CANADA

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It's a full days drive from the border to Calgary. A days journey through trees dripping a green gloss, landscape where no footprints are imprinted, it's like driving through a travel brochure.

I had plenty of time to ponder the first phone call to my parents.

I played out various scenarios in my mind. "Hi mom, I'm in Canada."

"What are you doing there?"

"I'm learning to dogsled so I can be a Mountie."

"What do you know about being a Canadian?"

You got me. I knew as much about Canada as Rallio did about Vietnam before he was drafted.

My parent's response to my new life as a Canadian Mountie could take a variety of tacks. They could be supportive and send money or CARE packages filled with warm clothing and dog biscuits. Or they could disown me for going into law enforcement and tell me never to step foot in their neighborhood again. My present circumstance would somewhat limit the impact of the threat. I suppose they could turn me into the FBI. I was fairly certain once I failed to appear after my induction letter, the FBI would be notified. Stories had circulated on college campuses about FBI agents parked in obvious stakeouts in front of parent's houses and girlfriend's houses and former employers. They're always told with an element of humor. The jokes on the FBI, ha, ha. For me, it was going to be hard to get a good belly laugh while standing neck deep in Canadian snow.

Gayle, Rallio, and I did what the Israelites did after they had reached the Promised Land, we united into one band and began to fight among ourselves. "What are you doing?"

"I'm changing the station. I don't like that song."

"I like it and I'm driving."

"I'm hungry. Let's stop to get something to eat."

"You can wait a little longer. We're almost there."

"How do you know how long I can wait? How much further do we have? What if I said I had to go to the bathroom, you gonna tell me how long I can wait? And can you roll up that window, the wind's blowing in my face."

Finally, the car dragged itself to the curb in front of her apartment and we crawled up the stairs each carrying a bag. Rallio managed one trip while I went back for more. We flopped down into her place like old prospectors coming out of the desert into an oasis. I looked around, "Ya got a nice igloo here."

It was a place where Rallio could begin to recover. He was bad for a couple of days, not screaming bad, but aching bad, like having a case of the flu. As I look back, she was quite fair to me. While she doted on Rallio, she let me stay on her couch without raising the question of compensation. I guess she viewed us as a packaged deal. I wish I could say that I was as magnanimous. Rallio and she became quite close. A good part of my reaction to her no doubt came out of jealousy as I watched them play twosies. I felt like the odd man out. I also felt endangered and not just emotionally. Without the proper visas, we were in a precarious position just one lover's spat away from deportation.

Rallio and I huddled inside her apartment like Jews dodging Nazis. We feared the pale light of day believing that our American walk would lead to suspicion and our American talk would eventually bear that suspicion out and we'd end up in a chair at police headquarters being softened up by the rubber hoses. We lived for the arrival of Gayle after her shift at work when she could escort us out of the apartment. I never knew that going to the grocery store could be such a treat.

It was not all that surprising that she took on the character of Canada so readily. Someone studied in American speech patterns might have detected her slight twang while she was in the states. A twang that became more pronounced the more she became Canadian. She knew details about holidays not on the calendar and history not in the books, at least not in the U.S. history books. At first I figured it was because she grew up near the border, then she clued us in.

"How do you know what's in Canadian bacon, Gayle? From what I hear no one knows what's in Canadian bacon, not even Canadian porkers."

"My mother was born in Canada and as far as I'm concerned she should have stayed here. She came to the U.S. to marry my father. That was the last decision she was allowed to make on her own." Gayle's father was a man who was out to dominate those around him, including his wife and children. Gayle's relationship with him was as much responsible for her not deporting me from her apartment as anything else. Part of her no doubt wanted to kick me out of her place and probably out of the country, but she wasn't about to send me back to the U.S., back to her father.

I watched Rallio and her with an eye that became more and more resentful and withdrawn. Somewhere past the third week, my bile popped and the gastric juices rolled up my throat. It was time for me to go. While she was away at work and we were sacked out on the couch reading the paper and watching the tube I told Rallio, "I'm thinking of heading out to Vancouver."

There was a delay. "What do you think you're going to find in Vancouver."

"A job for one. I can't even apply for anything here. Calgary is a nice place and all but it's not exactly a hotbed of technological development." Calgary is a cowtown. Vancouver is a big city and big cities have computer centers. I felt I had a chance at landing a job in an electronics plant or a business that needed someone to monitor their system.

"OK, when do you want to go?"

His words implied what I hadn't considered, that he would come with me. I assumed he would stay planted where he was. He had everything he needed. I can't say I was disappointed that he decided to join me. Even though he would have been better off staying with her, I wasn't about to reject his company even for his own good. That's why my argument didn't have a lot of force behind it, "You don't have to leave here, you know. Calgary is a fine place, it's just not right for me. It's got other things going for it other than technology and Gayle is in no hurry for you to get a job. You've got time to pick something you want to do."

I never knew his reasons, I can conjecture, but I don't know why he packed his bag and lined it up with mine. Gayle graciously arranged for a ride for the two of us with a salesman touting hospital supplies. Rallio left some small items with her; a shirt, a pair of worn-through boots, a bandanna, an extra belt, maybe he thought he'd be back. I had to dispose of a set of bongos, a radio without batteries, and I had no intention of returning. At the curb, I thanked her and then Rallio gently kissed her good-bye.

The salesman was a nice fellow accustomed to long miles on the road. He could talk for hours or be silent for hours whichever made the white lines more endurable. The only unfortunate occurrence came as we disembarked and that was through no ill intention of his, he simply had no appreciation for our state of affairs. He let us out in a suburb of Vancouver. Suburbs are no place for those on the bum. Suburbs are of similar character throughout the world. They are medieval, suspicious of strangers, closed in like special attractions. If you ain't got the money for a ticket, you ain't gonna get in and we didn't look like paying customers. He let us out near a park and we strolled over to sit down on the playground equipment. Rallio and I were raised in the suburbs so we knew the territory. Our bags made us suspect, they identified us as vagabonds and we stashed them in the bushes. We could safely stay in the park a couple of hours, any longer and we'd be spotted as loiterers. It only took one stop by a cop to find out we didn't have any Canadian ID so we stayed in a constant state of agitation while we discussed our options.

"Let's find a college campus. We'd blend in plus we could probably find a place to stash our gear. Who knows, we might even find a place to crash for the night."

A university campus was not familiar ground to Rallio so he wasn't keen on the logic behind my proposal. All he saw in his mind were indecipherable textbooks and old buildings. I saw a safe harbor and coeds. We thought about thumbing our way through town but in the end we took a bus which was a trick in itself.

"Does this bus stop at Vancouver University?" Bus drivers are sometimes hired because they have that unique gift of personality that allows them to step on the accelerator and throw old ladies searching for a seat down the aisle. Fortunately, we got a sweetheart.

"I think you mean the University of British Columbia."

"Is it on your route?"

It wasn't. But he told us to cross the street, wait for the next bus and tell the driver we want to catch a specifically numbered bus downtown and then get on the line out to the school. We thanked him and headed downtown. I felt much better after the convivial encounter with the driver. If he had been surly, we still would have made it downtown one way or another, even by foot if we had to, but we would have ended up downtown on edge staying in the shadows. Instead we rode the public transportation as if we were Canadians.

Once on the campus, we headed for the student services building. We found the center that contained the employment and housing listings. I walked around reading the notices while Rallio chatted up the woman at the desk. She was too old to be a student. Let me rephrase that: Too old to be a student just out of high school. Rallio approached her. "We're starting in the Fall but we're here a little early. Would you mind if we surveyed the board?" I never liked to ask, fearing a negative response. The housing information was listed in its totality, phone numbers and addresses so I was busy writing. The employment information was somewhat more concealed only listing the job description.

"Do you have student ID?"

Rallio was at the counter engaging her, "We're not officially enrolled and we won't be until the Fall. If we can't access the board, maybe you'd like to help us by recommending a safe but inexpensive area from which we can start our apartment search."

At the bottom of the board, in a corner was a flyer advertising the student hostel. The trip to the school was turning out to be worthwhile I told myself and enthusiastically took the information down.

"And since we have a little time to spend, we'd like to take in some of the tourist stops. Any place in particular you'd recommend?" he asked.

Most people like being consulted and she was no different. By the time Rallio had finished sweet talking her we had an all- day pass to the center whenever she was working and we had a list of places to tour and to avoid. Rallio bid her good-bye using her first name.

We made our way to the hostel. Large signs announced the larceny in the clientele. Unattended items were expected to disappear. I was reluctant to desert our junk. A trip to the student store for a padlock and a tramp back across the campus to the gym found us the safety of a locker. "Good thinking."

"Not really thinking, just retreating to the places I'm familiar with the most." While I was proud of myself, my lessons were limited to the campus. Without looking at Rallio, I knew there were itineraries that once wandered into were difficult to escape out of.

Everything seemed easy at first.

After the night in the hostel, a fellow hired us to wash windows for a day. The next day we found work at a car wash. The manager carried us for four days then told us we had to present immigration papers. When we couldn't comply, he paid us for one day and threatened to call Immigration. I was about to take it but Rallio stepped in front of me, "Aren't they going to want to know why you hired two employees without landed status?"

"`Cause you lied."

"Yeh, and how many times are you going to be able to run that by them? Wouldn't it be easier just to pay us than to continually have Immigration sniffing around your operation. And maybe Immigration will bring in some other authority. You clean with the Health Department, the Labor Relations Board, the National Bureau of Undergarments. Even if you are, do you really want them bothering you every couple of days? You know, now that I think about it, go ahead, call Immigration. Don't pay us. It'll cost you more than four lousy days at minimum wage."

He found it in his heart to come up with the money.

After that, it was next to impossible to get a job. I couldn't pay someone to hire me. They all wanted to see my documents. Sometimes they'd give me an application and tell me they couldn't hire without papers so I'd fill out the application to keep appearances but I'd put in a phony phone number and address. If you're not Canadian, you need a work permit and to get a work permit you need an entry visa and to get an entry visa you have to enter the country legally and we most assuredly had not done that. We were screwed.

Rallio got a job sweeping out a deli. The deli was strategically connected to a small bar. It wasn't long before Rallio was being swept out. He ended up owing the bar more money than he had earned at the deli so the bar and deli was a section of town we scrupulously avoided. After that I began to fear that Rallio might get a job in one of the other places we liked to frequent.

Just after he was fired from the deli, Rallio was loud, boisterous, and plastered coming into the hostel. We had already overstayed the limit stated in the regulations so I was apprehensive about drawing attention to ourselves.

"Rallio, you fucking idiot. You're going to get us kicked out of here." I then called him a drunken junkie. I could call him a "fucking idiot" because that was a generic term but a drunken junkie was too close to the truth. I regretted the words as soon as they left my lips. I would have liked to have sucked them back into my mouth. But it was too late. Drunk or not drunk, he heard. I could see it in his eyes.

I awoke the next morning and Rallio was gone. Along with Rallio was all but a little of my remaining money. I could feel the panic rising and it may have reached a crescendo and sent me into a stay at the heart attack ward but in he walked.

"Not a bad likeness, eh?"

"What's this?"

"That's you. I used your license. Hope you weren't too enamored with the picture. We had to cut it up some to fit."

We had our landed documents and a future via Rallio's shopping in the black market.

I was lucky and managed to get employment as a night computer operator. We found a little room to live in. Since my schedule was that of a vampire, I didn't see a whole lot of Rallio. He had a series of odd jobs. And a series of not so odd girlfriends, teachers, counselors, nurses, all in the service profession. One after another they seemed to burn out on Rallio faster than on their other clients.

Christmas season found Rallio on a month long drunk and me in a deep funk. I felt like I was sitting at the bottom of a well; I could hear the voices above and I knew there was great activity going on but I couldn't summon up the energy to climb the walls and pull myself out. I sat on the edge of the bed for almost an hour. Not lost in thought, just lost. Not feeling sorry for myself, or sorry for my parents, or sorry for the Canadians that had inherited us or the Americans like Rallio that were still wearing the green and slogging through the shit and killing the poor Viets; not feeling sorry at all, just not feeling. I sat on the edge of the bed coaxing myself towards breakfast. I was too tired to pour a bowl of cereal.

The days off from work were torture. I had to confront the emptiness. Apart from Rallio, I had no friends and working alone at night I was not likely to make any. I was too despondent and way too poor to develop any activities. I came home to start a two day weekend hoping Rallio wasn't in the room. But he was. He was sitting in a chair staring at the Christmas tree. Canadians celebrate Christmas so we thought we'd be more like the locals by observing the holiday. The tree was skimpy on ornaments but we had bought a string of small lights and I had added a blinking unit that controlled all the lights at once switching them on and then off.

I sat down and watched the lights. We both sat there quiet for some time mesmerized by the flash of the bulbs. Rallio spoke: "The night was black. Black like ink. So black the shadows had color. Then the sky would beam with white and yellow and red and the yellow would mix with the blue and give off a green hue. It was beautiful in a horrendous way.

"There was a guy in our company, a funny guy. Everyone liked him. He was always making jokes and doing funny stuff. He'd sometimes make this big ritual around mealtime. Pretending to lay out a spread and take orders. `This isn't what I ordered', he'd bellow. `I wanted glazed duck not twice bitten chicken. If I wasn't so hungry, I'd send it back. I'm withholding your 5 star rating till I taste dessert.' And he'd go on and on. He may have been the funniest person I've ever met.

"He decided no one was going to take away his Christmas, not the fucking Vietnamese, not the fucking military.

"They try to disconnect you, you know. Disconnect you from the outside world, from your family, from everything even yourself, everything but them. So he decided he was going to have a Christmas.

"You never knew when he might do something that would make your whole day. He picked up a book in Vietnamese once and for several days we saw him reading it. We knew he wanted us to ask him what the book was about. Mind you, it was in Vietnamese and he didn't read Vietnamese. Finally, someone confronted him. He tells us it's a story about a big unhappy dick. Everyone's telling him, `Bullshit. It ain't about no unhappy dick.' `Alright, don't believe me. But I'm reading the story if you want to hear it.' Then he starts to read it. `Call me Squishy Male.' And he starts to tell this story of a Captain Aflab who gets his dick taken off and he has to search the Seven Seas for it. Now everyone is booing him and hissing at him and his story thinking they recognize it. But pretty soon he brings in Tom Sawyer to whitewash the dick. And then Heidi and Jane Eyre and the Bobsey Twins. The story is so downright obscenely funny that there's no one saying a word. I mean we're focused with rapt attention. When he says, `That's all for tonight, now say your prayers and go to bed,' we're all disappointed. So disappointed that we make him continue the next night. And he does for several nights with the story getting more and more preposterous. Somewhere along the line Captain Aflab gets replaced by General Westy and then the big mopy dick gets an Asian cast to it. If Aflab was a megalomaniac, Westy was a pompous buttkissing moron who never had a creative thought in his life. He was leading the ship into treacherous waters hoping to capture the big white unhappy dick. The crew perishes and I don't remember how he tells it but the upshot is that Westy doesn't get lashed to the whale beckoning us all like in the book, he has to give it mouth to mouth to resuscitate it so he can keep it going. In other words, he ends up sucking the big one."

Rallio pauses here with a big smile on his face and I begin to believe that's all I'm going to hear but then he starts in again.

"He's going to have Christmas. So he sets up this Christmas tree. It's scrawny because he has to patch it together from dead jungle wood but it's recognizable as a Christmas tree. At first he puts cans and stuff on it. Then someone cuts out some tin stars and they look better than the cans. And then someone else takes a can and manages to make this great looking decoration by cutting holes in the tin and peeling small pieces away so they look like ornaments. We begin to string foil wrapping together. Anyway the tree looks mighty good. Maybe the best goddamn tree I've ever seen. Then he says, `Presents, I've wrapped presents. If you want a present or even if you don't, wrap something and put it under the tree.' And he got up and scooped up his presents in his arm and walked towards the tree and bent to set his presents down. And the tree blinked and he was gone and the tree was gone and Xmas for all of us was gone.

"Just like that ... Blink ... Gone .... Blink ... Gone ... Blink ..."

I sat there unable to move in the chair. Rallio fell asleep, drunk. I fell asleep, awoke and crawled into my bed.

A couple of months blinked and Rallio's father fell ill. The worse he got the more I worried that Rallio would make a run across the border to see him. When he died, Rallio was like a jigsaw puzzle cut into a thousand pieces each chopped and jagged and held in place only by the pressure of the others. If one falls, the picture disintegrates. I don't know if this is in the psychology textbooks, but I do know that it was the liquor that got him through those days. I read this somewhere, I wish I could credit the author. It wasn't meant to be an excuse but a statement of condition: "When we found that we had been deceived into becoming cogs in a murderous machine we looked into ourselves for the point of deception --- the reason we believed so easily --- and since the answer was as elusive as the question (the old fish and water situation) we took to medicating so we didn't keep asking the question."

Rallio moved in with a girl and stayed moved in. And I got a raise and a bigger place. We had one last glorious blowout together. It was on the day we were officially awarded landed status through the amnesty program. The Canadian Parliament had approved all of us ex-patriots for citizenship whether or not we had entered legally. For those of us who were still Americans in Canadian fur coats, this act changed that. It wasn't as easy or unanimous as history may record it. Many Canadians opposed it. Even some Americans opposed it, realizing that it would prevent us from carrying on a struggle against the U.S. war effort since our eggs were no longer in that basket. In a gesture that was darkly amusing to most of us, the United States later offered a sick kind of conditional amnesty. Draft resisters had to admit guilt. Even though the unrest, the military defeat, and the general turmoil all underscored the veracity of the anti-war position we were the ones that were expected to be contrite. To show you how disingenuous the U.S. proposal was, Rallio couldn't even take advantage of it. He had fought their fucking war but was classified as a deserter and deserters were not granted amnesty. It was like being a believer before Constantine, or an abolitionist before Lincoln, or a woman before Pankhurst.

Rallio and I got blitzed. I walked Rallio home and we ascended the front steps to his home. The door opened and a very pregnant girl grabbed Rallio and threw him inside. She screamed at me, "What's wrong with you? He was off the stuff and then you take him out. Who the hell are you?" She was crying and I was shrinking under her tears. Her voice got low and throaty, "Please don't come around here anymore."

And I didn't. Except one last time before I crossed the border.

I met Rallio for lunch. He was living in a suburb about ninety miles away and working for the railroad. He had an on/off work schedule. Several days on then several days off and he was off for a couple of days. We met for lunch so I could say good- bye properly. I'd called to say I was going back but I wanted to see him again. I think he wanted to see me also.

We sat down and I ordered a Diet Coke, remembering what had happened last time we met. He ordered an ice tea which I took for a good sign. After the waitress left, he said, "No more beer for me."

"Good for you, how'd you quit?" I was surprisingly nervous seeing him. It was almost like being out on a first date, you know where you want to make a good impression because you may not get another chance. At the same time you want to take an accurate assessment of the other person.

"It was Misty. She was a little girl, maybe three or four and I was sitting at the kitchen table, drunk, my head face down on the table. She was born with one arm shortened, you know. And it wasn't even her fault. She paid for my sins. I knew that even before the studies came out on the generational effects of Orange. I guess at some level we all knew it. The war that just keeps on giving. Anyway, I'm drunk as a skunk and I feel her next to me just looking the way kids stare, judging without the means of judgement. I wasn't sure how long she'd been standing there looking. I came out of my stupor long enough to hear her say, `Daddy, please don't be sad because of me.'

"If there was something I could have taken to kill myself right then and there I would have. Gladly swallowed it or stuck it through my gut but I was too drunk to even lift my head, too drunk to even decently end my life.

"When I finally sobered up, I found something inside of me had been pulled back and snapped. I came to understand that Misty would always believe that my failures, my inadequacies, my betrayals, were due to her. Her mother knew better. Misty might when she became a certain age but in the meantime, while she became that person she was to become, while she put on the layers that cushion us and make us whole, she'd be living with a cancerous spot that I had created and nourished.

"Once in my life when it mattered, I listened to other people. I wasn't going to listen again. They were telling me that I was a casualty, that I should have my name inscribed on that damn wall for all the life I was going to have. It was hate as much as love for her that made me quit drinking. I hated them. I wish I could say different now, but between you and me, I know it took both. And that was it. No more alcohol, no more dope. So that's my tale, not sad, but true. Now, you tell me about yourself. Why did you decide to go back after all this time?"

I told Rallio about my jobs in the computer industry and how I'd made a decent living even if the occupation necessitated frequent relocations. I told him I was between jobs and between girlfriends and it seemed like the right time to go back. Maybe it wasn't going to be a permanent feeling, but the border meant a lot less to me now than it once had, not only because I could legally move across unchallenged, but because it was so long ago that the things that seemed so heavy then, no longer carried much weight. I knew most of the exiles were staying away from their country of birth except for an occasional visit, but for me, I was heading south and if I stayed, then so be it. It was many years later I realized that I didn't come back like the prodigal son. I came back pissed and angry and still burdened and sure that the country was continuing to succor the worst of its tendencies.

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