Cementville by Paulette Livers Page B

war.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she whispers and leans her head toward the window and lets herself drift again. But the stranger doesn’t seem to mind this, and when he starts talking, she doesn’t mind either. She is in that half-present hovering state, one foot on this side, one on the other. MaLou doesn’t open her eyes, listening like a child playing possum. His voice is the way she remembers her father’s, soothingwith that backcountry lilt; he could be singing, for all the melody in it. It’s doleful, that honey accent, mountain-thick— dulcet is the word. But she suspects he somehow knows her secret, that she is a promiscuous borrower from the stories of other people’s calamities.
    â€œDaniel,” he says. “He hadn’t even started high school, last time I saw him. He’s the first of us to do that. Graduate high school. And boy, don’t you know a week later that government letter arrives.”
    MaLou sits up, checks her soft drink can to see if there’s anything left. “He wasn’t in the Guard unit with the others?”
    He shakes his head ruefully. “Guard’s filled up with everybody who’s somebody. People like us get the draft, pure and simple.”
    At Christmas dinner her uncle had talked about the National Guard, how it had gotten more difficult to get in. People saw it as an honorable way to serve your country without getting blown up for nothing in Vietnam. Donnie and Boyd and the others were in their third year in the Guard when word came that the unit was heading to Texas for intensive training, and shipping out in a matter of weeks. Uncle Rafe wasn’t sure which was worse, the sense of betrayal or the complete and utter bewilderment. Some of the parents had all piled together into Buck Farber’s real estate van and driven to the capitol to protest. The governor couldn’t see them, but they crowded into their congressman’s office and gave him what for. “And what for?” Rafe had ended the story, his face red, as he attacked the Christmas turkey with his carving knife. “Nothing.” It was the first holiday meal their only son had ever missed. Aunt Martha had to remind Rafe they hadn’t yet said the grace.
    A pale heat sneaks over MaLou’s left shoulder; the sun is coming up. The bus glides southwesterly. The stranger’s head has dropped back onto the headrest and in this naked moment when his eyes are closed and hers are open she examines his features. The shock of persimmon hair over his forehead. It is longer than that of other young men she has known. It curls softly around his neck like the tail of a fox kit. The profile dominated by a cliff of a brow, the fine orange hairs curly above deep eye sockets. She has not been able togain the color of his irises yet, but given that fair skin, she imagines them close to the cerulean of her Aunt Martha’s morning glories, the ones that climbed the porch rail in late summer, big as salad plates. MaLou shifts slightly toward him.
    â€œHe was cleaning fish behind Mama’s trailer,” he says. “Daniel. I had tied a few things in a pillowcase and was heading out. Didn’t see him there at the edge of the woods. He called out to me, ‘Where you off to, Byard?’ I said, ‘I’ll be back directly, little brother.’”
    â€œWhere were you going?” That hunger is up in her now. MaLou would swallow his story whole.
    â€œWhere any draft-age man with half a brain in his noggin was going. Canada.”
    â€œYou’ve been on the run all this time?”
    â€œGoing on five years. Take a look at the regular Army these days. It’s pretty much the poor kids and the coloreds, and them few that enlist of their own free will. I don’t know why I’m blabbing on like this to you. You could be Selective Service for all I know, hunting my sorry ass down.” He does not sound as if this is a prospect