1968

“Might you let that infernal noise die?” Mama’s voice pierced from the kitchen, brittle as shattering bone china. I obeyed in silence, the needle’s kiss rising, shivering away from the grooves of Pet Sounds, those tide-soaked harmonies slipping into memory once more. The Beach Boys—Pet Sounds—my salvation, my secret message in a bottle. Sergeant Pepper, too, on the shelf, both spinning in the dim sanctum of my thoughts, lullabies against the roaring dark. But the day itself loomed, gravid with dread. I had beseeched the sky, the walls, the trembling air: not today, not ever. Yet the draft—all capital letters, all cruelty—had dawned for the Vietnam War. A war with the taste of sulfur and old blood. A war that returned no sons, only hollowed shells or men zipped cold, unspoken, in government-issue bags. My mother, hunched beneath the yellowed kitchen light, wept steadily, the water from her eyes indistinguishable from the faucet’s drip. I drifted toward her, each step iron, already mourning a letter not yet opened, yet heavy as a tombstone in the hand. “I will not go,” I declared, the words falling like stones into still water. Her face twisted, a crumpled paper bag grimacing at my defiance. But I remained immovable as winter granite, unyielding. I refuse to feed myself to that particular machine—this war where boys return as pressed flowers between the pages of coffins, their dog tags singing hollow hymns. The innocents slaughtered like sheep, their cries echoing in the tunnels of my sleep. My Lai sits like a black pearl in my throat, choking me with its terrible weight. The images crawl behind my eyelids: children’s faces dissolving into newspaper photographs, their mouths open in soundless screams. How can I force my body into that crucible of meaninglessness? Not after My Lai carved its name into the soft flesh of my conscience. The burned villages rise like fever dreams, populated by ghosts who will not let me rest. This futile machinery of death—I will not oil its gears with my blood, will not become another casualty statistic typed neatly on government letterhead. The war machine hungers, but I will starve it of my presence. My father came downstairs and he was livid. When he got enraged everyone suffered his wrath. “What the hell is this?! You think you can just dodge the draft? They are goddamn commies. Do you want to have them ruling Vietnam?” he roared. “I could not give a s**t, Father. Just being honest with you,” I anxiously replied. I was not backing down from my decision. Let them be commies. It’s their f*****g loss! Not ours. “You are not my son. You are a wimp and a coward,” he hissed. “I don’t feel like killing people for no reason, Father,“ I explained to him. ”Are you retarded? They are evil!” he roared out. “Liks America isn’t evil,” I murmured. “What did you just mutter?” he asked in confusion. I must not have been loud enough for him to hear me. Probably for the best. He descended the staircase like god’s own executioner—rage rippling off him in a heat that made the plaster walls recoil. The house seemed to hold its breath, the air thinning into something brittle, about to c***k. “What in hell’s hollow *is this*? You think you can duck out? Skitter off into cowardice?” he spat, face florid with fury, hands clenched like the fists of saints freshly fallen. “They’re goddamn *commies*! You want them to puppet-string Vietnam like a rotten marionette?” His voice tore through me—thick, rusted iron dragged across the fragile glass ribs of my chest. “I don’t give a single damn, Father,” I murmured, though my voice trembled like a moth caught behind curtains. “Honestly.” A breath. A silence. Let them govern their graves. Let them swallow their war like communion wine turned to ash. It’s not our funeral. “You are not my son,” he hissed—his eyes volcanic. “You’re a coward. A wimp.” That word hung in the room like smoke. Cheap. Cruel. Indelible. I looked at his face—so red, so desperate—and said softly, “I don’t want to kill strangers, Father. Not for excuses burned into ribboned flags.” His face twisted. “Are you mentally retarded? They are evil!” “And America isn’t?” It slipped out—small, grainy truth, falling from my lips like a broken tooth. He blinked, stunned. “What did you just mutter?” But I didn’t repeat it. Let it rot in the space between us. Let the silence hold its own funeral. I turned my face away, not in fear—but in fatigue. Words were useless now, pale and flaking. He had built a god out of glory. I had only my breath, and my refusal to light the match. “Nothing. Erase the whole damn thing from your mind,” I whispered, voice cracked and raw, like dry leaves breaking underfoot. “Might as well dial the police myself—Mother, could you do it for me?” I begged, the words slipping from my lips like a surrender clothed in despair. They would come for me soon enough, shadows lengthening behind my steps, relentless. Better—I thought—to step willingly into the cold clasp of their hands, to trade the slow burn of hiding for the sharp cold bite of capture. “Okay,” she said, voice trembling like brittle glass about to shatter, “but the men in prison—they don’t care who you are. They will tear you down, strip you naked in the shadows of the shower, their hands hungry with violence and hate.” Her words collapsed into tears, spilling like acid down forgotten walls. “I am not afraid,” I whispered, a fragile lie pressed tight against cracked lips, the taste of it bitter as dried blood. “My ass you’re not,” my father muttered, a ghost of sound swallowed by the thick silence. He knew the ruin I was walking toward, as certain as I was—destined to be swallowed whole by nightmare and steel. My mother drifted toward the rotary phone, her fingers trembling like brittle branches against the cold plastic. She dialed 9-1-1, the circular clawing of the dial echoing like a slow funeral bell. The line hummed with silence—five seconds of hollow waiting—before a voice split the quiet, distant and mechanical: “What is your emergency?” She pressed me close, my cheek barely touching the cold speaker, forcing my breath and trembling words into the thin wire. “Yes,” I whispered, voice tight as a noose, “I want to be arrested for draft dodging.” The confession spilled out, raw and urgent, the hunger to surrender mingled with buried dread. “I know they’ll come for me soon enough. So it’s better to let their hands find me first.” The receiver held the weight of my sentence, a tiny dead thing waiting to be sealed. “Why do you wish to dodge the draft, if I may ask?” a woman asked on the other line, “I do not believe in the war effort. And Lindon B. Johnson, he is a crook—a goddamned crook,” I spat, my voice sharp as snapped piano wire, raw with all the fury I could not keep buried. Mother drew in her breath—a gasp as brittle as December ice—her voice trembling as she told me the police were coming, that the hounds were loosed. I counted out fifteen minutes while the clock thudded, bruising the silence with its relentless pulses. Then—the knock: raucous, brutal, as if the hinges themselves might c***k beneath it. I choked out, “Easy, I’m coming!” thin with panic, my hands dusted with sweat. I barely touched the doorknob before I was seized, wrists pinched in the cold snap of cuffs, dragged rootless and wheezing to the cruiser—another small mercy withheld, air stolen like dignity. “Isaac Mallory Taylor?” the first officer called—a block of stone masquerading as a man, his tone flat, bludgeoning, mirthless. He stood sentinel beside a chipped hydrant, barking questions at me, red-faced, list flapping in his fist like a death certificate. “Are you a communist spy?” No, I snarled, the words heatless in winter air. “Do you support the President of the United States?” A hell no, too—as honest and as useless as a prayer. Anger cracked on their faces—storm-clouds splitting—then the second officer’s hands, flinty and merciless, sent me reeling against the hydrant. Metal and bone colliding, stars flowering behind my eyes, the world tilting breathless and cruel. No kindness, not here. “Where are we going?” I asked, a wisp of speech in a blizzard, as they dragged me to whatever pit awaited. “To interrogation,” the first officer answered, venom pooling in his mouth. “I know you have answers tucked beneath your tongue.” He spat—spit and disdain—marking me as less than flesh. Led off, lamb to the s*******r, shadow trembling in the yellow glare, I could only whisper a silent pleading to the universe. Not tonight. Please not this, not now; for I am too young to die, too thin-skinned and trembling to be finished by men with night in their eyes.