Shooting the Moon Read online

  “The point is, son, you’re going to college in six months.” He tapped slowly at first, then worked up to rat-a-tat-tat speed. “The University of Georgia, class of 1973. Then medical school. You want to enlist after that, I’ll hand you the pen myself.”

  TJ sawed at his T-bone in his slow, deliberate way. “College is the coward’s way out, sir. How can I go to college when guys I played football with are fighting in Vietnam? Eddie McNeil’s missing in action.”

  The Colonel took a deep breath before he spoke again. I wondered if he was thinking about Eddie, who had been one of TJ’s best friends when TJ was a junior and Eddie was a senior and could do no wrong on the football field or any other place he decided to show up. He went straight from his graduation gown into an Army uniform, and a few months later shipped out to Vietnam. Two weeks ago, the day after Valentine’s Day, the principal had announced over the loudspeaker that Eddie was MIA. TJ had been pale as a ghost when I saw him get off the bus that afternoon, and when he told me why, I’d wanted to say something to him, but I didn’t know what to say except, “He’s probably okay.”

  TJ didn’t say anything in reply. He just walked inside the house and closed the door to his room behind him.

  “You won’t find Eddie when you go over there, son,” the Colonel finally said. “You can’t put yourself on a one-man mission to go find your friend in the jungle.”

  I eyeballed TJ, trying to figure out if Eddie McNeil was his real reason for enlisting, or if he was looking for any reason to go. We’d been playing war all our lives, and more than once TJ had said he’d like to get a taste of real combat, to see if he could handle it. Sometime around tenth grade, when it became clear TJ was talented at science, the Colonel started pushing medical school on him, and slowly TJ had come around to the Colonel’s point of view, but I would have bet money that part of him still wanted to test his mettle in battle.

  Now TJ said, “I want to go to Vietnam because it’s the right thing to do, sir. That’s the only reason. I’ll go to college when I get back.”

  Up to this point, my mother had not said a word. This was her way. She liked to let everyone else talk first, to get what they had up their craw out of their system before she weighed in. But now she leaned forward, her eyes rimmed in red, and said, “If you want to be a hero, then go to medical school. You can save hundreds of lives when the time comes.”

  “I’ve already signed the papers,” TJ said. He tapped lightly against his salad plate with his fork, like he was underlining his point. “I’m going to join the Medical Corps. It’ll be good experience.”

  “You’ve got time to change your mind, son,” the Colonel said. “It says so right there in the fine print.”

  TJ stared him down. “Do you really expect me to do that, sir?”

  “We’ll talk about it in a few days,” the Colonel said, cutting into his steak. “When you’ve had more time to think about what you’ve done.”

  “You should go, TJ.” I leaned over and grabbed his wrist, like I’d pull him all the way over there myself if I had to. “I’d go to Vietnam in a minute if they let me. Besides, you don’t know when we’ll get another war.”

  “Oh, honey,” my mother said. “You don’t know anything about war. You’re just a little girl.”

  “I’m starting eighth grade in September, which is hardly a little girl, and I read Time magazine,” I argued. “I know plenty about war.”

  “That’s enough, Jamie,” the Colonel said. But I thought deep down he had to be proud of me, and of TJ, too. He’d raised us, after all. He’d raised us to believe in the Army way. And as far as I was concerned, he’d raised us right.

  three

  Once we started playing cards together, Private Hollister and I fit right in with each other. If one of us had been a lot better than the other, we probably wouldn’t have become friends. But we were evenly matched, and even better than that, we both were good. It made us admire one another. It made us easy with each other.

  “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” I asked one morning as Private Hollister was dealing cards for a game of rummy. We didn’t know it yet, but this would become our game for the summer. Once we got started playing gin, it never occurred to us to play anything else.

  “Seven. All of us Bs, too,” he said, flipping the cards into neat piles.

  “You’re bees?”

  “Like the letter B,” he explained. “Bucky, Brenda, Betsy, Burl, Barney, Barbara, Bitsy, and Bob.”

  “You’ve got a Bitsy and a Betsy?”

  “Something wrong with that?”

  I picked up my cards and started sorting them out. “No, it just seems like it could get confusing, having two people with names that are so close together.”

  “Nah,” Private Hollister said, fanning out his cards and studying them. “Bitsy’s about six foot tall, and Betsy’s a tiny thing. You could never mistake them for one another.”

  I couldn’t believe how bad my hand was. The closest I had to anything was a pair of twos. No runs, no three-of-a-kinds. It was all deadwood. I needed to make some good draws and fast. I leaned forward and took a card from the top of the deck. “So who’s your parents’ favorite out of all the kids?” I asked, happy to see that I’d picked up the two of clubs. I discarded an ace.

  “My dad don’t have a favorite,” Private Hollister said, picking up my discard. “He’s pretty much lost interest in all of us. But I’m my mom’s favorite, no doubt about it. Who do you think taught me how to play cards? It’s because I stayed home all the time from school, acting like I was sick. I didn’t much like school.”

  “Why not?”

  Private Hollister discarded. “Because school didn’t much like me. Mom taught me cards when I stayed home, and I got so good she didn’t mind me skipping.”

  “My brother’s always been the Colonel’s favorite,” I said. “But it’s not like the Colonel doesn’t like me, too. He does. He and TJ just have a special bond together.”

  “That’s how it is with fathers and sons,” Private Hollister said. “Well, not with me and my dad, but I’ve seen it in a lot of other families. Usually it has to do with sports.”

  I nodded. “Football. Even though I like football too.”

  “Yeah, but you’re a girl. No father dreams of seeing his daughter playing in the NFL. Maybe you should try out for cheerleading.”

  I put down my cards. “Do I look like the cheer-leading type to you?”

  Private Hollister studied me for a minute. “You might not be peppy enough, that’s true. But you’ll be cute in a couple of years. I can tell. Bitsy was plain as day until she was fourteen, and then, look out, buddy. That girl blossomed like a sunflower.”

  “Hell’s bells,” I said. “I don’t want to be a stupid cheerleader.”

  “You know, I think it’s against the rules to cuss in here,” Private Hollister said. He checked his cards again, then knocked, signaling that he was ready to count points. “Anyway, you’re too young to cuss.”

  “I’ll be thirteen in December,” I told him for what had to have been the hundredth time that week. “Thirteen is old enough for cussing. So’s twelve, for that matter.”

  “For boys, maybe. Not for girls. Girls ain’t supposed to cuss at all.”

  “That’s a stupid rule. Either everybody cusses or nobody cusses.”

  “Well, no cussing when we’ve got customers. That’s a fair rule.”

  “I suppose.”

  I laid down my hand and counted the points from my unmatched cards. I’d managed to come back from a lousy deal, but that wasn’t enough to beat Private Hollister.

  “Let’s keep track of our games, you want to?” Private Hollister asked. He pulled a pen from his uniform pocket. “That’s what me and Mom do at home. Just so you know who has bragging rights at the end of the day.” Then he looked at me and grinned. “You know, I think you’re working out here all right. I wasn’t so sure you would at first.”

  “What do you mean, you
didn’t think I’d work out?” I asked, indignant.

  Private Hollister took a second to write down our scores. “Well, (a) for one thing, you’re a girl, and a lot of girls couldn’t handle being around GIs all the time without getting all silly and giggly and just acting dumb about it. Turned out you’re not that way, but I didn’t know it at the time. And (b) you seemed kind of young. I think it’s because you’re short or something. Or maybe it was the way you were dressed. Of course, that was before I knew you were a card shark.”

  My first day of work I’d shown up in a white blouse, a pair of pressed Bermuda shorts, and penny loafers, no socks. It wasn’t the first time I’d been to the rec center, but it was the neatest I’d ever dressed for a visit. On gray winter Sunday afternoons, the Colonel, TJ, and I would play pool on the pockmarked, cigarette-scarred green tables, and I’d wear a sweatshirt and old jeans, happy to be shed of my church clothes for the day. The Colonel was an excellent pool player, and he was teaching me and TJ all his tricks. My mother did not like this one bit. She thought it was inappropriate for a girl my age, on the very edge of womanhood, to play pool and spend Sunday afternoons in a smoke-filled room alongside young soldiers who were not above using colorful language if the situation called for it.

  The Colonel, on the other hand, thought any girl worth her salt should be able to shoot a game of eightball. So when he told me midsummer that if I didn’t get over the fact that my two best friends had moved away within two weeks of each other, both of their families reassigned overseas, and if I didn’t quit moping around on the living-room couch eating Snickers bars and reading old comic books, he’d get me a job peeling tomatoes at the mess hall, I suggested that I could volunteer at the rec center instead. I told him it would give me the opportunity to serve soldiers, which I knew he’d like, since one of his favorite sayings was, “Service to others is the highest calling.”

  I’d never been to the rec center on a weekday morning, and I’d been surprised when no crack of pool balls or ringing pinball machines greeted me my first day of work. The only sound in the whole place was the insect-whir of a ceiling fan and the soft flipping of pages. A soldier sat slouched behind the checkout desk, his face hidden behind a Superman comic book. When he looked up and saw me, he shoved the comic book into a drawer and came to attention.

  “I’m the new volunteer,” I said, hoping the tone of my voice would let him know that comic book reading was fine by me, although I was not a DC Comics fan myself, preferring the Marvel heroes as a general rule. “Are you the person I need to talk to?”

  He reddened a little and stood. “Private Hollister, miss,” he said. “Private First Class Bucky Hollister. My CO told me what your name was, but now I don’t rightly remember.”

  I stuck out my hand. “Jamie Dexter. I’m very excited to be working here.”

  Private Hollister looked at my hand as though I’d just offered him a live trout to do the tango with. His face got even redder, and so did his ears, which stuck out about a mile in either direction. He couldn’t have been a day over nineteen.

  “Well, if you want to know the truth,” he said, backing away a few steps, like he was going to do whatever it took to avoid shaking hands with me, “there’s not a whole lot to do here in the mornings. Most guys don’t show up until lunchtime.”

  “Maybe you should serve doughnuts in the morning,” I said, an idea that appealed to me as soon as I came up with it. “People will show up early if there are doughnuts around.”

  “I don’t know about that, miss,” Private Hollister said. “I’d have to check with my CO.”

  After we’d been playing cards together a week or so, Private Hollister admitted he never checked anything with his CO. “But if you’re still looking for a project, I thought of something you could do,” he said to me after he’d written down the scores for our final hand in his notebook. “You know anything about developing film?”

  “Not really,” I told him. “TJ’s the photographer in our family. He took pictures for the school paper when it wasn’t football season. He printed all the pictures himself.”

  In fact, most of TJ’s allowance and his tips from bagging groceries at the commissary went to film, camera equipment, and photography magazines. Most of my allowance went to Archie comics, Snickers bars, and overdue library book fines.

  “You interested in learning something? Because I’ve got all these guys who come in here with questions about how to develop their film in the darkroom back there,” Private Hollister said, nodding toward the hallway that led to the rec center’s arts and crafts area. “Personally, I don’t know a thing about it. Might be good if somebody who worked here did.”

  “I’d rather play cards,” I told him. “I’m not really all that interested in photography.”

  But then I got TJ’s first package, and suddenly I was very interested.

  four

  TJ’s first letter to me wasn’t a letter at all. It was a roll of film.

  The package was waiting on the front hall table when I got home from the rec center on a Friday afternoon. I rushed to tear it open, but my mother stepped in between me and the mail.

  “Let’s wait until your father gets home, honey,” she said, picking up the package and holding it out of reach. “TJ’s first letter from Vietnam is a special occasion.”

  I paced around the house for the rest of the afternoon, wanting so bad to get my hand on TJ’s letter. TJ’s package. Well, maybe not a big package. Maybe it was more like a padded envelope. But something was in there. Something from the war. Every five minutes I’d call out to my mother, “The Colonel won’t mind if we open it. He’s not sentimental about things like letters.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised by how sentimental your father is. He’s an old softy,” my mother would call back.

  I harrumphed at that. The Colonel was as soft as a granite wall.

  But I have to admit he seemed almost emotional when he saw TJ’s package on the table. “Why don’t we take a look at this thing,” he said, and I could tell he was as eager as I was to see what was inside. Normally the Colonel hardly even said hello when he walked in the door after work. He liked to go upstairs and change, first thing.

  The three of us sat down on the living room couch, and the Colonel used his penknife to open the padded envelope. He shook it a bit, and a black film canister dropped out. The Colonel examined it, and handed it to me. There was a note attached. “‘Jamie: No facilities here,’” I read. “‘Please develop and send contact sheets.’”

  No signature. No message about where he was or what war was like. Just a roll of film. And what did he mean Send contact sheets? You didn’t get contact sheets when the PX developed your film. All you got were pictures and negatives. One reason TJ said he learned to develop his own film is that he liked having all of his pictures printed on one sheet of paper, to see which ones were worth blowing up to eight by ten. Why hadn’t he written Please have developed at PX? He knew I didn’t have the faintest idea about how to develop film.

  But I’d known TJ long enough to know this about him: When it came to photography, he did not make casual mistakes. If he’d wanted me to take it to the PX, he would have written, Take it to the PX. In fact, if he’d wanted it taken to the PX, he would have just mailed it to my mother.

  But he hadn’t. He’d sent my mother and the Colonel a boring letter about the flight over and mess-hall food. “‘Everything comes out of a tin can,’” the Colonel read. “‘Even the meat. Even the chocolate cream pie. One guy I know actually wrote his mom asking her to send fresh tomatoes. I’d like to see that box when he opens it.’”

  The Colonel and my mother laughed, like that was some great joke. Personally I couldn’t care less that he’d made friends with a guy all the way from Alaska or that he’d seen a cockroach bigger than his fist on his first night in-country, information also included in the letter. What did that have to do with anything important?

  He’d sent me the roll of film with the i
nstructions to develop it. And the more I thought about it, the more I felt like that was fine by me. No one else was going to see TJ’s war pictures before I saw them. Maybe I hadn’t gotten a bona fide letter, but the pictures were my property.

  “You know who can help me with this?” I asked Private Hollister the next day, showing him the film. “I mean, how do you even get the film out?”

  “I told you, nobody around here really knows.” Private Hollister was wrapping tape around a Ping-Pong paddle handle as he spoke, cussing under his breath when he wrapped his fingers, too. Overall, the job appeared to be slow going. “I mean, there are a few guys who come in and use the darkroom, but it’s hard to say when they’ll show up. This one guy? Brezinski? All he takes pictures of are tanks. And there’s Sergeant Byrd, he comes in a lot in the afternoon. He’s a strange dude, though.”

  “What’s so strange about him?”

  “I heard he was at Khe Sanh with 1st Cav, and that it did something to him. I see him around, and once in a while he’s friendly, but mostly he’s just up in his own head. He goes off post with a camera by himself whenever he’s off duty. You almost always see him with a camera.”

  “What’s Khe Sanh?” I asked, hopping up to take a seat on a pool table, a practice strictly forbidden when anyone was in the main room, but one that Private Hollister let me get away with if no one else was there.

  “It’s a Marine base, only Army units are there too. It’s a real bad spot, way out in the boonies. They say you’re lucky if you don’t get shot just getting on or off the plane at the landing strip. That’s happened to plenty of guys. Guys who were done with their tours and heading out to go back to the States.”

  “You think he’d teach me to develop film?”

  Private Hollister peeled a strip of tape from his hand. “I guess so. He’s strange, but he seems nice enough. Usually you see him here around three.”