Christopher Linforth

Fence

The last time I saw Sinclair Newton he was on his way to the steel fence that surrounded Fort Royston. He didn't wave or say goodbye, but just walked over to his '88 Buick with a clump of folded pamphlets in his hand. We both knew where he was going as he sped off along the dirt track and away from his house.

I had known him since the eighth grade, when he sat behind me in honors English. His family moved into Ramsburg – a block from my house – and was quick to integrate by attending yard sales, ice-cream socials, and neighborhood barbeques. Sinclair and his mom brought the same over-seasoned potato salad every time. They had connections to the fort; his father was high up, something about intelligence gathering. I never met him, but each time I went to Walmart I stopped outside the fort and imagined what was inside. People said the base had hundreds of silos and a nuclear bunker for the President. I wasn't sure, but either way the town seemed to depend on the place. The economy, as I saw it, revolved around the dive bars near the railroad tracks and the $20-a-night motel that had a sign in the window that read “No Checks, No Whores."

There was no escaping that soldiers were part of the town. At the high school football games returning men would come and stand in the middle of the crab-grass field and we would clap, cheer, and shout. You couldn't decipher what we were celebrating, what the point of all the noise was for. We only knew it was expected. This went on for years until the soldiers would no longer come and we would no longer cheer.

When the protests first started in the summer of our junior year I had started to date a girl, Annie, and my parents had bought me a blue Ford pick-up with a tape deck and AM radio. The day after July 4th Sinclair tagged along with me to the demonstration at the army recruitment office on the edge of downtown. Throughout the car ride he seemed subdued by the possibility that his family might find out. He said something about his dad, the “Colonel," and wore his hood tight over his short brown hair and put on his aviators. Sinclair shouldn't have worried, the turnout was only six students from some distant college in eastern Kansas; they held brightly-painted banners and occasionally shouted “Bring back the troops!" and “Stop the war!" as they motioned people toward their petition. From the pick-up, I noticed, Sinclair watched as the fan bunting and flags came down and were kicked into the road. I remember he just sat and smoked cigarettes through the open gap of the window.

The protests continued through the summer. They were attracting more people, families mostly, angry with the death toll. At each one, Sinclair refused to join me. Instead, he remained in the pick-up and worked on a paper for history class. We were both taking it for college credit. We had learned that the bombers during the Second World War flew from the airstrips that peppered the Kansas grasslands to China, before refueling for Japan. The flat and hard prairie was well suited to the heavy loads of the B29's as they took off with their 250lb bombs. Photographs in the textbook showed the chalked messages on the iron casings: For Freedom, Lady Liberty, and Eat This TNT. The targets were the cities and the munitions-producing factories in Japan. Thousands died in the firestorms that swept through the wooden houses of the suburbs.

In class, Sinclair never raised his hand or contributed any to the debates about the events and ethics of war. In fact, Sinclair hadn't spoken since his family moved to a distant wheat farm on the other side of town. His mom told me Sinclair had seen several doctors, and counselors, but all failed to get a word from him. His vocal chords were intact and healthy. He'd simply stopped speaking. I figured it was due to his father leaving for his second tour of duty.

When the high school reopened in late August I didn't see Sinclair. I heard rumors that he'd been sent to a hospital on the East Coast or that he'd signed up and was away fighting with his father. I thought I saw him a couple of times outside of the stadium, a pale figure drifting through the lot. I even called out once, but the man never looked around.

In early fall he showed up at my house, he was thin and his hair was thick and unkempt. He didn't try to speak, but gestured for a drink of water. That evening he sat on my bed, flicking through some motorcycle magazines, until his mom took him away, cut his hair, and got him back at school the next day. 

As Thanksgiving approached the protests intensified. They had moved to the front gates of the fort and were held daily, often attracting a crowd of fifty or so. Veterans from Vietnam, Korea, and the Second World War came in their dry-cleaned uniforms and sat in deck chairs exchanging stories about their tours of duty. For hours I listened to them debate the effectiveness of small barrel howitzers and the power of the atom-bomb.

Later, when Sinclair arrived, I got him to follow me. We walked for half-a-mile through the dry scrub grass, a faded orange in the late afternoon light. From behind some creosote bushes we looked at the fence. The netted steel was held up by fifteen foot steel poles and topped with razor wire. Sinclair barely reacted as I said: “If I climb over and tape our message to the tanks and the jeeps of the officers, it could bring home what this war is all about." I watched the twenty or so soldiers jog in formation past the barracks and out to the firing range: “All I would need is a ladder and a blanket to push down the barbed wire." Sinclair smiled and offered me a cigarette.

I had planned to go over the fence on Thanksgiving night. Most of the soldiers would be enjoying a three-course meal in the mess hall. The day before, though, Sinclair had called me about a fight he had with his mom. His voice sounded different from how I remembered it: weak and hoarse as though he'd been shouting for hours. That evening, I gave Sinclair's mom a cooked turkey from my parents in hope of reconciliation between her and Sinclair. Her breath smelled of whiskey as she told me about a personal visit from the fort. A two-star general had read out a letter from military command: “It comes with the greatest of regret that..." She told me that Sinclair hadn't flinched; at first he'd held the same wry smile on his face then he broke down, screaming and cursing.

Outside of her house, I saw him standing on the porch and smoking a Newport. He was looking at the fields covered in ice. I put my arm on his shoulder, but he shrugged it off and took the pamphlets from my hand. I almost shouted out his name, but I just watched as he drove out for the day's protest at the fort, his Buick reaching sixty as he went through the open gate.

The following day the local newspaper reported how his body was found skewered on top of the fence, the steel spikes penetrating his lung, spleen, and liver. He had bled to death within a couple of hours; a random patrol found him and called in the medics.

I never went to the funeral. Sinclair''s mom held it out-of-state before she moved away, leaving her farm in the hands of local realtors. I heard she went somewhere west.

This story was originally published in the Winter 2009 edition of Camas.

Christopher Linforth is an MFA fellow at Virginia Tech. He is the editor of the forthcoming book, The Anthem Guide to Short Fiction (Anthem Press, 2011). He maintains a website at http://christopherlinforth.wordpress.com/.