Osprey Island

Thirteen

THE NATURE OF THE STRUCTURE OF A LIE

If the osprey passes from the American scene, we will lose a majestic and unique bird. Alone in a family between the hawks and the falcons, the osprey, unlike those numerous tribes, has but one genus, one species.

—ROGER TORY PETERSON, “The Endangered Osprey”

THEY LAY ON THE MATTRESS on the floor of Roddy’s shed. An old upright aluminum fan buzzed and whirred and blew out the sound of the crickets. Roddy lay on his back, stretched long, longer than the mattress, hands crossed behind his head. Suzy curled in toward his body, head in the crook of his underarm, knees at his hip, finger tracing the length of his torso, collarbone to pelvis, shoulder to hip bone. She ran her fingers along the scar on his side, her eyes closed.

“I never worked at a sawmill,” he said.

“Huh?” She opened her eyes.

“I didn’t get it working at a sawmill.”

“I guess I figured.” She closed her eyes again. She lay very still, just the fingers, tracing.

He was quiet a long while.

He hadn’t intended to tell her. He’d intended to tell no one. But none of this was foreseeable, and circumstances dictated their own imperatives. He had sense enough to have learned that much. He had sense enough to be afraid. Afraid that to give up a secret to one person on Osprey Island was to lose that secret to the world. And it wasn’t that the walls had ears or the trees had eyes, or that the birds overhead overheard your confessions and whispered them into the wind. It was that people just couldn’t help themselves.

He felt it in himself, that desire to talk. Perhaps it was his vigilant check of that desire that kept him so unnaturally quiet much of the time. He wanted to tell her, though. He wanted to give her something he’d never given anyone: a truth, of sorts.

He had trouble understanding what truth meant. He had lived with secrets, and secrets were just lies of omission and as hard to live with as any other lie. For there was no such thing as a solitary lie. It wasn’t that lies begot more lies; the casting of one lie merely brought into focus and relief a sprawling net of other lies. Roddy had been living those lies—a whole world of them—for twenty years, which was long enough for the world of lies to become its own truth. Or reality, at least. Maybe there’d been a time when he could have acknowledged the lie and stepped away from it, stepped back into the truth, but that time was long gone. That lie was now part of a foundation upon which other things had grown, and truth and fiction were entwined, which meant that there was no such thing as truth anymore. Nor had there ever been. What Roddy had once seen as truth—the truth of his childhood, for instance, before his lie—had only seemed like truth, when, really, it was as much of a lie as everything else. It was only in lying himself that he’d learned of the nature of the structure of a lie. And now that he could see it, he could see how everything was built of lies and how the world was a city of pick-up sticks raised on quicksand.

To acknowledge his lie to Suzy may have meant a good many things, but it meant one thing very clearly to Roddy: He knew he couldn’t undo the reality spawned from the lie, couldn’t ever return to the truth he’d left behind. But he could, at least, make sure that Suzy knew the lie for what it was. He could tell her. And he started to.

He told her what it was like to turn eighteen on August 8, 1968. He told her some things she already knew: like what it was like to live in a place where certain things didn’t get questioned—if you were a man and your country went to war, then you, as a man, went to fight in that war. End of story. Unless you happened to have a mother unlike every other mother you’d ever known. A mother who swore she’d burn your draft card herself if you didn’t do it first. A woman who begged you, whatever you did, not to fight that filthy, wrong, horrible war.

Suzy listened. She understood.

Roddy’s father had been a weak man who lived by a rigid set of codes, not smart enough to face the world without them. A man who told his son: You burn that draft card, you’ll be on the next ferry off of Osprey and never coming back, you hear? A man who said: You don’t fight in that war, you’re no son of mine, while his wife screamed and cried: No son of mine is fighting in that war. You had until you turned eighteen, and that had bought Roddy time—a few months past graduation—but not peace. What they’d done was effectively demand that he choose: Your country or your mother? Your mother or your father? Roddy’d had a war waged through himself.

“I couldn’t register. I couldn’t not register. I couldn’t talk to anyone.” Who would he have talked to? There were no draft counselors on Osprey Island. There were no hippies. Aside from Eden’s, there was only one point of view to be had.

“I left,” he said. “I had to. Whatever I did, it had to be my decision. It didn’t matter. I didn’t have a home anymore.” Eden and Roderick had managed to both lose their son and erode their marriage to a civil arrangement of household tasks and finances. That lasted a year, until National Geographic and the plight of the osprey served to render their relationship nothing more than legal. But until then, Eden cooked dinner, dusted, hung the laundry up to dry. Roderick cut the lawn and put out the trash.

Roddy hadn’t cared what people thought. They thought he’d fled. Never imagined that once he left their world he’d have gone anywhere but north, all the way. “Canada?” he said. “What the fuck was I going to do in Canada?” He’d never been anywhere in his entire life. “It wasn’t about right and wrong,” he told Suzy. “I didn’t know what was right and what was wrong. Or even if I knew . . . it was about what I could live with. It’s impossible to say, to talk about now, knowing . . . you know? Understanding. Then? I wasn’t like Eden . . .”

Suzy’s hand left Roddy’s scar for the first time since he’d begun. She pushed herself up on an elbow and looked at him in a way that Roddy would never be able to forget as long as he lived. She said, “Oh my god, you fought.”

He didn’t answer.

What Roddy saw on Suzy Chizek’s face in that moment of revelation was, he thought, pride. And as quickly as that new “truth” was born in her, his truth and his confession—the truth—slipped away. He fought back tears, which she read as the pain of a veteran of that terrible, wrong, awful war, the pain of having to deceive his mother, pain that made so much about Roddy Jacobs suddenly make so much sense.

Really, he fought back tears because he knew that in the truth she saw, his actions were valiant. In her eyes, he was suddenly brave. He could see the life she saw: unable to live with the idea of himself as a deserter, he’d enlisted, fought, seen unimaginable things, been injured, come home. In Suzy’s eyes, Roddy had known firsthand the horrors and survived to share his stories, to feed the strength of the antiwar movement and crusade for an end to the brutality. This story painted Roddy as so much more a man than the peace-love hippies who danced away to Canada while Suzy Chizek’s brother got his body blown apart in a flaming rice paddy. Roddy now joined ranks with the bravest of the brave—he’d fought and then renounced—and it was the only story of Roddy’s past that Suzy would ever be able to imagine now. She had too much Osprey in her to see otherwise. Too much Roderick Senior and Chas Chizek and Bud. Too much football and fireworks. Too much red, white, and blue. When Suzy Chizek left Osprey Island and went to college and joined the long-haired, braless, barefoot protests, she’d believed with a passion born of anger not at the U.S. government but at the fact that her brother Chas was dead. Hers was a passionate adolescent rebellion against everything her parents believed, everything she’d been raised to believe, and everything that had conspired to produce a world in which her brother didn’t get to be alive.

When he couldn’t hold back the tears any longer, Roddy let them come, and he let Suzy Chizek rock him and hold him as he cried.

Because the actual truth was this: On August 8, 1968, Roddy Jacobs turned eighteen and mailed the goddamned draft registration, because it was easier to mail it than not to mail it. And then he waited. It was the waiting he couldn’t take. Waiting and not knowing.

He lasted one month—the longest month of his life—and then he marched into the draft board and said, “I volunteer, I’ll fight. Send me anywhere. I don’t care.” At that point he was surprised to pass the psych exam. Because someone should have seen that he was far from all right.

It was after he volunteered that he ran, which was like signing himself up for the Most Wanted list. So then there was fleeing, and getting caught, and doing time. Then getting out, and then President Ford coming along, offering pardon, but by then there were enough people who thought the whole thing had been bullshit from the start, so he didn’t have trouble finding work, getting by.

The scar—the scar Suzy’d held under her hand as if to hold his body together in one piece—the scar was from fighting, yes. He’d gotten the injury in a bar in Tucson shortly after he’d fled, in a fight with a vet who’d called him a traitor and a coward and pushed him down. Roddy stumbled, beer in hand, and fell hard against the pool table, his beer bottle breaking on impact between the table and his body. The felt surface was ruined, and Roddy suffered wounds that required emergency surgery in a hospital where the cops had no trouble catching up with him, leveling charges of draft evasion. And that, as his mother would say, was that.