Machine Dreams
Great Uncle Clayton, his partner, died of a stroke in the plant office as one of the mixers was being repaired outside. The plant was gone, and years before Billy and I entered high school my father was working first as a salesman for a heavy-equipment company, then at a desk job for the State Road Commission. The desk job was short-lived. He became self-employed, an independent salesman of heavy equipment, aluminum buildings, office supplies, or cars. In the worst of it, shortly before he retired early and drew a disability pension from the Veterans’ Administration, he was selling a doubtful brand of life insurance from a makeshift office in the basement of the house we’d moved to in Bellington. He had a file cabinet and big desk down there, both pieces of the same metal office equipment he’d once sold. On the desk sat a lamp, a large manual typewriter, a row of spiral-bound construction catalogs between metal bookends, a porcelain coffee mug full of pens and sharpened pencils, and a nameplate with his name on it.
These objects from the room in the basement were the only ones my father took with him when my parents were divorced.
Also in the room was a single bed in which my mother slept the last few years of their marriage, boxes of old toys, a washer and drier, and a discarded couch and chair from an old living room set. On the wall was Billy’s black light poster of Jimi Hendrix; I don’t know why he put it up in the basement, but no one has ever moved it. The poster is lettered in pale green and rimmed in pink; both colors are meant to glow. Directly under the poster is the ironing board on which my mother once folded the family laundry. The laundry was piled first in a jumbled heap of clean white cotton on the same single bed where she slept then, hearing the waterpipes and tin furnace ducts make sounds over her at night. The pipes wind in and out of the basement walls, in and out of the ceiling, and at night they assume a dominance over the rest of the room.
The subterranean dominance of the pipes, their silent twists and turns in the dark, are reminiscent in spirit of the last few years my family lived in one house, and the year Billy went away. He was nineteen, the year was 1970, and he went away to Fort Knox for basic training. Fort Knox is where they keep the gold and train the kids. I hope they trained him damn well—it’s the least they could have done—but I don’t know. I’ve looked through Billy’s Fort Knox yearbook many times; Charles Hollis, Brigadier General, USA, Commanding, was right:
This yearbook will help you, your family, and friends to vividly recall the start of your military career.
The entrance to Fort Knox is pictured; there is a tank on a broad stone platform and a sign that says WELCOME TO THE HOME OF ARMOR. The famous gold is kept in the Gold Vault, a bunkertype building that looks like a two-layered concrete box cake with barred windows. I think about all those gold bars sitting inside a well-fortified silence, row after row of gold bars. Billy was golden, in the summer; he got that kind of tan. I wonder if someday I’ll be forty and think to myself,
Billy was a beautiful kid.
No, I refuse to ever think that.
Billy didn’t fail the first semester of his freshman year at the state University, but his grades weren’t good. He quit school on the day of his nineteenth birthday, before grades were ever sent home. Billy didn’t feel very involved in college, and he wouldn’t let them grade him. As he pointed out, grades would not have saved him from the lottery anyway. He didn’t resist the fall of the numbers the way I might have, but he evaluated things on a personal scale. I realize now that Billy was one of the more decisive souls in Bellington: he would not be moved. He made his own definitions. I finally begin to understand some of Billy’s definitions, but I’m a slow learner. It seems as though Billy, whom I always tried to instruct, is instructing me. And he isn’t even here, not right now.
The morning of December 3rd, 1969, the day after the lottery drawing for the draft, I went down to Aunt Bess’s to talk to myfather. Billy had already refused my suggestion that he resist the draft and go to Canada, but I was still plotting. Bess and Mitch had just finished breakfast. My cousin Katie, Bess’s daughter, had stayed the night but had already left for Winfield. Katie is in her mid-thirties, married and childless, delicate; I was sorry she’d gone. In
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