I Pledge Allegiance Read online

  That first day, we did what everybody did to a kid who got kept back. We teased and tormented him like the helpless, harmless hamster that he was. I didn’t even think anything of it. Matter of fact, I didn’t even think that he thought anything of it. I simply believed, in my lead box of a young boy’s head, that this was the way guys did stuff and everybody was more or less understanding of that situation.

  Until I found Rudi, on the way home, on his knees. I was walking on my own up Centre Street when I passed the turn splitting off into Moraine Street and South Huntington Avenue. And there were two of Rudi’s former classmates, big-shot fifth graders now, dumping the contents of Rudi’s book bag into the gutter, laughing. Rudi was in praying position, just off the curb.

  “You ain’t doin’ it right,” one of the kids said.

  “Of course he’s not doin’ it right. Rudi never did nothin’ right, which is why he’s in fourth grade forever. Right, Rudi-doody?”

  “That’s right,” said Rudi, hands folded, voice cracking.

  Right? Right? Okay, maybe this wasn’t way different from the stuff we were doing to him in the school yard, but … it wasn’t right.

  You know what else wasn’t right? When the two guys looked at me, I walked on.

  I left Rudi right there, on his knees, in the gutter, with all his books and pencils and papers splashed around him.

  I dreamed about it that night. I still dream it sometimes now.

  I didn’t bother Rudi the next day, though it was still a popular sport. I just couldn’t do it. Don’t get me wrong: This was not because I was a good guy all of a sudden and nobody else was. It was because I felt like a bad guy, and nobody else seemed to. I watched. I didn’t do anything to interfere with other people bothering Rudi, so I couldn’t have been all that good. But I also watched everybody else, and I could see that they didn’t see anything wrong with what they were doing. It was natural, it was the way of things, and they were all right.

  For some reason, though, I had an impulse. To invite friends home with me for the afternoon.

  So we walked together, me and Beck and Ivan, toward my house, the regular route.

  “What are we going to do?” Beck asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Stuff. The usual stuff.”

  “The usual stuff at your house is kind of boring, no offense,” said Ivan.

  “No offense, no problem,” I said. “I’ll work on it. It’ll be less boring.”

  Then we came up to Moraine Street. And there he was.

  Rudi, on his knees in the street, among all his things. Praying, just like yesterday.

  For several seconds we all just stood there, staring, taking in the scene. Actually, I was watching my friends while they took in the scene. As if I needed their reactions to tell me what I should think.

  I didn’t have to wait long.

  “Oh, no,” Beck said. “No.”

  “Uh-uh,” Ivan said, stomping toward the scene.

  Now I knew how to feel: outraged.

  “Hey,” Ivan said to the guys, the pair of big fifth graders named Arthur and Teddy we knew too well from hockey battles, and I knew too well from the day before.

  The two turned quickly and nervously. Then they changed right away to defiant, like you do when you know you’re guilty. “Hey what?” snapped Arthur.

  “Hey, leave the kid alone,” said Ivan.

  “What’s it to you?” asked Teddy.

  “He’s a friend of ours,” said Beck.

  Rudi, still on his knees, allowed himself a small smile.

  “Don’t get too excited,” Ivan said to Rudi.

  “Don’t lie. He’s nobody’s friend. Get lost and mind your own business.”

  I walked over to Rudi and pulled him up by the arm, since he didn’t seem capable of getting up on his own.

  “He’s our business,” said Beck firmly.

  So we were all standing there with the tension building. The big fifth graders looked tough up to a point. But there was enough school-yard history here — especially with Ivan — to know it wasn’t as simple as: older guys win. And their faces showed it.

  “Oh,” Teddy tried, “so it’s gonna be four on two, is it?”

  “Don’t be a jerk,” Ivan said. “This guy” — pointing his thumb at Rudi — “obviously doesn’t count. And this guy” — me — “couldn’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag.”

  Here was my chance to come up big. “Ah, I think I probably could,” I said.

  The point was made, anyway. Ivan and Beck stepped right up close to the big guys, and stood there and stood there.

  You could smell in the air how this was going. Ivan alone was enough of a force to settle this. We were all just waiting now to see how it was going to fizzle out.

  “Rudi, pick up your stuff,” Beck said, staring down Teddy the whole time.

  Rudi practically dove to the ground to collect his books and what all. The jerks took that as the break they needed. They walked, first backward, then turning away up Moraine Street. Arthur made an embarrassing little attempt at waving us off dismissively, but Ivan wouldn’t even let him get away with that much.

  “Try this again, boys,” he called out, “and you’ll be picking his stuff off the street next time. With your lips.”

  We watched them slither away, and it felt like a long time. Moraine Street is long, sloping down slightly to the pond, and by the time they crested it, they had checked back over their shoulders three times, slouching a little more each time they saw us again.

  That was a whippin’.

  That was our pal Ivan.

  “Thanks,” Rudi gushed, rushing up and shaking Ivan’s hand crazily.

  Ivan sneered at him, then took his book bag and dumped everything out again on the ground.

  That, too, was our pal Ivan.

  But Rudi was a lot happier picking his stuff up that time.

  And that was a moment, the moment. Something changed there for us as a foursome. Maybe it was kicked in by Rudi being needy and making us feel needed. It was as if we had adopted an orphan and we could never give him back. As if the responsibility changed us somehow. I don’t know for sure. What I do know for sure is that from then on we hung together, fought together, thought together, fought each other, from then on, forever. Something clicked there, that made us more than before, more than four.

  It made us, if it’s okay to say this, better.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  No, I Won’t Be Afraid,

  No, I Won’t Be Afraid

  When Ivan had his first punch-up with his old man, he stayed at my house for four days. When Rudi’s mother developed a habit of forgetting to pack him a lunch, Beck’s mom developed a habit of packing an extra sandwich and a second bag of Fritos into his.

  When my dad died, all three of the guys slept on my bedroom floor every night until I told them they could leave. Then they stayed until I told them they had to leave.

  We all chose the same high school when the time came. Even though Beck could have chosen some special genius school, he decided not to. Even though Rudi could have flunked out at any moment, he managed not to.

  And when the Vietnam War started pouring into my living room, just like everybody else’s living room, and I started getting nightmares, we all pledged none of us was going to go over there voluntarily. I just couldn’t live with it.

  Thursday night, Arboretum. Ivan and Rudi bring the drinks, I bring a bucket of Fontaine’s amazing boneless fried chicken, Beck brings a pan of his own butterscotch brownies made from scratch, because Beck is a freak. We meet at the top of Peters Hill to look out over treetops at the skyline and talk ragtime about the bigness of our futures and the smallness of Boston in comparison.

  I’m doing all that by myself for a while, as I’m the first one there. This chicken is amazing, and without the bones it is so easy to buzz through it. If they don’t arrive soon, I cannot be held responsible.

  I do like the skyline. I do like the city. It’s not t
oo small at all, really, and I believe I could be happy here for a long time to come. I’ll still talk ragtime, though.

  “Hey,” Beck says, tromping up behind me. “Want a brownie? They’re still warm.”

  I can smell them. I don’t even turn around.

  “Can’t have brownies yet. We’re still on savory.” I wave a piece of chicken in the air. Like a fish jumping to a fly, he comes alongside and snaps it out of my hand. He sits down next to me on the block of granite that serves as our bench, facing out at the city and the world on the far side of the city. “And the drinks are nowhere to be seen yet. Can’t do brownies without something to wash them down.”

  “Could try,” he says.

  “See, Beck, man, that’s where you start to worry me. That’s where your whole scientist thing starts to look like mad scientist.”

  “You think?”

  “I do. I know you are smarter than everybody everywhere, but sometimes that can get in the way. That’s why you need me, so my normal level of intelligence can keep you in touch with the rest of us.”

  He is examining the piece of chicken he has just bitten into. He is admiring it. “Thanks, Morris,” he says. “We’ll never discuss it again.”

  “Well, good. What are you ever going to do without me at college, Beck?”

  “I’ll just embarrass myself, Morris,” he says, putting a light headlock on me as we still stare in the same direction over Boston. I can hear inside his head as he chews.

  The truth is, his brownies are kind of dry. But I refuse to be the first person to tell him he’s failed at something.

  “Hey, is this what happens when I show up late?” Ivan asks.

  We turn to see him swaggering toward us, an open can of Moxie in one hand and four more hanging off the rings in his other.

  “Ugh,” I say, “again with the Moxie? That stuff tastes like carbonated tires.”

  “Quiet. Nobody needs Moxie more than you do.”

  “You were supposed to bring a full six,” Beck says, pulling a can off the ring.

  “Yeah, well,” Ivan says as I pluck another of the cans, “I mugged myself on the way over. I put up a brave fight, though. Where’s Bozo, anyway?”

  “Not here yet,” I say, and offer Ivan the chicken bucket. He reaches in and grabs a fistful of flesh, like he’s getting bait to go fishing.

  “Well, he better get here soon.”

  “Aw, you miss him,” Beck says.

  “Quiet, Brownie, I’m only thinking of you two.” He takes a seat on a boulder a few feet away and swallows a chunk of chicken whole, like a snake would with a frog.

  “Us?” Beck asks.

  “Yeah,” Ivan says, holding up the ring with two last cans dangling. “If Rudi doesn’t show up, what are you two gonna drink?”

  Fortunately, we don’t have to answer that, because Rudi comes walking up the face of the steep hill in front of us. It is not the normal way we come up, but the normal way of anything is always optional for Rudi. We watch him for a while, in the bluey evening light, and it seems to take him forever to reach us. It is a tough hill, but not this tough.

  “What’s that he’s carrying?” Beck asks.

  It’s white. It’s paper. It flaps in his hand in the light breeze, catching the remaining light as if it is some kind of signal flag he’s waving in surrender.

  Finally, he reaches the top of the hill, stands there silently in front of us. Kind of a cool picture, I think for a few seconds — Rudi standing tall with the skyline and the first stars hanging there behind him.

  But only for a few seconds. It becomes obvious pretty quickly that this is not cool at all.

  He holds the paper out in Beck’s direction — shoves it at him, really.

  “Does this mean what I think it means?” Rudi’s voice is crying. He’s not crying, is what he’d say, but his voice surely is. “Tell me what it means, Beck, man. You’re smart, I’m stupid. Tell me I got it wrong, and it doesn’t mean what I think.”

  It’s Beck’s assignment, but I read over his shoulder.

  You are hereby directed to present yourself

  for Armed Forces Physical Examination …

  It feels like it takes an hour for Beck and me to sit there reading this one page. Rudi doesn’t make a move, becoming just another dark lump of granite standing here on the hilltop. The silence is broken by Ivan pulling the tab off the top of another can. He has three of them now, decorating his fingers like sharp, curly silver rings. “So?” he says.

  Beck looks up to Rudi. “Have a brownie, pal.”

  Now Rudi starts crying for real. But he does take a brownie, then wedges himself tight on the rock chair between Beck and me.

  We had a pledge for this. Of course. We hardly ever talked about it, because, I think, nobody wanted to consider this possibility. At least that’s why I didn’t talk about it. It did not bear thinking about.

  Rudi is nineteen, a year older than the rest of us — because of getting kept back in fourth grade. We tended to forget. But the government failed to forget. So Rudi was eligible for the draft once he graduated and didn’t go for any kind of deferral.

  The three of us sit there, reading and rereading words on a page, trying to rearrange them into something better.

  “What?” Ivan asks.

  “Why would they want me?” Rudi asks earnestly.

  “‘Cause you are a good man, man,” Beck tells him. When we first and last discussed this, we all agreed that if one of us got drafted, we were all drafted. We knew we wouldn’t be together, physically. But we also felt that we would be together. In it. Together. The only way it should be and could be. Ivan’s opinion was that we would have to go just to balance the Rudi effect, because he was capable of getting shot to pieces and losing the war all by himself.

  The three of us are still staring at the page when, whap, it snaps out of the air and we see Ivan standing over us, reading for himself.

  He reads. Reads further. One foot starts tapping, like there is music only he can hear, and it is coming up in notes off that very page. Then his hips start swinging, his shoulders start shimmying.

  He is doing this little dance as he lowers the page and we are exposed to this broad, demented, delirious grin. He turns his back to us, continues his little silent shimmy-dance a few feet into the direction of the city skyline. He holds the page in the air, and he lets out a roar.

  “We … are … goin’ … to … Nam, boys!”

  I can hear his big-barrel voice roll down the grassy slope of Peters Hill, through the trees, through the neighborhoods, out of Roslindale, through JP, past Fenway and Brookline and out into downtown, bounce off of everyplace we have ever known and up into the air to sweep back to us again on our little spot on our old hill.

  Ivan does a touchdown celebration, spikes the letter into the dirt, and comes rushing over to shake the hand of poor, blindsided Rudi.

  “Congratulations, boy, and thank you, and I am sorry, but, wooo-hooo!”

  Rudi, on his feet and as confused as he will ever be, is shaking hands wildly in response, and crying, and smiling. Because Rudi idolizes Ivan.

  Even Ivan can see the six different kinds of expression warring across Rudi’s face. He grabs him now by the shoulders.

  “Rudi, buddy, you’re gonna be fine. You’re gonna be more than fine. You’re gonna be a man. And you’re gonna be a hero.”

  “Or maybe he’ll fail his physical,” I say hopefully.

  “This boy ain’t failing nothin’,” Ivan says, squeezing Rudi’s shoulders harder.

  “Will I?” Rudi asks. “Ivan, will I be a hero?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But … I peed myself. When I opened it. I peed myself.”

  “Jeez, Rudi,” Beck says, hopping up off the rock. “You didn’t even change your pants.” Rudi is, in fact, very damp.

  “I came running,” Rudi says. “I had to. Had to see you guys …”

  Ivan breaks off into a one-man conga line. “The Rudi peed his p
ants dance/The Rudi peed his pants …”

  “Do you have to be this happy?” I ask him.

  “You know I do.”

  I do know. He was never a fan of this particular pledge, and it is to his credit that he went along with it despite everything. To be honest, it was never a very Ivan pledge to begin with.

  “Army, baby. The armored cavalry, just like my old man. My dad spent World War Two riding tanks and slapping crybabies all over North Africa and Europe with General Patton. They were pals, you know. Did you know that? “

  We know that. He knows we know that. He loves telling us anyway.

  “Wait ’til I tell my dad,” he says. “He always thought Morris’s pledge was an ol’ nancy pledge anyway — no offense, Morris.”

  “Of course not,” I say, afraid he might start the slapping any minute.

  “Now we got a real pledge, boys,” he says. “A man’s pledge.”

  Instead, he picks up the letter, smoothes it out against his leg.

  On this point, I can’t disagree with him. We’ve been together, through whatever, since forever. And when we pledged that none of us was going to Vietnam without all of us going to Vietnam … well, if we didn’t mean that, then we are meaningless, aren’t we?

  Ivan walks up to Rudi, hands him back his letter. He stands back and shoots him a crisp and serious right-angle salute that he learned from his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father.

  Rudi, still a watery mess, does his best version of a salute in return.

  Then, for the first time and, I can assure you, for the last time, the four of us step up into a four-man hug. We hold it for a good minute while I look over Beck’s shoulder at the skyline of Boston already looking very, very far away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  One Tree, Four Branches

  There was never any doubt where Ivan was going. He didn’t even sleep that night, waiting up ’til the recruiting office opened. When he said Army, he meant Army.

  Beck had the hardest time. See, Beck is meant for better things. He’s a brilliant guy, from a family of smarts. His house is a strange place, always filled with music, with paintings all over the walls, and all of that stuff is created by the people who actually live there. His dad works with computers. Who works with computers? Who works with computers, paints, and makes music? I mean, I am mostly not a dummy, but to me those things come down from elsewhere, you know? They are not produced by people, much less by people you ask to pass the gravy.