"I don't know."
"She's totally your grandma."
They were in the microfilm room at the main library downtown, which was the coldest room in Tucson and possibly the world. Danny had come because Carter had asked him to and because Danny's mother thought the library was educational and would let him go anywhere if he said the word library first. The microfilm reader was a big gray hooded machine like something out of a sci-fi movie, and the librarian, a tall woman with silver bracelets, had threaded the reel for them and shown them how to turn the crank and then gone away and left them to it.
BISBEE DAILY REVIEW, the box said. JAN–JUN 1966.
Carter had done the math on the way over, pedaling. June 1956, age eleven. That made him born in 1945. The face in the Fourth of July photo was fifteen, 1960. Mrs. Abbott said 1966 was when the scissors came out. Twenty, in 1966. He'd been thinking about it for three days and what he kept thinking was, he said no. Somebody told him he had to do something. His father had once said yes.
His social studies class had done Vietnam for two weeks in May. Mr. Okafor had shown them a filmstrip and played them a record of "Fortunate Son" and then gotten in trouble with somebody's parents for it.
"What are we even looking for?" Danny asked. He had his chin on his fists. "This is like the most boring newspaper ever invented. Look. 'Ladies Auxiliary Bake Sale Raises Forty-One Dollars.' Wow. Stop the presses."
"Just keep looking for Abbott."
They found it in March.
It wasn't a big story. It was on page three, under a story about a new pump at the Junction Mine, a single column with a small headline.
WARREN YOUTH FAILS TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION
Carter W. Abbott, 20, of Warren, son of Mr. and Mrs. Walter Abbott of the Abbott Studio, failed to appear for induction into the armed forces at the Phoenix induction center on March 8, according to the Cochise County Selective Service board. Federal authorities have been notified. The young man, a 1963 graduate of Bisbee High School and a former employee of the Phelps Dodge electrical shop, is believed to have left the state. His family declined to comment.
Danny read it twice, his lips moving. Then he sat back.
"Your dad's a draft dodger," he breathed. "Like, an actual one. Like Canada."
"Shut up," Carter said. "We don't know that."