Act of Deceit

by Steven Gore

  Donnally had no doubt that the dawn rising over the landscape of his father’s new movie would illuminate the same thing: men wearing army green or Union blue or Confederate gray portrayed somehow as the true victims of the massacres they themselves committed, as if the forces that drove them to violence were as irresistible as gravitation, as if no willful general in Washington or Richmond or Hanoi or Saigon had ordered them to march into villages and no sergeant had ordered them to fire on the old and the weak, children and infants, cows and pigs and goats, or had ordered the houses or teepees or thatched huts burned and the survivors concentrated in camps.

  And as if they hadn’t obeyed by their own will and hadn’t pulled the trigger with intent.

  It was just man’s fate to do evil, that was his father’s repeated claim. It was as natural as the sunrise. No other explanations need be given, no justifications need be offered, and no excuses need be made.

  “If he’s still shooting the dawn,” Donnally said, “then I guess I don’t need to check the sign-in sheet.”

  His mother cast him a fond and forgiving smile. “I think this was purely an economic decision,” she said. “Not an existential one.”

  “Why? Did he put his own money into it?”

  “Actually, he did. He even reduced costs by shooting some of the jungle scenes in Mexico instead of doing them all in Southeast Asia.”

  “Why? The Pentagon’s movie budget got cut, so he found a way to get the Mexican taxpayer to foot the bill?”

  Before she could answer, a light knock on the door drew their attention to Julia, his mother’s nurse and companion, entering with a tray of tea and medications. Donnally rose as she set it down and then gave her a hug.

  “I didn’t bother asking her,” Donnally said, gesturing toward his mother, “because she won’t tell me the truth. So I’ll ask—”

  “The doctor said that nothing has changed,” his mother said, then she looked up at Julia. “Isn’t that right?”

  Donnally held his palm down toward his mother, but kept his eyes fixed on Julia. “Well?”

  “I better seek refuge in my constitutional right to remain silent,” Julia said.

  “Then I’ve got my answer.”

  “She’s been dreaming a lot about your brother,” Julia told Donnally as they stood next to his rental car in the driveway.

  “Probably because Donnie’s birthday is coming up.”

  Donnally looked up at his mother’s window. He watched the breeze ruffle the sheer curtains next to the bed where she lay asleep.

  “I wonder how she sees Donnie in her mind,” Donnally said. “As twenty years old or as the fifty-seven he’d be now?”

  Donnally felt a wave of sadness, imagining that his mother saw not how Donnie really would have looked, but as his father had looked at that age.

  “Why don’t you ask her?” Julia asked.

  “Because we’d get lost in a circular conversation since she’s not willing to admit to herself that if my father hadn’t sold his soul to the Pentagon, Donnie would still be alive.”

  “You’re wrong. She admitted that years ago. She’s just unwilling to make the choice you want her to make between your brother and your father.”

  Julia paused, then frowned and lowered her gaze.

  “No,” she finally said, looking back up at him. “that’s not really it. I think I’ve been framing it wrong. The choice you want her to make is between you and your father, between how you see the world and how he does, how you imagine the past and how he does.”

  “There’s no choice. The world is the way it is and the past was the way it was.”

  Neither of them had to say what that past was, for it lived in the present like an unhealed wound: advertising genius Captain Donald Harlan conducting a Saigon briefing, selling the war to the press, and to his elder son.

  Donnie had been so moved by his father’s story of Buddhist monks murdered by the North Vietnamese that he had enlisted in the marines, only to learn the truth eight months later when he talked to villagers near the DMZ: The monks had been executed by U.S. Korean allies.

  He went AWOL and traveled to Saigon to confront his father, who claimed to have been deceived by the South Vietnamese military. Donnie returned to his unit and was killed in what the Silver Star commendation described as “a heroic battle in which he had engaged the enemy on all sides.”

  It wasn’t until Donnally read the Pentagon Papers as part of a high school civics class that he discovered that Captain Donald Harlan had himself composed the lie, justifying it as having been told in the service of a greater good. He also learned that “engaging the enemy on all sides” meant in army-speak that his brother had been ambushed, led into a trap by those he believed he was fighting for.

  Coming home from school that day, staggered by betrayal and quavering with rage, Donnally had resolved to make his father the model for everything he wouldn’t be.

  The next day he moved out the house and got a job.

  On his eighteenth birthday he went to court and switched his first name for his last.

  And on the day he graduated from UCLA, he drove north and swore his oath as a San Francisco police officer.

  Donnally looked past Julia in the direction of the distant mountains, imagining his father’s satisfaction as he wrapped up the shoot.

  “My father still deludes himself that his fictions can be truer than the truth, when they’re just lies he tells himself.” He reached into his pocket for his car keys. “He’ll never change.”

  Chapter 11

  Just after dark, Donnally parked a battered Caprice station wagon along the tree-lined southern edge of Golden Gate Park. He shrugged a surplus navy peacoat over his work shirt and put on a tattered Oakland A’s cap to give him the appearance of a man just a couple of missed paychecks into homelessness.

  He slumped his shoulders in feigned defeat as he walked across the amber-lit street and passed by a collection of homeless men and lurking parolees. He entered the corner liquor store and bought two pints of E&J Brandy as bribes to make friends in the park with people who might know Charles Brown, and slid them into his coat pockets.

  Two tattooed skinheads bracketed Donnally as he stepped back onto the shadowed sidewalk, as though they were cowboys cutting a cow out of a herd for branding. The shorter of the men kept his hand inside his unzipped jacket. The taller gripped Donnally by the left elbow and leaned into him, urging him down the sidewalk.

  “Stay cool, man,” the short one said, without looking up. “It’ll be over in a minute and you can walk away.”

  Donnally slumped even lower as they pushed him into a driveway leading toward the closed underground garage of a two-story Victorian.

  “Just don’t hurt me.” Donnally said, as they descended. “I got kids.”

  Donnally stopped halfway down and looked at the taller of the robbers, then tilted his head toward his front right pocket.

  “Take the wallet, man. It’s everything I got.”

  The two skinheads glanced backward. Donnally followed their eyes. A homeless sixty-year-old Asian man was watching them from behind an overstuffed grocery cart parked on the sidewalk across the street.

  The shorter man pulled a Buck knife from his jacket and pressed it against Donnally’s side while the taller reached into Donnally’s front pocket and worked the wallet out. He thumbed through the two hundred dollars, then smiled at his partner as he took out the cash.

  He turned back to Donnally. “Where’s your ID?”

  “Hidden in the park. I got warrants. I don’t want to make it easy for the cops.”

  “For what?”

  Donnally shrugged.

  The shorter skinhead snapped the Buck knife closed, slid it into his back pocket.

  “No hard feelings, man. Just business.”

  “I know,” Donnally said, as the skinheads strolled back up the driveway. “Dog eat dog.”

  As the two turned the corner back onto the sidewalk, Donnally heard the
taller one laugh and say, “That asshole sure ain’t gonna call the cops. Last thing he wants is to share a cell with us.”

  Donnally reached into his sock, pulled out his cell phone, and called his old partner at SFPD. He described the two and said, “Swing by and see if you can ID the guys and get some photos, but don’t arrest them for a couple of days. I’m working on something in Golden Gate Park and don’t want to get burned. I’ll explain everything later.”

  Once he was certain that they’d returned to their posts by the liquor store, he walked back up the driveway and across the street toward the homeless man, now standing next to the station wagon.

  The man lowered the hood of his grimy green parka, slicked down his black hair, and then looked up as Donnally approached.

  “Tough break,” the man said.

  Donnally saw that he meant it. He nodded, and then leaned against his car.

  “It’s all I had,” Donnally said.

  The man peered up into Donnally’s eyes. “When you lose your job?”

  “About eighteen months ago. Baker’s Yeast over in Oakland. Unemployment ran out last summer.”

  The man smiled. “Mine ran out five years ago. I learned to live without it. You got a name?”

  “They call me D.” Donnally stuck out his hand. “You?”

  The man pulled off his knitted glove and held up his right hand; two fingers were missing.

  “Saam Ji. Three Fingers.”

  Donnally shook the remnants of Saam Ji’s hand, then reached into his coat pocket and withdrew one of the bottles of brandy.

  “Want some?”

  Saam waved it off. “Got a meeting with my probation officer early tomorrow. He’s got a nose like a bloodhound.”

  Donnally unscrewed the cap and took a sip.

  “Saam Ji. That Cantonese?”

  “Good guess.”

  “How come you’ve got a Chinese nickname, but you don’t have an accent?”

  Saam Ji squinted up at Donnally. “You a cop or something?”

  “I used to be a janitor over there at Gordon Lau Elementary in Chinatown until—” Donnally held up the bottle and shrugged. “Until this got in the way.”

  Saam Ji offered a weak smile of sympathy. “Yeah. I know how that goes. I’m not fresh off the boat. I was born in Cleveland.”

  Donnally pointed at Saam Ji’s hand. “How’d that happen?”

  “Let’s say I lost them gambling.”

  “Loan sharks?”

  “Over at Lucky Chances in Colma ten years ago. I was a pai gow dealer. Gambled in my free time. After I got in too deep, some gangsters took me across the road into Home of Peace Cemetery. Beat the crap out of me and stomped my hands.” Saam Ji sneered. “Home of Peace, my ass.” He held up his three fingers. “I wasn’t much good without all ten, so I couldn’t get hired anywhere else.”

  Donnally searched his jeans pockets and pulled out a balled-up five-dollar bill. He unfolded it and inspected it under the streetlight, then looked up and down the street. “There a McDonald’s around here?”

  Saam Ji pointed east. “In the Haight.”

  “Show me the way and we’ll share whatever ninety-nine-cent stuff they got on special.”

  Saam Ji smiled. “Thanks. I haven’t had a burger in months.”

  Donnally made a show of inspecting the bill and smiled back.

  “Let’s call it my last supper.”

  A half hour later, Donnally and Saam Ji were sitting at a metal table outside the McDonald’s across the street bordering the east end of the park. Saam Ji’s grocery cart was parked on the sidewalk ten feet away under a streetlamp.

  The teenager behind the counter had packed their orders for takeout without their asking.

  The five dollars and another fifty cents Donnally pulled from his coat pocket went further than he expected. Four burgers and a small bag of French fries.

  “Why’d you come to the park?” Saam Ji asked, sticking a fry in his mouth. “You got a car. You can stay wherever you want. Police are always hassling us around here. You go into the bushes to take a shit and when you come back, a city crew has hauled your stuff away.”

  “I was staying over in Berkeley by the marina for the last month,” Donnally said, “but there are too many psychos around.”

  Saam Ji grinned. “You mean worse than the guys that robbed you?”

  “Not worse. Just unpredictable. Hard to get a good night’s sleep. And I used to know a guy who lived up in the Frontier.” Donnally pointed toward the most isolated and jungled area of the park where the hard-core homeless lived.

  “I thought maybe I’d look him up.” Donnally smiled. “He’s a little unpredictable, too, but I’m friends with his brother.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Charles, but people used to call him Rover.”

  “Rover … Rover …” Saam Ji squinted into the distance, then looked back at Donnally. “A black guy?”

  “Yeah. About six feet. Fifty years old or so.”

  “I think I know who he is but he hasn’t been around for at least a year, maybe two.” Saam Ji smiled, his teeth yellowed and caked with French fry residue. “It’s hard to tell time when you’re not punching a clock.”

  “Any idea where he went?”

  Saam Ji wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket.

  “He couldn’t make it in the Frontier. Couldn’t stand being alone. He was always looking for attention.” Saam Ji’s eyes narrowed, then he squeezed them shut. “Let me think … let me think …” He opened his eyes again. “Noe Valley. That’s it. Noe Valley. I saw him over on Twenty-fourth Street by the bakery. Must’ve been a couple of months ago.”

  “Expensive territory.” Donnally chuckled. “He come into an inheritance?”

  Saam Ji shook his head. “He’s what they call a mascot around here. A guy yuppie people in the neighborhood feel sorry for. They give him money and food.” Saam Ji’s face turned grim. “I couldn’t live like that. It’s humiliating, and you always have to be ready to fight anybody who tries to move in on your block.”

  “Was he doing okay?”

  “Hard to tell. You know he’s crazy, right?”

  “Off and on.”

  “He’s mostly on. If you catch up with him, look at his hands. He punches things. Trees. Newspaper racks. All scarred and scabbed up. And paranoid as shit.” Saam Ji laughed. “I think that’s why all them white women are always giving him things. He acts like a scared puppy.”

  Saam Ji looked around, then stood up.

  “Thanks for the dinner. I better get to my spot in the park before somebody else moves in.”

  “I’ll walk back with you.”

  “Better not. It’s not good to be seen in the park with a cop.”

  “Cop?”

  “Or something like it.” Saam Ji winked. “You could’ve taken those two skinheads in a heartbeat.”

  “Then why’d you talk to me?”

  “First just to see what you were up to. And now that I know it’s about Rover, I’m glad I did. He’s really gonna hurt somebody someday. Probably a woman. It’s just a matter of time. And it’s not because he’s crazy.” Saam Ji gestured toward the park. “Lots of crazy people out there. Almost all of them are harmless. But Rover sometimes looks at women a certain way. Gives me the willies. I was glad when he left the park ’cause I would’ve felt guilty if he did something. Shit, if I wanted to be responsible for other people, I wouldn’t be living on the street.”

  “Has he done anything so far?”

  “I seen him in the bushes with some women, ones like him, but I never saw him hurt anybody.” Saam Ji shrugged. “I figured if they’re all crazy, it’s kinda no harm, no foul.”

  Chapter 12

  Donnally looked over at San Francisco Homicide Lieutenant Ramon Navarro sitting in the driver’s seat of the Mercury Marquis. They had been parked for a couple of hours in front of Jules’ Jewels at Twenty-fourth Street and Castro, surveilling the Noe Valley Bakery across
the street and watching the Saturday morning breakfast crowd lining up for sugar and caffeine.

  “You’re starting to look like a Mexican Buddha,” Donnally said, pointing at Navarro’s stomach stretching tight against a yellow button-down shirt and a brown sports coat.

  Navarro laughed, then ran his hand through his thinning hair. “Actually, I’ve been going for the Friar Tuck look.”

  Donnally tapped his thumb against his chest. “And I take it I’m supposed to be Robin Hood?”

  “I’m not sure you’d look all that good in tights.”

  Donnally smiled. “You’re not likely to find out.”

  They fell silent as they surveyed the street and the sidewalks, now overpopulated with mothers pushing strollers, wandering coffee drinkers in North Face parkas, couture-clad children of privilege, and red bandana-necked golden retrievers with their earnest noses sniffing the air.

  “Sometimes this feels more like Aspen than a big-city neighborhood,” Donnally said.

  Navarro waved his hands toward the surrounding hills. “Or an enormous set constructed to shoot Eddie Bauer commercials.”

  Donnally watched two women walk by, holding hands. “You think these folks realize how lucky they are?”

  Navarro stared ahead at the women for a moment, then said, “I suspect they mostly just feel deserving.”

  Donnally nodded toward a bearded man wearing three layers of coats and carrying a cloth sleeping bag. He was walking toward the bakery, eyes fixed on the sidewalk in front of him.

  “Until somebody like Charles Brown shows up,” Donnally said.

  Navarro held up a decades-old mugshot, then glanced back and forth between it and the man. “Maybe those folks are right who say that the mentally ill don’t age like the rest of us.”