Arriving here, I must meet the dead.

The boys I knew at that time had all lost their lives in Vietnam. The ones who survived as maimed and crippled had lost their lives as well.

Many simply blew their brains out. When they fully realized what had become of them, it was over.

Jimmy and I had taken to smuggling draft dodgers to Canada.

There were three of us. Jimmy Dog, Charleen, and I was the official space cadet.

“He’s always been like that,” Jimmy told Charleen. “He just stares at things. Sometimes for hours. He thinks there’s a beast in the middle of the lake.”

“I’ve noticed.”

One of us always stayed back at the farm. We called this role the Housekeeper. Mainly, you just made sure that the three of us could hole up there if the FBI came too close. It was not unlike maintaining a bunker. Food, supplies, batteries, radio, maps.

We called them Roger Dodgers. The route was wildly circuitous. We entered Canada way up north, then wandered down to Toronto. We always left Roger Dodger at a church. Different churches. Churches were very active then in the antiwar movement.

We never saw Roger again. The two of us driving Roger would then head back to the farm the way we came. We would hole up there until another Roger Dodger from a church group would arrive.

We never got caught. The penalties were decades in prison. Dodging the draft was a felony. A life of crime only was.

“I think she knows.”

Jimmy had always been more paranoid than I was. And I was paranoid about a lot of things. The FBI had not found us yet. We were pretty hard to find. I am a criminal. Basic training was laying low.

“About what.”

“Us. About us.”

My eyes to the sky. “Jim, everyone knows about us.”

He bit his lower lip.

Canada was another country. Another culture. An unwilling asylum.

The War in Vietnam created two Americas. There is division in America today. It is what is called a legacy. But during the War in Vietnam, we had taken to the streets, and we were angry. That spring, My Lai.

A month later, Martin Luther King was shot dead. Entire cities burned. America smelled like a Holy Eucharist of rancid piss, bell, book, and candle.

In June, Robert Kennedy. I was a teenager working on the Kennedy campaign. In Indiana, we were going door to door.

The culture was out of control. Boys I knew wanted to get to Canada and fast. The FBI was right behind them.

The three of us had become quite radicalized. Jimmy looked the part with the long hair. I wasn’t quite there yet. Charleen was still the girl next door. She loved us. It was a problem. Jimmy and I had grown up together on the farm. It would have been difficult for anyone to have been able to insert themselves into that. Charleen did it with the monastic diligence it required.

The farm had been abandoned a long time ago. People gravitated to cities. Rabbits, dust, weeds, and a little lake that was really a farm pond.

The suits are coming. The suits are coming. The suits are coming. Ring the bells. Saddle my horse. The midnight ride of criminals.

Churches had created smuggling rings. The three of us wanted in. To do something. Just standing there watching — going door to door with our stupid pamphlets would change nothing and we knew it — the old white American men cutting anyone down who stood in their fat way was not acceptable. You either put your life or your future on the line or go home.

We had gone home, but with the caveat that our futures and our lives could dodge down the rabbit hole at any moment.

Dodging authority was what we were about, and what we did.

The three of us naked at the pond. A christening. A confirmation. A laying on of hands. Jim’s fat, dark dick. Sex was the sign of the cross. Genuflect. I was a criminal.

Hunting season was upon us. You could hear hunters and their shotguns in the autumn hills. When we both fucked her, I could feel him hard inside her ass. Blind men are desolate. Sorrow would move to Canada. Abandonment had ripped its roots as the ground bled wild and plain and swallowing unforgivingly in dread meant the battalion of thieves — we were stealing your sons away — we had become was still traveling at break-neck speed in a GTO whose rearview mirror reflected watch the West crumble and fall and burn, baby, burn.

We always returned from Toronto after midnight. Turn the headlights off when you pull into the drive. Rumble in the shadows like a purring cat, then park it. I grew tired of the smell of potato chip bags and Oreos.

I would strip and run for the pond Charleen called a lake. I died with every kid we delivered to a church. Every Roger Dodger looking up at the tall church steeples as we tore away. His bitter pain a taste upon my tongue of all the people he had loved and had left behind.

I had done that, too. Perhaps not like the kid staring up at the steeples of a church. But loving Jimmy Dog meant that in no uncertain terms, you were leaving everything else you knew way, way behind.

There was a wicked beast who lived in the liquid blackness of the middle of the lake. My job was to swim around him and not allow my heart to stop before I had crossed to the other side.

Tim Barrus

Tim Barrus Blog

Posts tagged with draft-dodgers

SWIMMING TO THE OTHER SIDE: I THINK SHE KNOWS