War at Home: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

  “Really? I thought they were here for a couple of hours. I couldn’t tell from what I’d heard. I thought that it was some kind of Fourth of July protest.”

  “Nope,” he said. “We were prepared for that after last year.”

  “What happened last year?”

  “Some distraught mother put the blame on the army instead of the Communists for the loss of her son. She chained herself to the building, along with a few other protestors. I always thought it a shame. Her son died a hero. He wouldn’t’ve wanted her to tarnish his legacy.”

  “So you were prepared for the same thing this year,” I said.

  “We had some people stationed inside, and no,” he said, seeing my next question, “they couldn’t have had anything to do with the shooting. The girl was shot right there.”

  He swept a hand toward the closest corner of the granite. It was whiter than the rest, and had obviously been cleaned.

  “No one from inside the building could’ve made that shot,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t have expected it,” I said. “I’m a veteran, too. I know we don’t go around shooting people for expressing opinions, as much as we disagree with them.”

  For the first time, he smiled at me. “Where’d you serve?”

  “Korea,” I said.

  “You volunteer?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Truman inspired me.”

  His smile was wistful. “Me, too.”

  “But you stayed.”

  “I fit. At least we can get promoted on merit here,” he said. “The rest of the world isn’t like that.”

  “I know.” I glanced at the cleaned-up wall. “Kids today are different, aren’t they?”

  His gaze followed mine and he sighed. “Some aren’t. I’d say the majority of kids we get are ready to serve. Some are scared, but that’s healthy to me. Then we get these….”

  He paused, obviously censoring himself.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I’ve heard it before.”

  He shook his head. “You said it already. They got a right to their opinion, even if I don’t agree. And I don’t agree. We all owe this country. If we’re called to serve, we serve. We don’t lie about our intelligence or try to get out of it. Some of these kids come in and haven’t bathed for days. Some of them purposely stain their underwear and don’t wash them, trying to make us believe they’re too crazy to know hygiene. Most of them got out in the early years. We’re onto them now. Them and those doctors who write phony passes, and the goofy drugs they take to make them seem weirder than they are.”

  I shook my head. Maybe someone had thought to do that to get out of Korea, but I had never seen it. Once upon a time, I wouldn’t even have been able to imagine it.

  “However,” I said, “I do understand these kids’ desire not to get shot.”

  The MP laughed. “Hell, we all felt that at one time or another.” Then his smile faded. “But you know that sometimes freedom is worth dying for.”

  I knew that, too. I knew a lot of people who had died for freedom in our own country, including my friend Martin.

  “I talked to a cop a little while ago about the shooting,” I said. “A detective O’Connor.”

  The MP spat, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, making his opinion of O’Connor known without saying a word.

  “He told me that—”

  “A soldier did it, right?” The MP couldn’t wait for me to finish. “Bastard has no clue what it’s like down here. None of the people in our building would’ve shot anyone, and no one would’ve climbed on any roof to hit those kids. I told him that.”

  His anger surprised me. I decided to run with it instead of asking my original question.

  “He blamed you?” I asked.

  “Me and all the others in the building. But like I said, anyone who understands how sniping works would’ve known that we didn’t shoot that kid.” He glanced at the wall. People walking past us looked curiously at me, then looked away. They seemed to think I was in trouble. “It was bad enough that those kids wouldn’t even let us help her. We had a medic in the building, but the kids wouldn’t let us near her. One kid picks her up and hauls her off like she’s a sack of flour. I mean, don’t they teach kids anything in schools? He could’ve made her worse. I’ll bet he did.”

  “It’s possible,” I said. “She had a second emergency surgery this morning.”

  “I wasn’t even sure she’d make it to the hospital the way she was bleeding. Those kids were lucky they had a car.” He shook his head. “How’d we end up the enemy here? You know? The kids think we’d hurt the girl, the cops think we shot her. We’re just doing our job — and that does not include shooting young people, no matter how irritating they are.”

  I had found some well within him, or maybe he’d reached his last straw yesterday. I decided to push.

  “I’d heard,” I said slowly, “that the young man, Daniel, was involved in a group called the War at Home Brigade.”

  “Yeah, they’ve been leafleting us. A coupla other places, too. Telling us to pull out of Nam or they’d show us what it was like to experience war.”

  “Just recently?” I asked.

  “The last month or so. But we get so much nutty stuff, we just put it in a file and hope it never becomes useful.”

  “It makes me wonder,” I said, “perhaps these kids are living up to their name.”

  It wasn’t hard for him to make the leap. “And shooting one of their own? That’s a hell of a thing to accuse them of.”

  “They don’t trust the police or the military and these are kids of privilege, not raised the way you and I were.”

  “Except maybe a couple of them,” he said. “There were one or two blacks in the group, including the kid who ran off with the girl. They might have reasons for distrusting uniforms. That’s one of the reasons I got one, so our people have something to trust.”

  I nodded. I remembered that impulse too. Only it had failed for me. “I was just thinking that maybe they’re trying something, maybe they’re trying to use a creative method to shut you down.”

  He frowned, then glanced over his shoulder to see if he was needed at the main doors. People were still going in and out — a secretary carrying files like they were schoolbooks, a young man with his head down, his hair flopping over his eyes, as he carried a briefcase inside, a middle-aged man with perfect posture walking with military precision — but the other two MPs weren’t moving at all.

  This MP had made that move to give himself time to think about what he’d say to me. I wondered if he was beginning to regret the conversation.

  “You know,” he said as he turned back toward me. “If it’d happened any other day, I might’ve thought you were right. But no one’s here on the Fourth. The building would’ve been locked up tight, no one around, if it weren’t for last year’s protests, and no one knew that there’d be soldiers anywhere near the place. We didn’t announce it. And even if they knew, they’d need witnesses, and there were none. Maybe if they’d done something in Battery Park or near the Statue of Liberty, maybe then. But the timing’s off. And it doesn’t fit with the threats.”

  “The leaflets?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Those things threaten to wipe us off the map. You can’t do that with a rifle. I’ve been thinking bombs.”

  I felt my breath catch. “Can I see the leaflets?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Let me get them for you.”

  * * *

  It only took him a minute to get me the leaflets. He let me look at them, watching me the entire time.

  The leaflets were crude. Mimeographed on yellow paper, they all seemed to be the work of the same machine if not the same hand. Some of the drawings looked familiar — giant soldiers hovering over tiny Vietnamese people, an evil-looking Uncle Sam squashing a tiny Asian child, and drawing after drawing of explosions.

  Some of the leaflets were just rhetoric, obviously written by an educated person:

&nbs
p; The genocidal war in Vietnam continues, even if the futility of America’s military effort there and the aroused conscience of the American people have forced the government to make gestures toward a negotiated peace….

  I skimmed most of it, having seen similar arguments before. When the MP had handed me the leaflets — extra copies that he didn’t need — I had been stunned at the number of them. He said they’d been receiving dozens of them every week, often on different color paper and with different wordings.

  Finally, in the middle of the stack, I found it. Buried in a page of argument against Vietnam was this:

  We also cry out against the other war, the war against black America. The funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was followed by close to forty black funerals…

  …We demand that black intellectuals in our country be given the opportunity to speak to the young generation, through schools and other platforms, in terms of black cultural tradition, dignity, and militancy…

  The document ended with a demand to stop both wars — the war on blacks and the war in Vietnam.

  That smacked of Daniel to me, and jibed with what I’d been hearing about his concerns at Yale and in New Haven. I folded that leaflet up and tucked it in my back pocket. The rest I handed back to the MP. I didn’t need them, and if anyone else wanted them, I knew where to direct them.

  I thanked the MP for his time, then left the induction center, feeling more disturbed than I had when I entered it.

  The War at Home Brigade had certainly left its mark on this neighborhood. And Daniel’s reaction to that shooting hadn’t given me any additional confidence in the rationality of his actions.

  I found a coffee shop nearby on Pearl Street and had a light lunch, mostly because I wanted the chance to sit and think rather than because I was hungry. The day had turned oppressively humid, and I was glad to get off my feet.

  I pulled out the list I had made of names and addresses, seeing which were near my location. None of them were real close. I’d either have to walk some distance in this heat or take an even hotter subway ride.

  But I couldn’t stop now. I had to finish this.

  I had to find out what Daniel was planning, and I had to stop him.

  FORTY-FOUR

  The nearest victim, Joel Grossman, lived on Macdougal and West Eighth, not far from Washington Square Park. I had walked from the coffee shop, deciding to avoid the subway in the heat. Even though the train cars were air-conditioned, the stations were not, and the hot air grew foul by midday.

  When I reached the park, I found more construction signs, all of them announcing that the western end of the park would be closed starting on July 15. Graffiti covered the official words, mostly spray-painted swear words, although on one sign someone wrote: Its about freakin’ time.

  Grossman’s address was in a group of brick houses that seemed quaintly Village to me. They had been carved up into tiny apartments and had discreet buzzers near the door. I pushed the button next to Grossman’s name but got no answer. I waited for some time, tried the main door once, and discovered it was locked.

  A white woman with long brown hair poked her head out of a nearby window. “You buzzing for Joel?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Thought so,” she said. “I can hear the buzzer in my place.”

  “Is he all right?” I asked.

  “He was hurt a few weeks back,” she said. “He couldn’t stay alone so he went up to stay with his folks in the West Nineties.”

  “Do you know exactly where?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “but his dad’s Jerome, so I suppose you could look it up.”

  I thanked her and headed down the block. The West Nineties were a far cry from here. The Village always prided itself on being bohemian. If Grossman’s neighbor thought anything of my skin color, she didn’t show it. In the West Nineties, I’d be as suspect as I was on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive.

  No one was home at the next address on my list either — Victor McCleary, the young man who’d been shot a week before. He lived in an old tenement apartment on Perry Street. The address wasn’t far from the Christopher Street shooting site.

  None of McCleary’s neighbors had seen him, and none of them seemed interested in him either. I gave up and took the train north. The last address wasn’t far from mine. The very first victim lived in Morningside Heights in a student apartment. Which made sense, since the paper said he had enrolled at Columbia University.

  The apartment was in a drab white stone building not too far from the park. I trudged there, feeling grimy from the subway and a day in the heat. I had forgotten how hot this city could get: it didn’t have the benefit of cooling breezes off the lake, the way Chicago did.

  The doorbells for the apartments were inside the stone arch. Someone had rigged the bells haphazardly. A simple snip of the wires and I could have knocked out the entire system.

  I pressed the button for Ned Jones. To my surprise, someone yelled from above, “Whozzit?”

  I backed out of the archway and looked up, shielding my eyes. A shirtless redheaded white man, wearing a sling over his left arm, peered down at me from a landing on the fire escape.

  “My name’s Bill Grimshaw,” I said. “I’m investigating some shootings. I’m looking for Ned Jones.”

  “That’s me.”

  “I was wondering if I could talk to you.”

  “Sure,” he said. “C’mon up.”

  He slid the fire escape bars down toward me. I stepped into the nearby alley, grabbed the ladder, and tugged it down. Then I climbed up, hand over hand, until I reached the landing with Jones on it. A large window opened into his apartment. He sat on the sill. He was wearing a pair of cutoff jeans and nothing else. A lawn chair sat on the far end of the landing, its metal legs braced precariously on the landing’s iron bars.

  “You want a beer?” he asked.

  “No, thanks,” I said, “but water’d be nice.”

  “You’re in luck,” he said. “We got that.”

  He swung his legs inside the apartment and padded off. I looked around. The landing had a good view of the alley and the apartments on the other side. If I craned my neck to the right, I caught the edge of the Columbia campus. If I craned farther to the left, I saw only more apartments and the street beyond.

  When he came back, Jones had a glass in his good hand. I took the glass from him and extended an arm to help him onto the landing, but he shrugged me off.

  “I’m getting used to this. It’s healing slow. The bullet did a lot of damage.” Jones tilted his head as if he were investigating me. His eyes were a dark auburn, matching his hair. His skin was pale, almost translucent, in the sunlight. “It’s about time someone started looking into my shooting.”

  He didn’t ask to see any identification, and I didn’t offer any.

  “You know there’ve been others,” I said.

  “In the park?” He sounded surprised.

  “I don’t know about that,” I said. “I do know a number of young people have been shot in the city. The most recent was June D’Amato.”

  “Junie.” He swung onto the windowsill, and frowned. “She okay?”

  “She had two emergency surgeries since yesterday,” I said. “She’s not conscious yet.”

  “Jeez,” Jones said. “When’d this happen?”

  “Yesterday morning, at the Armed Forces Induction Center on Whitehall.”

  “Idiots,” he mumbled.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The gang, whatever the hell they’re calling themselves. I suppose they went down there to show their might.”

  “I was told they were planning something.”

  Jones shook his head. “These guys don’t know when to quit.”

  “I thought you were part of the group.”

  “ ‘Were’ being the operative word,” Jones said. “I was planning to drop out when this happened. In fact, the last thing I remember before the shooting was arguing about the direction of the
movement. I’m yelling something about nonviolence being the only way to fight, and whappo! I get zapped with a bullet, knocked to the ground, and I am out of it. Next thing I know, I’m in Columbia Presbyterian with IVs in me and a doctor hovering over me, telling me not panic.”

  “Sounds serious,” I said.

  “Shock,” he said. “That bullet went through my upper arm and destroyed some nerves. For a week there, they thought I might not have use of the arm. Now I will, but it’ll never be up to normal. I don’t have feeling in three of my fingers, probably never will.”

  I found myself looking at the arm in the sling. His fingers looked thinner and paler than the others, almost bluish.

  “What else do you know about the shooting?” I asked.

  “The cops say it was random. Someone was probably illegally firing off a gun in the Ramble. Now you’re here telling me others have been shot, so I don’t know. All I know is that I got hit.”

  “Three others,” I said. “Besides June D’Amato, Joel Grossman and Victor McCleary got shot. All on separate occasions. All lived through the initial shooting, although I haven’t been able to talk to any of them to see how they’re doing.”

  “All at ‘actions’?” he asked, putting a sarcastic emphasis on the word.

  “June and Grossman’s were,” I said. “McCleary got shot after a riot down on Christopher Street last week.”

  Jones rolled his eyes. “That damn bar. I told him to stay out of it.”

  “So you were good friends with him?”

  Jones shrugged. “I don’t know about that.”

  “But you were planning to leave the group.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Jones said. “There was new blood, and I really hated the direction. We were an offshoot of the SDS here on campus. We moved away from the militant stuff when some of the students held some buildings on campus hostage last year. Maybe you heard about that?”

  Of course I had heard. The Columbia takeover was often cited as the beginning of violent student unrest on campuses all over the United States.

  “You didn’t participate in that?”