Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

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.