Savage Season Read Free Page A

Seemed to me, we ought to have known when to cut our losses.
    I talked to Trudy long and hard, and it was the sort of thing she loved.  Noble involvement.  It lit her like a torch.
    With her blessing, I decided to quit college and allow myself to be drafted.  When it came time to step forward and take the induction, I would refuse.  I'd go the prison route instead.  That would be my statement.
    This was the time of the lottery, and I was drafted almost immediately.  I was disappointed my draft notice didn't say Greetings.  I had always heard that it did.
    I went to Dallas, took my physical, passed, and refused to go.
    The army tried to give me outs.  I give them that.  One officer even suggested I make a break for Canada.  The war had soured even his way of thinking, and he was a lifer.
    But I refused to run.
    It was suggested I sign as a conscientious objector, but again I refused.  C.O. status meant you thought fighting for anything, even your life, was wrong.  I didn't believe that.  Had I been around during the fighting of World War I or II, I would have gone and done my bit.  The causes were just and the wars were fought with a conclusion in mind.  I was an idealist, not a coward.
    So I went to Leavenworth.  Trudy and some of her friends came to see me from time to time and told me "right on" and how brave I was, and it felt good to hear it.  They wrote me nice letters.
    But that good feeling didn't last.  It didn't relax me at night when I could hear the cons snorting and coughing and crying and farting and sodomizing each other.  And there were guys in there who had bludgeoned their grandmothers to death who thought it their patriotic duty to kill me for not signing up to shoot gooks.  If I hadn't been a pretty tough country boy with iron foundry muscles, I might not have made it.
    Trudy kept coming to see me, but her friends dropped off.  She kept writing, but the friends quit.  She sent me clippings in her letters that told me what was going on outside, about the causes being fought for, the ground gained, the ground lost.
    Then her visits thinned, and finally stopped.  Next to last letter I got from her went on about how brave I was again and compared me to a number of counterculture heroes.  It said Cheep had died and had been buried in a cream corn can out back of the house, and that she had met a man named Pete who was big in the ecology movement and they had this thing going.  The last letter told me that the thing she and Pete had going was now really going, and she was filing for divorce.  Nothing personal.  She thought I was the bravest man she knew.  It was signed like all the others: Love Trudy.
    I did my time.  Eighteen months altogether.  I had planned the day they let me out for a long time.  I thought I would come out on a bright warm day with my fist held high, and Trudy would be there looking sexy and soft in a short windblown dress that would give me a good view of her long brown legs, and as the music came up, sweet but triumphant, she would run to me with those legs flashing and throw her arms around my neck and give me a kiss that would knock me silly from head to toes.  Then she would load me in a car and drive us away.
    But when I came out it was cold and drizzling.  I had to talk a guard into calling someone to drive me to the bus station.  Between paying for the car and the bus, the money I had when I went in and the money the government gave me for the non stimulating manual labor I did inside was almost gone.  Needless to say, I didn't feel like raising my fist.
    I went back to East Texas and found out I didn't want to help the underprivileged anymore.  I realized I was one of them.  I got a job in the rose fields outside of LaBorde, and that's where I met Leonard.  He was a Vietnam vet and a certified hardhead.  He didn't like my views on a lot of things, but he didn't hold them against me either; I gave him someone to argue with.  He was a martial