A silver-haired senator spoke with Irish eloquence:
“A novelist once wrote of his hero, ‘He was born with the gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad.’ Jamie Kilcannon knew too well that the world he wished to make gentle is too often mad. But even in madness, we remember the gift of his laughter.…”
The camera panned from the president and the first lady to a weeping man in a bow tie, then Stacy Tarrant, and stayed.
Lord leaned closer, taking in the haunted look, the way she held her head quite still. She had walked up the steps of the church with the same strong-willed dignity, so slowly that Lord thought she wished to pierce those watching with the wrong that Carson had done. Now he wondered whether law had stripped him of a normal response to tragedy. Yet the thought persisted: this purpose might sustain her.
As Lord watched, she listened to the senator’s eulogy.
“And even in death, the terrible beauty of his last spoken words reflects his larger hope for mankind: ‘Is everyone all right …?’”
Stacy’s gaze wavered, then fell.
“Jesus,” Lord murmured.
The service ended.
Lord and Cass watched as she left with Damone, controlled again. Damone’s face showed nothing; dimly, Lord tried to imagine the complexity of his feelings.
“We’d better go now, Cassie. We’re due in court.”
She nodded, facing the screen. As they left, Stacy stepped into a black limousine, and disappeared.
After this, the courtroom felt like a cathedral, the arraignment even more like the ritual Lord knew it to be. As Judge Rainey told him that he was charged with murdering Kilcannon, Carson stared as if listening to Latin. Reporters and artists filled the benches, scratching notes or first hurried sketches. When it was over, Lord touched Carson’s shoulder, and then two deputies led him away.
Cass stared after him. “He looks stoned,” she told Lord.
“He’s high on life.”
To his relief, Lord saw a small smile.
Outside, reporters spilled down the steps.
“What’s his defense?” someone called out. Lord and Cass kept going, until he bumped into a trench coat with breasts.
Trapped, he saw unruly black hair, a mobile-looking mouth, then bright hazel eyes with an off-center glint. “Give me a break, Mr. Lord. I’m not pretty enough to make anchorwoman.”
The misplaced flirtiness was so human that Lord almost laughed. “Who are you?”
“Rachel Messer—Channel 6.”
“Okay, Rachel. Maybe when I know what to say.”
“I can help you,” she said cheerfully, and stepped aside.
Cass’s Volkswagen was double-parked in front. Lord slid into the passenger seat, staring at the crowd.
“I wonder,” he told her, “if Carson could get a fair trial on the moon.”
She pulled away. “DiPalma hasn’t found the money yet. Or co-conspirators.”
“And Carson won’t talk about Vietnam.”
She glanced at him. “Looks like we’ll get his records up to the stint in Long Binh Jail. With any luck, we can find someone who served with him to talk with us.”
“But not Damone. And the impression he gave was that he can hurt Carson, not help him.”
“Maybe you can find some way to appeal to him. Later.”
“There is no way.” Saying this, Lord realized he was certain of it. “Whatever Damone does is for his own reasons.”
Carson puffed a Lucky Strike. “’Nam?” he said. “Again?”
“Things you remember.”
Carson laughed smoke. “Water.”
“Wet?”
“Yes.” The smile faded. “I can feel it on my skin.”
Lord doodled on his notepad. “What else?”
Carson stretched out his free hand, watching it waggle. “Choppers, swaying before they’d drop you.”
“When was that?”
“I don’t remember.” Carson’s arm went slack. “Ask Damone.”
“He won’t talk to me. Where were you, anyhow?”
“The jungle.” Carson’s eyes closed. “It’s all a blur—dark. I took a lot of dex.”
For a moment, the skin around his eyes seemed to tighten. And then he was gone, Lord thought, absolutely, gone. Staring at his useless notes, he wondered if Carson remembered DiPalma was waiting to try him for murder.
“Was that after you were in prison?” he asked.
Carson’s eyes opened.
“The Long Binh Jail,” Lord prodded.
Carson seemed to focus, intoning, “The LBJ.”
“What happened when you got out?”
Slowly, Carson shook his head. “I don’t remember, man.”
“How’d you get there?”
“I butt-stroked a lieutenant.”
“Why?”
“Fucker wanted us to count bodies.”
“What did Kilcannon do?”
Carson stubbed his cigarette. “I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“The big deal is that he’s dead.”
“It’s a rotten world, man.” Suddenly, Carson’s eyes seemed moist. “I remember when my kid was born, so pretty. I almost wanted to choke her so she’d never know.”
“Where is she?”
“Somewhere. South Carolina—I can’t find her.”
“What happened?”
“I fucked up. Couldn’t support ’em.…”
“What happened to the concert money?”
Carson watched the dying cigarette. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “I just don’t know.”
Lord wondered whether to believe him; only his child broke the litany of nonresponses. Half-curious, half-despairing, he decided to try another tack.
“What’s it like, Harry? In the cell.”
Carson thought. “It’s like being numb. No people—sometimes I feel like my mind’s just floating there.”
“What do you think about?”
Carson stared at his hands. “I try to remember things. You know, real things.”
Lord repressed the impulse to ask about Vietnam. “Real things?”
Carson paused. “Sometimes I think about being a kid.”
Lord handed him another cigarette. “What’s the first smell that comes to you?”
“Smell?”
“Uh-huh.” Lord hesitated. “I can remember hugging my grandfather. He wore starched collars—he smelled like soap and starch to me.”
Carson smiled faintly. Then he lit the cigarette, took a drag, and closed his eyes again. He was silent for some moments.
“Strawberries,” he said.
Five hours later, Lord began dictating his notes, reorganizing the sequence, trying to capture the tone and feeling of what Carson had told him.
Strawberries.
He was maybe three, and the basement was full of them. Light came through a small square window. The strawberries were stored in corners: in the moist, musty basement, they smelled fresh and sweet and ripe. He would help his mother crate them. Much later, after his father had given them up, Harry still imagined that his mother smelled like strawberries.
The farm. Sometimes he thought about that.
He can feel its rhythms. Rousting Joey at 5:00 A.M. to milk the cows. They stumble through the darkness, Joey rubbing his eyes, and turn the light on in the barn. The cows wait in their stalls. Joey feeds them grain; Harry strains the warm clover-smelling milk, puts it through the cleaning equipment on the back porch, bottles it. At 4:00 P.M. he does this over as Joey cleans the barn. Cows don’t know what weekends are.
Their wood-frame house sat on a crest surrounded by pines and oaks, overlooking the rolling fields and knolls which were all central New Jersey had. Before Mass Harry senior would stand out front to see what it needed. When the steps began sagging from thousands of footsteps, his father built new ones. You couldn’t slip a fingernail between the boards.
His father had doled out projects between Mass, their 2:00 P.M. dinner,
and “The Ed Sullivan Show” since Harry had been a kid—planting or repairing the tractor or cow shed or spreading cowshit through the crops or digging a new garbage pit or sealing the well. Harry and Joey never questioned him, except about the pine trees.
One Sunday, when Harry was ten, his father was trying to sell a few sheep off for cash and discussed this with a neighbor. Driving home he was quiet and the corners of his eyes were tight. Once they had parked he led the boys out back to an overgrown thicket. “We’ll plant them here,” he said. “Pine trees. To pay for college.”
“How will they do that?” Harry asked.
“Once they’re big enough, folks will come chop them down for Christmas trees. We’ll use the money to start you off.”
Harry didn’t get it. “Everyone we know cuts their own.”
“There’ll be people. John Raskin told me someone from New York City was asking after his farm. They’re looking to build an electronics plant.”
“Will they buy any sheep?”
“No.” His father turned to the thicket. “We’ll dig this out with a tractor and plant them in rows. Maybe five hundred.”
The trees became another job. Harry and Joey cleared the poison ivy and sumac and tore everything up by the roots. After they’d put in stakes with lines and planted the trees, his father designed a siphon method to irrigate that made Harry and Joey haul water in barrels. It worked well enough to make weeding a bitch. Pulling them that humid summer until his back ached, Harry felt the first stirrings of rebellion. Only the sight of his father inspecting the pine trees kept him silent.
But Harry didn’t brood on it. Lying in his room, he preferred listening to the night sounds coming through the window screen. There was the throb of crickets and frogs thrumming in different pitches. There was every bird sound in the world—bobwhites and whippoorwills with their two- and three-beat songs ending on a rise—barking dogs and sheep bells tinkling, geese honking, and the distant ruckus of thousands of cooped-up chickens. Harry’s senses got so keen that he could place the distance of summer lightning, counting a mile for each second before the thunder followed, and still catch the other sounds. The only noise which swallowed every other was the jets roaring from McGuire Air Force Base. In his early teens, these seemed to come more often.
Harry noticed that his father started watching Huntley and Brinkley after inspecting the pines. Usually, Harry senior had gotten what news he wanted from the Reader’s Digest; now he watched the war. One evening Harry wandered into the living room, where Chet Huntley was reading the day’s body count. “Looks like our boys mostly die on weekends,” Harry senior remarked.
“Why’s that?”
“Nobody watches then.” His father turned. “Those pines are needing water.”
A year or so later, after they got rid of their sheep, Harry senior spoke of college.
They were hauling water to the pines. “We can’t afford sheep,” his father said. “Better to try growing more tomatoes.”
“I’ll miss them, though.”
Harry senior nodded. He put down the water and stood amidst the trees. The tallest came to his chin. “Didn’t grow fast as I thought,” he remarked. “Two more years, maybe.”
Harry noticed iron in the black shock of hair. “Guess they need weeding.”
His father turned to him. “I can’t send you next year. Not right when you graduate.”
Harry shrugged. “I never wanted to leave that much.”
“Raskin’s selling his chicken farm to some company—people always need a back-up.” His father stooped to pick a weed. “Maybe the year after.”
His senior year the recruiters started calling. Harry’s father watched the news but did not talk about the war. The only time his anger showed was when some law student named Kilcannon put together an antiwar rally at Princeton. “They’re not against you going,” he snapped. “They’re just scared we’ll still be there when they lose their college deferments.”
Harry remembered that when the draft board called him into Princeton for a physical. They stripped him down to his underwear and shoes and walked him and the other guys through a bunch of tests that showed they still had heartbeats and could piss in jars. Fifteen at a time, they ended up standing on crosses which were taped to the floor: for some reason, Harry and some black guy were in with thirteen Princeton kids who knew one another. Three doctors in white coats made them drop their pants and bend over, and then asked anyone with a doctor’s letter saying he couldn’t go in to take one step forward. Thirteen white guys from Princeton stepped off the cross holding letters and were sent off to see more doctors. The black kid, who didn’t know what was happening, was bounced for having one leg shorter than the other. Harry just stood on the cross.
On the way home he was depressed. But when spring came without any letter he half-forgot. Beth Winship made that easier. They were in the same class at the regional high school: she liked him, she admitted, because he got good grades. Later she liked him for what they did in his car. She had kind of soft, pushed-in features which seemed made out of clay, but right in the middle were these green eyes that lit the whole thing. After a time the eyes were all Harry saw.
The night they graduated Beth let him. “I don’t want you to go,” she said afterward.
Her body felt warm. “Maybe they won’t take me for a while.”
The next month he got his notice. His father didn’t say much, just stared at the pines.
One night, Harry joined him at the window. “Lots of kids are going to Canada,” he said. “You can see it on the news.”
Harry senior’s mouth kind of moved. “That’s them.”
“Beth and I could go. We’ve talked about it.”
“Maybe it hasn’t supported us like it should, but I did this farm for a reason. Who’d take care of it, after?”
“Joey could.”
“No.” When his father faced him, a vein stood out on his forehead, and his voice was thick. “Are you scared, Harry?”
Harry turned away.
But it was the old man who couldn’t look at him when he left for the Army.
When the telephone rang, it was past ten-thirty, and Lord had finished.
“Is this Anthony Lord?”
A muffled voice—bland, without accent. “Yes.”
“You have a son named Christopher.”
Lord stood. “Who is this?”
The line went dead.
3
“CARSON,” Shriver said, putting down Lord’s notes, “is a Boy Scout.”
They sat in a house cut up into offices in a run-down part of Berkeley. Shriver’s baldness, outsized earlobes, and hanging jowls made the otherwise youthful psychiatrist remind Lord of Grumpy in the Seven Dwarfs.
“Boy Scout?” he asked.
Shriver nodded. “You’ve got two types most prone to postwar stress. The first was scary to begin with. The second is a naive kid whose belief in authority was blown to shit in Vietnam. Like Carson, maybe.”
“How did that happen?”
“Several reasons. As with Harry Carson, the draft sent the youngest soldiers in our history to fight a war that was meaningless and murderous—no one could explain why they were there, and they kept getting butchered taking and abandoning the same hills. And they knew most people weren’t there. Like you, I assume.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You can bet Carson picked that up in a nanosecond. There’s an axiom: veterans only trust other veterans. He doesn’t say who his friends were?”
“Maybe Damone.”
“What happened to them’s critical. Which brings me to the rotation system.”
“The thirteen-month tour?”
“Right. The average grunt measured his ’Nam time like a stretch on death row—each day he survived was another foot in the escape tunnel. Short-timers didn’t trust rookies because they might get them killed; rookies didn’t want to invest in guys who were leaving. So kids like Carson had a few close friends, and they ke
pt getting shoveled into bags.”
“Nice.”
Shriver’s smile was sardonic. “Nicer when their officers helped shovel them. By the time Carson got there we were bailing out, so only career officers punching their ticket had any stake in it. And the only success those guys could measure was counting dead VC.” He gave a mock philosophical shrug. “To get some, you’ve gotta give some up.”
Lord reflected. “My problem is tying Vietnam to shooting Kilcannon. For a Boy Scout, Carson’s not very forthcoming.”
“You make him sound like a recalcitrant witness. Truth is, what happened to him may have been so bad that he’s repressed it.” Shriver leaned forward, ticking off fingers on his hand. “First, the most intense combat experiences are often so fast or so horrifying that the memory doesn’t really process them. Second, some grunts were so fucked up on smack or dex that they never will remember—again like Carson. Finally, what they do remember might be too painful to talk about—’cause it’s traumatic, ’cause they don’t trust you, ’cause they’re so ashamed they can’t. And,” the smile flashed again, “because they’re scared to face that it screwed them up.”
Lord frowned. “To spend time with him, Carson’s clearly ‘screwed up.’ But he could be howling at the moon and not come within forty miles of legal insanity. California law requires proof that when he shot Kilcannon he didn’t know what he was doing or that it was wrong—even though he brought a loaded gun to work.”
Shriver shrugged. “They got Hinckley off.”
“That was in federal court, where the government had to prove him sane. In California, I have to prove Carson insane, and after Dan White got off they changed the law to make that even tougher. Which is why the feds let DiPalma grab the case and borrow the FBI. Plus, in state court they can go for the death penalty.” Lord paused, frustrated. “Without Carson’s help on Vietnam, I’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell. And no one’s going to believe he thought that Mauser was a banana.”
Shriver considered this. “In a way, I’d be more curious about shooting the camera. I find it hard to believe he thought he was destroying evidence.” Leaning back, he tented his hands. “The dance between real and unreal in stress cases is funny. Last year, a vet was looking out at the Oakland Hills when suddenly he flashed on Vietnam. He grabbed a gun from the house, commandeered a station wagon for his escape, and told the woman driving to go fast enough to evade the VC without getting a ticket. Finally, they ran out of gas.”
Private Screening Page 12
