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“I did a lot of motorcycle-riding. It’s fun, to try to be good with a machine …”
“Fantastic, kid!” The nice thing about not talking very much is that when you do talk, you can startle people so much that they listen. “Now. Look,” I said. “I’ve heard of some pretty dumb things, some people who really sold themselves down the river, but you take the cake, about. You have all these great things going for you, like a real live person, and yet there you are in Salt Lake at Dentist School. Please tell me… why?”
He set his pop bottle down with a heavy clink on the floor. “I owe it to my folks,” he said. “They’ve paid my way …”
“You owe it to your folks to be happy. Don’t you? They’ve got no right to force you into something where you aren’t happy.”
“Maybe.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe that’s the trouble … it’s too easy to stay in the system, the way things are. If I did drop out, I’d get sucked up in the draft, and then where would I be?”
“Ah—Stu?” I said. I wanted to talk about his school, but the last words frightened me. “What’s patriotism, do you imagine? What do you think it means?”
There was the longest silence then, that I had heard all summer. The boy was trying, he was turning it over and over in his mind. And he was coming up with nothing. I lay there and listened to him think, wondering if the same emptiness was in the minds of all the other coll
ege youth around the country. If it was, the United States of America was facing some more difficult times.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “I don’t know … what… patriotism … is.”
“No wonder you’re scared of the draft, then, fella,” I snapped. “This patriotism stuff is three words: Gratitude. For. Country. You go out, climb your mountains, you drive your motorcycles; I can fly wherever I want, write what I want to write, and I can jump all over the government whenever it’s being stupid. How many guys do you think have been shot all to bits so you and I can run our lives the way we want? Hundred thousand guys? Million guys?”
Stu sat on the pillows, his hands clasped behind his head, looking across the dark room.
“So we take a year or two or five out of this fantastic freedom,” I said, “and we say, ‘Hey, country, thanks!’ “
At that moment I wasn’t talking to Stu MacPherson, but to all my poor vacant young countrymen who couldn’t understand, whining about the draft in the midst of sacred rare beautiful liberty.
I wanted to box them all up and ship them to some slave nation, and make them stay there until they were ready to fight their way back home. But if I nailed the crates down on them, I’d be destroying the very freedom I wished them to see. I had to let them whine, and pray they’d see the picture before they broke the country into jelly-blobs of self-pity.
Stu was silent. I didn’t want him to talk. I prayed, very deeply, that in the silence, he was listening.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BY TEN O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING the oven Illinois was a kiln. The grass scorched beneath our feet. There was a very light hot breeze, a low oriental woodwind through the flying wires as we sat in the shade under the wing.
“OK, Stu-babe, here is a map. I shall take my knife and hurl it into the map. Wherever the knife hits, we go.”
I tossed the knife down end over end, and to my surprise, the blade struck hard and firm through the map. A good omen. We checked the slit eagerly.
“Great,” I said. “We are supposed to go land in the Mississippi River. Thanks a lot, knife.”
We tried again and again, and the only result was a map full of holes. There was a reason not to fly to any place the knife suggested.
A car stopped, and a man and two boys walked toward us.
“When they get out of the car, they are already sold,” Stu said. “Do we want to fly anybody today, or just get going?”
“Might as well fly ’em.”
Stu went to work. “Hi, folks.”
“You with the airplane?”
“Yes, sir!”
“We want to fly.”
“Glad to have you aboard. Why don’t you just step right over here …” He broke off in mid-sentence. “Hey, look, Dick. A biplane.”
It came small and quiet, whispering in from the west, easing down toward us through the sky.
