Free Men in the Making by Bruce Machart Page A

had been bald, he claimed, since he was nineteen and came down with scarlet fever. Four days and nights, a temperature so high the whites of his eyes went red as a July sunset, and when the fever broke he'd washed up, looked in the mirror, and run a comb through his hair for the last time. "It all come out," he'd told me one night. "All at once, four swipes of the comb and it was as gone as gone can get." Now I held my beer and marveled at him: at his head, slick and shining in the sun, a large vein snaking its blue way above one eyebrow; at his stomach, so slumped and low-slung you couldn't see his belt buckle. This was not the kind of man a boy disobeyed. This was the daddy of the daddy I'd never met, the man who, according to my mother, had walked his twenty-year-old son down to the recruiting office in Shiner as soon as the draft was reinstated. The man who told the recruiting officer, "This here's my only son, and he'd rather fight than farm. I figure if he's got to go get himself killed, he'd better damn well die a Marine." The man who, when he got word that my daddy had done just that after being taken down by friendly fire, went back to that recruiting office, slammed the purple heart my mother had gotten in the mail on that officer's desk, and told the man the Havlecks didn't have any use for a dead man's medal, so why didn't the Marines just melt it down and make some bullets and teach their boys how to shoot them straight—maybe at the enemy for a change.
    In a matter of hours I would learn that these stories were more legend than history, more talk than truth, but at the time, sitting there on the porch with a bottle of beer in my hand and nine years of mystery still roped tight inside me, all I could see was an enormous frowning man. This was a man you didn't mess with, no matter what my mother said about his talk being hooey, a man who wanted me to drink what he'd given me, so I took a careful swig, and it was cold on my teeth and bitter down deep in my throat and altogether surprising the way only a boy's first beer can be.
    "Now we're talkin'," he said, and after he'd polished the rest of his off with one turn of the bottle, he proceeded to inform me that even though the Spoetzl Brewery was just five miles away in downtown Shiner, and even though it was made in Texas, Shiner beer was still more Czech than Texan. They imported all the fixings, he told me, all the barley and hops and—hell, maybe even the water for all he knew. And the guy who ran the place, Walter Dudek—
Pure-D Euro-peean.
A nice enough guy, sure, but no Texan.
    I took another drink, my cheeks awash with a first-beer flush, and I wondered if I was drunk already, if my increasing confusion about Grandpa was the product of good beer or bad memory. "But you're Czech," I said, "aren't you? I thought all we Havlecks were."
    His face went fierce, his chapped lips parting in disbelief, the skin atop his head bunched up in distasteful furrows. "The hell I am," he said, setting his empty on the porch rail and letting loose a groan when he bent over, opening the cooler for another. "My daddy was Czech. Sure enough, no getting around it. Landed in Galveston when he was twenty-one. But me and your daddy, we're Texans, though one of us is a dead Texan. And you, boy, you're a dustbowl-loving Okie." He shook his head and bubbled his beer and made a clicking sound with his tongue. "Sorry to say it, son, but it's the God's honest truth. Your grandma, God keep her, she even dug up some dirt out here in the yard and sent it in a box up there to Tulsa so you could be born over Texas soil, and boy, I'll never know why in the hell she did it, I really won't, but she used UPS instead of Tex-Pak. Can you believe it? Got-
damn,
boy, do you know who
owns
Tex-Pak?"
    I shook my head that I didn't.
    "Lady Bird Johnson, that's who. We're talking Texan from titties to toenails."
    Out back of the barn, Grandpa's prized bird dog, Alamo, was raising Cain in his