Jim is wearing a cowboy hat, suspenders. Sometimes he sells tomatoes on the side of an old two-lane highway.
He’s sitting in a folding chair. His brim is pushed upward. Jim is smoker-skinny, and his belt looks too big.
He is my friend’s uncle, and his tomatoes look suspicious.
“Are these HOME-grown?” I ask.
“Yessir.”
The tomatoes are pink and blemish-free. They look like industrial candle wax.
“Did YOU grow them?” I ask.
He winks. “Friend of mine.”
But of course.
We talk. He’s been wanting to talk. He heard I'm a writer. He tells me he is a writer.
Since the third grade, he’s written over seven hundred poems. Maybe more.
His poems are mostly for his own reflection. Though he’s written poetry for local papers—a few funerals and birthdays.
He recites one. It’s about rows of peanuts, blue skies, and a dying mother. My kind of poetry.
But he never got a chance to pursue a career in writing. When the Vietnam draft enacted, he
joined. Instead of poetry, he learned how to jump out of airplanes.
“Killing changes you,” he says, “You’re trained to think of your enemy as nothing but a target, not human. Just how it is.”
All I can do is nod.
“But then,” he goes on. “You’re back home, you get to thinking about their mothers and such. And it messes with you.”
When he arrived stateside, he wasn’t the same. The guilt was crippling. Not for killing, but for surviving. His best friends met their ends before his eyes.
His first week home, he slept outdoors. Sleeping inside made him nervous.
And he had no interest in writing—it was hard enough just…