I remember that summer in Minnesota, at Aunt Linda's house. Little shack on the river. It was big for the town, though, and the lawn sloped right down to the water. I figured it was one of the more expensive houses in Littlefork, but I don't suppose that's saying much.

I got my number that August.

The lawn was littered with beer cans. My cousin Steve figured we ought to have a barbecue while the parents were out, and people had wandered over as soon as they saw the grill. The kids were gone now, but the coals were still smoldering.

Steve's sister Danny was sitting on the roof in an oversized sweater, eating a Popsicle, her dirty blond hair blowing in the wind. Her shoes were sitting next to her, and she had her bare feet stretched out on the shingles. She had the radio with her, turned up loud: Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones.

“Hey Danny,” Steve shouted. “How many of those have you had today?”

She shrugged. “About six. How many of those have you had today?” she asked, nodding toward Steve's unlit cigarette.

“None of your damn business.” He laughed. “Light me up, Dave.”

I shrugged and held out my Marlboro as he leaned over to light his own cigarette from its orange glow. Steve was always kind of a maverick – smart, but he drove you nuts sometimes. He had a full scholarship to the University of Wisconsin, though, so there wasn't much anybody could say to him. He knew something none of us did, apparently.

“You ought to put the radio on soon, Danny. They're calling the numbers soon.”

She took a last bite of the Popsicle, the juice trickling down her chin. “Steve, you got your deferment – why the heck do you care?” she asked. He made what I assumed was meant to be a subtle gesture in my direction. I shrugged.

“I can go in and watch it on TV,” I said.

“Nah, it's okay,” said Danny. “December 24th, right?”

“Yeah.”

She leaned over and fiddled with the dial until an authoritative-sounding voice crackled through the speakers. “Turn it up,” I said. She nodded.

“...large drum container. In the first container are three hundred and sixty-six plastic capsules – one for each day of the year, plus one for leap year. In the second container, there are three hundred and sixty-six capsules containing a numerical value in that range.”

“Did they change it?” asked Danny.

“Shh.” Steve paused. “Turn it up. It's different from last year. They're drawing the birthdays, and then a number to go with it. Doesn't go in order – it's all random.”

I sat down and stretched out on the grass, watching the smoke rise from my cigarette as it quivered between my fingers. “They're starting.”

“October 2nd, one hundred and ninety-one. January 6th, two hundred and eighty-five.”

“They're probably safe,” said Steve, blowing a smoke ring. Where he found the time to learn that kind of shit, I never knew. “Upwards of two-hundred, you're not going to get called. Under fifty, you can bet they're shipping you off to Vietnam.”

“March 14th, two hundred and twenty-four. July 14th, one hundred and fifty six. June 9th, three fifty-two.”

I could feel my heart pounding under my cotton shirt. I imagined some balding guy in a suit, leaning over the barrel, pulling out a little capsule that would tell me if I lived or died.

“February 5th, ninety-seven. December 24th, two.”

I stopped. I stopped everything. Stopped moving, stopped breathing. I wanted to hear it again. I wanted to hear my birthday again, with a different number after it.

“Dave?" The lawn was quiet. "Dave, are you okay?” Danny asked. I didn't look at her.

The grass was soft and green under my fingers. I could hear crickets chirping. The lighting bugs were just starting to float out from under the eaves. It smelled like it was going to rain. Out on the river, I could see a log with some sunbathing turtles on it. I could just as easily see a Swift Boat, painted army green, with a .50 caliber machine gun mounted to the back. I was manning it. I looked away, and it disappeared.

“I need a shower.”

I dragged myself to the porch, throwing my cigarette down and grinding it into the concrete with my heel. I pulled the screen door open and winced as it slammed behind me.

Danny must have been sitting right above my bathroom. Steve had climbed onto the roof, and I could hear them murmuring through the cracked window. I turned on the shower to drown them out. I felt the water running over my shoulders and trickling down my back. I wondered if blood felt thicker. I dug my nails into my scalp as I massaged the shampoo into it, and the thick foam fell from my hands and gathered at my ankles. I thought about holding a gun and bit my lip until it bled.

---

I didn't say grace that night. Aunt Linda said the same prayer we always did, the old Catholic one, but I couldn't remember the words. I mumbled “Amen” anyway, and my Uncle Ted looked up.

“So,” he said, digging a fork into the pot roast, “you know what all of us want to hear, boys.”

My father looked up, interested; my mother's face grew small and worried. Danny was staring at me, twirling her spaghetti slowly around her fork.

Steve cleared his throat. “I'm three-thirty six.”

“Oh, thank God,” said Aunt Linda, dropping her fork noisily. “You can go to law school now, Stevie.”

My mother, by now, had noticed my expression, and was staring at me with her eyebrows knit together from behind her glass of wine.

“What about you, Dave?” my father asked.

I looked over at Danny. She was still twirling, and I wished she would put the stupid noodles in her mouth. “Two.”

“Two what?”

“Just two.”

My mother wheezed and began to choke on her potato soufflé. Steve and I stood up, but my father had already leapt from his seat, thumping her on the back until she coughed up the offending chunk of pastry. She sank into her chair and started to cry, weeping into a monogrammed napkin. I leaned over and reached out for her, but my father shook his head.

“Just leave.”

“What?” I mumbled.

“Just go for a while.” He fished around in his pocket and held them out in front of me. He was angry. I didn't know why he was angry. “Go for a drive.”

Everyone except my mother was staring at me. I took the keys to the old Ford and backed away from the table.

---

Steve was in the passenger seat. He was wearing a white shirt, half-buttoned, and had his arm hanging out the window. Any other day, it would have made me nervous, but today I had other things to be nervous about.

The river was on our left, turned to molten copper by the setting sun. I could see white birds skimming its surface, gathering on little islands in the middle of the water.

“Listen, Dave,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “You can get out on medical grounds, probably. Got any severe allergies? Bee stings? Shellfish?”

I shook my head.

“They've got guys who do this for a living now. Only half the kids who get called even go, they're so good at it. They've got a guy up at Harvard -”

“I don't go to Harvard, Steve.”

“You don't have to go to Harvard. He can come up with stuff for anybody. You oughta write him, Dave. I bet he'd help you out. For free.”

There weren't any other cars for miles – just open fields. I changed gears and pressed my foot down on the accelerator. “Maybe I want to go to 'Nam, Steve.”

He sighed. “Pull over, Dave.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

I sighed and slowed down, pulling the car to a stop on the strip of gravel that bordered the road. Steve rolled up his window.

“Do you remember when you guys came up here in '59?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“My mom boiled a lobster. You cried.”

“I was eight.” I fiddled with the knobs on the radio.

“But it was a lobster, Dave. A lobster!”

I wanted to spit on him. “You don't understand. It made this noise like it was crying. It was still moving and everything.”

“And you think those Asian kids are going to hold still?”

I heard something crack as soon as my fist hit his face, but I didn't feel guilty until the blood started to pour out of his nose. It trickled down his face and onto his shirt, dripping onto its immaculate white collar. He got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. I sat there for a few minutes, key turned halfway in the ignition, staring at the dashboard lights. I pulled the emergency break and got out of the car.

Steve was standing off the road a bit, in front of a sea of yellow Rapeseed blossoms. He had taken off his shirt and buried his face in it, the red blood blooming on the white fabric.

“Steve?” I edged closer.

His reply was muffled. “You would have punched my lights out if I'd let you.”

I paused. “You okay, Steve?”

He lifted his head and nodded, wiping his face with a clean corner of the shirt. “Doctor said I have excess blood vessels in my nose or something. Happened once when I fell off my bike. It looks way worse than it is, trust me.”

We stood there for a couple of minutes, looking out at the sunny field as the sun dipped into the horizon.

“If I go, I'm a bastard,” I said. “And if I don't go, I'm still a bastard.”

“Then do whatever feels right.” He was standing there holding a dirty shirt with blood under his nails, and he still carried himself like Cary Grant. “At least you'll just be a bastard, and not a bastard and a hypocrite. If you were a hypocrite, it would be an awful shame. I hate hypocrites.”

“You don't hate bastards?”

He laughed. “I couldn't. I told you already, I hate hypocrites.”

---

I was up at seven the next morning, pretending to read the newspaper. I had my feet propped up on the coffee table when someone walked in. I pulled them down, thinking it was Aunt Linda, but it was only Danny.

“Dave, will you come with me to get my car fixed?”

I folded up the funnies and stuffed the paper back together. “Yeah, sure. Why?”

“Uh, I don't know.” She stuffed her hands into her back pockets. “The guys there are really strange. You know.”

I didn't really know, but I followed her out to the car anyway. “Is it safe to drive?”

“Yeah, it's just the odometer thing. It stopped working last week.” There was something odd in her expression that made me think she wasn't telling the whole truth, but I went along anyway.

It felt funny sitting in the passenger seat. I wasn't accustomed to being chauffeured around, much less by a girl, but she had insisted on driving. We watched the Minnesota countryside roll by through a curtain of mist; it was drizzling, and only getting wetter. We had been driving north out of Littlefork for about ten minutes.

“How far away is this place?” I asked, yawning.

“Not much farther,” she replied.

I leaned my head against the window and closed my eyes, but the buzzing of the glass made it impossible to sleep. The white light beat through my eyelids, and I had Wagner stuck in my head. I turned and looked at the dashboard.

“Say, Danny, your odometer is working fine.”

She shrugged.

I licked my lips. “Where are we really going?”

“I'll tell you when we get there.”

I leaned back and shoved my hands into the pockets of my blue jeans. We were still going north on Highway 71. I tried to put together a map of the state from what little pieces I could remember, but I couldn't think of anything particularly remarkable this far north, besides International Falls.

There was nothing, besides International Falls.

We turned right, following the road. I sank farther into my seat. It was raining harder now, and the torrents whipped the stalks of grain until they bent to the wind's path. I pressed my hand against the window, and my sweaty palm clung to the glass.

“We should go back,” I said. “We need to go back.”

“I'm not turning around now,” she said.

“Did Steve put you up to this?”

She didn't answer. I wondered how long they had been planning it. I turned and looked out the window, trying to decide if these views of the prairie would be my last glimpses of America. Danny kept driving. Eventually, she pulled off on a township road and pulled the car to a stop.

“I have to pee,” she said.

“Great.”

“I'm going to get out, and I'm going to run somewhere, somewhere really far away, so that you can't see me.” She paused. “And I wouldn't know if you left. I wouldn't know if you took that five hundred dollars out of the glove box. I wouldn't know if you ran north, and I wouldn't know if you got a boat across that canal route on the border, or even if you swam it, since it's less than a hundred meters.” She got out of the car, and the rain beat down on her bare neck, plastering her sweater to her skinny shoulders. “Goodbye, Dave.” She slammed the car door shut. I threw mine open and jumped out, landing knee-deep in a puddle.

“Danny! Danny, wait!”

She was already running. Her purple sweater got smaller and smaller, bobbing up and down between the stalks of grain until it was only a tiny speck. I got back in the car and sat down, massaging my temples. I clicked the glove box open. There was the envelope – a little white thing in a Ziploc bag, with my name on it.

I can tell you what I was thinking about in that moment. I was thinking about that lobster, on Aunt Linda's stove, and how its antennae stopped twitching when they dropped it in the water. I was thinking about napalm. I was thinking about my cousins in a little logging town, watching Reggie Jackson on the weekends.

I tied my shoelaces, I got out of the car, and I ran. I ran from the lobster pot. I ran from the shrapnel and the dirty standard-issue blankets and the officers in command. I ran from the dirty look my father would have given me. I ran until I was knee-deep in mud, until my hair was soaked and stuck to my forehead. I didn't care. There's a certain point where you're so wet that you stop caring, because you can't get any wetter.

I only stopped when I was about a mile into Canada. It was a little shack on the edge of the road – a laundromat, of all things – but the lights were on. I must have looked like a wreck, because I scared the kid at the counter half to death when I asked him to use the phone.

I sat down on a bench and wrapped the curly cord around my fingers. I stared at my bare feet, white and wrinkled on the warm linoleum. It rang three times, and someone picked up.

“Hello?”

“Mom? I'm in Canada.”

I could hear her breathing over the phone. She didn't say anything.

“I'll call you – I'll call you later, okay?”

There was a long pause. “Do you need money?” she asked. Her voice was tiny and distant.

“No.” A knot was tightening in my throat. “No, Mom. I've got enough.” There was crackling on the line. “It's starting to break up. I'll call you later, okay?”

“All right.” She was crying.

“I love you, Mom.” If she said something back, I didn't hear it. I hung the receiver on the wall. I fished in my pocket for my last pack of Reds. They were soaked. I threw them into a trash can next to the washing machines.

The kid at the counter played with the radio dials until he found something he liked. The voice was familiar. Mick Jagger. Gimme Shelter.

I sang along.

-----

Note: I did choose to post this under historical fiction, despite the fact that I took a lot of liberties with the setting. Still, feel free to point out historical inaccuracies.