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by Ben Weise
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Another Memorial Day Weekend. How many has it been? Spider webs. Sometimes I even forget what day it is. Never mind.
It’s high time again. Nature preening its colors. Parks and beaches opening up. People of all makes and models testing their legs. Testing the water. People in looser clothing spreading their blankets and their talk with summer winking around the corner like a girl with a secret.
But it wasn’t always that way.
“Dumb ass Cracker” you called me when we first hooked up. I remember. I also remember your hate. The crosses burning your eyeballs. Bodies dangling from tree limbs. You said I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. But you – Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis… Rosa Parks and King… The Fire Next Time… Watts burning… and Newark – you knew all about that. Hell, you could’ve probably taught a course on it.
But here it is. Half a century later. Flags pouring from windows. Flags growing in the street like weeds. Parades and lollypops. Got to honor our men and women in uniform keeping America safe. Making it great again. Hallelujah. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.
Still you and I found a way to bridge the gap although it took a while. Your brothers didn’t like it. Called you “Oreo.” You told me not to worry about it. That you didn’t. When I asked you what it meant, you just shook your head and smiled the way you always did when confronted by ignorance.
We were in the perimeter drinking beer. Passing a joint back and forth and the sky like a big black kettle with a zillion fire flies. You’d been talking about your family. About your old man who worked odd jobs when he wasn’t driving a Greyhound bus. And your mom sewing and taking in other people’s laundry while raising seven kids. That’s when you got quiet. Said you wanted to go to college when you got back and study law like Thurgood Marshall. Put them in a proper house in a decent neighborhood. Change the world for black folks.
But we had our laughs too. Honey bucket details. Penny ante and matching girlfriends. You looking at the picture of mine and telling me all you’d need is one date with her and she’d be cooking you breakfast. Thought you’d get a rise out of me on that one, didn’t you? And the night we left our guard post in battalion. Remember that? To watch a porn movie? Jesus! “Take a bust or fill two thousand sand bags,” the CO yelled with his eyebrows jumping up and down like they weren’t attached. Two days later, he was rotated out and we’d filled barely three hundred between us. Tickled the hell out of you.
Whatever made you join the Green Machine? You never did let on about that. Damn sure wasn’t love of country. But I knew better than to keep asking. The way you’d sit on your bunk staring holes through anything that passed across your field of vision. It was eerie. Almost like you knew.
Then the day we played tag football and me going all out to catch one of your bombs, only I caught a root instead. Busted up my foot. Who was to know that’d be the last time? You standing there with that shit-eating grin on your face shouting “dumb ass Cracker” as the truck left for the triage.
Funny how all that comes back after so many years. The feeling of the place. The anxiety and resignation. The brokenness and the suffering. Those poor bastards. Some of them lying under sheets where there should’ve been legs. Others with their faces hidden except for a breathing hole. And me hobbling around on crutches like I was one of them. At some point, this young Marine comes up to me. He’s got gauze covering half his neck and upper body. Third degree burn I could tell by the smell. He asks me if I got hit. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him what happened. So I said “yeah.”
The next day, back at battalion, I hear they had incoming. “Knocked out the generator,” somebody tells me. “And the mess tent got hit. No milk till they get a new shipment.” Then on to our hooch. It reeks of pot. It stinks of anger. No welcome. No music. No nothing. “What’s going on?” I want to know. Nobody saying a thing like I’m some kind of pariah. Finally, “Anybody seen Chicago?” They look away. They wring their fisted hands. “Guys! Where’s Chicago?” I catch a faceless voice from the far corner: “He’s gone, man.” “Gone where?” Another voice. Loud. Savage. “He’s dead you fucking prick. He got smoked.”
The years don’t make it easier.
Once upon a time a black boy and a white boy found a way to each other. They transcended ugliness and for a few short months exalted in their youth and likeness. They laughed and shared and dreamed of justice. Of equality in a world divided by bigotry.
A kid nicknamed Chicago, who appeared and as quickly disappeared from my life. Snuffed out like a candle. Still, his light shines. Still he continues to live in my heart though it’s blackened by a cowardly lie. No wound there visible to the undiscerning eye. Just a recurring voice on any given day from some netherworld corner that has its way with me.
Would I do it again? Lie? Would an honest response have lessened the physical pain of my interlocutor? Would it have regrown arms and legs and rebuilt shattered lives?
It’s late in the day. My walls don’t speak of courage on the battlefield. My bed is soft and warm like the woman beside me whose hand on my chest assuages the guilt. Until the cock crows. Until the last formation and the final rollcall.
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Ben Weise is a retired adjunct professor of ESL and Academic Writing at Rutgers University. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Tipton Poetry Journal, As You Were, Silhouette Press, Cosmographia Books, Wanderlust, and Blue Nostalgia.
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