Osprey Island

What Roddy saw on Suzy Chizek’s face in that moment of revelation was, he thought, pride. And as quickly as that new “truth” was born in her, his truth and his confession—the truth—slipped away. He fought back tears, which she read as the pain of a veteran of that terrible, wrong, awful war, the pain of having to deceive his mother, pain that made so much about Roddy Jacobs suddenly make so much sense.

Really, he fought back tears because he knew that in the truth she saw, his actions were valiant. In her eyes, he was suddenly brave. He could see the life she saw: unable to live with the idea of himself as a deserter, he’d enlisted, fought, seen unimaginable things, been injured, come home. In Suzy’s eyes, Roddy had known firsthand the horrors and survived to share his stories, to feed the strength of the antiwar movement and crusade for an end to the brutality. This story painted Roddy as so much more a man than the peace-love hippies who danced away to Canada while Suzy Chizek’s brother got his body blown apart in a flaming rice paddy. Roddy now joined ranks with the bravest of the brave—he’d fought and then renounced—and it was the only story of Roddy’s past that Suzy would ever be able to imagine now. She had too much Osprey in her to see otherwise. Too much Roderick Senior and Chas Chizek and Bud. Too much football and fireworks. Too much red, white, and blue. When Suzy Chizek left Osprey Island and went to college and joined the long-haired, braless, barefoot protests, she’d believed with a passion born of anger not at the U.S. government but at the fact that her brother Chas was dead. Hers was a passionate adolescent rebellion against everything her parents believed, everything she’d been raised to believe, and everything that had conspired to produce a world in which her brother didn’t get to be alive.

When he couldn’t hold back the tears any longer, Roddy let them come, and he let Suzy Chizek rock him and hold him as he cried.

Because the actual truth was this: On August 8, 1968, Roddy Jacobs turned eighteen and mailed the goddamned draft registration, because it was easier to mail it than not to mail it. And then he waited. It was the waiting he couldn’t take. Waiting and not knowing.

He lasted one month—the longest month of his life—and then he marched into the draft board and said, “I volunteer, I’ll fight. Send me anywhere. I don’t care.” At that point he was surprised to pass the psych exam. Because someone should have seen that he was far from all right.

It was after he volunteered that he ran, which was like signing himself up for the Most Wanted list. So then there was fleeing, and getting caught, and doing time. Then getting out, and then President Ford coming along, offering pardon, but by then there were enough people who thought the whole thing had been bullshit from the start, so he didn’t have trouble finding work, getting by.

The scar—the scar Suzy’d held under her hand as if to hold his body together in one piece—the scar was from fighting, yes. He’d gotten the injury in a bar in Tucson shortly after he’d fled, in a fight with a vet who’d called him a traitor and a coward and pushed him down. Roddy stumbled, beer in hand, and fell hard against the pool table, his beer bottle breaking on impact between the table and his body. The felt surface was ruined, and Roddy suffered wounds that required emergency surgery in a hospital where the cops had no trouble catching up with him, leveling charges of draft evasion. And that, as his mother would say, was that.

Fourteen

THE BROODINESS OF HENS A Brief Lesson in Avian Reproduction

The chicken, like the Mormon of old, is a polygamous creature. At any given moment, and with little pomp or circumstance, the male selects the female whose vent is closest to his own. He drops one wingto the ground, grabs his intended under the other wing, and mounts. Flapping his wings, the male balances, his vent flush against the hen’s.Transfer of sperm from his cloaca to her oviduct is swift; the male dismounts. An avian sex act lasts roughly fifteen seconds. It is only afterward, in fluffing her feathers, that the female appears to experience any satisfaction whatsoever.

—WALKER WINSTON, A Gentleman’s Guide to Raising Chooks