Black Op: Africa

Mister Nice Guy

Everybody always said that I was a nice guy. In high school I was pretty much the invisible kid and that was exactly the way I wanted it. My name is Henry Mallard. I was an average student and did alright in all my classes. I didn’t belong to any of the cliques or clubs at school because I just wasn’t interested. I always liked machines and cars, but we didn’t have any kind of automotive shop classes at my high school. I did well in gym class, but I was not any kind of star athlete either. I could climb the ropes without trouble, run a mile without really breaking a sweat and do as many push-ups and sit-ups as the coach wanted us all to do. I wanted to be just another average kid and left alone. I saw some of the fat kids and the skinny nerdy kids getting bullied and swore it would never happen to me. If someone dumped my books in the hallway it would definitely be the last time they did it. I was always ready, but it never happened. I never wanted to get into any trouble because it would be a gigantic hassle both in the principal’s office and when I got home. I was the oldest of seven children and I had to be the one all the others looked up to. If I got into trouble the punishment would have been more severe for me in order to deter that same behavior in my younger siblings. I didn’t like it, but that’s life. It was never a good thing to be someone that the principal knew by name, or someone that the bullies knew either, and my school had both. Sometimes they were hard to tell apart.

My best friend Tommy, on the other hand, was always trying to get noticed. He would wear the flashiest tie or a funny hat or that stupid looking pair of red pants to school when things got too quiet. You could always tell when Tommy was wearing those pants, even if you didn’t see him coming. They were bright red corduroy bell bottoms; you know the kind of corduroy with the really pronounced ribs that would make noise every time you moved. Well, Tommy would make as much noise with those pants as humanly possible, sometimes even mumbling the voo, voo, voo sound as he was walking. I was sure he would set himself on fire by walking a little too fast in those things some day. To make matters worse he would wear a shiny white leatherette belt with those things. The pants had big wide belt loops, so you could wear whatever size belt you wanted, and he picked that big, fat white thing. The buckle was huge and shiny brass, and glinted every time he moved. It had some slogan on it like Today’s my day, or Today’s the day or something like that, I don’t remember. He wore high heeled pointy Beatle boots which were the rage back then and he had the long hair just like Ringo. Sometimes he would wear a paisley shirt, sometimes one with big polka dots and sometimes a Nehru jacket with a big flashy pendant on a chain. I asked him once why he wore such wild clothes all the time and he said, It’s my uniform, man!

I really don’t know why he was my friend because we had nothing at all in common. I would wear a light blue cotton shirt and a thin dark tie to school almost every day because I figured that was the best way not to call attention to myself, and it worked. We all had to wear ties to school because that was the dress code in public school back in the sixties. I would walk the halls from class to class and almost never get my books dumped on the floor like some of the other kids. Sometimes I would wear one of my suit coats to school because they kept the school rooms pretty chilly in the winter. They said it was to keep us stimulated. Personally, when I was cold I couldn’t concentrate on anything but being miserable. I always wondered why we had to go to school in the winter and in the worst weather conditions there were anyway. Going in the summer would have been smarter because there would be no snow days to make up later and we wouldn’t have to sit in cold wet clothes in class all day. Summer days are longer so we could stay when school let out and play ball on the fields, and we wouldn’t have to get up in the dark to go to school every day. I always wore the same basic dark blue or black straight leg pants and a two inch black belt. My belt buckle was brass too, but it was thin and ordinary. I wore standard heel black dress shoes. I combed my hair off to one side which was kind of the style for shorter haired guys, and my prescription glasses had thin black frames and lenses that were not too thick. I wasn’t much of a bully target.

Tommy lived just down the street from my house, and around the corner. Our houses were pretty much alike because the same contractor built the whole neighborhood. Mine was tan and his was painted a dusty green. We rode to school and back home on the same bus every day with the same neighborhood kids. Most of them were pretty cool, no bullies or crybabies thank god. It was usually a pretty quiet ride both ways. One day some guy in a pickup truck slammed into the back of our bus as we were stopped to let some kids off. The bus driver went ballistic on the guy and we all thought he was going to kill him. Some one of the neighbors called the cops and they came and quieted everybody down. No one was hurt so they towed the pickup away and we continued home on the bus.

Some weekends I would go over to Tommy’s house and we would listen to some LP’s. He always had more money than I did so his collection was a lot better than mine. He had a brother and a sister. He was the one in the middle. His little brother Paul was always a pain and wanted to hang out with us, and sometimes we let him, but most times we just chased him away and he went to play with his own friends. Tommy’s sister Sue was a different story. She never wanted anything to do with us and always called us Scrubs. If I was just a little older I would have wanted to ask her out on a date because she was really pretty with her long blonde hair and all. But I never did.

Tommy’s mother was really nice, too. She would always ask if we were hungry and make us something for a snack. She liked to drink whiskey a lot and sometimes really got drunk and silly. When Tommy’s dad came home and she was like that he would tell us it was time to go outside and get some fresh air. We knew they were going to have an argument, so we left. Tommy’s dad was a good guy and usually talked about his job at Sylvania. He would always tell us that the best way to get a good job was to finish high school and go to college. I always knew that Tommy would go to some state college or something, but my family didn’t have the money. We had seven kids in my family and just feeding us all was a chore. My dad worked three jobs sometimes just to make ends meet. I felt bad for him.

On the Saturdays that we went to my house we mostly stayed outside because I had some pretty deep woods behind my house. Sometimes we would bring our BB rifles out back and set up targets to shoot at. Cans were cool because we could use them over and over, but we never shot at anything glass; it was too hard to pick up after. We used to try to shoot the pine cones out of the trees, and most of the time I could, but Tommy wasn’t a really good shot so I missed on purpose a lot. One day he shot at a blue jay and killed it. Lucky shot that he hit it, but we both felt pretty bad about it.

In our last year of high school Tommy got a car. It was his dad’s old sixty three Chevy Impala and it was a standard shift three speed on the column. It was a six cylinder and ran pretty nice. It was a black four door with a red interior and had an AM radio and an eight track tape player in it. He kept it for a while and traded it for a Corvair convertible. My mother said that I couldn’t have a car until I was finished high school, but I was building one in the back yard. My dad had an old Jeep that was all rotted away and he couldn’t get an inspection sticker for it, so he was going to junk it. I found another old Jeep with a blown engine and convinced him to give me the old junker and I would try to make one good vehicle out of the two of them. He agreed and I spent all my free time out in the back woods working on my Jeep. I ended up swapping the bodies because I wanted the four wheel drive and the snow plow that was on the junker. I almost had it finished when my dad sold it. I was pretty disappointed, but we needed the money.

My dad quit his job in the machine shop and bought an old backhoe in August of 1967. He said he wanted to go into business pulling stumps and digging drain systems for people. He found an old forty seven Ford dump truck that was going to be the hauler, but we never got a trailer hitch put on it. The truck was old and pretty bad. It had a flat head eight cylinder engine and a five speed unsynchronized transmission. You had to double clutch the thing in order to shift it without grinding the gears. It had a bad generator so any time we wanted to go somewhere with it we had to bring another charged six volt battery along. None of the lights ever worked and it was a real tank.

I worked with my dad after school and sometimes instead of school when he needed me. It was hard working for family because you never got any time off. I was always expected to be there whenever there was something to do; nights, weekends and even if I had already scheduled a date. The day of my 1968 high school graduation I spent in a hole building a dry well out of concrete blocks for a customer.

When my next younger brother was old enough to take over for me I got a job working in a printed circuit factory during the day and pumped gas at the Shell station at night. I paid my rent to the house and brought home some milk and groceries once in a while to help out a little.

When school was over Tommy and his girlfriend Dawn were always together and I didn’t see him much. That was OK because I was seeing a nice little thing myself. One day we heard that Tommy had an accident and his girlfriend was killed. His car blew a tire and skidded out of control and landed off the side of the road in a brook. Nobody ever said that it was his fault, but he was never the same after that. The funeral was especially hard on him. He blamed himself for the accident, and even though Dawn's family was kind and understanding there was still something that didn't feel right about the whole situation. I heard that they were planning on getting married, but he wanted to wait until they could get some money together for a place to live first. Dawn wanted to start a family right away, but Tommy said he wasn't ready for that either. He went away to some out of state school and I never saw him again. Someone said that he joined the Air Force and served as an aircraft refueler in a flying tanker. His folks moved away and I lost touch with all of them. I guessed that they had their own problems.

back to top

Chapter 2

Pauley

Eventually I found a really nice girl named Pauley and we got married in February of 1971. I was so proud that there was a Mrs. Henry David Mallard now. We dated for almost a year before she asked me to marry her. Yup. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. She even dragged me up to her father one Saturday afternoon and pretty much forced me to ask him if I could marry his daughter. Of course he said yes because his house was full of kids too. He was happy to get some space back. Pauley had seven brothers and sisters, and she was the third girl from the oldest with two older brothers. I got along with all of them even though I didn’t care much for their baseball, football or other sports games. I’d rather be rebuilding an engine or changing a clutch. Her dad, Phil, was some kind of executive at a big company and her mother, Angie, worked part time for some high end woman’s clothing store at the mall. Phil drove a little Opal Manta, the car that looked like a baby Corvette, and Angie drove the big Cadillac. She was pretty uppity most of the time and always thought her daughters deserved better boyfriends and husbands. No matter what we did for our women it wasn’t good enough for mom. She was kind of a witch with a capital B. When she started in on Phil he would set his beeper off and say that he had to go to work because there was some kind of emergency going on. I knew he was really going to Dunkin Donuts to sit and read the paper for a few hours. When he died I knew that he would finally be able to rest in peace.

Pauley was always going somewhere with her sisters and sometimes just with her mother. They would all get in the Caddie and go shopping for a new pair of shoes or something. I’m sure that they were just jabbering the whole time about how their husbands weren’t making enough money or that they wished they could afford a new car or some other complaint that was never going to be resolved. When we were first married Pauley wanted her own car. We made plans before we were married that we would get a small place like one of those nice mobile homes that everybody liked so much back then, and we'd both work to save enough money to buy a real house with our own yard and everything. We both wanted kids, but we needed to wait until we had the house and a decent