but never left

 

her car. Instead of

dancing, we talked and talked, not

about Vietnam,

 

civil rights, riots,

or anything else but us:

Angela and Ashe.

 

After our Sadie's

date, Angela wanted to

meet my family,

 

but that was the last

thing I wanted. My home life

couldn't take any

 

more drama. I told

her that my parents were on

the brink of divorce,

 

so a meet-up was

not a good idea. “But my

mom would love you,” I

 

said, and left it at

that. But Angela's too smart

for that. “What about

 

your dad?” She smiled. “Would

he love me, too?” Trying to

avoid her eyes, I

 

shrugged and said, “Well, Dad's

complicated,” and changed the

subject. How could I

 

explain my dad's old-

fashioned attitudes about

war? I didn't want

 

to risk losing my

girlfriend and my family

both at the same time.

★  ★  ★

At home, raw tension

entangled our lives. Mom's and

Dad's orbits rarely

 

intersected, and

when they did, they passed in a

silence as cold as

 

outer space. Most nights,

Dad worked late, Mom attended

protest rallies, and

 

I'd eat alone, do

my homework, and go to bed

without seeing them.

 

Sometimes I'd lie in

bed, wondering if things could

have been different.

★  ★  ★

I came home from school

one day and found my mom in

the kitchen, crying

 

into the phone. Tears

streaked her red cheeks, and when she

saw me, she wiped her

 

eyes, turned her back to

me, said, “Gotta go,” and hung

up, looking guilty.

 

I knew she didn't

want to talk about why she

was crying. It was

 

probably about

Dad, a rally, or something

heavy. I had planned

 

to tell her about

Angela, but she didn't

need anything else

 

to worry about,

so I headed upstairs to

tune out. Something was

 

going on with her,

and I didn't like the tell-

tale signs. She'd shift from

 

being mellow to

being emotional, and

then ravenously

 

hungry. Could it be

marijuana? She could buy

it at those rallies

 

or anywhere on

campus. It was hard to think

my mom had become

 

a pothead, but who

could blame her? Maybe getting

high helped her deal with

 

her failed marriage and

all the crap going on in

the world around her.

 

Angela and I

had our first “disagreement”

over a movie.

 

She wanted to see

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,

but I wanted to

 

see
Bonnie and Clyde,

and as we argued about

it, I felt myself

 

acting like my dad.

I stopped. Arguing. Talking.

Looking, listening,

 

that was better, way

better, and the longer I

looked at her, the less

 

I cared about what

movie we went to. I just

wanted to be with

 

her. Standing outside

the theater, watching the

soft curve of her lips

 

and the light from the

marquee glittering in her

chocolate brown eyes,

 

I wondered when Dad

stopped feeling this way about

Mom. When did they start

 

to care more about

ideas than each other? I

took Angela's hand,

 

pulled her to the box

office, and bought two tickets

to
Guess Who's Coming

 

to Dinner.
Even

if I had known in advance

that she was going

 

to cry through the whole

movie, I wouldn't have changed

anything that night.

 

Angela's parents

welcomed me into their home,

and their kindness stirred

 

a rush of envy

in me. They appeared to be

everything I'd hoped

 

my own family

could have been. Mr. Turner,

a political

 

science professor

at ASU, shook my hand

like we were old friends.

 

“Angela's told us

a lot about you, so we're

glad to finally

 

meet the famous Ashe

Douglas.” We sat around their

kitchen table and

 

talked and laughed and ate

peanut butter cookies and

filled the room with a

 

warmth I'd never known.

But I wrecked it all when I

asked about their son.

 

“Kelly?” Angela's

mother faded like someone

had punched her off switch.

 

“He . . .” A panicked look

to her husband, and he slid

his hand over hers,

 

patting it gently

while he told me they hadn't

heard anything from

 

Kelly, Angela's

older brother, for a while.

“Army mail isn't

 

very efficient,

especially coming out

of Vietnam, and

 

our son's never been

much of a letter writer,

but still, we worry.

 

When you've got a boy

at war, it's tough not knowing

if he's okay or

 

not.” Angela nudged

me with her foot and nodded

at the door. “I'm sure

 

he's fine,” she said. “But

he should know we need to hear

from him more often.”

★  ★  ★

Angela walked me

outside and told me how her

brother's silence had

 

tied her family

up in knots. “Dad handles it,

but it's killing my

 

mother. She can't stop

worrying about him, if

he's dead—or worse.” When

 

I wondered what was

worse than dead, Angela said,

“Missing in action.”

 

Seventeen is my

favorite prime number, and

not because I'm a

 

number nerd. Dad wore

seventeen in college, just

like Dizzy Dean, his

 

old baseball hero.

I wore it too, of course, but

it wasn't just sports

 

that made me like it.

When I was young, Mom really

loved a Beatles song

 

that had the line, “Well,

she was just seventeen, you

know what I mean . . . ,” and

 

I thought it was cool

to hear a song based on my

birthday, and then I

 

started noticing

seventeens everywhere, and

it made me feel like

 

I belonged to a

secret club. The Celtics' John

Havlicek wears my

 

number, and it's the

number of syllables in

a haiku poem,

 

and it's the day in

May when
Brown versus Board of

Education
was

 

announced, and it's the

age you can give blood, join the

military, and

 

get married, and it's

the name of a magazine

for girls, and it's the

 

number of years a

weird kind of cicada lives

underground before

 

coming out to mate,

and it's the day I was born,

and for years I'd been

 

looking forward to

turning seventeen on May

seventeenth. I can't

 

say for sure what I

expected to happen the

day when my birthday

 

stars all aligned, but

I figured something special

would take place, something

 

I'd never forget.

In a way, I felt like that

cicada, and I

 

was ready to dig

out from underground and get

on with adult life.

★  ★  ★

But my birthday got

off to a lousy start when

I heard on the news

 

that the past two weeks

were the bloodiest ever.

More than one thousand

 

Americans died

in Vietnam in those two

weeks, and Angela's

 

family still had

no word from Kelly, and Mom

was in bed acting

 

sick the whole time. How

could I celebrate when so

much was going wrong?

 

When you start to love

someone like Angela, you

learn how to talk and

 

how to listen, and

you start talking about things

you've never before

 

dared to say out loud—

all kinds of things: dreams, goals, and

fears. Angela planned

 

to change the world by

joining the Peace Corps and then

teaching grade school kids.

 

“If we want to change

things,” she said, “that's where we've got

to start.” I loved her

 

confidence, her faith

in the future, and I wished

that I had some of

 

her rock-solid self-

assurance. I thought a girl

like her feared nothing,

 

but I was wrong. She

was worried about what might

happen if Kelly

 

turned out to be a

POW or, worse,

missing in action.

 

“I don't know if Mom

could take it.” Her voice soft now,

edged with dread. “I don't

 

know if
I
could take

it.” She sighed, and a heavy

silence filled the air

 

between us before

she spoke again. “And sometimes

I'm afraid, just plain

 

afraid of all the

craziness in the world right

now. There's so much I

 

want to do, Ashe, but

what if something happens that

blows up all my dreams?”

 

The ache in her voice

surprised me, and I didn't

know what to say, but

 

I knew that if I

had to, I'd gladly dive on

a grenade for her.

★  ★  ★

Angela knew that

I was afraid of getting

drafted and sent to

 

Vietnam. She knew

it wasn't politics that

made me oppose the

 

war, it was plain old

fear. I can't explain it; I

was as loyal as

 

the next guy, but the

thought of battle turned my spine

to ice. I didn't

 

want to die, but I

also worried that in a

life-and-death battle,

 

my hesitation,

my fear might cause someone else

to die. With bullets

 

flying and mortar

shells exploding all around,

would I have the guts

 

to sacrifice my

life to save my buddies? If

a live grenade rolled

 

into camp, it would

kill me if I covered it

or if I didn't.

 

In my heart I knew

that if I went to war, I

wouldn't make it back—

 

or if I did make