The_NewCatwoman
02-09-2006, 03:23 PM
**I've never posted on the Story Board but I wrote this story last night and posted it on my MySpace page. While very gently visiting I figured "Why not post it here as well?" The story was inspired by the Vietnam War in general and a nightly news feature that I saw about the movie Be Good, Smile Pretty (http://www.orphansofwar.org/index.html) a few years ago.**
**1967**
He felt the sand shifting under the back of his head, the silent weight of the sky and the beach and the ocean surrounding him. With his eyes closed he felt her head laying on his chest, trying to ignore her fear, her disbelief at just the sound of his heartbeat. Stroking her long brown hair he squinted, marveling at the strands twisted around his fingers.
They hadn’t expected to see one another again, her his Virginia, him her Horus. Childhood had seen them running over the expanse of their two homesteads side by side, the grass and rocks meeting their bare toes with comfort and familiarity. There had been no adolescence, he’d gone into the Naval Academy, she to some girls school back East and just as they knew their parents had devilishly planned they drifted apart.
Then there’d been his proper induction into the Navy, standing straight and uniformed in the front room, scratching his neck. She’d passed by on the way to the kitchen for a bottle of Dr. Pepper. Apparently she hadn’t even been told he was home, but that didn’t make sense, no, she’d just wanted him to believe she didn’t care either way.
Outside on his back patio he’d bored her with the revelation that each stone had been hand picked in New Mexico and shipped back to his fathers residence in western Maryland, cemented right were they sat. She’d twirled her hair and tried desperately to act disinterested until she’d finished the soda and—unintentionally, unceremoniously—belched. She’d buried her face in her arms, red as a strawberry, eyes tearing with embarrassment. He’d been tempted to laugh, to spite her for her selfish independence of him, what else could she have expected after such a long drink? Instead he’d merely rubbed her back and she’d welcomed him home.
Shaking his head he leaned against an iron chair leg, his mother’s most-prized patio set he reminded himself, and informed her of what was to be his grim journey into nothingness. She’d sat up; Marygrove splayed proudly across her college sweatshirt and denied his every word. Virginia as sure as any nineteen year old woman should be assured him that that couldn’t be true.
He’d scratched at his mustache, a project of his newfound manhood, and staring across the backyard, ignoring her strange, inured expression, ordered her to understand. That Friday he was off to Basic Training and within many more months would come Vietnam.
She’d stood in all of her chaste grace, plucking an imagined piece of lint from her skirt and chucked the bottle as hard as she could to her left. They’d each listened through the silence until a satisfying shattering of glass inevitably followed somewhere near the wooden fence. Then he’d walked her the whole, miserable twenty feet to her house, depositing her in her ground floor bedroom. Months later Naval buddies, ammunition buddies, pick-up-game-of-cards buddies all wished vainly for him, imagining for their own piece of mind, that he’d scored that night. No soldier should die a virgin.
Now he lay, mustache long gone, the scent of their beach scene settling in his nostrils as she fell asleep. His eyes returned to their favorite position, closed, as the remembrances of moaning and crying and “Please don’t let me die” zipped through his mind. Of screams for mothers and wives named Dottie, Patricia, and Beatrix, muttered words of the Last Rites were all slowly met with the sound of peace. His feet free of socks or shoes he dug his toes into the sand and decided he wouldn’t tell her what had happened or what he’d seen. He might wince a little at popped balloons, water pistols, or smile at taunting six year old brats with plastic army helmets and avoid the newspaper for a long while if he could. But whatever happened he was merely glad if she didn’t abandon him for Back East or Up North. If she sat waiting on the patio, head held high, Coke bottle squeezed between her knees. If she sat waiting for him.
**1967**
He felt the sand shifting under the back of his head, the silent weight of the sky and the beach and the ocean surrounding him. With his eyes closed he felt her head laying on his chest, trying to ignore her fear, her disbelief at just the sound of his heartbeat. Stroking her long brown hair he squinted, marveling at the strands twisted around his fingers.
They hadn’t expected to see one another again, her his Virginia, him her Horus. Childhood had seen them running over the expanse of their two homesteads side by side, the grass and rocks meeting their bare toes with comfort and familiarity. There had been no adolescence, he’d gone into the Naval Academy, she to some girls school back East and just as they knew their parents had devilishly planned they drifted apart.
Then there’d been his proper induction into the Navy, standing straight and uniformed in the front room, scratching his neck. She’d passed by on the way to the kitchen for a bottle of Dr. Pepper. Apparently she hadn’t even been told he was home, but that didn’t make sense, no, she’d just wanted him to believe she didn’t care either way.
Outside on his back patio he’d bored her with the revelation that each stone had been hand picked in New Mexico and shipped back to his fathers residence in western Maryland, cemented right were they sat. She’d twirled her hair and tried desperately to act disinterested until she’d finished the soda and—unintentionally, unceremoniously—belched. She’d buried her face in her arms, red as a strawberry, eyes tearing with embarrassment. He’d been tempted to laugh, to spite her for her selfish independence of him, what else could she have expected after such a long drink? Instead he’d merely rubbed her back and she’d welcomed him home.
Shaking his head he leaned against an iron chair leg, his mother’s most-prized patio set he reminded himself, and informed her of what was to be his grim journey into nothingness. She’d sat up; Marygrove splayed proudly across her college sweatshirt and denied his every word. Virginia as sure as any nineteen year old woman should be assured him that that couldn’t be true.
He’d scratched at his mustache, a project of his newfound manhood, and staring across the backyard, ignoring her strange, inured expression, ordered her to understand. That Friday he was off to Basic Training and within many more months would come Vietnam.
She’d stood in all of her chaste grace, plucking an imagined piece of lint from her skirt and chucked the bottle as hard as she could to her left. They’d each listened through the silence until a satisfying shattering of glass inevitably followed somewhere near the wooden fence. Then he’d walked her the whole, miserable twenty feet to her house, depositing her in her ground floor bedroom. Months later Naval buddies, ammunition buddies, pick-up-game-of-cards buddies all wished vainly for him, imagining for their own piece of mind, that he’d scored that night. No soldier should die a virgin.
Now he lay, mustache long gone, the scent of their beach scene settling in his nostrils as she fell asleep. His eyes returned to their favorite position, closed, as the remembrances of moaning and crying and “Please don’t let me die” zipped through his mind. Of screams for mothers and wives named Dottie, Patricia, and Beatrix, muttered words of the Last Rites were all slowly met with the sound of peace. His feet free of socks or shoes he dug his toes into the sand and decided he wouldn’t tell her what had happened or what he’d seen. He might wince a little at popped balloons, water pistols, or smile at taunting six year old brats with plastic army helmets and avoid the newspaper for a long while if he could. But whatever happened he was merely glad if she didn’t abandon him for Back East or Up North. If she sat waiting on the patio, head held high, Coke bottle squeezed between her knees. If she sat waiting for him.