Time to Hunt (7 page)

“Look, let me go tell Crowe I’m leaving. I’ll be right back. We’ll go somewhere.”

He disappeared back inside the house.

Julie stood there in the Washington dark on a street above Georgetown as the traffic veered along Wisconsin. Pretty soon Peter Farris came out. Peter was a tall, bearded graduate student in sociology at the University of Arizona, the head of the Southwest Regional People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice and nominal honcho of the group of kids he and Julie had shepherded out by Peace Caravan from Tucson.

“Where’s your friend?”

“He’ll be back.”

“I
knew
that’s what he’d be like. Big, handsome, square.”

But then Donny returned, ignoring Peter.

“Hi. It’s stupid, but Crowe wants to go to another party and I think I ought to go with him. I can’t … It’s just … I’ll get in touch with you as soon as…”

But then he turned, troubled, and before she could say
a thing, he said, “Oh, shit, they’re leaving. I’ll get in touch” and ran off, leaving the girl he loved behind him.

T
he next morning, waking early in his room in the barracks, almost an hour before the 0530 alarm, Donny almost went on sick call. It seemed the only sane course, the only escape from his troubles. But his troubles came looking for him.

It was a boneyard day, he knew. His team was up. He had stuff to do. He skipped breakfast in the chow hall, and instead re-pressed his dress tunic and trousers, spent a good thirty minutes spit-shining his oxfords. This was ritual, almost cleansing and purifying.

You put a gob of spit into the black can of polish, and with a scrap of cotton mixed the black paste and the saliva together, forming a dense goo. Then you applied just a little dab to the leather and rubbed and rubbed. You should get a genie for your troubles, you rubbed so hard. You rubbed and rubbed, a dab at a time, covering the whole shoe, and then the other. You let it fry into a dense haze, then went at it again, with another cotton cloth, went at it like war, snappity-snap. It was a lost military art; they said they were going to bring in patent leather next time because the young Marines couldn’t be trusted to put in the hours. But Donny was proud of his spit shine, carefully nursed through the long months, built up over time, until his oxfords gleamed vividly in the sun.

So stupid, he now thought.

So ridiculous. So pointless.

T
he weather was heavy with the chance of rain and the dogwoods were in full bloom, another brutal Washington spring day. Arlington’s gentle hills and valleys, full of pink trees and dead boys, rolled away from the burial site and beyond, like a movie Rome, the white buildings of the capital of America gleamed even in the gray light. Donny could see the needle and the dome and the big white house and the weeping Lincoln hidden in his portico of
marble. Only Jefferson’s cute little gazebo was out of sight, hidden behind an inoffensive, dogwood- and tomb-crazed hill.

The box job was over. It had gone all right, though everybody was grumpy. For some reason even Crowe had tried hard that day, and there’d been no slipup as they took L/Cpl. Michael F. Anderson from the black hearse to the bier to the slow-time march, snapped the flag off the box, folded it crisply. Donny handed the tricorn of stars to the grieving widow, a pimply girl. It was always better not to know a thing about the boy inside. Had L/Cpl. Anderson been a grunt? Had he been a supply clerk, a helicopter crew member, a military journalist, a corpsman, combat engineer? Had he been shot, exploded, crushed, virused or VD’d to death? Nobody knew: he was dead, that was all, and Donny stood at crisp attention, the poster Marine in his dress blue tunic, white trousers and white cover, giving a stiff perfect salute to the wet-nosed, shuddering girl during “Taps.” Grief is so ugly. It is the ugliest thing there is, and he had fucking bathed in it for close to eighteen long months now. His head ached.

Now it was over. The girl had been led away, and the Marines had marched smartly back to their bus and climbed aboard for a discreet smoke. Donny now watched to make certain that if they smoked they took their white gloves off, for the nicotine could stain them yellow otherwise. All complied, even Crowe.

“You want a cigarette, Donny?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“You should. Relaxes you.”

“Well, I’ll pass.” He looked at his watch, a big Seiko on a chain-mail strap he’d bought at the naval exchange in Da Nang for $12, and saw that they had another forty minutes to kill before the next job.

“You ought to hang your coats up,” he told the team. “But don’t go outside unless you’re buttoned and shined. Some asshole major might see you, put you on report and
off you go to the ’Nam. You’d be back for the next box job. Only, you’d be the one in the box, right, Crowe?”

“Yes, Corporal, sir,” Crowe barked, ironic and snide, pretending to be the shavetail gung-ho lifer he would never even resemble.

“We love our Corps, don’t we, Crowe?”

“We love our Corps, Corporal.”

“Good man, Crowe,” he said.

“Donny?”

It was the driver, looking back.

“Some Navy guys here.”

Shit, thought Donny.

“Donny, are you joining the Navy?” Crowe asked. “You could make
a fortune
giving jelly rolls in the showers of a nuclear sub. You could—”

Everybody laughed. Give it to Crowe, he was funny.

“All right, Crowe,” said Donny, “I just may put you on report for the fun of it or kick the shit out of you to save the paperwork. While I talk to these guys, you give every man on the team a blow job. That’s an order, PFC.”

“Yes, Corporal, sir,” said Crowe, taking a puff on his cigarette.

Donny buttoned his tunic, pulled on his cover low over his eyes and stepped outside.

It was Weber, in khakis.

“Good morning, sir,” said Donny, saluting.

“Good morning, Corporal,” said Weber. “Would you come over here, please?”

“Yes, sir,” said Donny.

As they got out of earshot of the men in the bus, Donny said, “Man, what the
fuck
is this all about? I thought I was supposed to be undercover. This really blows it.”

“All right, Fenn, don’t get excited. Tell them we’re from personnel at the Pentagon, verifying your RSVN service preparatory to separation. Very common occurrence, no big deal.”

Down the way, in the rear of a tan government Ford,
Lieutenant Commander Bonson sat behind sunglasses, peering ahead.

Donny got in; the engine was running and air-conditioned chill blasted over him.

“Good morning, Fenn,” said the commander. He was a tight-assed, scrawny lifer in the backseat, sitting ramrod perfect.

“Sir.”

“Fenn, I’m going to arrest Crowe today.”

Donny sucked a gulp of dry, painful air.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“At 1600 hours, I’ll show up at the barracks with a plainclothes detachment of NIS. We’ll incarcerate him at the Navy Yard brig.”

“On what charge?”

“Security violation. Naval Penal Code DOD 69-455. Unauthorized possession of classified information. Also, DOD 77-56B, unauthorized transmission or transference of classified information.”

“Ah—on what basis?”

“Your basis, Fenn.”

“My
basis, sir?”

“Your basis.”

“But I haven’t reported anything. He went to a couple of parties where they were flying the NVA flag. Half the apartments in Washington are hanging the NVA flag. I see it everywhere.”

“You can place him in the presence of a known radical organizer.”

“Well, I can place
myself
in that same guy’s presence. And I have no information to suggest he was compromising Marine security or intelligence. I just saw him talking with a guy, that’s all.”

“You can place him in the presence of Trig Carter. Do you know yet who Trig Carter is?”

“Ah, well, sir, you said—”

“Tell him, Weber.”

“This is straight from this morning’s MDW-Secret Service-FBI
briefing, Fenn,” said Weber. “Carter is now suspected of being a member of the Weather Underground. He’s not ‘merely’ a peacenik with a placard and some flowers in his hair, but he’s an extreme radical who may be linked to the Weather Underground’s bombing campaign.”

Donny was dumbstruck.

“Trig?”

“Don’t you see it yet, Corporal?” said Bonson. “These two bright boys are hatching up something good and bloody for May Day. We have to stop them. If I collar Crowe, maybe that’ll be enough to save some lives.”

“Sir, I saw nothing that would—”

“Then get with the fucking program, Corporal!” Bonson bellowed. He leaned forward, fixing Donny with his murderous glare. He seemed to bear a grudge against the known world and was holding Donny responsible for all his disappointments, for all the women who wouldn’t sleep with him, for the fraternities that wouldn’t pledge him, for the schools that wouldn’t accept him.

“You think this is some kind of joke, don’t you, Corporal? It’s beneath you somehow. So you’ll go along to stay out of ’Nam, and just play it cool and cute and rely on your good looks and your charm to drift through? You won’t get your hands dirty, you won’t do the job. Well, that stops today. You have a job. You have a legal order assigned by higher headquarters and passed down through a legal chain of command, vetted by your commanding officer. You will perform. Now, you stop screwing around and pretending like your feelings matter. You get on this thing and you get inside and you get me what I need, or by God, I will see to it that you’re the only U.S. Marine on the DMZ when Uncle Ho sends his tanks south to mop up. We’ll get you a Springfield rifle and a campaign hat and see how well you do. Are you reading me?”

“Loud and clear,” said Donny.

“Go do your fucking job,” said Bonson icily. “I’ll hold
off a day, maybe two. But get inside
before
May Day or I’ll sweep them all up and off to Portsmouth and you to the ’Nam. Do you copy?”

“I copy, sir,” said Donny, blushing at the dressing down.

“Out,” said Bonson, signifying the interview was over.

“Y
ou okay?”

“I’m fine,” Donny said.

“You look not-cool.”

“I’m cool.”

“Well, a bunch of us were going over to this party in G-town, Donny. I found out about it from Trig.”

Oh Christ, Donny thought, as the solicitous Crowe loomed over him in the upstairs barracks room where the off-base men kept their huge gray lockers and were now stripping down after a hot afternoon in the boneyard.

“Crowe, you know we may be on alert at any time. Is your riot gear outstanding? What about steaming and pressing your tunic, washing out your dark socks, and spending an hour or two on that spit shine, which has begun to look a little dim.
That’s
what you ought to be doing.”

“Yeah, well,” said Crowe, “believe me on this one, I know. We’re not going on alert till 2400 tomorrow night.”

Donny almost pointed out that if you said “2400” you didn’t have to say “night,” but Crowe wasn’t stoppable at that point.

“And we’ll just hang around here. We may get on trucks and, probably on Saturday, we’ll deploy to a building near the White House. But it’ll be a short deployment. All the action’s going on across the river. The whole point of this one is to converge on the Pentagon and close it down. Trig told me.”

“Trig told you? He told you about the deployment? Man, that’s classified. Why the hell would he know?”

“Don’t ask me. Trig knows everything. He has entrée everywhere. He probably is having cocktails with J. Edgar
himself right as we speak. By the way, did you know Hoover was a fruit? He’s a goddamn
fruit!
He hangs out in Y’s and shit.”

“Crowe, you’re not
telling
Trig shit, are you? I mean, it might seem like a joke to you, but you could get into deep, serious green crap that way.”

“Man, what do
I
know? Little Eddie Crowe’s just a grunt. He knows nothing.”

“Crowe, I’m not kidding.”

“Is someone asking about me?”

“So where’s this party?”

“Shouldn’t you be trying to find your girl? She didn’t look too happy when you bailed out on her last night to hang out with us. And if I know my horny hippie peace freaks, that bearded guy hanging on her shirttails has a serious case of the please-fuck-mes. You may have to call in a fire mission on
him
. Hotel Echo.”

“Nobody’s asking about you.”

“ ’Cause if they are, here’s my advice: give me up. I ain’t worth shit. Seriously, Donny, roll over on me in a second. If it’s you or me, buddy, choose you. It would be a shame any other way.”

“Eddie, you’re full of shit. Now, where’s this party? I need a fucking keg of beer.”

“Maybe Trig can find your girl.”

“Maybe he can.”

They showered and dressed, and signed out with a warning from the duty NCO to call in every couple of hours to make sure the company hadn’t gone on alert. Sure enough, Crowe’s obedient buddies waited just outside the barracks’ main gate, on Eighth Street. They climbed in the old Corvair.

“Hey, Donny.”

“Cool. Donny, the hero.”

He could hardly remember the names. He had a splitting headache. He had told a lie, direct and flat out.
Nobody is asking about you
.

But goddammit, how had Crowe known so much?
Why had he asked Donny the other day where they’d deploy? Why was all this bad shit happening anyway? And what about Julie? She was camping in some muddy field with what’s his face, and he hadn’t even really
talked
to her. She hadn’t called and left a number, either. Man, it was all coming down.

But when they got there, Trig came over and greeted them, and when Crowe told him Donny’s situation, he said it would be no problem.

“Sure,” he said. “Let me make a call.” He went off, and Donny sat among a bunch of turned-out Georgetown kids, dressed like young Republicans, while Crowe, in his hair-hiding boonie cap, worked a girl who didn’t work him back. Presently, Trig returned.

“Okay, let’s go,” he said.

“You found her?”

“Well, I found out where the University of Arizona kids are camping. That’s where she’d be, right?”