A Hideous Beauty

by Jack Cavanaugh

  It was Ingraham who made me want to interview Palmer when he called me into his office to tell me I was wasting my time, and then again when he summoned me after learning I was going to Montana despite his advice.

  I don’t like people telling me how to do my job. Besides, I wanted this book to be my best writing. How often does a man get an opportunity like this one? And I didn’t want some moldy old history professor at Yale or Harvard using me as an example in his lectures as a historian who publishes prematurely with incomplete research.

  Two days later Ingraham slaps the obituary notice on my desk. He didn’t send it by messenger. It was important enough to him to deliver the coup de grâce himself.

  That pretty much settled it. I mean, what kind of person would I be to suspect the president’s chief of staff of such duplicity that he would manufacture a phony obituary notice just to win an argument with a nobody freelance writer?

  So I didn’t bother calling to confirm Palmer’s death.

  At least for an hour.

  Both the Shelby Reporter and Twin Oaks Funeral Home confirmed the obituary notice. Apparently Palmer flipped his truck on Interstate 15. They estimated he was traveling over a hundred miles per hour. Alcohol—Palmer’s lifelong personal demon—contributed to the accident.

  Which brings me back to the president’s pajama party. Why would he think that Doc Palmer would be a better frame than me if Palmer was dead?

  With more than an hour to drive, I shifted the inflatable doughnut to a more comfortable position. Maybe all that would come of this trip would be a visit to Doc Palmer’s grave. But I had to see for myself. I still had Palmer’s home address. I figured I’d start there and work my way to the grave.

  I stepped out of the car into a dust cloud of my own making. If my directions were correct, this was the Palmer place. If I’d taken a wrong turn, this was probably Idaho, because there weren’t many turns and the roads were long.

  The house and barn had seen better days. Both showed evidence of being punished by strong winds and extreme temperatures. The barn had once been red. Now, it was weathered gray with red streaks.

  “Hello?” I shouted.

  The double barn doors gaped wide open. There was no sign of life anywhere. Same with the house. While the door was closed it looked like it had been dead for over a year.

  “Just like its owner,” I muttered.

  I decided to try the house first. All three porch steps groaned when I stepped on them. Or was that me groaning? It had been a long trip. The paint on the screen door, what was left of it, was peeling. The screen was torn at the corner.

  I knocked.

  “Hello?” I called. “Anyone home?”

  With no answer I turned to the barn, but my chances of finding anyone there looked remote. This place was deserted. I’d made the trip for nothing.

  Halfway to the barn a voice stopped me. “Hold it right there!”

  I turned to see a man with a gun rounding the house. A faded red ball cap was pulled down tight, trimmed around the edges with ragged gray hair. His flannel shirt was wrinkled and his overalls were worn and dirty. He advanced until he was close enough to kill me without aiming.

  I displayed empty hands. “I mean you no harm.”

  “That’s the difference between us, then,” he spat. “I mean you plenty of harm unless you jump in that car and go back to wherever you came from.”

  A huge black hole at the business end of a shotgun punctuated his point. For reasons unknown—other than that I have a tendency to see the ridiculous side of danger—I imagined myself getting a load of buckshot in the backside. My only hope was that it would hit the left cheek to balance the dog bite on the right and my limp would then be even.

  Offering my friendliest smile to the man, I said, “There’s no need to—”

  BLAM!

  Shotgun thunder rent the air. With a practiced motion he pumped the next round into the chamber and leveled the sights at my chest.

  “All right!” I shouted. “All right! I’m going!”

  I began working my way around the front of the car.

  “It’s just that I came all the way from Washington, D.C., to—”

  BLAM!

  Another round scattered the air. He reloaded and took two threatening steps toward me.

  “I’m going! I’m going!”

  Only for some reason I seemed to have forgotten how to open a car door. I clawed repeatedly at the latch but for some reason the combination of what to push and what to pull had suddenly become a mystery to me.

  “What’s your name?” the man barked.

  Oh . . . great . . . not only couldn’t I remember how to open a door, I couldn’t remember my name. “Um . . . um . . . it’s, um . . .”

  Give me a second here, will you, buddy? Do you know how embarrassing it would be to die because you couldn’t remember your own name?

  “I . . . um . . . ah . . . Ah! . . . Austin. Grrrr . . . Grrrant Austin.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “Actually, I don’t work for—”

  “WHO DO YOU WORK FOR?” he shouted.

  “I’m a writer! Freelance! I wrote a book about the president.”

  His brow furrowed as he chewed on that.

  “Step around the car,” he said. He motioned in the direction he wanted me to go with the barrel of the shotgun.

  I did as he instructed. I stepped around the front of the car until nothing was between me and the shotgun.

  “Take your shoes off,” he ordered.

  “My shoes? What do my shoes—”

  BLAM!

  Bending over, I pulled off my shoes without unlacing them.

  “Socks too.”

  The socks flew off.

  He blinked hard several times to focus on my feet with eyes so bloodshot I couldn’t see any white in them. His tongue worked the inside of a cheek that was rough with salt-and-pepper whiskers. He tilted his head to get a better look at my feet. Then he leaned over even farther.

  Do you know how hard it is not to wiggle your toes when someone is looking at your feet? He leaned so far it must have made him dizzy. He stumbled sideways, but caught himself. “Shuffle them in the dirt,” he said.

  I started to object, then figured the fewer times he pulled the trigger on the shotgun the better my chances of leaving here alive. I shuffled my feet in the dirt.

  “Let me see the bottom of one,” he said.

  I lifted my right foot and showed him the bottom.

  He nodded and seemed to relax a little, but he didn’t lower the shotgun. “Austin, you say.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’re the idiot they paid to write all them lies about Douglas. Or maybe you were duped. You don’t look like the mercenary type to me.”

  “I researched the book thoroughly,” I insisted.

  “Did you now? You wrote what they wanted you to write and that makes you a liar, only worse, since you sugarcoat the lies so nice that people smile when they swallow them.”

  “Listen,” I said, my ire rising. “Just because you hold a weapon doesn’t make you right. Who are you to pass judgment on what I wrote, or upon me for why I wrote it?”

  He shook his head. “For being a high-priced writer, you’re not too smart, are you? Just what did you expect to find out here?”

  “The truth.”

  “And if you find the truth, will you be able to die happy?”

  I never liked those Siamese-twin questions where it’s assumed two queries are linked at the hip. Since I didn’t have an answer for it, I kept my mouth shut.

  “Just as well,” he said. “You’ll find no truth here, only more lies.”

  The only pictures I’d seen of Doc Palmer were of him when he was young and in the army. This man looked like he could be Doc Palmer’s father, or the way a young Doc Palmer might look when he got old.

  “Some very powerful men don’t want me to find the truth about Doc Palmer,” I said.

  The old man
sniffed. “Go back to where you came from, kid. Doc Palmer is dead.”

  “It’s not that easy. The same men who don’t want me learning the truth about Doc Palmer are attempting to frame me in an attempt to assassinate the president.”

  That got his attention. “What the blue blazes are you talking about?”

  “Do you have a copy of my book?”

  He scowled at me.

  “It’s easier to show you if you do,” I explained.

  I must have piqued his curiosity, for he marched me behind the barn to the lip of a garbage pit.

  “I think it’s in this end,” he said.

  The scent of rotten milk and meats and vegetables stirred in an unholy stew of odors. I waited for him to reach for a rake or a pole or something to aid the search.

  “Jump in,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You’re the one who wants to find it, remember? I’m the one who threw it there.”

  There was a three-foot drop into banana peels, eggshells, coffee grounds, and what looked like some kind of ledger paper saturated with salad oil.

  He motioned with the gun for me to jump.

  I picked my spot carefully. My feet hit a large piece of cardboard, then slid from under me. I went down hard, the corner of a milk carton jabbing me in the back. Scrambling to right myself, I stuck my foot in a mess of coffee grounds.

  “Try over there,” he said from above, oblivious to my discomfort.

  Luckily, I managed to find my book in short order beneath a flattened Wheaties cereal box. The cover had cottage cheese on it. I brushed the curds off.

  “Toss it up,” he ordered.

  I tossed him the book and began searching for a foothold to climb out.

  “You stay down there,” he said.

  “I’m not staying down here! You’ll have to shoot me.”

  He repositioned the shotgun so that it was pointed at my head. “Don’t tempt me,” he said. “This way I can look at what you want to show me and keep an eye on you at the same time.”

  I looked around and was tempted to pelt him with a fuzzy blue stalk of celery. Instead, I said, “First chapter, first word.”

  Tucking the shotgun under his arm, he pulled a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket, then opened the book to the first chapter. He began to read aloud.

  “No . . . just the first word,” I said, trying to find a place to stand where something wasn’t squishing up between my toes. “Now . . . second chapter, second word . . .”

  With the third chapter he caught on to the scheme. I let him continue on his own for a while, offering only, “It ends at the thirteenth chapter.”

  After reading the thirteenth word, he closed the book and laughed. “If that don’t beat all. And you had no idea they’d done this to you with your own book?”

  “Go ahead, rub it in.”

  “What did you do to deserve this . . . mess with someone’s daughter? Oooeeee. They really did a job on you, didn’t they?”

  He reached down, offering me a hand.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Call me Doc.”

  CHAPTER 15

  With the shotgun harmlessly at rest on his forearm, Doc Palmer walked me back to my car. I did a little jig as we walked, trying to shake the coffee grounds off my feet. “Doc, is there some place I can . . .”

  He groaned loudly. “I’m getting too old for this kind of thing. I gotta sit down.”

  I thought he was going to take me inside the house. Instead, he slumped onto the front bumper of my rental car. He propped the shotgun beside him, pulled out a handkerchief, doffed his cap, and proceeded to mop his forehead. As he did, he chuckled again, still amused at how I’d been set up with my own book. “They’re clever. Yessiree . . . you gotta give them their due.”

  The coffee grounds wouldn’t come off. I tried wiping one foot clean with the other. “Doc, is there a—”

  “You know,” he mused, “I’ve always wondered if things would be different had Noonan survived. What do you think? Can one man change history?”

  Noonan. I recognized the name. “You’re talking about Lieutenant Roy Noonan . . . the man the president attempted to rescue in the Ho Bo Woods.”

  Doc Palmer looked at me with great sadness. He took no joy in what he said next. There was no righteous indignation, no satisfaction at setting the record straight, only sadness, the kind that comes when you’re forced to peel back reality’s skin and show someone how ugly life can be. He said, “Lloyd Douglas may have pulled Noonan out of the Ho Bo Woods, but only after he murdered him.”

  “No . . . I can’t accept that.” My denial rang hollow. Even as I stood there with coffee grounds on my feet, the story I’d written, now a screenplay, was being filmed for a television special, and all of a sudden I sensed what I hadn’t sensed before—that the reason it would make such a great television movie was because it was no more real than any other movie made in Hollywood.

  The account as I had heard it portrayed Lieutenant Noonan as a likable fellow, dashing, handsome, but ambitious, and his ambitions often put his platoon in needless danger.

  Living in the shadow of a famous father—all-American at Yale, World War II hero, congressman-turned-senator—Roy Noonan was in Vietnam for one reason only, as a springboard to political office. His father, inspired by Joseph Kennedy, had charted a path for him that would lead to the White House.

  Fresh from personal leave, Noonan returned just as Alpha Company had come off a long, difficult mission. To curry favor with his superiors, Noonan volunteered his platoon for a particularly dangerous mission in the Ho Bo Woods. The location was a notorious death trap. Alpha Company could expect to come up against fresh Vietcong units, elite units of Vietcong sappers, and a complex system of tunnels and speed trails. All of this under a triple-thick jungle canopy.

  It was a suicide mission. That’s how everyone in Alpha Company saw it. Everyone except their ambitious platoon leader. He saw it as a chance to impress a few generals.

  The night before the mission the men were unusually quiet. They drank heavily to numb their nerves and prepare themselves for certain death. Sensing their mood, indeed sharing it, Douglas moved among the men, encouraging them, praying with them.

  The next morning, with a whine of turbines, Alpha Company was airlifted to a savannah-like clearing where they were dropped into smoke and confusion. With gunfire erupting from the woods, they maneuvered their way around tree stumps, termite mounds, and the skeletons of a hundred or more cattle. Fighting their way to the perimeter, they dug in.

  The plan was to press the initiative, to keep the enemy off balance and not give them time to react. After establishing their night defensive position, they sent out ambushes along the enemy’s speed trails.

  Shaken by the heavy resistance during the drop, Lieutenant Noonan fell apart. He began whispering excitedly that he could hear the enemy all around them. He insisted on staying where they were. The only way to get him to carry out the mission was for Douglas to promise to remain at his side and protect him, and then, only with repeated encouraging could Douglas keep Noonan focused on the mission.

  Twilight came and darkness crept through the jungle with surprising speed. Everything they touched was wet and slimy and dripping. Traversing the forest was like walking in a cave or a tomb that was covered with vines.

  The enemy struck without warning, lighting up the area with a barrage of mortars, grenades, and tracer bullets. Everyone scattered from the trail, diving into the woods. True to his word, Douglas stuck with Noonan.

  That’s when Noonan lost it. He fell to the ground in a fetal position, refusing to move. While Douglas returned fire, an enemy grenade landed between them.

  In a frozen moment, the two men exchanged glances. Noonan’s eyes crystallized with the realization of what he had to do. He threw himself on top of the grenade.

  Douglas fell to his knees and cradled his platoon leader in his arms. Just before he died, Noonan said to Dougl
as, “It’s better this way, that you live and I die. Go home. Make your life count. Remember, from this moment on, you’re living the hopes and dreams of two men.”

  Despite heavy fire and at great personal risk, Douglas carried his fallen friend back to the medevac helicopter, and when Vietnamese regulars, scared from the fighting, tried to pull American corpses from the helicopter so that there would be room for them to climb in and escape, Douglas held them back at gunpoint, threatening to shoot them.

  For his heroic actions in the Ho Bo Woods, Lieutenant Lloyd Douglas was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. And when his party nominated him as their candidate to run for president, his campaign slogan was: “He carries the hopes and dreams of all Americans on his shoulders.”

  At Doc Palmer’s farm, I shuffled my feet in the dirt and sat next to him on the front bumper. “Enlighten me,” I said. “If it didn’t happen as I recorded it in my book, how did it happen?”

  Doc sighed as though debating whether or not he wanted to relive the pain that would come with the telling. “You have the basic timeline and events of the mission correct. We had just come off a long march and our tails were dragging. We were surprised when they told us we’d be going out again so soon. But Noonan had nothing to do with our unit being selected for the mission. We were notified of the mission before he returned from leave. Like the rest of us, he didn’t like it, but when the orders came down, he obeyed them.

  “As for Noonan falling apart under fire? He was no more scared than any of the rest of us. You’d be nuts not to be afraid. But to the point of cowardice or incapacitation? Hogwash. Your characterization doesn’t fit the man.”

  I was willing to concede his point. “You claim that Douglas murdered Noonan. How can you know that? They were separated from the rest of the platoon.”

  “Douglas was there,” Doc said. “He told me.”

  “Now I know you’re blowin’ smoke. Douglas told you he fragged Noonan? You expect me to believe that? What . . . did he just come up one day and say, ‘Oh, by the way, Doc, that heroic act that has become the cornerstone of my entire political career? It didn’t really happen the way everyone thinks it did. What really happened is that I dragged my commanding officer into the woods and murdered him.’”