Machine Dreams

can’t do more. That he should, and he can’t.”
    I listened to his voice, its hesitations. He was asking these faraway, successful men to intercede. He was asking for help.
    Bess waited a moment before going on. “It’s a terrible thing to think of losing a child. So many times I was afraid about Katie. If you outlive your own child, well, I suppose you go on, but I don’t know if you ever really live.”
    I was alone in the house on the day Robert Taylor’s letter came. In two weeks, we’d had no word except that the army had no other information. My mother had gone back to her administrative job in the school system. She said she wept easily and embarrassed herself at work, but working was better than being at home, where that man had stood in her living room and told her about Billy. I hadn’t wept at all. The blue envelope with the familiar miniature map of Vietnam lay on my mother’s gold carpet under the mail slot, and I thought at first it was a message from Billy. My father had received a letter just a few days ago, writtenabout a week before Billy was MIA. I hadn’t let myself read it. But this wasn’t his handwriting, and then I saw the name on the return address and sat on the steps to the upstairs and read. Many times, without moving. Then I took the letter to my room and cried loudly, horribly, hearing my own sounds. The letter was a miracle. My first reaction was thankfulness and inordinate hope. I’m still thankful. No matter what happened when they got on the ground, he wasn’t alone.
The Luke is my shepherd:
not my phrase, Billy’s, Billy’s joke. He hadn’t been alone, that was it. The image in my mind was of Billy in the air with Luke, both of them poised to land, arms extended.
    My father couldn’t seem to quite believe the letter at first. I showed it to him that same afternoon and said Billy had mentioned Taylor to me, I did remember the name.
    “You say this is a black fellow, from Los Angeles?”
    “What difference does that make, Dad?”
    My father shook his head impatiently. “Don’t make any difference, but the government ought to make this information official. If this is the truth, why haven’t they told us this? They ought to back up this man’s story. Right now, this is still hearsay.”
    I was completely puzzled by his reaction. Did he think the set of facts made things seem worse for Billy? “Hearsay?” I took the letter back and looked through it again. “What are you talking about? This man was there. He kept his agreement with Billy and wrote to me. Don’t you see what he says here? He saw Billy jump.”
    My father went inside to phone Reb Jonas, to phone the state senator who’d promised to help. I sat on the porch swing and put the letter carefully back into its thin blue envelope.
    When the army wouldn’t confirm Robert Taylor’s letter, I decided the men Mitch was phoning needed some reminder Billy was real, that Taylor’s letter existed. I made a list of men in charge: President Nixon, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of the Army, our Congressmen, members of the House Armed Services Committee, the Governor, assorted others. I sent them,along with a typed copy of Taylor’s letter, a Xerox of the original, and my own request for information, two 8″ × 10″ photos of Billy. I drove back and forth to Winfield to have the photographs printed in two days by a color lab. They were, in effect, before and after pictures.
    The first, taken the summer of ’69 when Billy worked for the Park Service at the river, shows him in cutoffs, bare-chested, his hair still long, about to dive from a boulder into green water. The water is very clear and you can see outlines of submerged rocks in the water itself.
    The second is Billy in uniform, at the going-away party Mom had for him when he was home on leave in May. Kato took the picture and I went down to Black’s Billiards to get the negative from her. It was a hot evening in August; I parked in the alley and walked up the fire escape steps to the back door of the apartment. She gave me the negative in an envelope, and we sat on the ribbed metal landing that served as the Black’s porch. We drank iced tea. Kato brought out a box of pretzels but neither of us ate. She told me she’d always keep Billy’s letters, made me promise to tell her any news we heard of him. And she gave me an address. Buck had been transferred to a town in western Pennsylvania and she was leaving soon to go and live with