Trinity Fields (43 page)

The more I read, the more I began to admire this guy Mitchell. He was impenitent, an absolutist, resolute and cocky as hell. There was an Old Testament stubbornness to his approach that awed me. It was true that he registered with his local selective service board back in 1964, but when he started to inform himself about our doings in Vietnam, he took a stand. He didn't run and he didn't lie. He sought no relief in any of the various administrative remedies the service is empowered to grant, such as community work. He didn't make a claim to be a conscientious objector. He didn't flee across the border into Canada. He acknowledged receipt of the notice that ordered him to report for induction on January 11, 1965—didn't burn his draft card, didn't allege that it got lost in the mail like others did—but simply refused to report as ordered. That was that. His was civil disobedience of the purest kind, I began to believe. He would not do what he was told to do because, he held, to do so would be to defy the laws of the land. With the spunk of a born contrarian, he sought nothing less than a declaration in court that the selective service immediately cease to function, making—under his lawyers' aegis—a pretty good argument against the legality of its existence in the first place.

The reasoning went as follows. One, the Constitution avows—Article 6, clause 22—that treaties our government makes with other nations are a part of “the supreme law of the land, and that Judges in every State shall be bound by them.” Two, the Treaty of London is a treaty within the meaning of said article in the Constitution. Three, the conflict in Vietnam is a “war of aggression” in the sense defined by the Treaty of London. Four, our waging of a war of aggression in Vietnam violates that treaty and therefore makes that war illegal. And, five, a citizen bound to act according to the supreme law of the land cannot rightfully participate in the Vietnam war. So that, six, as a law-abiding citizen of the United States of America, and an individual responsible for the morality and lawfulness of his conduct, he was obliged to decline the selective service system's invitation he report for active duty. This was insolence in a class of its own, was brass-balls reasoning, and I admired him for it.

The only problem with brass balls, however, is that they lack the capacity to produce semen. Nothing, unfortunately,
came
of all this. It was a shame. The court of appeals affirmed the original trial court decision. In March 1967 the Supreme Court denied him his petition for writ of certiorari and tossed the case. I wondered whether Mitchell was aware of the futility of his honest approach. I also began to wonder whether it wasn't the courts that were becoming the ultimate dodgers of the draft issue. It seemed unconscionable that they would refuse to consider this case. At least find him guilty and offer a written decision.

But, as I say, in his dissent, Justice Douglas touched upon points that would shape me as a man and, soon enough, as fledgling lawyer. By late 1969, for better or worse, this was what I was—almost. The exam had been passed but the conduct committee decided to hold up my final admission to the bar while they reviewed my arrest record, and weighed whether or not my behavior as an activist would jeopardize my ability to protect and defend the Constitution and the laws of this land. Hearings were scheduled, took place, and then months would go by with no word until I'd receive a letter to inform me that another hearing would have to be arranged so that the committee could cover some points that had not been addressed during the last hearing. Et cetera, et cetera: I knew I was being punished, and guessed that eventually they would have to grant me admission. In the meantime, while they were making up their minds whether or not to admit me, about whether my conduct would or would not bring shame onto their lousy association, I had taken work with a lawyer who was an active member of the ACLU, and whose practice was an ideal model for what my own would be: devoted to civil liberty cases, and vis-à-vis the war, dedicated to getting protestors out of jail, not to mention out of prison, to filing discrimination suits against my alma mater, to acting as legal counsel to any members of the antiwar movement who needed such help. My sham discharge from service in my pocket, I set forth to assist anyone who had acted similarly, burned a draft card, needed the telephone number of a psychiatrist who opposed the war and would produce an evaluation—after a battery of tests and a session—that spoke of a suicidal disposition or homosexual tendencies, who in other words would create a written deceit that would cause the recruiter to deny the subject admission into the military.

Months grinding along, the deepness of my depression got silted in, slowly. The country was caught in its own agony, and given I'd chosen which side I was on in the general argument, the work for me to do enlivened me again, despite myself.

Jess would call and I didn't know which was worse: the pleasure that came from talking with her, or the melancholy that blanketed me afterwards.

—How's it going with your parents?

—Sometimes fair, sometimes not.

—Why don't you come back?

—I will, she'd say.

—Great, I would answer. —When?

—I'm not sure.

—Well, you have this place, you know, and it's yours.

—I know, she would say in a voice so low I could hardly hear her.

And then I would say, —Well, in as cheerful a voice as I could manage, and she'd say, —I assume they haven't let you in yet or I'd have heard about it.

—You assume right.

—How's the work going?

—Nonremunerative and labor intensive. Kind of the perfect thing for me right now, I guess.

—You eating anything?

—Fingernails and carrots.

Which would make her laugh the laugh I loved best from Jessica. It was immersed down in her, and then almost against some demure will, just rose into the air, just like that, innocent and really exuberant. It was her best laugh, the kind that would make me laugh right back. Jessica is your friend, I'd think, when we did hang up. And I'd begin to think of reasons to call her later that same day, or early the next.

I heard the word
inexpiable
used in court on the afternoon of our birthday—mine and Kip's. It is one of those terms my father would call a five-cent dime. It means unforgivable. Would I ever be able to forgive Kip for doing what he'd done? would he be able to forgive me for what I intended to do? Then Jessica called me that night to wish me a happy birthday, and I asked her once more, —When are you coming home? and when she said, —What about tomorrow? I said, without missing a beat, —Tomorrow would be just fine. And though she didn't return on the next day, it was the beginning of her coming home to me.

There was a canyon up in the Jemez so backland we could only reach it after half a morning on our horses, followed by another hour of tricky climbing. It was our discovery, this place. The horses tethered below receded until they became dark stains on the pale green floor of the head of the canyon cleft. We pulled ourselves up the face of the warm semivertical cliffs, finding footholds and niches as we went along. Sometimes the indentations in the stone seemed of such accommodation to our progress that we sensed they had been carved out by early settlers, Anasazi climbers, pueblo people who scaled these sheer slopes with the same ease we walk a level path to the market. Weather had worn away all evidence of tooling, though, so we couldn't be certain. The cliffs projected in different directions as we reached a midpoint toward what appeared to be the first summit—we were nowhere near the peak of the mountains that rose away, horizon after horizon, toward the farthest clouds—and just when we thought we were too tired to hoist ourselves upward farther, the rock gave into a flat, and we lurched forward and lay recumbent, breathing hard in the thinner air. At the time, we never considered the peril in arriving here. If one of us had, no doubt it wouldn't have been mentioned for fear of prompting the contempt of the other. We rode, we climbed, we lay face down for a minute to catch our breath, is all. And then we stood on top of the world, or nearly, and then strode forward on this mini-plateau, this stone table that, again, was smoothed to something of ballroom glaze, as if by thousands of bared feet. The first time we'd come here we didn't know what lay at the interior edge of the long shelf of rock. The first time we just meandered, balmy pioneers. Thereafter, we knew what was ahead.

Some stands of aspen and fir. An Abert squirrel with rabbit-tall ears scurrying away, annoyed. Some mountain sheep droppings. And always the hawks, broad-winged and red-tailed, and every so often a bald eagle.

It was like looking down into the sky. We reached the end of the plateau and the rock broke off from its easy horizontal plane into a straight vertical drop of about thirty feet. At the bottom was an irregular oval basin, a sink of water. Its surface was serene, as if asleep, and it mirrored the passing clouds with such verisimilitude, detailing every shadow and wisp in its dense glass, that in the right light the pool looked as much like sky as the sky did.

Kip let out a shriek when he was pushed, and his voice followed him down, already resounding in the stone bowl, until he hit the even surface of the water with a thick splash.

He disappeared underwater.

When the top of his head appeared, a good distance away from where he had entered the pool, the surface shattered with foaming white and green bubbles. He howled with laughter.

—It's freezing, he cried out.

Without a thought I leaped out into the dry emptiness and when I punched through the skin of sky's reflection the walloping, hard water pulled my flesh upward on my face, and my feet braced for the bottom of the pool; I didn't know how deep I had plunged but it seemed leagues before I kicked not rock but cold water, and paddled quickly back to the surface. Kip was already out and ascending a quite defined path that curved back toward the crest.

Games never stayed simple, it seemed, with us. This one developed in the following way. The object was to watch as the clouds passed, and wait until there was an opening of blue, a patch moving along the face of the pool, judge its direction and velocity and dive, headfirst or feetfirst, it didn't matter, straight into the center of the target. You named your target right before you dove.

—Elephant, we'd shout, or —dragonfly!

—Hedgehog, we would shout, then dive.

—Blue pony!

Then down into the elephant's eye, the dragonfly's wing, the hedgehog's belly, the blue pony's mane.

Kip was smiling when he reminded me of this. They were good days, I knew it. What he told me then was that he used to do the same thing with the Hmong kids. They had found a place, up in the dangerous hills above Long Tieng. The water was not nearly as deep, and the jump from the cliff was possibly longer—it was as if you hung in the air endlessly before your body slapped into the cold water—but otherwise was much the same.

It was like a second chance for him, he thought. But a second chance at what?

“There are words to describe what had happened to me,” Kip is saying. “They're meant to be derogatory. What happened was that I'd
gone bamboo
.” Like going crazy, perhaps, if viewed from the outside. But from inside the experience, a seductive alternative to going crazy. The lunar New Year came, and by the time it did Wagner and Kip were remarkably integrated into the community. They had made many friends, not only among the children, but their parents. Kha Yang was there, with his wife and two young boys. There were a few other spotters, joined by farmers and refugees—all distinguished by their hopeful will and strong capacity to survive. Kip and Wagner sat with their friends and drank
lao lao
—white lightning, rice whiskey—they watched the game of ball-catch between the girls and boys. Black iron pots of sticky rice stood on fires and the smells of roasted meat wafted over the three-mountained bowl of Alternate. When you eat with the Hmong you must always finish the food you accept from your host. Kip knew this. Hmong feasts were always served the same way, with woven bowls and wooden or silver platters laid out for the guests. Many were the times when you weren't quite sure what was being offered you. Kip knew this, too, and tended to favor the vegetable dishes, which at least he felt he could recognize. A bean looked like a bean, but with meat—you could never tell. The banquet was well under way, the
lao lao
flowing, when Kip and Wagner, guests of honor, arrived. Each took the broad leaf of plantain, as was the custom, and went to the feast table. Roasted chicken flavored with lemongrass,
larp
—a cold minced pork or fish that tastes of lime and garlic and onions—tiny fried birds—hummingbirds, Kip was told—that were crunchy and eaten beak and all, a kind of ratatouille seasoned with hot spices that reminded Kip of Chimayóan red chili. There was a dish they served that looked for all the world like tomato aspic. Wagner urged Kip to give it a try, which he did.

—How's that taste? asked Wagner.

—Not bad, said Kip.

—Take some more, it's good for you.

Kip spooned some more onto his green plate, and continued on.

Their hosts were congenial and never were their earthenware cups of
lao lao
allowed to become empty. There were stories told by various heads of the families gathered, but though Kip's command of the language had improved, they tended to talk too quickly for him to understand much of what was being said. Wagner, from time to time, would lean over and fill Kip in on the gist of the story. Sometimes Wagner would warn him, —Don't smile, this is somebody's cousin who witnessed a torture, or other times ask, —You following this? we're supposed to laugh at the end of this one. Wagner helped him with vocabulary whenever he could, as well.

Dinner was far along when Wagner, a mischievous twinkle in his eye, turned to Kip, nodded at his plate, and said, —I'm proud of you, son.