[Excerpt]

The Law Library is open all night on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Alona can escape Christine’s negative vibes. Besides, in the stacks, Alona can trade the smell of her dorm-room pile for the smell of ancient scholars. Alona takes the elevator to the sixth floor. She logs in to a library computer with her roommate’s student ID and password. On the second day after Christine moved in, Alona discovered this and other passwords, including Christine’s MasterCard and Facebook, taped to the underside of Christine’s keyboard shelf.

Kevin’s story in the Southeast College Review is online. Alona pays fourteen dollars to subscribe because it would be too obvious to use Christine’s MasterCard. Alona downloads Kevin’s story and reads with such intense concentration that she doesn’t notice the night janitor run his mop under the desk and over her feet.

The Blue-Green Turns Red

by Kevin Machelmann

Fate’s a fickle fiend. Eleven months ago, I just finished eleventh grade, and I’m surfing South Beach with some friends, and this girl asks me to “help her learn to surf.” She gets on her board where it’s four or five feet deep. I’m holding her board. She rises to one knee. When the wave comes, I give her board a gentle nudge.

It only takes forty-five minutes to bike from my house to her house. From then until summer ends, we see each other every day. Marvin and Margaret. We must’ve carved it on a hundred trees. She was my first and only love. Two years ago in my freshman year, my high school put on one of the best Bye Bye Birdie productions ever. Unfortunately, Margaret didn’t see it. Margaret was using our summer together to prepare her audition for a lead role in her school’s upcoming Bye Bye Birdie. Margaret and I sang “Put on a Happy Face” with our own choreography about a thousand times. We showed everybody—friends, strangers at the beach, even my parents. Margaret had the best voice in the world. Every time she sang “One Boy” she looked right through my eyes into my soul.

I won’t go into all the sexual details, but geez, I loved her. She sure showed me some important stuff (sexually speaking). I never heard of any steadies talking about it like we did. In the early fifties, about the time her mom became pregnant with Margaret, her mother had been a secretary in the same building at the University of Indiana as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex. At lunch, all the secretaries, including Margaret’s mom, got the down and dirty from the Kinsey Institute typist. Margaret’s mom passed the Kinsey secrets down to Margaret, and this knowledge was passed on to me from Margaret herself. She made me happier than I thought possible.

One day on a picnic, Margaret tells me she has a boyfriend at the University of Miami who’s coming back down from New York for his senior year, his last year before he’ll be drafted, and she dumps me. Dumps me.

The next day, I take the bus to the Induction Center and volunteer to go to Nam. My fake ID says I was born in 1946 instead of 1951. The truth. I’m sixteen. Thanks to my ID, I become Alphonso Ramirez. I enlist. No one at the Army Induction Center questions my ID. They don’t mind too much that my ID says I’m twenty-one and I avoided registering for the draft for three years, because now they got me, Private Alphonso Ramirez.

In Viet Nam no one in my Company believes I can’t really speak Spanish. I am trying to learn Vietnamese, though. I have a phrase book. I practice every chance I get. I practice with refugees. “What is the best restaurant in town?” “How many sons and daughters do you have?” “Please add that to my tab.” Our Vietnamese liaison attached to our company, Lieutenant Ng, tells me in Vietnamese that “my machine gun mouth kills boredom.” “Machine gun” mouth is hilarious in Vietnamese. I learn to be funny even with my limited Vietnamese vocabulary.

I really apply myself to becoming fluent. I spend hours with Lieutenant Ng. He gives me a Vietnamese language textbook, but it has French to Vietnamese translations. Luckily, I got all A’s in high-school French, which really wasn’t that long ago. Studying the Vietnamese textbook shows me I miss high school the most. Besides Margaret. At the base, while the guys in my squad enjoy marijuana and beer, I memorize Vietnamese nouns and verbs.

Our company commander, Major Gaze, sees I’m pals with the Vietnamese liaison officers. He summons my platoon non-com, Sergeant Johnson, and me to company headquarters. The sergeant, already on his second tour of duty, worked his way up through the ranks. He knows how to play the game. Poor Sarge got drafted after he lost his football scholarship in his sophomore year in college. Johnson was injured with only four seconds left in the only game he started. Behind 23-21, he had led his team ninety-three yards down the field to the three-yard line when his knee was shattered by his own teammate stumbling onto him. As second-string quarterback, it was surprising that, at the end of the season, he would be the one to lead his team to a bowl-game win and earn a few million for his college. But that wouldn’t happen. On the last play of the game, he watched from a stretcher as the kicker missed the easy kick for the win. A year later his leg was A-OK for the Army, but not football.

At headquarters, Major Gaze asks me to report back to him about suspicious talk or activities, no matter how seemingly inconsequential, from our “so-called allies,” as he calls them, meaning Lieutenant Ng and the other South Vietnamese Regular Army Officers. The Viet Cong more times than not knew where we’d be patrolling and would wait in hiding for American infantry on patrol in the countryside. Major Gaze orders Sergeant Johnson to cut me some slack, so I’m free to gather intel. No base chores like latrine duty.

Lieutenant Ng invites me to a party in a district administration center off-base with about fifteen other Vietnamese officers. Between shots of counterfeit Kentucky bourbon, a few of them ask me questions about America. How big is the average swimming pool? Did I ever meet Marilyn Monroe? Is there still slavery in America? Almost no other American speaks Vietnamese, so right off the bat they think I’m hilarious. After a few minutes, all the Vietnamese officers are listening and laughing. Eventually my talks become almost weekly events, at least when there isn’t an enemy offensive. Probably my odd Vietnamese word choices and naiveté—I am only sixteen after all—earn me the reputation as a stand-up comic for the Vietnamese officers. A few of them give me gifts. Vietnamese candy and pastries. The marijuana from Captain Ng—which I’m not supposed to mention—I share with the guys in my platoon. Everyone’s thankful because nine pounds goes a long way. The best gift is a seven-foot oil painting of a street in Hanoi. Many G.I.s thought it was a little odd that a Latin American kid ended up as a Vietnamese stand-up comic.

I report everything to Major Gaze—even the oil painting of Hanoi, which he confiscated for the intel. Turns out the intel on the painting is valuable, so I get promoted to Corporal Ramirez. I forgot to tell the major about the marijuana, though.

My poor parents. All through high school, our heated arguments always ended with me threatening to move to San Francisco like our neighbor, Flora, the flower child. I send them a short note:

Dear Mom & Dad,

I’m in Viet Nam.

Love, Your son,

Marvin, a.k.a. Corporal Alphonso Ramirez

They thought I had gone to Haight Ashbury and wanted to disown me because they hate hippies. After receiving my letter from Nam, they write back and say they are very proud, but sixteen-year-olds should not be in the Army. They have to write to me as Corporal Alphonso Ramirez, otherwise the letters would not reach me, because there is no Marvin Braverman in the Army. They tell me they are hiring a lawyer to have me discharged, but it is difficult because enlistees with fake names are administered by a separate chain of command from underage enlistees.

Out on patrol in enemy territory one afternoon, Lieutenant Ng and I guard the rear of our column. Lieutenant Ng whispers some grammar and word choice suggestions for my new routine about the best make-out spots in American high schools—Drama Department costume room, under the bleachers, staff room during a fire drill. When I finally get Lieutenant Ng to understand the fire-drill concept, he laughs so loud that he gives away our position. Sergeant Johnson wants us shot.

And that is ironic because Sergeant Johnson is the first guy I see get shot. Now his intestines, which I recognize from my Biology textbook from only last year, are sliding out of him onto broken bamboo stalks.

Meanwhile, enemy bullets whizz by inches above our heads. I remember his story about watching the missed field goal from the stretcher. That’s also when the cacophony of smells hit me to the point where I puke. Sergeant Johnson looks at me like he expects me to change the situation. Magically put his guts back. Like me puking shouldn’t be what he sees as he breathes his last breath. I look into his eyes and try my hardest to project straight into his brain the image of that field goal kick going right between the goal posts. Other than that, I don’t know what to do. They don’t cover disemboweled sergeants in basic training. Besides, Johnson and I never liked each other anyway.

Alona stops reading. She rereads the final paragraph. And again. The teammate stumbling on Johnson’s knees in a stupid football game determines his life. She flops out of her chair and lies on the floor. Holding her intestines in place, she listens to the sound of an electric floor polisher humming a path from a distant corner of the library to the stair landing just below her computer station.