dog years: The Moon Looks the Same Anywhere You Are
I was twenty-three and home from Korea. Bill Drake was from New York and he showed us around. Drake had Dutch in him and his family had one of the last farms in Brooklyn. I know that's hard to believe now, but it was a good sized farm, with cows. Drake was hard to like after Korea, but I wasn't' ready to go home yet, and his family having the farm made it easier to avoid leaving. On the day I'm thinking of, he took me and Bobby Dougherty and David Clinger all over. We went to the zoo and to the Metropolitan Museum and then to Central Park. I took my shoes off there and carried them while I smoked a cigarette. My feet still looked bad from the cold and the trenchfoot, so I didn't look down at them. I just walked around this big field, taking it all in until I had enough.
When I walked up on the boys, Bobby was trying to hold a girls hand, but she kept snatching it away and holding it under her armpit. Bobby would reach for her hand as quick as she'd pull it away, each time grazing her breast. Her face was red and she was a big girl. Big boned. But when she smiled she had big wide white teeth and looked pretty. She sat away from her friends, but she wasn't afraid of us. She looked down at my feet when I came up on them and Bobby got her hand away from her. She let him hold it without trying to pull it back. I think she put it all together then. Our hair wasn't regulation anymore, so I bet it threw her off at first. But when she saw my feet and then Clinger's jump wings on his forearm she knew we were soldiers. It was exactly at that moment I wanted to leave and go home to my folks.

That night, me, Clinger, Drake, Bobby, and Drake's sister and her husband went into the city so we could see Times Square at night. Drake's sister laughed at how slow we walked and I reckon it was pretty odd considering we were soldiers. But the 187th mostly just dropped in and started fighting. To this day, I don't remember the marching as much as I remember the falling and watching the sun's reflection in the toes of my jump boots. It was the same as jumping out of a second story window and landing on a driveway. I remember that. The falling, not the landing as much.
There was so much light in that one spot that I forgot it was night-time. I looked up for the moon and I swear it was smaller than the smallest bulb on the tiniest sign. But when I looked up and found the moon, I couldn't look back to earth. I was frozen in place. Drake's brother-in-law and Bobby were playing grab ass over Drake's flask and went on without me. I couldn't call to them, you see. Because the moon looked like it did in Korea and I was scared to death that if I took my eyes off of it and looked back around me, I'd be back at the war. All that noise and the lights and me in my civilian clothes and I was scared that I was nine thousand miles away. The moon looks the same anywhere you are and it's a damned scary thing to know that after you've seen the sights I've seen.
After the guys noticed I was gone, they double-timed it back to collect me. We didn't talk about alot of things that happened up to that point, so I wasn't too worried about anyone discussing it afterwards. Drake's sister and his brother-in-law were quiet too. His draft notice had come two weeks earlier, around the time we got home.
I went back to the farm by myself and this is the part I wanted to tell you. On the train there was this couple. She had a diaper bag with an full bottle in a little side pocket and he had one of the early baby strollers. They didn't fold back then and were fairly damn heavy. I was caught up in imagining him lugging that cumbersome son of a bitch up and down the stairs of the train stops and then, suddenly, it came to me. There was no baby with them. My eyes shot to their faces so quick that I think they felt it, because they looked back at me. He had black pockets under his eyes that looked like the inside of a ball glove and her face was washed clean. We sat among all the people on the train, like we were the only ones there. And I don't know if I made it up or if they sent the images to me somehow, but I saw what happened to their baby girl. The scene came to me like a broken movie reel, the film flipping too fast and the bright light of the projector flashing in my face in a sickening rhythm. It was all so horrible that I busted out crying. I was just sitting there rolling my hat in my hands, sobbing louder than I ever had in my life. Louder than I ever had when I was a child myself. I didn't even wipe my eyes. I just looked out the window around the time we came from underground and found the moon.

It looked like a smudge of chalk on a blackboard through my tears and I watched it hold still as the train rolled away from all of the light.