Blood and Oranges by James Goldsborough (latest books to read txt) 📗

people! he’d said. God, how she’d wished Joe had been there! She wasn’t a polemicist, never had been. She’d said something pitiful about the injustice of five thousand dollar fines compared to the criminal damage done to the city, and Robby began quoting from Ayn Rand about the evils of government regulation. Afterward, she knew what she should have said: that governments are established to assure that markets work for everyone, not just for big corporations. She’d been too angry to think straight.

She told him about the foundation soon after he returned from the disastrous trip north with Cal. She’d been sitting with him in the garden and mentioned it innocently enough. He had a right to know what they were doing with the estate. His reaction astounded her. “So you and Aunt Maggie set up a foundation with your inheritance from Grandpa Eddie? Shouldn’t I have something to say about that?”

She’d never discussed money with Robby. The bank handled his school expenses and provided him with a generous allowance. And there he was challenging what she and Maggie were doing and asking if the money was his? What if I need that money to get started in business? he said. Isn’t that how Grandpa Eddie got started, with money left by his mother? She’d refused to talk any more about it. Got up and walked into the house.

“By the way,” said Joe, his imagination stimulated by alcohol and a good duel with his son, “I gather you haven’t heard anything from our friends at the Selective Service System. Setting up a lottery system is the damndest thing I’ve ever heard of. Either you have a draft or you don’t. Sounds too much like the Civil War when you could buy your way out of serving.”

“How can you buy your way out of a lottery?” said Lizzie. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Your number comes up or it doesn’t.”

“My point,” said Joe, “is that in a real war everybody goes.”

“So Vietnam isn’t a real war?” said Robby.

Joe took a sip of cabernet. “What do you think?”

Robby had thought about it all right, just as every boy of draft age in the sixties was thinking about it. You could hardly take a political course at Stanford or any university in the country where Vietnam didn’t come up. Students had deferments as long as they were in school, but the war started to heat up just as Robby’s class came close to graduation. Their future lives depended on the lottery.

“I guess I don’t have to ask what you think, Dad.”

“I asked first,” said Joe, smiling. “What would John Galt do? Would he go?”

Robby’s eyes widened, showing his surprise. “Don’t tell me you’ve read it.”

“Who is John Galt?” said Lizzie.

The men laughed. “A mysterious character in Atlas Shrugged,” said Joe. “Everyone runs around asking: ‘Who is John Galt?’”

“And so who is he?”

“He controls the world and has disappeared into the Rockies.”

“I don’t like governments telling me what to do,” said Robby.

“War is different isn’t it?” said Lizzie.

“Different if you’re attacked. Not if you’re the attacker.”

“Your number will be in the lottery,” said Joe. “The question is, what do you do if it comes up?”

“What business do we have keeping Vietnam from uniting?”

“You mean you wouldn’t go?” said Lizzie.

Robby examined his mother. People who saw them together saw no resemblance, no more than they saw between Joe and Robby. It was as if nature took the genes of both parents, shook them up and produced a cocktail that resembled neither. Robby had his mother’s thick hair, though it was darker. His eyes were blue, unlike anyone in the family but Cal, whose blue eyes came from his mother. He wished he had the Mulls’ good eyesight but had his father’s myopia. Both his parents were artistic, and he had none of it. He took himself for a throwback to Grandpa Eddie—smarter, shrewder, tougher.

“No. I won’t go.”

If Robby was looking for approval, he got none. His parents did not respond. Joe had been too old for the other war, the good one, but would have gone. A war lottery was something he couldn’t understand. Lizzie didn’t like the war either, but was patriotic enough to feel uncomfortable with her son’s answer.

♦ ♦ ♦

With no job offer he deemed worthy and growing Vietnam uncertainty, Robby had moved back into his boyhood bedroom in Brentwood. Lizzie had hoped Cal would ask him to move in with him in Westwood, where he’d returned from Angie’s house in Echo Park into the same apartment building on Tiverton she’d once shared with Maggie. But Robby and his godfather were no longer on speaking terms.

During two summers at Exeter and two more at Stanford, Robby had come home to work with Cal at the Sierra Club. He was more an intern than an employee, but earned a little money and enjoyed the work, which got him around Southern California. She’d been happy about it, happy that Robby and Cal were close. Part of it, she believed, was that Robby looked on Cal as the last male Mull, and Cal looked on Robby as the son he didn’t have. With their blue eyes, they even looked a little alike. Cal took his role as godfather seriously.

Between Robby’s junior and senior years at Stanford, Cal took him on a field trip to Northern California. Castle and Cooke, which owned much of Hawaii, had bought a swath of land in Sonoma County with the intention of building a residential development along ten miles of virgin coastline. At the time, only a hundred miles of California’s thirteen-hundred–mile coast were still accessible to the public, and the plan to shut off access to ten more miles at a place called Sea Ranch just north of Gualala was the last straw. The Sierra Club and other environmentalists formed the Coast Alliance to oppose the project.

The Sonoma coast is an isolated and desolate place where former Indian villages like Gualala are connected only by narrow north-south Highway