When I was twelve years old, on one of the three shelves of our small family bookcase I discovered a copy of Hiroshima by John Hersey, and I read it like an obsession in just one day and one night. The click and clatter of one victim's shin bones—his ankles and feet having been severed in the atomic blast—on the concrete city sidewalk as he ran who knows how or why or where kept me awake in my bed late many a night and turned me and tossed me in recurring nightmare. Certain for forty years that this image had come from Hersey's book but wanting to check the text to be certain of it and perhaps to quote the description exactly, once, twice, three times I thumbed through the book, my eyes scanning each page for the passage I remembered, and I could not find it. Had I made it up? Had I confused the terrible reality of Hersey's subject with a panel from one of Mike's comic books? Dimly, gradually over the passing months, I conceded reluctantly that I had.
But not this:
There were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks…. Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of a teapot.
Yet despite my years of daily whippings from my father, the trauma of my learning of the Holocaust and of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the ugly anecdotal gossip of World War II and the Korean War that trickled down to us children in the schoolyard and locker room, to me it seems no contradiction to call my eighteen years of childhood—the first five in Emerson and the rest in Shenandoah—idyllic. Often followed by my dog Boots, I rode my used bicycle all over town, I played Peewee and Midget baseball, I competed in all junior high and high school sports, and on almost every day of every summer it seemed I spent two hours or more with friends at the big blue public swimming pool. Less than a strong swimmer and afraid to dive head first off the high board, I mastered the Canadian cannonball.
Kaboom splash sprinkle—
Again!
Kaboom splash sprinkle—
Again!
Kaboom splash sprinkle—
Again!
I'd stop at Jay Drug and ask Ed to make me a cherry Coke or a lime freeze.
In the evening—
Girls.
"I'm a lover, not a scholar, not a fighter," my friend Rick often said and I'd repeat.
"I'm not a fighter."
No.
I did not fight.
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