couldn’t talk to anyone.” Who would he have talked to? There were no draft counselors on Osprey Island. There were no hippies. Aside from Eden’s, there was only one point of view to be had.
“I left,” he said. “I had to. Whatever I did, it had to be my decision. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have a home anymore.” Eden and Roderick had managed to both lose their son and erode their marriage to a civil arrangement of household tasks and finances. That lasted a year, until National Geographic and the plight of the osprey served to render their relationship nothing more than legal. But until then, Eden cooked dinner, dusted, hung the laundry up to dry. Roderick cut the lawn and put out the trash.
Roddy hadn’t cared what people thought. They thought he’d fled. Never imagined that once he left their world he’d have gone anywhere but north, all the way. “Canada?” he said. “What the fuck was I going to do in Canada?” He’d never been anywhere in his entire life. “It wasn’t about right and wrong,” he told Suzy. “I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong. Or even if I knew . . . it was about what I could live with. It’s impossible to say, to talk about now, knowing . . . you know? Understanding. Then? I wasn’t like Eden . . .”
Suzy’s hand left Roddy’s scar for the first time since he’d begun. She pushed herself up on an elbow and looked at him in a way that Roddy would never be able to forget as long as he lived. She said, “Oh my god, you fought.”
He didn’t answer.
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,