Ten Days in the Hills (33 page)

“But did he kill the old guy as a man or as a woman? Would a woman really have the strength to do that kind of damage?” said Charlie. “I mean, if she started out as a woman, let’s say five eight or so, which is pretty good-sized for a woman but not so big for a guy, would the sex-change operation really endow her as a man with enough strength, not to mention the killer instinct, to beat the guy’s head to a pulp and knock his teeth down his throat? But let’s say she started as a man; then it makes more sense that there would be residual strength even after the operation for that sort of thing.”

“That’s what I think,” said Zoe. “Don’t you agree, dear one? The way I picture it is kind of like that movie
The Crying Game.
The old guy picks up someone he thinks is a regular female prostitute, and when he gets her home, he pays her and she takes her clothes off, but then he doesn’t like what he sees, and gets violent—”

Paul opened his mouth as if he meant to say something, but Cassie, looking at the paper, interrupted him: “It says he said the old guy was raping him.”

“And what does that mean?” said Simon. “How do you rape a prostitute? Doesn’t being a prostitute imply consent? I’m not suggesting anything.” Isabel saw him glance at her. “I was just curious.”

“Unless,” said Paul, “Zoe’s right and she was going out as a woman, and she was consenting to vaginal intercourse but not to anal intercourse, and so the one would be consensual and the other would be rape.”

“That reminds me of a story I saw on the news once, years ago, back in Chicago,” said Elena. “A guy was convicted of rape because the woman he slept with had multiple-personality disorder, and only one of her personalities had consented to having sex. That wasn’t a California story.”

“I think we should just read what it says and take it at face value,” said Isabel, thinking that this discussion was going to drive her crazy.

“It doesn’t have a face value,” said Max. “The jurors couldn’t figure it out, either.”

“It would be interesting to know what the defense lawyers knew,” said Delphine, who had been reading over Cassie’s shoulder. “I mean, they had a choice. Do they send their client into the courtroom as a man or as a woman? Maybe they realized that if the jury couldn’t figure it out, then they would have to give the guy the benefit of the doubt. Didn’t one of the lawyers say that this proves that the system works?”

“Yes,” said Cassie.

“Maybe that’s what they meant. I mean, Jamie knows what happened in the bedroom. He’s the only one. So he’s the only one who knows whether it was murder and robbery or manslaughter and theft, and the only sign of his reaction to the verdict is that he cried. Did he cry as a man or as a woman? Did he beat the old guy as a man or as a woman? How can anyone know?”

Silence descended around the table, and Isabel’s toast rose out of the toaster. She reached for the hummus, which was in the middle of the table. Cassie rattled the paper and turned the page.

Zoe picked up one of the inside sections of the paper, and Max picked up the A section, the dangerous section. Isabel didn’t have to look closely to notice that there was plenty of Iraq news. She saw that Elena noticed, too, and consciously turned away. Simon got up from his seat, took his plate to the sink, and then rummaged in the cabinet by the sink for a moment and came up with four circular black-and-white cookies. Before Elena said anything, he exclaimed, “Mom, they’re Newman-O’s. See? Taste one. They’re incredibly crisp on the outside and fabulously luscious on the inside.” He held one out to her, but she waved his hand away. He said, “I’m sure the frosting is a nutritious mix of tofu and naturally bleached carrot pulp—”

“Yes, Simon,” said Elena. “Now, is your filming winding up today?”

“Yeah—”

“Do tell,” said Max, folding down the paper, “what scene are you filming today?”

“Well, we might have to do the bartender in the neoprene suit again. The breasts were kind of flat yesterday, and they looked more like flaps than boobs. I think the girls were going to stuff them with something last night. Other than that, there’s only one scene left, and that’s the men’s naked tap-dance. We’ve been practicing all week, even though it’s only about a minute long. All we have to do is step and turn and step and turn, and then tap around in a small circle, and then jump up and land in, what is it, second position, you know, where your legs are apart and your chest is up and your shoulders are back. The director picked the cast for equipment size rather than dancing ability, and I guess I would have to say that a sense of rhythm doesn’t seem to correlate with equipment size. And it seems like the more we rehearse the smaller the equipment gets, so he wants to get it on the first take.”

“That stands to reason,” said Charlie.

“Filming always presents unexpected challenges to the original conception,” said Max with a smile. He went back to his paper.

“So you’re going back to Davis tonight?” said Elena.

“Well, no,” said Simon. “They rented everything for another day, and I don’t have to get back till Sunday.”

Elena looked at him skeptically.

“If then. Mom, I’m up to date in my classes, I’m refining ideas for my thesis, and there’s no problem. I promise. Don’t you enjoy having me around? Everyone else is here. I’m helpful and entertaining. I did the dishes last night, right? And I did a good job, didn’t I, Cassie?”

“He did a good job,” said Cassie.

“Do you enjoy having me around, Cassie?”

“I do.”

“Do you enjoy having me around, Delphine?”

“More or less.”

“See, Mom, from Delphine, that’s very positive—isn’t it, Delphine?”

“Very positive.”

“Because Delphine has high standards, don’t you?”

“Very high.” She smiled.

Isabel saw Zoe smile to herself. Isabel felt the tiniest little prick of something at this smile—what was it? She had never had a sibling, of course, and so she was spoiled rotten, of course, and in fact it hadn’t occurred to her that Simon could be a rival for her family’s affections, and anyway, she was twenty-three years old and beyond caring about that sort of thing, of course, but she cleared her throat and went over to the sink with her plate, and decided that, yes, Simon would be better off back at college Sunday night.

Then Zoe said, “Dear one, we should go see this show at LACMA.” She pushed the paper toward Paul. “It’s a show of Middle Eastern art. It says, ‘But even as art historians and archeologists are warning against the possible destruction and looting of important sites, the L.A. County is preparing a landmark exhibition of historic art and artifacts from the region that includes present-day Iraq.’ I’d like to see that.”

“I would, too,” said Paul, and then Elena said, “Having a war there is like, oh, I don’t know—”

“Bombing Dresden?” said Cassie. “Here’s a piece about whether analogies between American attacks on Iraq and Allied attacks on Germany during the Second World War are appropriate. It’s interesting.”

Elena scowled, and Zoe glanced at Paul, evidently sorry she’d brought anything up, but Isabel didn’t care whether they talked about the war or not. It was not a subject she thought should be avoided, actually, which is what they all seemed to be doing.

Cassie went on: “‘At high noon on March 12, 1945, just eight weeks before the capitulation of Germany to the Allied forces, 1,000 American planes attacked the city of Swinemuende on the Baltic coast of Germany. The city, crammed with refugees from eastern Germany who had been ethnically cleansed and raped by the Red Army, was bombed mercilessly and sprayed by machine gun fire from American dive bombers, which chased people through the city. Of the city’s 25,000 civilians, 23,000 were killed that night.’” She cleared her throat.

Cassie glanced down the page. “I think he’s objecting to any analogy between the bombing of Iraq and the bombing of Germany at the end of the war. Someone must have made the comparison.”

“On TV,” said Simon.

“Do you want me to keep reading?” said Cassie.

Elena coughed. No one said anything. Finally, Isabel herself said, “I think it’s interesting,” and she did.

“I’ll skip down. ‘Never before in history had a civilian population endured such a military assault. One and a half million bombs were dropped on 161 German cities and 800 villages over five years, leaving half a million civilians dead, including 75,000 children. An additional 78,000 of Hitler’s slave workers and prisoners of war were killed. No one was ever punished for these acts. The winners, not surprisingly, didn’t indict themselves for war crimes. And, in fact, there was nothing technically illegal about their actions. According to Telford Taylor, the chief U.S. prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials, there was no international agreement limiting aerial bombardment to military targets—so, technically, the bombing was legal. Nevertheless, it was unprecedented and beyond any of the customs of war. The war itself was just, but the means by which it was conducted were unjust and unimaginable.’”

“What about the Blitz?” said Delphine. “And the way they bombed Coventry and Southampton and all those other cities?”

“What about six million Jews?” said Isabel, who only said it because she knew Stoney would have, but as she said it, she thought, Yeah, what about that?

Cassie nodded and went on: “‘And worst of all, the bombing was an unmitigated failure. It simply didn’t work….’”

“What does that mean?” said Simon. “It destroyed the cities, right?”

“‘…It weakened Hitler but didn’t lead to his overthrow. It didn’t destroy morale or incite rebellion; 75,000 children killed and it didn’t do anything except, perhaps, strengthen the resolve of the German people against the Allies.’”

“It sounds like he’s on your side,” Max said to Elena.

“That’s what they do, though,” said Elena. “They put the reasonable part first. They concede something. That’s what he’s conceding—that bombing doesn’t work. He’s going to twist it around by the end. They wouldn’t have him on the editorial page if he didn’t support the war.”

“I think he’s just having his say,” remarked Paul. “This has been on his mind for years, and now he gets the chance to express it. It doesn’t really matter if it fits the circumstances or not.”

“You know what I just remembered?” said Max. “Once, my eighth-grade Latin teacher told us about the firebombing of Dresden, which we, of course, had never heard of, and how his mother or his aunt or his grandmother, maybe it was, would huddle in the basement and shake her fist at the Allied bombers as they flew over. I wonder if I went home and asked about it, or if I just filed it away until now. My uncle Walter was a photographer in the belly of one of those bombers. His job was to lie flat and take pictures of the devastation as they flew their missions. I knew all about Uncle Walter, but I never made the connection between the old lady shaking her fist and my uncle in the belly of the plane until now.”

“What about my uncle Freddie?’ said Charlie. “He was in the Engineer Corps, and it was his company that landed secretly the night before D-Day and made their way up Omaha Beach, disarming land mines in the dark. Not only didn’t they want to get blown up, they couldn’t reveal that they were there by letting any of the mines explode. By the time the GIs landed, according to Uncle Freddie, he and his men were ten miles inland. But he never talked about it, either. But the war wasn’t all bad. Freddie’s brother Tom went into the army band as a French-horn player. In the Battle of the Bulge, the German pincer action was so sudden that they had to drop their instruments and run. But they ran east. Pretty soon they came upon the spot where the German band had dropped their instruments, so they picked them up. And they were much better instruments than the ones they had lost. I guess Tom came home with three French horns, and when his own son needed a violin twenty years later, he sold one of them and bought the kid a Stradivarius.”

“I had a cousin in the Battle of the Bulge,” said Cassie. “His whole unit was wiped out, and the only way he survived was to crawl into the rotting carcass of a horse.”

“What happened to him?” said Elena.

“Well, he came home and went into the meat business.”

Charlie and Delphine laughed, as did Cassie. Then she said, “But of course he had problems. I don’t know that he consciously made the connection between the horse and the meat business.”

“What did your dad do?” said Isabel to Max. She was used to Cassie, but did wonder if she knew what she sounded like.

“Well, he always said he wanted to be a flyer, but he was too tall, so he ended up working for the newspaper.”

Cassie went on: “‘At a press conference last week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld noted comparisons had been made between the current campaign and the bombings of Germany. It’s a laughable comparison. You cannot compare the mass destruction of incendiary warfare—aimed at killing civilians in extraordinary numbers—with the noisy but relatively precise and targeted attacks on Baghdad. Such comparisons are far too kind to Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the British leader of the Allied campaign….’”

“But you could compare it to the Blitz,” said Zoe. “I think.”

Isabel saw Elena cast her mother a startled glance, but Zoe had that look she always did—“Who, me? I’m not trying to say anything, I just happen to be talking.” As far as Isabel was concerned, the fact that she saw her mother’s point, or, maybe, agreed with her, didn’t make up for that look, so fake.

“‘The difference is this: In Baghdad today, civilian deaths would constitute failure. In World War II Germany, they meant success. The U.S. would be a pariah in world opinion today if it targeted even one Iraqi city the way it attacked German cities relentlessly for five years.’”

“The U.S.
is
a pariah in world opinion today,” said Elena.

Charlie stared at her.

Cassie folded the paper and flipped it over. She said, “Last paragraph. ‘A better comparison is to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. If the Iraqi leader…’”

Elena dropped the butter knife and picked it up again.

“‘…were to use chemical or biological weapons—which strike civilian and military targets indiscriminately over a large territory—that would be comparable. Then Hussein would be the true heir of “Bomber” Harris.’”