Last Notes from Home (40 page)

They put me up in a motel across from the main officers’ club in Arlington. As Bill was one of their own, they treated me royally—couldn’t have been more gracious—and it wasn’t until the second day, my lunatic tape recorder running, that it came to me that they weren’t going to tell me a goddamn thing and doubtless were a good deal more interested in what the Brigadier had possibly told me over the years.

As they were talking to a novelist, they pretended to believe I’d be more interested in Bill’s boozing and alleged wenching—the “Ex’d fuck a snake in the bush” notion—than in exactly what it was my only brother had done with his life. It must have been because of hearing this nonsense, Alissa, that I began to suspect these guys were feeding me pap, for not only did I know the Brigadier had dearly loved his wife Judy and his son Scott and though I was playing my drunken upstate New York rube role to the hilt, I was actually beginning to wonder if all this crap hadn’t been orchestrated.

As you may or may not know, Alissa, these guys were a terribly embittered group, having taken no small part of the blame for our failure in Vietnam. The quack scientists had convinced the spook community that there was no longer any need for human intelligence (HUMINT), that it was too unreliable, that there was too much room for double-dealing, and that they had now perfected satellites capable of looking down the front of Dolly Parton’s dress and defining the aurora borealis around her right nipple. One guy had gone all the way back with the Brigadier and I began to understand, by the very nature of the things he revealed, that, like Judy, he too was sure it was those documents crossing my brother’s desk that had killed Bill.

The guy and Bill had met when Castro and his bearded boys came out of the hills of Cuba and sent that tinhorn brutish tyrant Batista flying into exile. The Brigadier, then a captain, had recently been teaching at the intelligence center at Ft. Holabird and had been placed in charge of what in Pentagon jargon was called the Cuban Desk. The guy said the army then borrowed him from Langley and got him up in a master sergeant’s uniform and assigned him to our embassy in Havana as a military attaché. It was his job in Cuba to keep eyes and ears alert, as the agency so diligently trains its operatives to do, and do his best to determine how many men Castro had under arms, what weaponry was available to them, in other words where and where not the Cubans were vulnerable, what in military talk is called the Order of Battle.

He then fed that information to Bill, who in turn wrote it up “in language that even generals can understand, as Bill used to say” (and I can just hear him saying it, Alissa!), and then sent the reports “upstairs.” After we severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, he said he went back to Langley and though he and the Brigadier’s paths crossed from time to time socially, they didn’t really work together until eight years later, at which time the Brigadier spotted his name on a list of men available to him and he was brought to Saigon, now dressed as a lieutenant colonel, and acted as an aide to Bill.

Even after Bill had made full colonel, that is, so many years after Korea, there were days he was limping so badly from the jeep rolling over on him—not to mention the shrapnel scars on his back and leg from an earlier wound—that he seemed almost in need of a cane. Therefore I waited until the appropriate moment, then said to these guys that with Bill’s combat experience in Korea he would have appeared to be a natural to have been assigned a regimental field command. Had he been ordered to do so, I asked, in his physical condition would he have been expected to carry out those orders?

“Certainly,” these guys assured me, hastening to add that he had been away from combat units so long and due to his particularly sensitive MOS in intelligence, it would have been a ridiculous bureaucratic screwup had the Brigadier drawn a field command.

If my brother was going to continue the heavy drinking that had begun during his intelligence career, he had struck a bargain with his wife to start attending church again and together they’d gone to an Episcopal Church in Arlington. One Sunday, in his sermon, the Episcopal priest began a long adoring paen to Martin Luther King, Jr., whereupon the Brigadier abruptly stood from his aisle seat, in the military way pivoted, and to Judy’s redfaced embarrassment stormed from the church, his heels clacking in parade fashion. Some months later, en route to Florida, I stopped at Bill’s house in Springfield and asked the Brigadier what his problem with King was? Thereupon Bill was off on a furious tirade about King’s philandering and whore-mongering (this, mind you, Alissa, coming from my brother!), his depravity, his utter lack of morals, and so forth and so on. Without then having any confirmation, I was nonetheless certain that at that time someone was tapping King’s phone, bugging his office, and conducting a surveillance of him and. mat for whatever reason Bill had access to these files. Bill sighed and spoke.

“It doesn’t matter a hot damn anyway, Ex.
Martin Luther King is a dead man”

And it wasn’t three months later that I picked up
The Palm Beach Post
and discovered that King was indeed a dead man, felled by an assassin’s bullet as he stood on the balcony of a Memphis motel. When I told his Washington friends what he had revealed to me, one of them, flustered, said I shouldn’t forget just how bright a dude Bill was, how extremely controversial King was at the time, that the Brigadier was merely perceptive enough to prognosticate such an end for King, nor should I further forget that for the last two years of his life King was predicting just such an end for himself. For all that, Alissa, King’s assassin, James Earl Ray, has maintained to this day that he was prompted into the act, as Brutus was by Cassius, by an army officer with a Spanish name and accent, and I couldn’t help believing if these dudes had a guy bright enough to quote, in old Finnish, from P. Cajander’s (1846-1913) translation of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet,
which one of them had done for me, they’d hardly have trouble coming up with a guy who could cultivate a Spanish accent. Hence, Alissa, I’ve never felt comfortable with the notion that James Earl Ray was entirely into fantasy.

“Doing precisely what, Your Lordship?”

“Now, Frederick, me lurverly, there you go again, being a naughty, naughty boyo. You know it’s against the game to ask questions like that.”

“Listen, Your Grace, I wish I could get it through that thick Irish skull of yours that I haven’t the foggiest notion what you and Toby are up to. The other night I heard—as did half the guests in this Lodge!—you barking into that asshole kelly green phone of yours about a shipment arriving at Vladivostok at such and such oh-hundred hours, Greenwich Mean Time, and if that shipment was, let’s say, arms intended to be transported across Siberia to the Russkis, thence rerouted to your thug pals in the IRA, and had you even approached the Brigadier with any such lunatic scheme as this, you’d have found that lardass of yours—excuse the personal aspersion, Your Grace—in a federal prison quicker than the time it takes to kiss the bleeding fucking Blarney Stone.”

“Oh, but my dear Frederick, there you go speculating again, which I’ve repeatedly warned you, my dear, is also against the game, oh,
very, very much against the game.
And I doubt very much that your brother would have reacted in any such way. Remember, laddie, it took me three years to get you to admit that on your mother’s side you are a Maguire—the veritable warring clan of Ulster, years ago broken up and dispersed all over Eire by the bleeding Limeys, so in terror of the Maguires were the skulking cravenly Brits!—ergo, your brother was a Maguire, too, and had he been born in Derry I have no doubt whatever that he’d have been in the very thick of the Troubles. Further, let me remind you, me lurverly, that I’ve made it through both your books—true, it was a struggle, a monumental effort on my part, they never would have seen typeface in Dublin!—and beneath that gross syntactical clumsiness there nonetheless resides the mentality of a born radical, no, an out-and-out bleeding anarchist! Certainly two brothers born as close together as you could not vary that much in their ways of viewing the world. No way, me lurverly!”

I held my peace because I knew in my heart that had Bill and I been born in Londonderry we would indeed have been in the thick of it. Whether with the Provos or the Prods is open to question but not too much of a question. Somewhere along the dim line of our heritage, we had let go of our Catholicism, rather like releasing a kite to the indifferent winds; but we had nonetheless both been confirmed in the Anglican or High Church and I had no doubt whatever that the Brigadier bought it all, which cushioned him between Heaven and those acts duty demanded he perform on earth. Too, I have a provision in my will requesting that our local priest in Alexandria Bay, Father Meehan, who is everything a priest ought to be, perform a brief lay ceremony over my ashes. Hence I’ve never had any doubt that had I returned to the church, it would have been to the Roman. It was as though my brother and I had released the kite and instead of blowing out of view, the kite had got caught in shifting winds and hovered immovable there in azure skies. Many years ago, when
The New Yorker
did those marvelous parodies of famous writers, a guy did a beauty on Graham Greene, making the hero the pilot of a monoplane who wrote messages in the sky; and I suspect that as a writer my fear of returning to something as entrenched as our Maguire Catholicism is nothing other than the fear of cluttering up a yarn with the temptation to send messages from on high. O’Twoomey was right. Bill and I would most assuredly have been counted with the Provos.

The question most often posed by O’Twoomey, and the one that drove me completely round the bend, that would lead eventually to all our problems, including my “marriage,” was why, with the Brigadier’s distinguished career, he hadn’t at his interment been accorded full military honors.

“Now listen, Jimmy, for Christ’s sake, for goddamn once listen to what I’m telling you!
Puowaina
is an extinct volcanic crater—they don’t call it Punchbowl for nothing!—the breezes are minimal there and when my sister-in-law saw the weather report, she felt full military honors, what with the caisson, the band, and so forth, would simply be too long a time to ask his comrades, the enlisted men’s firing squad, my elderly mother, et cetera, to stand in the heat for such a portentous ceremony. Why do you have to keep asking that question?”

Soon enough it became apparent why.

As we did not return to Lanai until first light on Monday, I made a practice of going to Punchbowl with Robin and Hannibal before dusk on Sundays. First I’d buy a couple leis from a fat jolly Hawaiian woman who had a kiosk on Kalakaua, then Robin, Hannibal, and I would pile into her Porsche, drive to Punchbowl, and place the leis on the Brigadier’s grave. I’d then briefly bow my head, Hannibal would do the same and pray aloud in either Hawaiian or that odd abrupt pidgin, often weeping for a man he hadn’t known. And all the while Robin would be recording—for posterity no doubt—on her expensive Nikon, which she clicked with the rapidity of a silenced automatic weapon. As often as not, and as was her helpless wont, Robin turned this brief commemoration into a farce. While she was clicking away, she’d holler, “Jesus Christ, Exley, can’t you pray or weep or do something? Look at Hannibal! Look at Hannibal! I mean, you really are an aloof haughty cock-sucker!” Yes, Robin turned these brief moments into high comedy and I would, I swear, often hear the Brigadier laughing beneath the sacred earth of
Puowaina.
Hannibal was another matter entirely and his grief rose from some strange spirituality in his soul.