Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

But one boy—flush-cheeked and small for his age—pulled Cal aside during morning assembly and told him he was unique in God’s eyes. “I know,” the boy said, “because I am too. I can’t touch my toes, you see. I have unusually tight hamstrings.” He bent over to demonstrate, and his fingertips barely reached his kneecaps. “We’re each meant for a special thing,” the boy said, and when Cal asked what his special thing was, the boy shrugged and said the two of them would have to wait to find out.

They didn’t talk about it. Neither of them wanted the other to feel bad. Neither of them wanted to be the one with a problem—if, indeed, there was a problem, which there might not be, because neither of them knew how this was supposed to go and who had time to stop and assess? Problems, in this way, win out. Problems conquer the world.

Her advice was to care less. Even better—don’t care at all. She didn’t mean about Cal, but about the things that came out of his mouth. “You have to love him, and you have to let him love you back. But you don’t have to care about every dumb thing he says, because I can guarantee you, tomorrow he’s going to say something dumber.” Becky’s eyes widened at the irreverence of that. “It’s not just Cal,” Ida said. “It’s all of them. They think they’ve got all the brains, but if they did, they wouldn’t walk around sounding like idiots half the time.

The psychologist was around sixty and had white hair and black-framed glasses and a weariness in his face that Felix trusted.

When she read about the atomic bombings, she gasped at the number of people who suddenly found themselves spirited—like the pictures she’d seen from Pompeii: casts of men and women holding one another, or frozen mid-crawl. What did they all do, suddenly, without their lives? Nothing, perhaps. They drifted and cried, not yet realizing they could be done crying. Or they drifted and waited for bearings, not yet realizing that bearings didn’t matter anymore.

Lillian Salt had thinning blond hair and a face that knew disdain better than any other expression.

Part of what had appealed to her about Columbus, when she was eighteen, was its vastness—all there was to see and do, and the chance to be a part of it. What appealed now was its vast anonymity, its ability to cloak people in its density, so that you could live your life without answering too many questions or encountering too many expectations. Right up to your last moments, if you wanted, so that the most lasting impression you left on your neighbors was that they’d known nothing about you.

Cal told her, one evening on their after-dinner walk, that he just wanted the kid to find a job he kept for more than six months. Skip was nixing his chances of liking anything, with that kind of impatience.

Skip’s death had killed all the years he was supposed to have and all the things he was going to do—and one of those things was being Tom’s friend. His death had killed their friendship, their shared time and stories together as kids—now only Tom’s. It had killed their chance to be middle-aged, and old together, and make fun of each other for dropping their teeth and stuff. It had killed all that—for a war that made no fucking sense.

Her eyes are lively, but the skin that holds them in place looks like it might be tired of doing so.

Despite his moment of clarity about how so many people, like Vincent (for God’s sake, like Skip and Theo), had it far worse than he did, he’ll spend days thinking of himself as an extremely fucked-over individual.

In April of 1975, the war that killed Skip—and, when all the counting was done and the civilian death toll included, close to two and a half million other people—finally came to an end, twenty-one years after it started. The North Vietnamese, having intended to take Saigon from the beginning, took Saigon, and the country. By that time, the Watergate scandal had come and gone; Nixon had resigned, been pardoned, and was in California writing his memoirs. A jet trail of pain and grief hung in the sky over families still trying to understand why they’d had to sacrifice their sons, and yet—or therefore—America began gearing up for its bicentennial. Here and there, in gift shops and clothing boutiques and grocery stores, anything that could be manufactured in red, white, and blue began to appear—from snack cakes to coolers to steering-wheel covers to golf bags. Also, another rocket was being sent into space, this one to meet up with the Russians, and because Snoopy signed on to promote it, everyone forgot about the Red Scare. They bought rings that told them what mood they were in. They bought CB radios on which they had no one to talk to. They bought pet rocks. They put down shag carpeting and raked it each morning to lift the pile. They heard on the radio, over and over again, the promise that love would keep them together, and the song Elton John did about freedom—that wonderful fringe benefit of American life that had been doled out unevenly since the dawn of the Republic.