Machine Dreams

her quiet way, Katie would have agreed with me. Bess stayed in the kitchen as I followed my father into his bedroom; she knew I wanted to talk to him alone.
    “Dad,” I said, “aren’t you worried about Billy?” I stood on one side of the perfectly made double bed. My father stood on the other.
    He looked down at the ribbed bedspread and touched the foot of the wooden frame with one hand. “Course I’m worried. We don’t have any damn business over there.”
    “Dad, I borrowed some money from Student Loans. It’s money for Billy to go to Canada, and I have information about places for him to go, people to contact. There are organizations that will help. I want him to go soon, and I would drive up with him.”
    My father looked across the room and made a sound with his mouth. A click of his teeth, a sighing of air through his pursed lips. Scowling, he shook his head. “That’s not right either. He’d never even be able to come back here.”
    “He doesn’t have to live here. It’s possible to live somewhere else besides Bellington.”
    “I’m not talking about Bellington, now you know that. He couldn’t live anywhere in this country.”
    “Does that matter?”
    “Well,
hell yes
it matters.”
    I touched the surface of the bed. The spread was so smooth, the pillows so perfectly covered, I didn’t see how anyone could have slept there the night before. “Dad,” I said, “I think we should all talk to Billy about going to Canada. Someday he’d be able to come back, surely.” I waited, my father made no reply. “If we let them get hold of him, there won’t be anything we can do later to help him.”
    Silently, my father nodded. Then he said, “I don’t know, Miss. We’ll have to hope they don’t send him there.”
    “Don’t send him? Of course they’ll send him. Why do you think they want him?”
    My voice had taken on a strident tone, and my father leaned a little toward me across the bed. “The government has troops all over the world, they don’t just send everyone to Vietnam. Besides, this is Billy’s decision. If he’s old enough to be drafted, he’s old enough to decide what he wants to do.”
    “Daddy, he’s just a kid.”
    Mitch put his hands in his pockets and shifted his weight to one foot. “So are you.” He looked at me straight on. “You know what you think. Don’t you think he knows what he thinks?”
    I was frightened. Suddenly it all seemed real. “What do you think he should do?” I asked.
    My father frowned and shook his head. When he frowned so gravely his blue eyes were nearly hidden in his creased eyelids. “I don’t know, Danner. Whatever he decides, I will stand with him.”
    “Does Billy know that?”
    “Yes, I think he knows.”
    “What would you do if it were you?”
    “Why, I guess I’d go in. I did before. Most of us did. Anyone who could.”
    “But this isn’t even a declared war.”
    “Neither was Korea. Lot of boys went to Korea. Lot of boys from around here.”
    “But not Billy,” I said. “Billy is ours.” My voice was shaking, so I whispered, “They weren’t.”
    We heard water running from the tap in the kitchen. Bess, the sleeves of her sweater pulled up, was washing the breakfast dishes. She washed dishes in a tin basin in the deep enamel sink, then put them in the drainer and poured scalding rinse water over them. The water would be heating now in the teapot.
    “Godammit it to hell,” my father said quietly.
    Before he went to Vietnam, Billy had a seventeen-day leave home. Once, late at night, we came back from the Tap Room and sat in his Camaro out in front of our mother’s house. We listened to the tape deck, shared a bottle of beer, and smoked a joint.
    “This dope isn’t bad,” I said. “Where did you get it?”
    “Kato and I bought an ounce in Winfield.”
    “Billy, you want to hear my latest idea on how you don’t go to Nam?” I took a drag on the joint.
    He smiled amiably. “Sure.”
    “You get busted, like I did, only worse. They hold you here for trial. You’re found guilty, of course, and they put you in some nice safe jail for first offenders for a couple of years. By the time you get out, Vietnam is over.”
    He laughed. The car held a fragrant smoke and the town seemed empty, quiet. Street lamps lit up the leaves of the big trees. Early May, and there was a faint green stirring in the leaves, a gradual wind. “You really think they’d let me off the hook on a drugs charge, after they spent