Callaloo

It must’ve been nineteen seventy or seventy-one— both Kennedys dead, Dr. King dead, the war that drove Johnson from the White House seeming as if it will never end, a few boys from home burned up in the faraway jungle, the boy who sat beside me in algebra class, who came back alive, dead when his drug-smuggling plane crashed somewhere along the Mexican border. Now Nixon is President, we don’t know about Watergate yet and the Democrats have little hope, but we go anyway, a fundraiser for some long forgotten congressman, summer, hot, the sun a boil on the concrete skin of the parking lot. Greenville, Texas. Inside the Holiday Inn’s small reception room, it’s hotter still, but no one wants to leave. Over the sweaty handshakes, the Howdies and back slaps, a rumor floats: LBJ himself is coming. So we stay on, stay on for the bad wine, the bad hors d’oeuvres— triangle sandwiches of tuna fish, celery stuffed with pimento cheese— stay on while the light outside dwindles to dark, curious to see this man who already seems almost apocryphal. Years before, running against Kennedy, he’d helicoptered to our little town—we’d never seen a helicopter!— and at the high school an auditorium full of kids waiting, rapt. I can’t imagine why he came there—we couldn’t even vote— but there he was, as they say down here, big as Texas. When he draped his long form over the podium and drawled, “Y’all tell your mommies and daddies that ol’ Lyndon says Howdy!” the whole room erupted with our claps and cheers, all of us, even those who’d sneered at him before, lifted in those long arms, believing we had seen the future he seemed so much one of us. In a week or two a few of us, in secret, would be back in love with JFK, a Yankee but so handsome, the same ones who’d someday be marching in the streets, a whole generation screaming, Hey, hey, LBJ, how many boys did you kill today? [End Page 138] We were only children. Now some of us have children of our own to put to bed, jobs to go to in the morning, the rumor of his coming like a fable that foretells the coming of a stranger. But when I turn to go, opening the door, he’s standing there on the other side, not reaching for the doorknob, just standing there, his huge body filling the frame, but changed, older, the hang-dog eyes and hang-dog face cast down, somehow more naked than when he showed his scars on television, abashed even, a young boy screwing up his courage to knock on his first date’s door. Then he looks up, and in the moment before he catches himself and grins that big grin, sticks out his hand, I see he knows he’s already dead, his eyes the vast plains of West Texas where you could drive and drive for hours and never see another living soul. [End Page 139]