Freedom by Mike Bond

Author:Mike Bond
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781949751253
Publisher: Mike Bond

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ON JUDGEMENT DAY Mick woke early, took two tabs of acid and lay beside Rachel waiting for it to hit but it didn’t. He’d had nightmares again of Troy wounded, of himself hunted in Bali. Rain hammered the window-panes and sloshed down the downspout. Rachel fumbled for her watch in her clothes on the floor. “Hey it’s eight-forty.”

In the Lex train going downtown he couldn’t tell if he was stoned or not. The weird advertisements, the drum and shriek of wheels, the gently rocking passengers, were clearly hallucinations. But there was no disconnect between what he thought and did: he wasn’t stoned. Damn. He tried to think how to raise his blood pressure.

The doctor sat at his metal Selective Service desk scorning petitions of malady from a line of supplicants. Implacable and lethal, he had literal power of life or death over his cringing naked subjects. He said you were 4-F and you were out on the street, free forever. He said you were 1-A and you climbed on a bus to Fort Benning and in three months could leave your brains and guts on some Vietnamese hill.

He scanned Mick’s file, took his blood pressure. “You don’t have hypertension.”

“It says right there –”

“I said you don’t have it. You’re headed to Vietnam.” He stuffed Mick’s file back in its folder, cocked a thumb at the induction room. “Get in line.”

Mick stood in a line of young men in a dark corridor, all naked, feet cold, soles dirty, clasping their folders before them like fig leaves. Not sure why, he stepped into the john. It had two stalls, one with no door. Holding his breath against the smell of shit he waited for the one with the door, locked it and scanned his file. Everything was there.

Terrified at what he was doing he ripped the first three pages to small pieces then the rest, then the folder too, flushed and flushed again till all were gone. Sure that abject terror would show in his face, he stepped into the corridor and joined the line going the other way of young men who had been rejected and had their files turned in.

Wouldn’t the Selective Service know it was gone? Or would its absence simply make him invisible? When they checked on the draft status of Resistance leaders wouldn’t they see it was missing? With shaking knees and a hollow stomach he dressed and stepped dizzily out the heavy door into bright midmorning sun.

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