The Kill Call

30

Journal of 1968

And that’s the thing about memories. They come back to you in the darkness or in the daylight. They arrive like strangers at night, they appear out of the shadows in the heat of the sun. Or they walk up to you, smiling, in the rain.

No matter how guilty you feel, you know the truth when you come face to face with it. You know it by its eyes, and its voice. You know it so well that you don’t need to ask its name.

And then what do you do? What would you do? No one knows until it happens, until the call comes and you do whatever is needed.

1968. A year of revolution? Well, maybe. But every spasm of rebellion was ruthlessly crushed. Russian tanks rolling into Prague, students facing riot squads outside the Sorbonne, Boss Daley’s police clubbing hippies on the streets of Chicago.

But that was the 1960s to me. The world on a knife edge. It was the U2 incident, the Bay of Pigs, the Six Days War, the building of the Berlin Wall. American B-52s circling constantly just outside Soviet airspace, ready for the first strike.

But the one thing I remember most about events in the outside world is something that everyone else seems to have forgotten. That January, a B-52 Stratofortress crashed in Greenland, spilling its load of nuclear warheads across the snowy wastes. When I read about that, I imagined the aircraft coming down a few miles to the east, in Soviet territory. US bombs falling on Kamchatka. And it could have happened so easily. Across the world, fingers were on the button, and World War Three hung on a hair trigger.

Often, when I was out there in the fields, I could feel Jimmy alongside me, walking in the midst of a shadow, even on the sunniest day. And we’d talk about this subject a lot, the way that things worked out. I’d tell him about the feeling of guilt. The guilt of being the one who survived.

Of course, a lot of people have died since Jimmy. But it’s different when you’ve seen them die, when you know their last sight of the world was your own face, that your reflection was caught in their eyes as they took their last breath.

And worse, when you wonder every day if they believed it was you that killed them.

You know, it took me a while to be sure that it wasn’t me. But I remember the exact moment. It was the night I saw them on the street, the two of them, just leaving the Bird in Hand. I could see straight away that they’d forgotten Jimmy. They’d managed to put his death in the past, the way I never did.

Arm in arm, they were. A laugh, a kiss, and something more than that. There was a terrible anger that came up inside me then. It burned like a flame, and it never went out. It blazed inside me like a nuclear core, scorching through my heart and my blood, contaminating a part of my brain with its fallout.

They had made me guilty. I could never forgive them for that. They had made me feel responsible for Jimmy’s death, and they made me tell lies. Why had I listened to Les, just because he was number one? Why had I thought that life was too short, that we could all die tomorrow, so none of it mattered?

That was the moment I changed. In that one, bright, devastating flash, I realized what I had to do. No matter how long I had to wait, I knew who the person was that I needed to kill.