Mrs. Skinner, my English teacher, had cornered me after school one day near the end and said I was wavering between a B and a B- in her class, that she couldn't make up her mind. Then she changed the subject, asked me about Burnet; she said she was dying to hear any news at all before she left for the summer to study in Greece. She admitted to having had a runin with Burnet's old man and that she didn't have the courage to go visit him. But if I could do this one little thing, just go and talk to Burnet Sr. and find out if his son was still alive and kicking, well, it would just plain be appreciated.
It was a bribe, I suppose. And I could tell that Mrs. Skinner was not a person used to bribing her students. Prim and proper were words that fit Mrs. Skinner, whose favourite poet was Keats, whose eyes were amazingly blue and whose skin was an olive sort of colour. She must have been part Acadian. I had always liked her and she had always liked me, but she had always liked Burnet better, fooled by Burnet's good looks and brutish charm. Mrs. Skinner would have passed Burnet if he had stayed all year, even if he did little more than blow his nose on the final exam.
“Sure,” I told Mrs. Skinner. “I'm not exactly on good terms with his old man though, you understand this?”
“No one is,” she said. “I've asked other students. They've refused. But Burnet was your friend.” Then she fluttered her eyes, hesitated. Had she intended the past tense?
“I guess he's still my friend,” I said. “I just haven't heard from him lately.”
There were no dogs at the Burnet homestead. I heard them though in the distance, chasing after some poor wild creature. I knocked on the kitchen door. No answer. I heard a TV on inside. Through the window I could see Burnet's old man sitting at the kitchen table. I knocked again on the window and it rattled in its frame.
When Burnet Sr. looked up, I waved as if I was an old friend. He looked at me like I was someone dropping by to sell him a vacuum cleaner. When I waved a second time and pointed to the door, he reluctantly got up from the table, clicked off
The Price is Right
and opened the door.
“Yeah?” he asked.
“I came by to ask if you've heard from your son,” I said.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Burnet Sr. spit in my face. “Why would I hear from him? He doesn't live here any more. How the hell should I know what he's doing?” He left me standing there with the door open, walked back and sat down at the bare wooden table. Before him was an open bottle of Keith's and a plateful of what appeared to be baked beans. There was an open loaf of Ben's Holsum White Bread beside it. After a slug of beer, he grabbed a slice of white bread, sopped it in the beans and stuffed it in his face. With his mouth full, he looked back at me. “Come in and close the fucking door.”
So I came in and closed the fucking door.
“Sit down somewhere. Anywhere.”
But there wasn't much to choose from. A three-legged chair, a green vinyl-covered chesterfield with springs protruding. I opted for a seat on a pile of firewood sitting squarely in the middle of the room. It looked like the most stable thing around.
“Aw fuck,” Burnet's father said, like he had just been pushed over some invisible limit inside his head, as if I had been the final straw to a really bad day. He spit the beans and bread back onto the plate in one great tan bolus and he pushed his plate away. “Now my goddamn dinner's cold.”
It was my fault of course. “Sorry. I don't mean to keep you from your meal. It's just that some of us at school, we really wanted to know about Burnet.”
The man got up and slugged back what was left of the beer, then threw the bottle into the case of empties behind the wood stove. Burnet Sr. studied a black and blue thumb nail like he
was reading a newspaper. “Who ever cared a fuck about him? No one. Only me.”
“I cared,” I offered. “He was my friend.” I did the same as Mrs. Skinner.
Was.
“That's a laugh,” he said, belching loudly to punctuate his point. I was remembering the morning Burnet and I had lifted the car off of his old man's hand. All that hate, all that anger. This was not, I admitted to myself, a family that was easy to get close to.
“How is he?” I asked. All I could do was pursue the point.
“He ain't never coming back. That's how he is,” Burnet Sr. said as he picked up his plate on the table and scraped the cold beans and bread into the garbage, then threw the plate in the sink where it broke in two. “It's almost like I never even had a son.”
“What happened?” I stood up now and went over to him. I dreaded hearing the words, but my worst fears had come true.
“What happened was that he turned chicken shit. He got over there and he just fucking couldn't take it.”
“You mean he's still alive?”
“He won't be if he ever comes back here.” The man's eyes were kind of glazed over. Rage or sadness or something of both mixed together.
“But he's not dead?” I asked. I already had him buried and gone. Now Burnet was back in the world of the living, some-where. God knew where. “Is he still in Vietnam?”
“My guess is that he's got a fucking job wiping the ass of Ho Chi Minh by now. He deserted. Went AWOL the first day in the field. That's what he did.” Big Burnet's fist came down hard on the table. He glared at me like it was all my fault.
I tried to conjure up a picture of Burnet alone in the jungles of Southeast Asia, on his own, AWOL. He was in deep shit. Where would he go? What would he do? “Maybe he just figured out that killing was the wrong thing to do,” I said.
Burnet picked up the chair he was sitting in by the back and brought it down hard on the table until it splintered. “If
he ever comes back here, I'll turn him in,” he said. “If I don't kill him first. Now get out of here.”
I guess I had what I had come for. I stood up and began to back slowly towards the door. “I'm sorry,” I said. “You might be wrong about him. It might be something other than just chicken. He might have just figured out he was doing the wrong thing.”
“Shut up and get out!”
I gingerly pulled open the door, slipped out and began to walk away. I was halfway across the muddy, littered yard when I heard the door open again. I was almost afraid to turn around, afraid I'd see him standing there with his twelve-gauge aimed at me. I had always known this was going to be a dangerous mission. I should have settled for the B-.
“Wait,” Burnet Sr. said. I spun around to see he was out the door. He heaved what was left of the chair into the wild rose bushes and walked towards me. I stood stone still. He didn't have a gun. Just a pair of clenched fists. He walked up so close that he was breathing down on me. I could smell his beer breath and his foul stench. I looked him right in the eyes as he spoke. “If you tell anyone,
anyone,
I'll break your fucking neck.”
I shook my head. I could never explain to the raging father what I felt just then. I didn't think less of Burnet for what he did. I was beginning to think that maybe he had finally woken up. Even if he went AWOL because he was scared, that was okay by me. I figured it might have been the best that could happen. If he could keep his butt out of jail and alive and find his way to a safe haven somewhere, he might just get his act together. “I'm not going to tell anyone,” I said. But it wasn't the threat. It was because people wouldn't understand. They'd jump to the wrong conclusions. I wanted Burnet back here to tell his own story. But I didn't want his old man to think I was intimidated. So I looked the ugly old fart in the eye and added, “If you hear from him, you tell him he still has friends here. You tell him to get in touch with me.” Then I let fly a long, sleek
line of spit onto the ground, the sort of act of defiance Burnet's old man would understand. I was, by nature, not a spitter, but Burnet was. His old man would recognize the style of my spit, know that his son had taught me to spit that way; he would recognize that it landed perilously close to his foot. He would wonder what other tricks his son had taught me. I turned to go.
Mrs. Skinner would not hear the news. I would not even tell Gwen, for despite what I had said to his old man, I still worried that Gwen might be attracted to Burnet if he came back, especially now
if he
had turned into a deserter. I guess I really didn't want him to come back, but I hoped he was safe some-where. I would not tell a living soul what his father had said.
There is nothing to report of graduation because it is a blur. I had bought a car by then, an old 1957 Chevy station wagon that someone had driven here from Alberta so it was not all rusted out. After graduation, Gwen and I were going to drive on down the Shore to a “secret spot.” We were going to make love for the first time. We wanted to be alone somewhere away from Whalebone Island, away from our past selves. I had bought a pack of twelve condoms. I had a sleeping bag in the back of the car. There was a bottle of cheap wine rolling around under the back seat.
Somewhere that night on a dark lonely and beautiful stretch of sand, my car parked right on the beach with waves lapping near my tires, we were going to make love over and over and sort out what we were going to do for the rest of our lives. With the graduation ceremony ended, we turned down the various invitations to get drunk with our fellow graduates. We said goodbye to our parents who made feeble protests about being out too late but knew that whatever we were up to, we would not be dissuaded.
It should have been the most natural thing in the world for us. There would be no guilt, no feelings of mistrust. It was a
cool night, so instead of lying out on the beach at Excelsior Point, I uncurled the sleeping bag in the back of the station wagon and we both took all our clothes off. At first we lay in each others arms, hardly moving. The night was perfectly quiet and still. I could hear the blood pounding in my own ears, I knew this was a thing to approach slowly, that we had all night, that nothing could ruin it, that it was the beginning of a new phase for us. We'd been through so much together, knew each other so intimately, had shared so much that I felt like Gwen was already part of me. This mere physical thing was the obvious and ultimate commemoration of who we were.
She licked her tongue inside my ear and then I slid down to kiss her mouth, her slender, beautiful neck, and further down to where I put my mouth around her nipple and took a gentle suck on it which made her body twitch. I was prepared to keep descending to kiss her body all over, to test her reactions to anything I could do if it would bring her pleasure. My eyes closed, my tongue exploring the contours of her flesh, I discovered that, right then, I was more interested in giving her pleasure than caring about my own. Was this the way other men felt? Was this the key to love? Not the taking but the giving? It seemed like a wonderful concept and I continued to caress and kiss, to explore with my tongue. I could keep this up all night. As I burrowed further down, licking the light fine hair that followed below her navel, she suddenly stopped me and pulled me back up.
“What?” I asked. I was drunk and stoned and delirious with something, but had not even remembered to open the bottle of wine.
She kissed me hard on the mouth in that funny way we had of kissing until our teeth clicked hard against each other. Then she held my head in her two hands. “There's something I have to tell you first. Otherwise you'll think that I tricked you.”
“Tricked me? What are you talking about? Do you think I'm letting you take advantage of me?”
“No. It's not that.”
“What is it?” I asked. A light wind had come up out of the northeast. I looked away form her, up and away towards the sea, towards the dark clouds scudding along further up the coast.
“I'm going to Boston tomorrow for the summer,” she said abruptly.
“Why? What's going on? You didn't tell me.”
She was very cool now, very clinical. “It might be longer than the summer. I have to see.”
“See what?” My world was shattered.
“See if I can do any good. I'm going to work for the peace movement. I want to do something to help stop the war. I can't do that from here.”
Before I could speak again, before I could question, I suddenly understood Gwen and I knew that our island world was too small to contain her. I knew she wanted to protest, to work in whatever way she could to fix the world. It was selfless, not merely ambitious, and I knew she was capable of doing some real good. But I also realized that she was now willing to sacrifice me, to sacrifice us, for this more noble cause. And that made me very angry.
“You can come with me if you want,” she said, kissing me on the forehead like I was a little boy.
“No. I don't want to leave. I want you to stay.” But it was hopeless.
“I have to do this,” she said then kissed me again, sucking my tongue into her mouth, wanting to make up by drawing me back into the interrupted lovemaking.
At first all desire had fled. My mind whirled. I wanted to turn back the clock by minutes, by hours, to any time before the bomb had been dropped. I wanted to be there on the gravel road again, a boy, watching as the strange American car pulls up and out steps Tennessee Ernie Phillips. I wanted to be there looking at the little girl in the backseat who would hold my love, my adoration for years. I wanted to start all over again.
Gwen became more animated despite my confusion and seeming indifference. Now it was she who began to explore down my body with her tongue. That soft tongue dancing over my bony chest. I was ready to get up, to open the door, and plunge out into the dark night, go running naked and screaming along the beach, crying, wailing in pain to let her know how much all this hurt, how much harm she was doing to me. But I couldn't move.
And then the anger swelled up in me again. I grabbed Gwen's hair, twisting it in my fist, pulled her face back up to mine and assaulted her mouth with a kiss, biting her lip and pushing my hand down to grab one of her breasts. Love had turned to lust and the lust was mingled with the hurt pride of the male ego and pain. I still wanted Gwen, I still wanted her then and there but I knew it was no longer making love. It would be something else.