Paul Davis

Issue 16

Flash Nonfiction

Mom folded laundry on the top of a dryer in our white ranch house in town. From the window, I could see the yellow lemon tree she’d planted in the front yard years ago.

“Do you want to be a politician or a businessman?” she said.

She was always asking questions like this: “Would you rather be tall and dumb or short and smart?”  Or “What is the meaning of life? Is there one meaning for all, or does it depend on the person?”

“Politicians have a lot of friends,” she said, placing a stack of towels in a plastic basket. “They can change things. But business owners have money. It’s not true what they say about money. It can buy happiness.”

We were neither rich nor powerful. My father worked as a grove foreman, overseeing gangs of migrant workers who pulled oranges from trees outside of town. On holidays, the crew boss—a man with black shiny hair and impossibly clean fingernails—brought my father tamales wrapped in aluminum foil. My father waited until the man started his truck before he threw the food in the trash.  Over the years, my father had learned several Spanish words and phrases. Si, he said loudly. Puedes hablar más despacio? Cómo estás?

On weekends he golfed or fished for mackerel in the blue-green waters of the gulf. Sometimes he roped calves in dusty Florida rodeos. Middle-class poor, he lusted after new things: a Jack Nicholas putter, a roping horse raised in Texas, a power boat with a hulking black Evinrude motor. If the rest of the family wanted to join him on his weekend outings, he said fine, just don’t get in the way.

On weekdays my mother slept late. My pre-school meals featured Wonder Bread toast and Frosted Flakes. In the summers, she worked on 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzles or planted flowers in her backyard garden. She had a small bookcase in her bedroom, which contained the family Bible, a handful of Frank Yerby novels, and a paperback about the death of Marilyn Monroe.

“They say she was murdered,” my mother said. “The Kennedys may have killed her. Or the mob.” She shook her head. My mother was beautiful, too, with long, tanned legs and curly brown hair. “Poor girl. She never had a chance.”

Politics? Business? In 1971, I wanted only one thing: to escape the jungles of Vietnam. I was an 18-year-old high school senior with a low U.S. draft number. I kept a folded map of the U.S. and Canada in the glove compartment of my beat-up Chevy Nova.

The older boys I knew had already come back from the war. They kept guns under their pillows or laughed too loud at bad jokes. JoJo Barwick lived a block over from me. A Viet Cong threw a grenade into his helicopter as he flew into a hot zone. JoJo grabbed it, cocked his pitching arm back, and hurled it. It exploded near his face and tore a piece of his scalp away. You could see the bare spot where an Army doctor stuck a metal plate in his skull. When planes flew over his house, he crawled under his bed.

I dated a red-headed girl whose brother went to Vietnam. His name was Robert. After I dated his sister a few times, he pulled me aside and said, “Don’t hurt her. She’s crazy about you. If you hurt her, I’ll come after you.” He told me that he and the other soldiers pissed on the bodies of dead Vietnam fighters. Once, they captured a Vietnamese woman who stabbed someone in the troop with a knife. Some of the men in his unit wanted to shove a grenade launcher between her legs and fire it. He never finished the story. A few months after I stopped dating his sister, Robert tried to kill himself with a rifle. He put the barrel against his neck and tried to pull the trigger with his big toe, but his grip shifted at the last minute. The bullet missed his brain but severed a nerve, and he lost the use of his legs. After a few months, he got a motorized wheelchair, which he drove like a race car on a state road near his trailer.

My greatest fear was being maimed. The Viet Cong threw bear traps in pits and covered the openings with branches and grass. They crafted punji sticks, too—sharp, fire-hardened bamboo sticks hidden in holes. If a U.S. soldier stepped on the trap, a bamboo spear would be driven through his foot. At night, I dreamed of blood and tripwires. I froze, my right leg in midair. Which way?

The government never called my number. President Nixon started bringing U.S. soldiers home in the wake of anti-war protests.

Of course, there were some dark moments that year, the year of questions. The Weather Underground exploded a bomb in the men’s room in the White House. The Knapp Commission investigated police corruption in New York City. My parents broke up.

But mostly, the world returned to normal. Intel released the world’s first commercial microprocessor. Disney World built Cinderella’s Castle on swamp and pastureland in Florida. And workers in New York finished the World Trade Center’s south tower–the second tallest building in the world.

My mother’s question faded. Richard Nixon? Lee Iacocca? Like I could run a country or a corporation.

That summer, I got a job on a construction crew. I used a sledgehammer to knock down old homes to make room for new ones. Two weeks in, I stepped on a nail that went through my boot.