ease. Not completely, of course. He couldn’t very well tell Vance about Gay Head, but other than that the weekend had been innocent, hadn’t it? Why hadn’t he taken the trouble to paint Vance a narrative picture of how they all had spent their time together? He’d assured Jacy’s fiancé that none of them would have ever harmed her, but why hadn’t it occurred to him to tell Vance how they—or at least Mickey—had actually protected her from harm that afternoon when Troyer came by and tried to grope her in the kitchen?
But on second thought, no. This wasn’t a comforting story to share with Vance. In order to tell it honestly, he’d have had to explain how they’d all been sitting out on the deck, Creedence on the stereo, drinking beer, lazily passing a joint around. Okay, sure, the story would illustrate that, far from harming her, they’d served as her protectors. But it certainly wouldn’t have put straight-arrow Vance’s mind at ease to picture his fiancée out on that deck, drinking beer and listening to protest music and smoking weed with a pack of fucking hippies. Plus, if she hadn’t gone with them to the island in the first place, she wouldn’t have needed them to defend her against the ghastly neighbor.
Probably better to have explained why Jacy had decided to join them for the weekend. She wasn’t looking to party before the wedding, far from it. Teddy had talked her into coming along in hopes of tag-teaming Mickey over those three long days, convincing him to head to Canada instead of reporting for duty. She’d been pleading with him pretty much nonstop since the night they all got their draft numbers. (You wouldn’t actually go, though, right? Tell me you wouldn’t be that stupid.) In the months leading up to graduation, Teddy had also been pressuring Mickey to rethink his options, for all the good that had done. How could you argue with somebody who conceded the validity of every single point you made? Yes, Mickey agreed, the war was both stupid and immoral. No, he had no desire to either kill or be killed, certainly not in a steaming jungle on the far side of the world in a cause no one had bothered to really articulate. Yes, heading to Canada would be the smart move. No, he didn’t worry about people calling him a coward.
“Then why, Mick?” Teddy had implored him. “Explain why you’d do the wrong, dumb thing when you could do the right, smart one?”
“Because I said I would.”
That’s what it came down to. His father, Michael Sr., a veteran of the Second World War, had hated every minute he’d spent in the service, but was proud, as he put it to Mickey, to have done his bit. When they call, you answer. You don’t get to ask why. That’s not how it works. Not how it’s ever worked. Your country calls, you answer. A pipefitter by trade, he was by all accounts a squared-away, no-bullshit kind of guy. Gruff and uneducated to be sure, but salt of the earth, too. He worked his forty-hour-a-week union job and then, most weekends, worked off the books to make his large family’s ends meet. Growing up, Mickey had been raised as much by his older sisters as their worn-out parents, so it was only later, after he went off to Minerva, that he and his old man had become close, which was strange, if you thought about it. At a time when so many fathers and sons were increasingly at odds, the two of them had forged a bond so deep and durable that it took them both by surprise.
Which was why his father’s sudden death the summer of Mickey’s junior year had hit him like a sledgehammer to the base of the skull. A big guy like his son, Michael Sr. had been eating with his crew at a local lunch counter, and when it came time to go back to work, the other guys all rose from their stools and he didn’t, his heart having detonated five seconds earlier. Turned out he’d known for some time that something like this would likely happen, but never said a word. Not to his wife, not to his grown daughters, not to his son. No, the last thing he’d said to Mickey was Your country calls, you answer.
But again, nope. None of this would’ve impressed gung-ho, love-it-or-leave-it Vance. He couldn’t imagine, much less approve