Memorial Bridge (46 page)

Father Gavin rifled his pages, then read from one. " 'In fighting over here I have seen things done that I know are war crimes. I have seen people killed that had their hands in the air. I have seen a man killed that was already hurt and had no weapons; the sergeant just cut his head off. Also a lot of people here are carrying around ears of people...'"

Richard stood up and climbed past Cooney, who was writing furiously. He stooped to Cooney's ear. "Don't dignify that crap by copying it down. It's bullshit."

Cooney whispered right back, "He's a priest." Father Gavin whipped his glasses off and fixed the two obnoxious students with a glare.

Once more Dillon looked right back at him. A priest should know better. Then, clutching his camera and meter, he turned and headed up the long aisle, aware that the faces of the other students were frozen with the shock they had in common. It was one thing to hear such accusations from an SDS kid ranting from a bench at Dupont Circle, but another entirely from this figure of the absolute.

Behind him Father Gavin resumed reading. " 'Before I start this letter, I want you to promise to forget it as soon as you've read it. Yesterday I shot and killed a little eight- or nine-year-old girl with the sweetest, most innocent little face, and nastiest grenade in her hand, that you ever saw. Myself and six others...'"

As Dillon approached the last rows of the auditorium, where the ROTC cadets were sitting, he looked over at them with contempt. Why are you letting him say this shit?

The cadets were cowed, shrunk in their chairs. One was blushing furiously, as if with shame, and that was too much for Richard. He stopped and leaned over the guy. "You don't believe him, do you? Why are you sitting here as if you believe him?"

The cadet looked up at Richard. There were tears in his eyes.

Richard shook his head, then wheeled toward the door. He saw the two leafleteers still standing there, and now he saw what he had missed on the way in: propped against a chair was a large poster of a Vietnamese child whose skin had been bubbled by napalm. Under the hideous photograph were the words "Why Are We Burning, Torturing, Killing the People of Vietnam?" Richard knocked the poster down as he went by it. It fell with a clatter. The two antiwar ushers leapt back. Richard gave one of them the finger, then looked toward the stage to see if, as he hoped, the priest had noticed.

Father Gavin was resolutely reading on. " '...isn't on one side. A week ago our platoon leader brought in three prisoners...'"

Richard started through the door, but when he heard the priest's next words he froze.

" 'This guy from intelligence had all three lined up...'" Intelligence? DIA. His father. Sean Dillon, by now, was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Intelligence, that's Dad. Richard turned back to listen.

" 'One was a woman. He stripped her down to the waist and stripped the two men all the way. He had a little gadget I thought was a walkie-talkie or something. He stuck one end of this wire to the lady's chest and it was a kind of electric shock, because she got a real bad burn. From what she was screaming, my buddy and I could figure she didn't know anything.

" 'Then they took this same wire and tied it on the lady's husband and brother, but on their lower parts. I grabbed the damn thing and stuck it to the backass of the guy from intelligence.

" 'Ever since that day I've been sick to my stomach and haven't been out on patrol or anything. My sergeant tells me I'm suffering from battle fatigue and might get sent home.

" 'We wish we could send you a couple of those electrical gadgets to use on the powers that sent and keep us here. This must end soon or a lot of us will go nuts.'"

The priest had finished. The silence in the room had the feel of solid mass. The priest was staring at the ceiling, his glasses in his hands, communing with the ghosts, perhaps, of the dead Jesuits. Disapproval and despair, like dark angels, fluttered above him.

"Father?" Richard took a few steps down the sloping aisle. His hand was in the air, a dutiful petition.

Father Gavin looked toward him.

"Father, that's wrong, what you just did." Richard's voice, to his own ears, had an eerie calm. Was he nuts? "You can't slur military intelligence like that because of one—"

"What's your name?"

"Dillon."

"These are not isolated reports, Mr. Dillon. Merely graphic ones. U Thant asserts that more civilians are now being killed in Vietnam by American warplanes than by Communist terror. Our country may have begun with good intentions, but to achieve them we have begun to systematically commit evil acts. Have you had my moral theology course?"

"Yes, Father, I—"

"Do the ends justify the means, Mr. Dillon?"

"No, Father, but—"

"The evil our nation opposes in Vietnam does not justify the evil of our opposition."

"But, Father, American intelligence officers are not evil." Richard's voice had become too loud and he checked himself. What made the moment so strange, so "nuts," was the way it involved both an absolutely unprecedented act of defiance and a simultaneous, gut-reaction defense of the central principle of authority itself, the very spine of his life. "I won't let you just say that as if you were there, as if it's doctrine. American intelligence officers are not evil!"

"We are what we do, Mr. Dillon."

"That's right, Father. Including you." Richard turned. The poster showing the napalmed child was at his feet. He kicked it. Then he stalked out of Gaston Hall.

The cool evening air feathered Richard's hair as he cruised along with the top down. His car was a nine-year-old baby-blue Ford convertible, and even though he lived in the dorm at Georgetown he often drove back to Boiling. The Officers' Club had a dance band on weekends and Richard loved to take dates there, mainly because of Sergeant Foster, who had once been his father's orderly and now worked as a club steward. The sarge would greet him and his date just inside the awn-inged door as if they were VIPs. With the flourish of a continental maitre d' he would lead them to a table on the edge of the dance floor. While the sarge got them drinks, no questions asked, Richard would take his girl into his arms and glide with her across the glassy parquet, waiting a few minutes before looking into her eyes, which would invariably sparkle with delight. At that moment Richard always felt something in him sag; what a phony he was to have brought her there, to have made her think it was his.

It knocked girls out, too, the way the helmeted air policemen at the main gate brought themselves to attention as Richard's car approached, then as he drove through, how they snapped off a salute. The sticker on the Ford's front bumper had three stars on it, just like the Lincoln, even though his father never drove the Ford and was rarely in it. The air policemen knew Richard and they knew he was no officer, much less a lieutenant general, but they always saluted anyway, and Richard always waved. When the top was down he usually said, "How you doin', guys?" But not tonight.

Tonight Richard waved feebly as he went through the gate, unable to come out from under the weight of the events in Gaston. The priest was
one thing, but what he could not get out of his mind were the slanted, wet eyes of the little Vietnamese girl in the poster, eyes which had been pleading up at him just as he kicked it. The feeling was, he had kicked her.

He slowed down as he entered the tree-lined enclave of Generals' Row. Once an AP had pulled him over for speeding right in front of the vice chief's quarters. In the military such infractions were bumped up to the perpetrator's commanding officer, and in the case of dependents, like Richard, they were bumped to the father's commanding officer. It was an army brat's nightmare to get his father reprimanded. Richard would never forget the night his father had come home steaming after being called on the carpet by the secretary of defense himself. Richard realized later that the secretary had intended the sham rebuke over the traffic ticket as a joke, but it had been no joke at Quarters 64.

"64. Lt. Gen. Sean Dillon." The tidy sign caught Richard's eye as he approached the house. The sight soothed his rough feelings some. The house was exactly like a dozen others on the Row, and though it had seemed a mansion to Richard when he was growing up, he knew now it was nothing compared to the real mansions on Foxhall Road or in Georgetown. Still, it was the only place he remembered living in, and despite his complicated feelings about the base, he could not arrive at the house itself without a sense of relief. He pulled in behind a long black Olds. He knew that Olds, but it took him a moment to place it as the archbishop's. "Crap," he said, and his impulse was to turn right around and go back.

Coming here tonight was to have been like tagging-up. A quick touch of the bag was all he wanted, a glimpse of his father, the sharp crush of his mother's arms. With the friendly but formal archbishop here, Richard would have to sit down. He'd have to answer questions about his courses. At some point he'd have to reply to the archbishop's sly hint that he consider the seminary after Georgetown.

He opened the door as quietly as he could. Voices in the dining room. He went into the kitchen, and when he saw Sergeant Mack he put his forefinger to his lips. Sarge grinned at him silently while Richard tiptoed across the kitchen. They slugged each other's shoulders, an old ritual of greeting.

"Hey, Rich. How are you?" Mack's raspy whisper made Richard think of Louis Armstrong. The stocky Negro was built solid as a fist. It
was easy to believe that twenty years before he'd been an all-army boxer. He'd started out a mess hall cook, but now he'd been with the Dillons for nearly nine years, three full tours, which indicated how they prized him. Sean Dillon liked Mack because of his rough-edged manliness. Cass liked him because he neither ingratiated nor resented. She did not want a servant who seemed like one. She also liked him, though nothing was ever made of this, for being a practicing Catholic. Richard liked Mack for no reason, and had since he was fourteen. Sergeant Mack had taught him how to drive.

Those hours, his first at the wheel of the baby-blue convertible, which at the time was still his mother's car, formed the center of a set of cherished memories. With a kibitzing Mack at his side, he had bombed up and down unused stretches of runway at the naval air station adjoining Boiling, less a learner than a make-believe Sterling Moss. Mack had made him feel almost instantly, not that driving was easy, but that he, Richard, had a natural gift for it. For highway experience they took long drives out to Mount Vernon or upriver to Great Falls. Once, cruising aimlessly in the Virginia countryside near Leesburg, Richard had asked Mack how it happened that he was Catholic. The top was down and they'd had to speak loudly. Mack had shrugged and said his people, Kentucky farmers, had always been Catholic. When he'd sensed Richard's surprise—Negroes were Baptists, weren't they?—Mack had added easily, as if stating the most obvious and natural fact of all, "The people who owned us were Catholics."

"The people who what?"

"Owned us."

Richard felt the lumbering auto veer, and the sudden sense that he was going to crash the car frightened him. It took a moment for him to feel in control again. When he looked over, Mack was watching the corn fields pass, apparently expecting no reply.

"I'm fine, Sarge," he said now in a whisper of his own, and he had an impulse to tell him about the girl whom Cooney had called "colored."

"They don't know you're coming, do they?"

"No. The arch is here?"

"And Father Simms."

The archbishop's secretary, an effete priest who used too much cologne. It gave Richard the creeps to shake hands with him. Richard's
theory was that the archbishop liked having Father Simms around because, by comparison, he looked like Joe DiMaggio.

"Who else is here?"

"Just the two."

"And my dad? He made it home?"

"Late, of course, which is why they're still at the table." The sarge picked up the coffee tray he had just prepared and offered it to Richard. "Surprise your mother."

Richard took his windbreaker off and crossed quickly to the orderly's closet to don a white waiter's jacket, then came back. "Right you are, Sarge."

Laden, he backed through the swinging door.

"Coffee, madame?" he intoned.

His mother sent up a shriek of pleasure. "Rich!"

She was the only one of the four to get to her feet, and he hated to turn her aside. "Careful, milady." He placed the tray on the sideboard. Then, with a young prince's panache, he gave her the hug she deserved, covering the pleasure he took in getting his with a hammy "Hi ya, Mom! How ya doing!"

The grave mood in which he'd driven across Washington seemed to have evaporated, so that when he turned to the others, his Joe College good humor had already brightened their faces. He shook hands with his father hungrily, glad for the unmistakable flash of the affection that bound them. Father Simms was as limp-wristed as ever, but he too seemed glad to see Richard. The archbishop clapped both his hands over Richard's, his way of deflecting the traditional kissing of his ring, not that Richard needed to be deflected. "My spiritual consanguino!" the prelate said, an old joke between them, referring to the mystical relationship supposed to exist between a priest and those he'd baptized.

Sergeant Mack appeared from the kitchen carrying a place setting which included a cup and a plate of the cake the others had finished. Cass patted the table, a place next to her. "Sit here."

Richard helped Mack serve the coffee before he did.

"To what do we owe this honor?" his father asked from the far end of the table. The question was put casually, but his father wanted to know. With a host's complete authority he had just laid aside whatever else they'd been discussing.

Richard sensed the intensity of his father's gaze. They hadn't seen
each other in more than two months. Though Richard had come home for Easter dinner, General Dillon had been on an inspection trip; to Japan, Cass had said, but now Richard wondered, Had it been Vietnam?