“Thanks, Sergeant Major.” Slaight took a long swig of beer, finishing the can.
“That help you, son?” Eldridge studied Slaight. The kid’s mind was churning … cranking. He could tell.
“Sure did, Sergeant Major. Beatty. I know him. Know of him, anyway. Jesus. That’s the weirdest twist in this thing yet … weirder than two autopsies even.”
“Well, lemme tell you something, boy. I don’t want to know. Got that? You keep it to yourself. And if you want a piece of advice, I’d keep my fanny just as far away from this shitstorm as my little legs could carry me.”
“I’ve got you, Sergeant Major.”
“You’re on your leave time, aren’t you, Ry?”
“Well … if you want to call visiting the com on leave … yeah.”
“And they just called you up and roused your ass up here, huh?”
“Yeah, they found me. My leave form, up in Regimental Headquarters. They’re all on file up there. Easy enough.”
“Tell you what, Slaight. I been meaning to drop by old Building 720 before I clear post … got a few goodbyes to say and all that. Now. Let’s see. You’ll be back in New York City by tomorrow, if I’m not wrong. That correct?”
“Yeah.”
“So you wouldn’t know it if somebody yanked your leave form and it just kinda disappeared, would you?” The sergeant major was grinning ear to ear now.
“It’s hard to know what’s happening up at Woo Poo when you’re down in the city, I guess.”
“Leave it to me. More important records than goddamn cadet leave forms have been made to vanish for lesser reasons, lemme tell you. And take a piece of advice from an old sergeant, will you?”
“What’s that, Sergeant Major?”
“The army only gives you thirty days a goddamn year….” Eldridge nodded his head in the direction of the terrace, where Mrs. Eldridge and Irit sat talking. “Use it.” Eldridge laughed and punched Slaight in the stomach affectionately.
“You bet, Sergeant Major.”
“Thought I told you to knock that stuff off.”
“Yeah … but Jesus, Sergeant Major. You’re always going to be, well, the sergeant major to me … to lots of guys. Christ. Just because the army says you’re through doesn’t mean we have to … forget, does it?”
The sergeant major wrapped a beefy, tanned arm around Slaight’s shoulders and hugged him tightly. Slaight looked in his eyes, and the sergeant major looked away reflexively.
“I don’t guess it does, Ry. I don’t guess it does. God damn, this is some shit.”
“What’s that, Sergeant Major?”
“This place. West Point. I been in the army all my goddamn life, and I never seen anything like it. I mean, I’ve seen it come, and I’ve seen it go. Hell, I used to know guys, old SOBs when I first signed up, thought the army went to hell in a handbasket the day they traded the horse for the tank. I seen some changes in my day, Slaight. By God, I seen some changes. But this place. I’ll tell you what. I never seen anything like it in the army till I got here. I served under West Pointers since I was a private, but you’d have told me about this place, I wouldn’t have believed you, not in a thousand years, I wouldn’t have. The kinds of stuff I’ve seen here … the stuff they do to each other … makes you wonder, that’s what it does. Makes you wonder. I guess retiring is the best thing for me. I’m just an old sergeant. But I’ll tell you what. It all seems different to me now. All of it. Now that I’ve seen West Point up close, I guess my kind is finished in this man’s army. I don’t belong any more. Know what I mean? I don’t belong. That’s what makes me sad. Learning after all these years that you don’t belong. Hell’s bells, maybe I never did. Who knows?”
The sergeant major tugged at Slaight’s shoulder as they walked out the back door to the terrace.
“You need anything, Slaight, just call Santa Fe information. They’ll have me listed in a couple of days. And you tell that Leroy Buck to stay in touch, too. And that John Lugar, too. God damn, it’s going to be lonely out there without you guys.”
Slaight didn’t know what to say, so he didn’t say anything.
“Irit Dov.” The sergeant major embraced her. “Irit Dov. Your daddy’s a general, over there in Israel, isn’t he? Wasn’t I reading about him last year in the papers, during the war?”
“Yes, Sergeant Major.”
“Not you, too. Come on. Call me Ed.”
“You’re not going to get to her either, Sergeant Major,” Slaight interrupted. “She’s a corporal in the army reserves over there.”
“God damn. An old man can’t win anything any more. Okay, Irit. You take care of this young man, you hear me?”
“Yes, Sergeant Major.”
They walked to the Mercedes and got in. They said brief good-byes. It was the way in the army. Sharply. Clean. Leaving was always fast.
From a phone booth in Highland Falls, Slaight called Major Consor and reported on his conversations with General Hedges and the sergeant major. If Consor was disturbed to learn there was not one autopsy, but two, of David Hand floating around with his name attached to them, he didn’t show it. Consor had unreal control, like the doctors on the televisions shows. It was like showing emotion was illegal or something. But Consor did ask Slaight to keep the information about the two autopsies to himself and to get in touch if he heard anything else. Slaight promised he would.
They drove back to New York City in fading light. Quietly. Irit watched Slaight. He concentrated on the road and drove well, as he always did. But she knew he was thinking. It was all over his face, wrinkled into a permanent frown, a grimace of distaste. It was impossible for Slaight to hide his emotions, a fact Irit found comforting, for all she had to do was look at him and she knew what was up.
She didn’t ask him anything because she knew if she did, he would snap at her. It was always that way for a day or so after he left the academy. His temper was brittle. She knew if she asked anything, they would have a spat, and later, he’d blame it on West fuckin’ Point. That’s what he always called it. West fuckin’ Point. They’d argue and fight, he’d brood and pout and hide from her—going away, she called it—and when it was all over, he’d blame it on West fuckin’ Point.
West Point was his excuse for everything. For all his moods, all his mistakes, all his faults, all his failures … and for all his skills, all his talents, for his manners, his sense of right and wrong, his tenderness, his occasional bursts of anger, bitterness, resentment. West Point just sat there on the Hudson and soaked up blame like a sponge. In a way, West Point protected Ry Slaight. West Point protected him from himself—from his true self—and he didn’t know it.
When they’d garaged the Mercedes 190-SL and returned to Irit’s building, she checked the mail.
“Ry, there’s a letter here for you. It was forwarded from West Point,” she said.
The envelope was pink, obviously from a girl. He avoided her eyes. They rode the elevator in silence, the floors going by with ringing metallic clicks. Upstairs in the penthouse, she disappeared into the kitchen to fix supper. Slaight sat down on one of the sofas, took off his shirt, shoes, and socks, propped his feet, leaned back in his khaki pants bare-chested in the summer night, and opened the letter.
June 20, 1968
152 Chartres St.
New Orleans
Dear Ry,
My brother is dead, an accidental drowning they said. We buried him next to my grandfather in the family tomb, and I cried. For two weeks, I put it out of my mind, but today I couldn’t stand it any longer. 1 got out all the mail I received from him this past year while I was in Paris, and I went through every letter this afternoon. All he could talk about was Ry Slaight this and Ry Slaight that and Ry Slaight did such-and-such and I saw Ry Slaight at the movies and Ry Slaight went somewhere and did something and I heard Ry Slaight said and on and on.
Now he’s dead and buried. I don’t believe for one minute it was an accident. And I think you had something to do with it. If it�
�s the last thing I do on this earth. I’m going to find out what happened and I’m going to make you pay.
Samantha Hand
Slaight dropped the letter at his side and rested his head on the sofa. Jesus H. fuckin’ Christ. Samantha Hand. Today. This.
Irit walked in from the kitchen carrying a tray of crackers and cheese, saw Slaight with the letter at his side, sat down across from him, and said:
“Ry? Ry? What is it? Tell me.” He handed her the letter. She read it.
“Ry, all day you haven’t said a thing about what’s going on. I haven’t asked you about it because I knew you needed … well, I knew you had to go up there to see that man, the commandant. And I knew you needed to talk to the sergeant major. And I knew you needed the time to sort it all out for yourself. But this, Ry.” She held up the letter.
“What is the meaning of this? I want to know. I have a right to know. This whole thing is destroying you, Ry. And it’s destroying us. Tell me. Please. You’ve got to tell me.”
Slaight raised his head and looked at her. She was remarkably beautiful. His hands shook. He put his head between his knees to hide his face. She moved to the sofa next to him and stroked the hairs on the back of his neck.
He was tired and she was right. The whole thing was eating him alive. He was falling apart. He knew he was going to need her. He needed help to see it through.
“Irit, it’s a long story. A long story. I’m going to tell you all I know. The whole thing. First, I need a drink. I want a glass of bourbon on the rocks, tall. Then I’m gonna start at the beginning, on July 1, 1967, and tell you every goddamn thing I know. Everything I know about this fuckin’ ghost, David Hand.”
* * *
BOOK III
* * *
David Hand July 1967
18
Newspapers called it long and hot. In Detroit, Newark, Watts, and New York, there were riots, fire bombings, the helmeted presence of the National Guard. The word “trashing” entered the language to describe wanton, aimless violence and destruction mirroring domestically the war still raging in Southeast Asia. In the Middle East another war erupted, flared briefly, and was over. Wishfully, or stupidly, it was known as the Summer of Love.
At West Point, they weren’t fooled. All that craziness out in the streets … all the screaming and stomping and yelling and burning and demonstrating and music and long hair … all of it had meaning. Especially the hair. There was something, well, unsettling about long hair. Like rock and roll, long hair was loud, a catcall at America. It was effeminate, a constant reminder of the little black hole in men’s hearts which was of the female. That summer, the noise was so loud and the hair so long, it seemed dangerous. It was power derived from appearance. It was dimensionless. It came from nowhere and it went nowhere and it could not be controlled.
This was power in its most subtle form: power in the absence of money. It was power such as only a handful of men understood completely, and in their minds, it was by rights West Point’s—the power of the warrior class. Historically, their power was a willingness to wait, to bide one’s time in billets at low pay, sometimes as in the 1920s and 1930s, nearly forgotten while the rest of the world went about its business, manufacturing goods and services, achieving status, garnering possessions, land, and money. The warrior class, the West Pointers, eschewed money, they were good at waiting, for at the end of their time on the sidelines, they would go to war and change the shape of the world. Warriors had never been paid very much, so they were said to have served, and what they did was known as the service. But it was always more than that. It was a calling, a spirit, a mysterious something not measurable in civilian terms. The power of the warrior class was the power of men willing to kill other men, and who could measure such a willingness in terms of money? In all of recorded history, soldiers had been underpaid and overworked and very, very powerful, and their power had never been effectively challenged, for the willingness to kill or risk being killed had no monetary equal on the battlefield.
In the summer of 1967, their power was challenged, and the effectiveness of the challenge lay in its diversity, decentralization, and almost total lack of money.
The warriors were mired in a war ten thousand miles away which was not changing the shape of the world. And people back home—kids, housewives, students, fathers, congressmen, senators, citizens—were saying it couldn’t be won and should be ended. Now. Guys coming home from the war weren’t being met by marching bands and baton twirlers. They were returning to Customs, Greyhound bus stations; three more months of pulling details in some stateside hellhole like Fort Bragg or Fort Polk or Fort Leonard Wood. Hassles, man. And outside, “in the world,” as the saying went, out there past the gates, in the streets, were increasing numbers of people who weren’t interested in possessions, land, or money, who just wouldn’t stop chanting peace. It was all getting to be too much. Last year, for the first time in the academy’s 165-year history, West Point had begun recruiting, sending out cadets from the academy to the high schools, competing for graduating students like West Point was just one more college or something. Everywhere, all around the warriors, there were threats. Everywhere, there was hair.
Clearly, something had to be done. They had to grab a final symbol to brandish West Point’s separateness from the rest of the country, its impregnability. They grabbed the cadet haircut. It made sense. Haircuts were image. They could be extreme, loud: white sidewalls, hair so short and bristly around the sides of the head it showed ash-white scalp. Hair so short the head was shiny. An inch on top, just beyond burr-head, enough to plaster down with water and grease and barely affect the look of hair. Hair. It became an obsession at the United States Military Academy, an obsession propagated by a single man, Brigadier General Charles Sherrill Hedges, the brand-new commandant of cadets freshly minted in Vietnam, a combat hero. He conceived of the cadet haircut as the academy’s symbolic moat, the thing to be crossed to get to West Point, the belief to be embraced if you wanted to be a cadet. More than anything else during the summer of 1967, short hair would characterize the Military Academy, mark the cadet, make the man.
The academy itself was groomed as impeccably as its cadets. It became a military Disneyland, a lush green summer dream, a memory of the way things were. To those boys who traveled from the fifty states and several foreign countries to become cadets, West Point would seem a place Tom Sawyer might have aspired to, even in the hot mist of that hectic summer of 1967.
As the new cadet candidate fresh off the bus from New York passed through the gates of West Point, the academy lay before him frozen in time, so consistent was reality with the images formed in the mind by The Long Gray Line on the television late movie, the yearly spectacle of the Army-Navy football game, the books by Red Reeder he had read in junior high school. To the left was the drill field, lined by the old stables, converted now into warehouses and offices. Above the drill field stood barracks built in the 1920s, long brick buildings with porches and floor-to-ceiling windows, elegant reminders of the “brown-shoe army.”
To the right was the Thayer Hotel, perched atop a piece of granite the size of a football field, lobby hung with battle flags, walls lined with regimental crests. And everywhere was granite … great boulders and hunks of it exposed on the side of a hill, roads blasted through it, houses nestled among it, granite, granite, and more granite … rock … stone. High above the area of cadet barracks, a mountain of granite, topped by the Cadet Chapel, a building so singularly imposing that in the late afternoon with the sun in the west, it seemed to cast its shadow over the entire academy. The Cadet Chapel was a cathedral of gray stone, walls flowing into the rock so the chapel and its granite mount seemed to be one. At a glance, the chapel looked like a European castle, battlements topping walls, great oak doors giving way to gloomy interiors, the entire structure cold and gray like the rock on which it stood.
Yet there was something oddly gentle about the whole of the academy. The main post was a place of aristo
cratic stature. Beautiful old brick and wood-frame officers’ quarters lined the streets, sitting on huge expanses of well-trimmed lawns at a respectful distance from one another. White wooden signs with neat black stenciled lettering announced the names and ranks of occupants. Many of the old quarters were three stories high, with a fourth containing dormer bedrooms. Sixteen-foot ground-floor ceilings and double parlors with fireplaces, brass doorknobs and cut-glass bathroom fixtures, marble sinks, floors of fine hardwoods or long-leaf yellow pine, screen porches garnished with wicker furniture upholstered in colorful floral prints, oaks and red maples dappling the perfect green lawns with shifting, wind-blown shade … the overall effect was of a past held reverently to the bosom of the academy, a belief in the continuity of things. The buildings and the lawns and the great pieces of granite which surrounded them were like a steady hand upon the shoulder. The feeling was solid. So was the academy. Having stood upon that historic fist of stone for 165 years, its forefinger directing the passage of the Hudson River, the academy provided a solace, a calm no longer enforced outside the gates of the academy.
Inside the gates, solitude was still enforced. There was to the atmosphere of perfect well-being pervading the academy in the summer of 1967 a lesser design and a greater design. The former had to do with getting through the next day, the next week, the next year. Laying low seemed the best course. Wait it out. The lessons of history, never lost upon warriors, taught that all things would pass, even opposition to the military. West Point would persevere.
The latter design had to do with the reason the Military Academy existed in the first place: to pass a special knowledge of the warrior class to a select group of young men. To cadets. The West Point catalogue did not advertise four years of study as a college, though upon graduation a bachelor of science degree was promised. The academy was described as a “way of life.” Within the academy’s unique notion of itself rested the greater design of West Point: a conservative idealism embracing the ancient ethic by which great ideas, principles, and knowledge were meant to be separated and revealed only to a chosen few. In modern times, this ethic had been distilled elsewhere to a set of rules one followed if one wanted to get ahead. But at West Point, the ethic remained essentially unchanged from 1802, the year the Military Academy was established by an act of Congress at the urging of President Thomas Jefferson.
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