“Coffee?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh, sit down, Fenn. You don’t have to stand.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Donny sat.
“We want to go over your testimony with you. Tomorrow there’ll be an arraignment, at the Judge Advocate General’s Offices at the Navy Yard, nothing elaborate. It’s simply a preliminary to an indictment and trial. Ten hundred. We’ll send a car. Your undress blues will be fine; I’ve arranged with Captain Dogwood for you to be off the duty roster. Then I think we’ll give you a nice bit of leave. Two weeks? By that time, we should be able to cut orders for your new stripes. Sergeant Fenn. How does that sound?”
“Well, I—”
“Tomorrow won’t be hard, Fenn, I assure you. You’ll be sworn in and then you’ll recount how at my instruction you befriended Crowe and traveled with him into a number of peace movement functions. You’ll tell how you saw him in the presence of peace movement strategists such as Trig Carter. You saw them in serious conversation, intense conversation. You needn’t testify that you overheard him giving away deployment intelligence. Just tell what you saw, and let the JAG prosecutor do the rest. It’s enough for an indictment. He’ll have a lawyer, a JAG JG, who’ll ask you some rote questions. Then it’s over and done and off you go.”
Bonson smiled.
“Clean and simple,” said Weber.
“Sir, I just … I don’t know what I can tell them. There were hundreds of people at those parties. I saw no evidence of conspiracy or deployment intelligence or—”
“Now, Donny,” said Bonson, leaning forward and trying a smile. “I know this is confusing for you. But trust me. You’re doing your country a great service. You’re doing the Marines a great service.”
“But I—”
“Donny,” said Weber, “they knew. They knew.”
“Knew?”
“They knew we had Third Infantry committed in Virginia, that the DC National Guard was a complete fuckup, the 101st Airborne was stuck at Justice and the 82nd down at the Key Bridge and that the cops were frazzled beyond endurance after eighty straight duty hours. It was an elaborate game of chess—they move here, we countermove; they move there, we countermove—all set up to get them to that bridge where they’d be faced by United States Marines where the chances of a big-time screwup on television were huge. And that’s just what they got: another martyr. Another catastrophe. The Justice Department humiliated. A propaganda victory of immense proportions. They’re parading with Amy’s name in London and Paris already. Give them credit, it was as skillful a campaign as there was.”
“Yes, sir, but we tried to save her. The girl panicked. It had nothing to do with us.”
“Oh, it had everything to do with you,” said Bonson. “They wanted her going off the bridge and the Marines to take the fall. See how much better that is than the Washington Metro Police or some third-rate National Guard unit, most of whom’d be demonstrating themselves if they had the chance? No, they wanted a big scandal to be laid right at the Marines’ feet and that’s what they got! And Crowe gave it to them. Now, it is mandatory to get this fact before the public, to show that we were betrayed from within and to move swiftly to restore confidence in the system by eliminating the treason. And I can’t think of a more edifying contrast for the American public than between Crowe, an Ivy League dropout with his fancy connections, and you, a decorated combat veteran from a small Western town doing his duty. It’ll be very educational!”
“Yes, sir,” said Donny.
“Good, good. Ten hundred. Look sharp, Corporal. You will impress the JAG officers, I know you will. You will inherit your own future, the future you and I have been working on, I know it.”
“Yes, sir,” said Donny.
They rose.
“All right, Weber, we’re finished here. You relax, Fenn. Tomorrow is your big day, the beginning of the rest of your life.”
“I’ll get the car, sir,” said Weber.
“No, I’ll get it. You—you know; tell him what’s cooking.”
“Yes, sir.”
Bonson left the two younger men alone.
“Look, Fenn, I’m the bad cop. I’m here to give you the bad news. I’ve got photos of you smoking grass with Crowe, okay? Man, they can really nail you with them. I mean big time. I told you this guy Bonson was cold. He is beaucoup cold, you know? So give him what he wants, which is another bad boy’s scalp to hang up on his lodge pole. He’s sent a bunch to the ’Nam, and he wants to send more. I don’t know why, what he is driving at, but I know this: he will rotate your ass back to the Land of Bad Things and not ever even think about it again. He’s got you cold. It’s you or it’s Crowe. Man, don’t throw your life away for nothing, dig?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good man, Fenn. Knew you’d see it our way.”
At 2300, Donny just walked out the front door of the barracks. Who was there to stop him? Some corporal in first platoon had duty NCO that night and he was scribbling in the duty logs in the first sergeant’s office as Donny passed.
Donny walked to the main gate and waved at the sentry there, who waved him past. Technically, the boy was to look for liberty papers, but in the aftermath of an alert, such niceties of the Marine way had fallen aside. Donny just walked, crossed I Street, headed down the way, took a left, and there found, unbothered, his 1963 Impala. He climbed in, turned the key and drove away.
It didn’t take him long to reach Potomac Park, site of the recently abandoned May Tribe. A few tents still stood, a few fires still burned. He left his car along the side of the road and walked into the encampment, asked a few questions and soon found the tent.
“Julie?” he called.
But it was Peter who came out.
“She’s sleeping,” he said.
“Well, I need to see her.”
“It would be better if she slept. I’m watching out for her.”
The two faced each other; both wore jeans and tennis shoes, Jack Purcells. But Donny’s were white, as he washed them every week. Peter’s didn’t look as though he had washed them since the fifties. Donny wore a madras short-sleeved button-down shirt; Peter had some kind of tie-dyed T-shirt on, baggy as a parachute, going almost to his knees. Donny’s hair was short to the point of neuroticism, with a little pie up top; Peter’s was long to the point of neuroticism, a mass of curly sprigs and tendrils. Donny’s face was lean and pure; Peter’s wore a bristle of scraggly red beard and a headband.
“That’s very cool,” said Donny. “But I have to see her. I need her.”
“I need her too.”
“Well, she hasn’t given you anything. She’s given me her love.”
“I want her to give me her love.”
“Well, you’ll have to wait awhile.”
“I’m tired of waiting.”
“Look, this is ridiculous. Go away or something.”
“I won’t leave her unguarded.”
“Who do you think I am, some kind of rapist or killer? I’m her fiancé. I’m going to marry her.”
“Peter,” said Julie, coming out of the tent, “it’s all right. Really, it’s all right.”
“Are you sure?”
Julie looked tired; still, she was a beautiful young woman, with hair the color of straw and a body as lean and straight as an arrow, and brilliance showing behind her bright blue eyes. Both boys looked at her and recommitted to her love again.
“Are you okay?” Donny asked.
“I was in the lockup at the Coliseum.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“It was fine; it wasn’t anything bad.”
“You killed a girl,” said Peter.
“We didn’t kill anyone. You killed her, by telling her being on that bridge mattered and that we were rapists and murderers. You made her panic; you made her jump. We tried to save her.”
“You fucking asshole, you killed her. Now, you’re a big tough guy and you can kick the shit out of me, but you killed her!
”
“Stop screaming. I never killed anyone who didn’t have a rifle and wasn’t trying to kill me or a buddy.”
“Peter, it’s okay. You have to leave us alone.”
“Christ, Julie.”
“You have to leave us.”
“Ahhh … all right. But don’t say—anyhow, you’re a lucky guy, Fenn. You really are.”
He stormed away in the darkness.
“I never saw him so brave,” said Julie.
“He loves you. So much.”
“He’s just a friend.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t get here earlier. We were on alert. There was a lot of shit because of Amy. I’m very sorry about Amy, but we didn’t have a thing to do with it.”
“Oh, Donny.”
“I want to marry you. I love you. I miss you.”
“Then let’s get married.”
“There’s this thing,” Donny said.
“This thing?”
“Yeah. By the way, I’ve technically deserted. I’m UA. Unauthorized absence. I’ll be reported tomorrow at morning muster. They’ll do something to me probably. But I had to see you.”
“Donny?”
“Let me tell you about this thing.”
And so he told it: from his recruitment to his attempts to enter into a duplicitous friendship with Crowe to his arrival at the party to his strange behavior that night until, finally, the action on the bridge, Crowe’s arrest and tomorrow’s responsibilities.
“Oh, God, Donny, I’m so sorry. It’s so awful.” She went to him and in her warmth for just a second he lost all his problems and was Donny Fenn of Pima County all over again, the football hero, the big guy that everybody thought so highly of, who could do a 40 in four-seven, and bench press 250, yet take pride in his high SATs and the fact that he was decent to his high school’s lowliest creeps and toads and never was mean to anybody, because that wasn’t his way. But then he blinked, and he was back in the dark in the park, and it was only Julie, her warmth, her smell, her sweetness, and when he left her embrace, it was all back again.
“Donny, haven’t you done enough for them? I mean, you got shot, you lay in that horrible hospital for six months, you came back and did exactly what they said. When does it end?”
“It ends when you get out. I don’t hate the Corps. It’s not a Corps thing. It’s these Navy guys, these super-patriots, who have it all figured out.”
“Oh, Donny. It’s so awful.”
“I don’t work that way. I don’t like that stuff at all. That’s not me. Not any of it.”
“Can’t you talk to somebody? Can’t you talk to a chaplain or a lawyer or something? Do they even have the right to put you through that?”
“Well, as I understand it, it’s not an illegal order. It’s a legitimate order. It’s not like being asked to do something that’s technically wrong, like shoot kids in a ditch. I don’t know who I could talk to who wouldn’t say, Just do your duty.”
“And they’ll send you back to Vietnam if you don’t testify.”
“That’s the gist of it, yeah.”
“Oh, God,” she said.
She turned from him and walked a step or two away. Across the way, she could see the Potomac and the dark far shore that was Virginia. Above it, a tapestry of stars unscrolled, dense and deep.
“Donny,” she finally said, “there’s only one answer.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Go back. Do it. That’s what you have to do to save yourself.”
“But it’s not like I know he’s guilty. Maybe he doesn’t deserve to get his life ruined just because—”
“Donny. Just do it. You said yourself, this Crowe is not worth a single thing.”
“You’re right,” Donny finally said. “I’ll go back, I’ll do it, I’ll get it over. I’m eleven and days, I’ll get out inside a year with an early out, and we can have our life. That’s all there is to it. That’s fine, that’s cool. I’ve made up my mind.”
“No, you haven’t,” she said. “I can tell when you’re lying. You’re not lying to me; you never have. But you’re lying to yourself.”
“I should talk to someone. I need help on this one.”
“And I’m not good enough?”
“If you love me, and I hope and pray you do, then your judgment is clouded.”
“All right, who, then?”
Who, indeed?
There was only one answer, really. Not the chaplain or a JAG lawyer, not Platoon Sergeant Case or the first sergeant or the sergeant major or the colonel or even the Commandant, USMC.
“Trig. Trig will know. We’ll go see Trig.”
Bitterly, from afar, Peter watched them. They embraced, they talked, they appeared to fight. She broke away. He went after her. It killed him to sense the intimacy they shared. It was everything he hated in the world—the strong, the handsome, the blond, the confident, just taking what was theirs and leaving nothing behind.
He watched them, finally, go toward Donny’s old car and climb in, his mind raging with anger and counterplots, his energy unbearably high.
Without willing it, he raced to the VW Larry Frankel had lent him. He turned the key, jacked the car into gear and sped after them. He didn’t know why, he didn’t think it would matter, but he also knew he could not help but follow them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Peter almost missed them. He had just cleared a crest when he saw the lights of the other car illuminate a hill and a dirt road beyond a gate, then flash off. His own lights were off, but there was enough moonlight to make out the road ahead. He pulled up to the gate and saw nothing that bore any signal of meaning, except a mailbox, painted white with the name WILSON scribbled on it in black. He was on Route 35, about five miles north of Germantown.
What the hell were they up to? What did they know? What was going on?
He decided to pull back a hundred yards, and just wait for a while. Suppose they ran in there, and turned around and collided with him on the road? That would be a total humiliation.
Instead, he decided just to watch and wait.
At the top of the hill, they turned the engine off. Below lay a farm of no particular distinction, a nondescript house, a yard, a barn. Propane tanks and old tractors, rusted out, lay in the yard; there was no sound of animals. The farm, in fact, looked like a Dust Bowl relic.
Yet something was going on.
Twin beams illuminated the yard, and Donny, with his unusually good eyesight, could make out a van with its lights on, a shroud of dust, and two men who were in the process of moving heavy packages of some sort out from the barn into the van by the light of the headlamps.
“I think that’s Trig,” Donny said. “I don’t know who the other guy is.”
“Shall we go down?”
Donny was suddenly unsure.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t figure out what the hell is going on.”
“He’s helping his friend load up.”
“At this hour?”
“Well, he’s an irregular guy. The clock doesn’t mean much to him.”
That was true; Trig wasn’t your nine-to-fiver by any interpretation.
“All right,” said Donny. “We’ll walk down there. But you hang back. Let me check this out. Don’t let them see you until we figure what’s happening. I’ll call you in, okay? I’m just not feeling good about this, okay?”
“You sound a little paranoid.”
He did. Some hint of danger filled the air, but he wasn’t sure what it was, what it meant, where it came from. Possibly, it was the mere strangeness of everything, the way nothing really made any sense. Possibly it was his own fatigue, raw after the many hours on alert.
They headed down the hill, and Donny detoured them around the house, until at last they came upon the two men from the rear. Donny could see them better now, both working in jeans and denim shirts. They were loading by wheelbarrow immensely awkward sacks of fertilizer into the van, packing it very full, AMMONIUM NITRATE, the
sacks said. Dust that the wheelbarrow tires ripped up from the ground filled the air, floating in large, shimmering clouds, which shifted through the beams of the truck lights and in the yellower light that blazed from the barn door. It lit wherever it could, coating the truck, the men, everything. Both Trig and the other man wore red bandannas around their faces.
Pushing Julie back into the dark, Donny stepped out and approached, coughing at the stuff in the air as it filled his mouth and throat with grit. He stepped farther; nobody noticed him.
“Trig?” he called.
Trig turned instantly at his name, but it was the other man who reacted much faster, turning exactly to Donny, his dark eyes devouring him. He had a full, tangled web of blond hair, much thicker than Trig’s, and was large and powerful next to Trig’s delicacy. They looked like a poet and a stevedore standing next to each other.
“Trig, it’s me, Donny. Donny Fenn.” He stepped forward a little hesitantly.
“Donny, Jesus Christ, I didn’t expect you.”
“Well, you said to come on out.”
“I did, yeah. Come on in. Donny, meet Robert Fitzpatrick, my old friend at Oxford.”
“Halloo,” said Robert, pulling off his own bandanna to show a smile that itself showed a mouthful of porcelain spades, a movie star’s gleam of a smile. “So you’re the war hero, eh? We’ve hopes for you, that we do! Need boyos like you for the movement. We’ll stop this bloody thing and get the west field covered in horseshit and ammonium nitrate, if I’m a judge of things. Roll up your sleeves, boy, and get to work. We could use some back. Me goddamned pickup broke down and I’m stuck with this piece of shit to git the stuff out to the spreader. We’re doing it at night to beat the heat.”
“Robert, he’s been on some kind of alert for seventy-two hours. He can’t do manual labor,” Trig said.
“No, I—”
“No, we’re almost done. It doesn’t matter.”
“You left so suddenly.”
“Ah, one more demonstration. I was worn out. What did it prove? I’ve lost my will for the movement.”