THE RECRUIT
BY BRYCE WALTON
It was dirty work, but it would make him a man. And kids had a right to grow up—some of them!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1962. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Wayne, unseen, sneered down from the head of the stairs.
The old man with his thick neck, thick cigar, evening highball, potgut and bald head without a brain in it. His slim mother with nervously polite smiles and voice fluttering, assuring the old man by her frailty that he was big in the world. They were squareheads one and all, marking moron time in a gray dream. Man, was he glad to break out.
The old man said, "He'll be okay. Let him alone."
"But he won't eat. Just lies there all the time."
"Hell," the old man said. "Sixteen's a bad time. School over, waiting for the draft and all. He's in between. It's rough."
Mother clasped her forearms and shook her head once slowly.
"We got to let him go, Eva. It's a dangerous time. You got to remember about all these dangerous repressed impulses piling up with nowhere to go, like they say. You read the books."
"But he's unhappy."
"Are we specialists? That's the Youth Board's headache, ain't it? What do we know about adolescent trauma and like that? Now get dressed or we'll be late."
Wayne watched the ritual, grinning. He listened to their purposeless noises, their blabbing and yakking as if they had something to say. Blab-blab about the same old bones, and end up chewing them in the same old ways. Then they begin all over again. A freak sideshow all the way to nowhere. Squareheads going around either unconscious or with eyes looking dead from the millennium in the office waiting to retire into limbo.
How come he'd been stuck with parental images like that? One thing—when he was jockeying a rocket to Mars or maybe firing the pants off Asiatic reds in some steamy gone jungle paradise, he'd forget his punkie origins in teeveeland.
But the old man was right on for once about the dangerous repressed impulses. Wayne had heard about it often enough. Anyway there was no doubt about it when every move he made was a restrained explosion. So he'd waited in his room, and it wasn't easy sweating it out alone waiting for the breakout call from HQ.
"Well, dear, if you say so," Mother said, with the old resigned sigh that must make the old man feel like Superman with a beerbelly.
They heard Wayne slouching loosely down the stairs and looked up.
"Relax," Wayne said. "You're not going anywhere tonight."
"What, son?" his old man said uneasily. "Sure we are. We're going to the movies."
He could feel them watching him, waiting; and yet still he didn't answer. Somewhere out in suburban grayness a dog barked, then was silent.
"Okay, go," Wayne said. "If you wanta walk. I'm taking the family boltbucket."
"But we promised the Clemons, dear," his mother said.
"Hell," Wayne said, grinning straight into the old man. "I just got my draft call."
He saw the old man's Adam's apple move. "Oh, my dear boy," Mother cried out.
"So gimme the keys," Wayne said. The old man handed the keys over. His understanding smile was strained, and fear flicked in his sagging eyes.
"Do be careful, dear," his mother said. She ran toward him as he laughed and shut the door on her. He was still laughing as he whoomed the Olds between the pale dead glow of houses and roared up the ramp onto the Freeway. Ahead was the promising glitter of adventure-calling neon, and he looked up at the high skies of night and his eyes sailed the glaring wonders of escape.
He burned off some rubber finding a slot in the park-lot. He strode under a sign reading Public Youth Center No. 947 and walked casually to the reception desk, where a thin man with sergeant's stripes and a pansy haircut looked out of a pile of paperwork.
"Where you think you're going, my pretty lad?"
Wayne grinned down. "Higher I hope than a typewriter jockey."
