The Trinity (4 page)

And this is how his first months pass, a cacophony of drink and loneliness and private worship of the gods of the north. He stands outside often, when he can, while at the chapel and elsewhere, and looks straight up into the sky. He is looking for Valhalla and signs from Odin, his favorite and dearest of the ancient gods, the god of all things he admires most: god of poetry, god of love and god of war.

He is ready for war, and he badly wants fellow soldiers in this holy war of races he intends to wage, even if it is only a few.

The village of Lutherkirk is small, one main street with a small store, a chemist shop, a post office, a bank, a garage, a bakery and four pubs. High Street is flanked by three roads that contain mostly simple homes, many multiple-unit dwellings with small gardens and no front yards, with the front doors opening right onto the sidewalk.

Crowley enters the main pub in Lutherkirk early on a Friday evening just as the darkness becomes complete. The pub occupies the first floor of a simple hotel. It is dark, the air is stale, and cigarette smoke shrouds everything. When he enters a pub he typically sits at the bar, but this time, noticing two young men from the base at a table, he decides to join them.

The fact that they are American is obvious. One is wearing a flannel shirt and cowboy boots; the other is wearing a college sweatshirt. The Scottish dress is quite different from that, slightly more formal. Both young men are fair-haired, and the one in the sweatshirt is quite overweight, probably borderline on the Navy’s acceptable standards of personal weight. His chest is loose and flabby; he has a double chin and still a few freckles on his cheeks. The one in the flannel shirt is so thin that he appears almost feminine. His shoulders slouch forward and he is wearing tight blue jeans in the fashion of a country music star, with a belt and large belt buckle and a pack of cigarettes in his front pocket.

Again, Crowley sees the white twinkling lights hovering below the ceiling, and he feels the gods are leading him to the two young men. He hasn’t seen the lights since he was in Houston, and the initial sight of them makes him nervous and excited. Despite his priesthood training, despite his wayward beliefs, the sight of the apparently supernatural is still disconcerting and intense.

The two sailors, both lowly seamen, recognize Crowley; they know him to be a chaplain—and more notably, an officer. Officers and enlisted don’t typically interact. In fact, fraternization between the two military castes is forbidden.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” Crowley says with an enthusiasm unusual to him as he takes a seat at the table with the two young sailors, both with nearly empty pint glasses in front of them.

They nod. “Hello, sir.” They sit more erectly.

Crowley notices their tenseness. Their discomfort makes him feel smug, secure, powerful.

“Relax, fellows,” says Crowley, scanning the pub, making sure there are no other Americans. There aren’t. “I’m not here to lecture you about drinking or try to get you to come to church. I’m out for a pint, myself. Even priests need to have a drink now and then.”

And Crowley looks more relaxed, like a person who belongs in a pub. Wearing a tartan tam that he purchased in a shop in Dundee, a dark blue wool sweater on top of a white collared shirt and khaki trousers, he looks almost Scottish.

“What are you boys drinking? Lager?”

They nod in affirmation, glad someone is buying them beer, as their funds are running low and payday is a good week away.

Crowley walks to the bar and comes back clutching three pint glasses, dripping beer as he deposits the glasses on the table.

The priest produces a pack of cigarettes and offers one to each of the young sailors. The heavier one, Brad Hinckley, is shocked. He was raised around a Catholic grandmother, and the sight of a priest smoking and drinking surprises him. He also thinks it’s cool. All three light their cigarettes and exhale simultaneously.

“So, how long you boys been here, been in this country?” Crowley asks.

Hinckley has been in Scotland six months. The other sailor, Lee Rodgers, just a bit longer. Crowley asks them if they like being there. They both hate it. They hate the weather, which is continually cold and damp, and they hate the people with the stupid accents. The Scottish people are referred to as “blokes” by the Americans, a term that the Scots find offensive. The two refer to everything Scottish as “bloke.”

“This bloke money is too big for your wallet.”

“The bloke beer is horrible,” they both claim while quickly drinking their pints.

“The bloke music is weird. No good country stations on the radio,” says Rodgers. He hails from southern Missouri, just outside of Cape Girardeau.

“The bloke T.V. only has four channels, with weird shows and sheep herding contests, and cricket is the most boring sport I ever saw and soccer is stupid and I can’t see any football,” says Hinckley, who constantly recalls the glory of watching college football in his native Nebraska. Nothing else in his life matters as much.

Crowley sees potential in these two young men. They are slightly bitter for no good reason.

“Will I ever see either of you in church?” Crowley asks.

They both lie and say yes.

“Better yet, screw church—come to my house, I insist. A sort of Bible study, free food and beer. How’s that?”

It is the week preceding Christmas and a priest is usually absorbed in church related duties, but not Crowley. There are things he can do, Masses to prepare, homilies to write, but he is not interested. He will wing it for his Christmas Eve Mass, as he does all Masses. Maybe he’ll put up a box for canned goods for the poor. Which poor? The poor on base or the poor Scots? He does not know. Maybe (and most probably) he will throw the cans away.

Yet he may keep them for himself, he decides, as the three unusual friends leave the pub and pile into Crowley’s Austin and drive the few miles to the priest’s farmhouse.

The priest’s cupboards, small refrigerator, and liquor cabinet are stocked for an occasion such as this. He knew it would only be a matter of time before he found some potential recruits; he just didn’t expect them to be American. He felt the choice was made by the gods, and he wasn’t going to tempt fate and contradict them. He feels their presence in his cold sitting room and looks for the white lights as he shovels coal into his fireplace and strikes a match.

Hinckley and Rodgers stand around awkwardly, staring at the walls in the dimly lit room. Father Crowley has decorated it with abstract paintings and tapestries, and on the mantel stands a small and simple swastika made out of black iron on an iron pedestal.

Hinckley and Rodgers nudge each other as they both see it at the same time. Both are shocked, and despite the history lessons to which neither paid much attention, neither of them is offended.

Crowley feels trepidation as their gazes linger above the mantel. He studies their faces in that priestly way, looking for signs of emotion, but each face remains blank. They continue to look about the room.

“Sit down, sit down.” Crowley points to a dusty couch with greasy upholstery that came as part of the furnishings. He wanders off to the kitchen and retrieves three cans of beer, British cans, tall, taller than an American can of beer.

“So, tell me,” Crowley says, “where are you two from?”

Nebraska, Missouri.

“Really? What part?”

“Jus’ outside of Cape Girardeau.”

“All over, but I guess you could say Grand Island because I was born there.”

And it is true; Hinckley had a vagabond childhood spread across the eastern part of Nebraska. He had been born out of wedlock. His mother went from town to town, relative to relative, boyfriend to boyfriend, working mainly as a waitress, sometimes as a bartender. Grand Island to Lincoln to Omaha to West Point, back to Omaha to Norfolk, back to Grand Island and Omaha again.

Depending on the nature of her current relationship, Hinckley’s mother would drop him off at her parents’ house to live, a house in a less desirable part of Omaha that used to be more desirable. He would live with them for months at a time and would attend school there, and in the school, he would be a definite minority, a fact that disturbed his bigoted grandfather to no end.

“Niggers,” his grandfather would say, “have ruined this town, have ruined this neighborhood. They all sit around and do nothing except kill each other over drugs and wait for welfare checks. They don’t work, and when they do, they’re lazy. I ain’t never met a good one yet. Shit, when I was growing up before that god-damned Martin Luther King showed up, they all worked, did as they was told. But now, hell… I ain’t met a decent one yet.”

His grandparents had long paid for the house they lived in and couldn’t afford to move. Due to emphysema, his grandfather couldn’t work. He had been drawing disability and later on Social Security, and those monthly checks could only go so far. He sat in the living room of their old bungalow watching the sidewalk decay and the parade of longtime neighbors move and pass away. He didn’t venture out much. He had to keep an oxygen tank by his side, so he watched a lot of television, the back of the set against the picture window in the living room, so he could look outside and watch television at the same time. He felt he had to keep an eye on his property.

Brad dreaded and feared school. He felt isolated because of his color, felt the fear of the blacks because of his grandfather. Brad would rush home and watch television with his grandfather and only do a cursory amount of homework. On Saturdays in the autumn, their attention turned to college football. They would watch the Nebraska games with a rabid passion; nothing else in the world mattered, and they would spend the preceding week in anticipation of the upcoming game.

Sundays, his grandmother would drag the adolescent Hinckley to Mass, to a church over the Missouri River in Council Bluffs. He would sit stone-faced and inattentive, his thoughts anywhere but on the Mass in front of him. The words of the homily would not reach beyond his ears, and the concepts of Jesus and God and love never meant anything to him.

Ultimately, his mother would leave her boyfriend or get left by a boyfriend and she would come back to Omaha and stay with her parents for a while, until school let out, and then it was off to Wahoo or Norfolk or wherever there was a place to stay and a job to be had.

Hinckley’s father was nonexistent; his mother was just eighteen when he was born. His father had been in the Navy and had gone off to Vietnam and died in a gunboat on a river in the Mekong Delta. He left Nebraska not knowing his young girlfriend was pregnant, and no one knew for sure if he ever knew. His parents ignored Brad’s mother. Pentecostals of the severest kind, they secretly felt their son died because of his sin, for lying with Brad’s mother out of wedlock, and they thought of her as a harlot, as that whore of Babylon responsible for the fall of their son.

After struggling to finish high school in Omaha, Brad had thought of nothing except joining the Navy, a conscious decision to identify with his father. He flew with glee on a plane to Chicago for boot camp at Great Lakes. He was disappointed upon his arrival. He expected to be entering an all-Caucasian world but was almost frightened by the number of minorities: blacks, Mexicans from Texas and California, Puerto Ricans from New York and New Jersey, and even three Asians who really didn’t bother him, but he thought of the gooks in Vietnam that had killed his father. He recalled pictures of his father, thin, athletic and handsome, bearing little resemblance to himself.

He didn’t excel the way he expected to; the sedentary life in front of the television and a propensity for constantly snacking made him overweight despite his tender years, and he couldn’t keep up with the demands of the physical training. He threw up during the first morning run. He struggled to complete twenty-five push-ups, and this weakness made him a target of the company commanders and the butt of jokes amongst his fellow recruits. He hated to be laughed at by anybody, especially by the blacks. So he sucked it up and ran through the pain and nausea, completed the required push-ups and sit-ups by sheer will, and by the end of boot camp he was a model recruit. No one would laugh at him again. He was still pudgy, and this disappointed him. After boot camp, he was sent to storekeeper school on the other side of Great Lakes. It was a short six-week course on how to be a naval supply clerk. He made sure to finish at the top of his class, and then it was on to RAF Lutherkirk, Scotland.
There won’t be many niggers there
, he thought.