Three Men
of God, excerpted from a completed novel (entitled To Whom Thus Michael),
was published in the South Dakota Review, Vol. 37, No. 2, Summer 1999, Pine
Hill Press.
About
4,050 words
© 2000 G.D. Peters
THREE MEN
OF GOD
by
G.D.
PETERS
I’m Harris. I was in sixth
grade when Mike and Bobby were in high school. Mike was a year older than
Bobby, and graduated that year, in ‘64. They always kidded me that our folks
ran out of real names after Michael and Robert, but actually I’m named after my
Mom’s brother, my Uncle Harris. Anyway, Mike and Bobby were inseparable back then;
I was sort of the tag-along. Looking back on it now, I can see that I was a
diversion for them at times, but they were living on an entirely different
plane. One night, for example, when the folks were away, they sat in the living
room sipping Dad’s brandy and arguing theology well into the night. I didn’t
understand a word of it. I don’t suppose they minded my listening in, but I
still remember the fire in their eyes as they argued back and forth, and the
more I think about it the more I realize that they were probably oblivious to
me altogether. I’ll say this about them, however, they were two of a kind,
slinging Nietzsche and Kierkegaard around like you or I might the Yankees and
Dodgers.
I don’t want to give the
impression that Mike and Bobby were only thinkers. They were two of the better
athletes in town, and competed with a fervor that was compelling. And they were
artistic: Michael was painting in oils by the time he was eleven or twelve, and
Bobby had his first acoustic guitar at ten. Living with them, being their young
charge, was the stuff that dreams are made of; but I was ever the dreamer, and
all the while they never lost sight of the realities of this life. Bobby, in
particular, seemed to have had incredible foresight, for he lived as if he were
cramming a lifetime into the brief period of his adolescence. And when he left
us, it was as though the wind from another world had blown in and left a
magical dust in its trail, something we would remember with great wonder but
very little understanding.
As for Michael, he seemed the
father ship to Bobby; it was from him that Bobby derived his sense of
mortality, for Michael was no idealist. When John Kennedy was killed, for
example, all the world mourned the loss of a world leader, while Bobby and
Michael debated the “Great Man” theory of history. Don’t get me wrong, like
everyone else they were deeply saddened, but they scratched and clawed beneath
the surface for a philosophy which might explain the chain of events that
shaped the world they lived in.
I still have all of Bobby’s
letters. After he went to college he wrote home about the beauty of his campus,
the freedom that he felt. I guess that much was good, given the ugly twist his
short life took. He wrote:
This campus is beautiful in autumn. A wind that
seems to carry all the way from the great lakes blows across the fields at
night, the air is clean and fresh, the trees tall and swaying and strong: lean
trunks with bushy, flowing tops.
I guess because the upperclassmen live
off-campus it seems like freshmen and sophomores have the run of the school,
and we act like we own the place, you’d be amazed how brash a collective group
of eighteen year-olds can be.
I’m still fighting for a spot on the team,
haven’t been cut yet. There are two or three upperclassmen who look like good
receivers, and two or three other frosh to beat out, but Coach says I run good
routes, and I haven’t dropped any yet, so who knows?
Am reading lots of William Blake
these days, and Keats. The rest is all introductory coursework, psych,
sociology, biology which I particularly like. I could diagram the Krebs cycle
for you if you had a need, it might make a nice place-mat. Philosophy is okay
but at this point very basic. Am hoping they’ll eventually reach to the heart
of something, as opposed to dancing with the bare bones of if God made me then
who made God?
Meanwhile, Mike hasn’t written since the first
week of school, what’s going on with him? That first letter didn’t sound very
good to me, do you have anything to relate? Give Harris the goose. Is he
quarterback material? Stay on top of him, I wish I wasn’t away from him like
this.
From Bobby’s later letters it
is clear these were days of extreme happiness for him. One early letter told
how, as a prank, he and his pals would fill an envelope with shaving cream,
seal it, open it with a letter opener, and slip it under someone’s door. You
drop a textbook on the envelope and spray the room with shaving cream. Simple,
yet elegant. He also wrote about something called short-sheeting, folding a
guy’s top sheet up so his legs got jammed halfway under the covers. I couldn’t
figure out what the hell he was talking about until I learned about it,
firsthand, my own freshman year.
But Bobby didn’t yet know
that Mike had dropped out of Berkeley, and no one was rushing to tell him, too
worried he might be inclined to follow in those footsteps. You could tell from
his letter he’d already found first-year philosophy too elementary to suit his
taste. In our house everyone was walking on eggshells, worried that Bobby was
going to drop out, too. Meanwhile, Mike was still in California, but he was
driving a cab by night and painting in a friend’s studio by day. I have with me
all of Bobby’s belongings, which include the first letter he got from Mike
after Mike had dropped out of school:
I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but
I’ve quit school. The level of moral integrity at a major university is no
greater than what you’ll find in the outside world, and I find this place is no
harbor or shelter but merely another gateway to the storm. I am being
instructed by men and women who preach honor and integrity, both intellectual
and otherwise, and then cheat on their husbands and wives, with their students
and with each other.
The so-called professors of art teach paint by
numbers, if you could call it that, they haven’t breathed a breath of fresh air
in years, probably since they took these jobs, and they’re turning young
artists into painters—the kind that do your house every six years.
And I don’t want to disappoint you but second
year philosophy is still a joke. They’re talking about am I part of your dream
and does that make you God, or suppose the whole universe is just an atom on the
tip of someone’s fingernail, I’m exaggerating but, honestly, sometimes it
doesn’t get any deeper than that. It proves there is a God, it would be
impossible for so much chaos to reign supreme by random chance. It makes me
wonder if this is what’s in the universities, what’s left in the real world?
Whatever is out there, I aim to find out for myself.
It strikes me now, looking at
these letters, that Mike and Bobby were alike in more ways than I might have
suspected. In any event, this was the first link in the unraveling. Of course,
Mike had written the family first about quitting school, but until he wrote
Bobby the circle was unbroken. Now, twenty-six years later, when I read that
letter I think only of the perfect harmony which preceded that first discordant
note.
They both went to Mike’s
senior prom, only because Mike got his friend, Janet (who had a thing for
Bobby, anyway), to bring Bobby. Those two lived it up that whole weekend. They
spent Saturday morning shooting pool in the basement, and let me play, too, but
I had to rack the balls. I didn’t care, it was a privilege to me. I can still
remember Mike standing in the corner leaning on his cue stick, one foot behind
him, up against the wall.
“Bobby, don’t you watch out,
Harris gonna beat you, little brother,” Mike says, his head angled the way it
gets when he’s razzing a body. He had cool green eyes that sparkled like
champagne when he looked at you.
“Don’t you watch yourself
he’ll beat us both,” Bobby says, leaning over the green felt table for a shot.
He is wearing faded jeans and white sneakers with no socks. He has jet black
hair that shakes like silk about his ears. He is the wilder of the two.
We’re playing straight pool
so we have to call our shots; that’s a little rough on me considering I can’t
even make them, let alone call them. I reach to my toes to line up the
five-ball, but badly miss.
“Gotta concentrate, Harris,”
Bobby says. “Go on and try that shot, and concentrate now,” he says, placing
the five ball back where it had been.
I don’t want to tell you how
many times Bobby replaced that five-ball until I made
the shot; I don’t want to remember
the goodness that spun from his heart because it hurts to remember him, knowing
how he died. For five—maybe ten—minutes, Mike stood propped in the corner while
Bobby taught me pool. Then, when I finally made that five-ball and Bobby said
‘your shot Mike,’ he stepped quietly from the corner and picked up the
four-ball, placed it at a different angle, and began to teach me that shot. And
for a little while the two of them were of a single mind and spirit, teaching
their kid brother to shoot pool, the science and the angles and the soft touch
and the luck. Mike was wearing a frayed button-down, its tails hanging out, and
Bobby had on a loose tee-shirt, and I remember it like it was a snapshot I
could pull out of a drawer and show you.
It would be different if they
were still here to share the feelings with, the memories. Or even one of them.
But with both of them gone it seems like something from a fairy tale, long ago
and far away.
After we finished shooting
pool we washed Mike’s white Fury in the driveway, and then they took me into
town with them to get their tuxedos. There was a little man with a bald head
and glasses, a tape measure dangling from his neck. He fitted the tape measure
around Mike’s waist, down the inside of his leg, across the back of his
shoulders.
“Hey,” Mike says to him, “you
got one in a half-pint for small-fry here?” He stands still, being measured,
but cocks his head at me, turning his lips up at the corners. His eyes twinkle
and shine. I don’t suppose he was any bigger than Bobby in real life, but his
demeanor, his natural swagger, made him seem larger than life to me. As for
Bobby, he was more touchable, more fallible. I suppose it was just that Mike
was first-born, but I wonder if it was only my perception, or whether he saw in
himself the extra height to which I, and others, had elevated him. Bobby,
especially, held Mike above all others in love and respect, and would have died
for him, and maybe in some small way did.
As I say, though, they each
walked out with the same size tuck.
A funny thing happened then,
as we were driving home. We passed the ball fields and Mike pulled over onto
the soft shoulder and we got out, leaving the tucks hanging on hooks in the
back seat, and ran down to the baseball diamond. Bobby took the mound, Mike
played first base, and I was at the plate, but we didn’t have any bats or balls
or mitts, it was all mimed, like make-believe. Bobby pitched an air-ball toward
me at 90 miles an hour and I saw it coming and swung, and felt like I made
pretty good contact if you were to ask me.
“Strike one!” Mike called
from first base.
“What!” I called out,
astonished, thinking I’d smacked at least a triple. But Bobby’s left arm swung
up and crooked back, snagging an imaginary return throw from the catcher. He
bent over, taking the signals, shaking him off two or three times just to shake
me up. He reared back and threw another sailing smoke down the alley, right
down the pipe. I smacked it into the upper deck in left field.
“Strike two!” Mike hollered
from first.
“No way, Mike!” I called to him.
“Strike two small-fry,” he
said. “You gotta keep your eye on the birdie Harris! Go on, now, concentrate.”
He looked at me sideways with his knowing smile. He was all guts and steel and
heart; a man of few words, but plenty of guts and heart.
Bobby stood on the mound, his
right foot toeing the rubber, glove hand behind his back, flipping the
imaginary ball several times in the air. Mike was bent over, hands to his
knees, eyeing Bobby and me. I dug deeper into the box and took a couple
practice swings, then a couple half swings, bringing the invisible wood to a
rest halfway between Bobby and third base, pointing to where I would hit one
out.
Bobby began his windup,
bringing his hands together up over his head, drawing up his left leg, shifting
his foot to the trench in front of the rubber, rearing back with his throwing
arm and springing like a rubber band, bringing the ball up over his shoulder
and down the chute she comes, maybe 92 miles per hour, straight as an arrow and
quick as a switch. I don’t have time to think, I step and swing, trying to keep
my eye on the ball, but I’m afraid he’s thrown it past me again. I am about to
toss the bat down when I look up to see Mike and Bobby both turned toward left
field, Mike shading his eyes from the glare of the sun.
Then I know it, and I start
trotting toward first base, keeping my eyes on Mike all the while.
“She’s outta here!” Mike
says.
“Whoa there, Harris,” Bobby
calls out from the mound, “you sure kicked the skin offa that lil’ Suzy.”
I trot around the bases, the
sun pouring down over the left-field bleachers as it swallows up the white
leather bird I sent flying into the horizon of that sunny day and the rest of
my sorry life.
*
I wear my hair long now,
mostly because it’s what feels natural for me, but mostly also because it’s how
Bobby wore his before they made him cut it off. His first letter from Camp
Collins was pretty sad to read, even though I never saw it until I was in
college myself. By that time Bobby had long been gone, and we hadn’t heard from
Mike in seven years, as if he had fallen from the face of the earth.
Bobby wrote about his
uniform, his hair, his convictions:
Sorry I haven’t written before now, but you
don’t exactly get a social hour around here. This first week’s been pretty
intense—for everything they take from you they give you three. They shaved off
every hair on my head, and gave me an equal number of rules, regulations, and
do’s and don’ts. If long hair was my attempt at identity the army’s here to
strip that and spit polish and buff it. We all got the same uniform and boots
and hats, identical in every way. We all got our heads shaved clean to the
skull. We’re only numbers here, PFC Johnny Appleseeds, the troops, orders and
orders.
I don’t really believe in this war, but there’s
no guarantee I’ll be shipped to Vietnam, either. For every nine men that get
their orders for ‘Nam there’s one that pulls a tour on the mainland, or in the
South Seas. Anything’s possible, so don’t worry too much about it. Either way,
it’s our country, and if the duty calls, somebody has to answer.
I’m not sure exactly how I feel about shooting
one of these M-14’s at another human being, regardless of his race or political
ideology. I guess I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. In the meantime,
it’s one-mile runs every morning and close order drill twice a day, rain or
shine. Mostly rain, out here.
I met a guy out here, also named Bobby, but
everybody calls him Red on account of his hair. Sometimes I call him Alfred E.
Neuman, he’s always got this “What, Me Worry?” grin on his face. Ask Harris,
he’ll explain that one. I just call him Bunyan, he’s the size of Paul Bunyan
and the blue ox all put together.
I’ll write again next week.
And it was signed “love,
Bobby.”
Three months later Bobby and
his friend Red landed on the airstrip at Khe Sanh. Bobby served out almost his
full tour of duty, coming within a few weeks of making it out of that living
rat hole. He called it “getting short,” as in “I’m getting short now, real
short; two weeks to go before I rotate my short ass back to the land of the
twenty-four hour generator.” He almost made it, too.
In a way we were luckier than
many; at least we got him back.
Mike never flew home for the
funeral. He never saw the letter from the State Department, never saw Bobby
going into the ground.
I could never understand why
Bobby was killed, let alone why Michael didn’t come home to help us bury him. I
sat alone that night in their bedroom, drinking from the pint of Jack Daniel’s
Bobby had left me before he went to college. We kept it hidden in one of his
tall winter boots at the back of his closet. I walked back and forth, fingering
the books Bobby had kept on the shelf above his desk, and pulled down a volume
of Nietzsche, “The Antichrist.” I flipped through the pages, left it lying open
on the desk.
Inside Bobby’s desk drawer
was the King James Bible he’d kept from his early days in the church. It had
lain for years, untouched. I pushed the drawer shut.
I thought back to the summer
of ‘65, the last time the three of us were really together. Mike had not yet
begun his second year at Berkeley, not yet dropped out, and Bobby had not yet
left for Cornell. The three of us were up in their room together. I was sitting
on Bobby’s bed, Bobby was on Mike’s, and Mike was at Bobby’s desk, flipping
through that volume of “The Antichrist.”
“God,” Mike said with a kind
of half-laugh. He closed the book and replaced it on the shelf. “I wonder if he ever read Nietzsche?”
I didn’t know what the hell
he was talking about; I didn’t understand most of what Mike and Bobby were
talking about in those days. But later on, up in their room after the funeral,
not knowing why Bobby had died, not understanding why Mike had disappeared, I
began, finally, to search for my own conclusions. I flipped through that same
volume, the way Mike had done that day. “Maybe there is a God,” I said to
myself, to Bobby, lying six feet under newly turned earth, and to Mike, who was
off beyond the horizon, wherever he may have been. “There must be; otherwise,
who’s going to pay for all of this?”
We never learned what really
happened to Mike, at least not at that time. I was to find out on my own, much
later, what the actual circumstances had been. And who’s to say, perhaps it was
better that we hadn’t known the truth? As far as the family was concerned Mike
had simply disappeared. Dad hired private investigators on three separate
occasions, and they came up empty each time. I figured he was probably living
somewhere in South America, or maybe in Ireland. He could be hawking papers at
a newsstand on a street corner in Chicago, or driving a cab in Detroit. He
could be dead, for all we knew, and there came a time when that was all we had
left to believe. Whatever it may have been, one way or the other, something
inside him had snapped, and he just dropped out on us, the way he’d dropped out
of Berkeley, only much worse.
Or so we thought, at the time.
The hardest part is
remembering how good it was in the beginning. I think about those days quite
often, and have this funny image of Bobby dropping a huge textbook onto an
envelope fattened with shaving cream, followed by the somber image of his
casket being lowered into the earth.
And somewhere along the way
it finally dawned on me who Mike was talking about that day up in his room. And
when I think about God these days I find myself wondering if he ever did read
Nietzsche.
*
When Mike and Bobby came down
in their tuxedos that night Mom and Dad were in the front room, and Mom took
their picture coming down the steps. I still have that picture: you can see two
handsome young men in gray tuxedos smiling down the banister, a nine year old
puppy-boy in tow, peeking through the railings. There are many pictures of me
from various times in my life. When I look at some of them I see only the image
of someone from another time and place. But there are other pictures for which
I remember my every movement, every thought, during the moment preserved by
fate and film. I see this particular picture and remember the hopes and
feelings coursing through my young blood, remember because for me this is one
of those strange moments each of us retains, which recurs frequently, perhaps
on a weekly or even a daily basis, which seems mysteriously to have planted itself
on our mind’s eye. I remember this particular moment as if it occurred this
evening, the race my heart was running as I watched Bobby’s broad shoulders
descending the steps below me, Mike in front of him, and Mom and Dad at the
foot of the steps, she holding the camera to her knowing eye. Unlike the
photograph, my view of this scene was from behind, above Mike and Bobby on the
steps. Mom and Dad are in that image, and I am not, so the photograph captures
an image quiet different from the one that I recall, like a negative, in a way.
Would that I could share the
wondrous rapture of this moment, for it holds a singular pleasure in my heart,
perhaps unrivalled in all the trillion moments which have passed beside this
meaningless life. A young boy whose days are filled with the innocence of
youth, his hours glazed with the sugar of a thousand smiles, and sneakers, and
grass and dirt; his nights crammed with dreams of filling the shoes of Mike and
Bobby, of walking down those same steps in the same tuxedo, his Mom taking the
same picture. Mike and Bobby.
And me.
They backed out the driveway
in Mike’s Fury and in a half-hour returned with their dates for Mom to take
more pictures. Mike and Bobby had pinned corsages to the gowns, but I am not in
this picture. The four of them stand in the driveway, their arms draped across
all shoulders, but I remember standing at the doorstep, watching. Then they all
piled into Mike’s Fury and backed out of the driveway and into their senior
prom and what was to be, I suppose, their last fling weekend together.
By the time I had attained my own senior prom the glass had been broken. The only thing I really remember about it is that Mom didn’t take any pictures. And there was nobody to rack the balls while I shot pool for three hours that morning. Only the four and five balls, every shot imaginable.