Spencerville

well-bred, college-educated woman putting up with that shit from—where you going?”
    “Bathroom.”
    Keith went into the bathroom and washed his face. He looked in the mirror. Truly, he’d been blessed with the right genes and didn’t look much different than his pictures from college. Jeffrey, on the other hand, was barely recognizable. He wondered how Annie looked. Jeffrey would know, but Keith wasn’t about to ask him. Anyway, it made no difference what she looked like. He returned to the porch and sat. “How’d you know I was back?”
    “Oh… Gail heard it from somebody. Can’t remember who.” Jeffrey went back to the other subject. “She looks good.”
    “Gail?”
    “Annie.” Jeffrey chuckled and said, “I’d encourage you to give it a go, Keith, but that bastard will kill you.” He added, “He knows he got lucky, and he’s not about to lose her.”
    “So, Antioch, home of the politically correct crowd. You fit right in there.”
    “Well… I guess I did. Gail and I had some good years there. We organized protests, strikes, trashed the Army recruiting station in town. Beautiful.”
    Keith laughed. “Terrific. I’m getting my ass shot off, and you’re scaring away my replacement.”
    Jeffrey laughed, too. “It was a moment in time. I wish you could have been with us. Christ, we smoked enough pot to stone a herd of elephants, we screwed with half the graduate students and faculty, we—”
    “You mean you screwed other people?”
    “Sure. You missed the whole thing fucking around in the jungle.”
    “But… hey, I’m just a farm boy… were you guys married?”
    “Yeah, sort of. Well, yeah, we had to for a lot of reasons—housing, benefits, that kind of thing. It was a real cop-out—remember that expression? But we believed in free love. Gail still claims she coined the expression ‘Make love, not war.’ Nineteen sixty-four, she says. It came to her in a dream. Probably drug-induced.”
    “Get a copyright attorney.”
    “Yeah. Anyway, we rejected all middle-class bourgeois values and sentiments, we turned our backs on religion, patriotism, parents, and all that.” He leaned toward Keith and said, “Basically, we were fucked-up but happy, and we
believed.
Not all of it, but enough of it. We really hated the war. Really.”
    “Yeah. I didn’t think much of it either.”
    “Come on, Keith. Don’t lie to yourself.”
    “It wasn’t political for me. Just a Huckleberry Finn thing with guns and artillery.”
    “People died.”
    “Indeed they did, Jeffrey. I still weep for them. Do you?”
    “No, but I never wanted them to die in the first place.” He punched Keith in the arm. “Hey, let’s forget it. No one gives a shit anymore.”
    “I guess not.”
    They each had another beer and rocked. Keith thought that in twenty years they’d have lap blankets, drink apple juice, and talk about their health and their childhood. The years in between the beginning and the end, the years of sex, passion, women, politics, and struggle, would be fuzzy and nearly forgotten. But he hoped not.
    Keith said, “How many of us from Spencerville were at Bowling Green? Me, you, Annie, that weird kid who was older than us… Jake, right?”
    “Right. He went out to California. Never heard from him again. There was that girl, Barbara Evans, quite a looker. Went to New York and married some guy with money. I saw her at the twentieth class reunion.”
    “Spencerville High or Bowling Green?”
    “Bowling Green. I never went to a high school reunion. Did you?”
    “No.”
    “We just missed one this summer. Hey, I’ll go next year if you do.”
    “You’re on.”
    Jeffrey continued, “There was another guy from our high school at Bowling Green. Jed Powell, two years younger than us. Remember him?”
    “Sure. His folks owned that little dime store in town. How’s he doing?”
    “He got a head wound in Vietnam. Came back here, had a few bad years, and died. My parents and his were close. Gail and I went to the funeral and handed out antiwar literature. Shitty thing to do.”
    “Maybe.”
    “You getting mellow or drunk?”
    “Both.”
    “Me, too,” said Jeffrey.
    They sat awhile and caught up on family, then reminisced a little about Spencerville and Bowling Green. They told stories and recollected old friends, dragged up from the basement of time.
    It was getting dark now, and the rain still fell. Keith said, “Nearly everyone I knew sat on this porch at one time or