The Trinity (20 page)

He has gone through the week mindlessly, barely making himself presentable in the very casual dungaree uniform.

Crowley senses all this immediately upon Hinckley’s arrival. He offers him a beer. Brad declines. This concerns the priest. He herds the young man into his car and they head to Dundee. They drive in silence. The priest attempts some small talk; he even asks about football.

“The season is over,” replies Hinckley. It’s the only comment he makes during the half-hour drive into Dundee.

They stop to eat on the edge of town at a gloomy pub along East Dock Street, an establishment preferred by the men who work the boats. It is dark and plain and somewhat dirty. They sit at the bar and eat fish and chips. Brad, in this atmosphere, drinks one pint and then another and then his mood lightens and he forgets about the previous week.

He realizes he is with his other friend, the priest.

“Why was he such a dumb son-of-a-bitch?” Brad asks the priest suddenly.

“I don’t know, I don’t know,” answers the priest, who knows a little bit about mourning. He knows Brad misses his friend and is feeling guilty. Even though he is and was a bad priest, he has a sort of intuitiveness for human nature. He was himself a sensitive young man. His sensitivity didn’t erode until his latter days in Houston when his heart became filled with so much hate.

“He is better off where he is now, I assure you. His acts were seen in heaven, and the gods want us to continue, they do. I had a dream that a beautiful maiden flew down from the sky and took Lee into her beautiful alabaster arms. She held him against her breast and flew into heaven. She was a Valkyrie and Lee was given the honor of entering Valhalla, our white heaven, as a fallen warrior. We had to do it. He would have talked and then you and I would not be sitting here right now.”

Brad nods and he feels reassured by the priest’s words.

“He wasn’t nearly as intelligent as you are, not nearly,” Crowley continues. “He didn’t sense the importance of what he was doing. He didn’t see the big picture, unlike yourself. You know our task is holy and right and necessary. We must continue, but we will do so differently. We need another member. Two of us just aren’t enough. There is magic and strength in the number three, in a Trinity. There must be three of us, three of us bonded by blood and courage.”

Hinckley is flattered by the priest’s compliments. No one has ever complimented him on his intelligence. He was considered slow in school and slow by his mother, who raised him in front of a television set. He often spent the late afternoon and evening hours after school by himself, watching cartoons and game shows, as he waited for his mother to arrive home from whatever restaurant or tavern she was working in at the time.

She would leave him bags of potato chips and soda for dinner if she was going to be especially late coming home. If she returned at a more reasonable hour, she would bring him something from work in a Styrofoam box. Homework was largely ignored; she would only pay attention to his grades when he came home with a dismal report card. She thought he was dumb, and there wasn’t much point in trying to develop him academically. She felt he was happiest in front of the television set. So be it. He would have to work for the rest of his life, so what was wrong with a little childhood slothfulness?

He became obese by the age of eleven, and was pushed through to the next grade each fall even though his teachers knew he shouldn’t be. They didn’t want him back in their classrooms the following year, finding it too hard to teach a child when there is no structure at home, no continuity of the orderly school day.

He learned his predicament by the time the fall of his senior year approached. He heard other kids talking about jobs and college and potential careers. He had never thought about his future after school, other than being miles from his grandparents’ neighborhood in Omaha and in a place where there were no black people. He dreamt of a sort of Utopia where college football is played all year. (The fact that several of the Nebraska football players are of African descent has been of no consequence to him. That fact, he has always conveniently ignored.)

He knew he needed some sort of vehicle to propel him towards adulthood. He knew his childhood had not prepared him to take care of himself. He didn’t want to keep following his mother around—nor was he welcome to do so. Many of her boyfriends looked at the chubby child and then the tall and fat adolescent with disdain. Life with his grandparents wasn’t appealing, either; aside from watching football with his grandfather, life in their home wasn’t too pleasant. He didn’t like sitting in the dark and small living room with bottles of pills on a television tray. He didn’t want to fall asleep each night listening to his grandfather wheeze while attached to an oxygen tank.

So he was led to the military, and because of his late and unknown father, he picked the Navy. The recruiter was straight with him. “If you want to get in the Navy, you need to lose the weight, most of it, anyway. You won’t make it, looking like that.”

He lost the weight. A lot of it, anyway.

Through sheer willpower and starvation, he deprived himself of food after seven in the evening and didn’t eat lunch in school. He hid in the school library during the lunch hour and pretended to do his homework while his stomach ached for food so badly that his hands started to shake. He wanted out of this life badly, and a certain discipline that had not been evident in him for his entire life took over and he succeeded. He still looked like an overweight young man. Some would call it baby fat. His stomach still hung over the waistband of his pants, but in appearance, he looked respectable enough.

His success in losing weight gave him confidence, a sense of pride that he had never possessed. He passed his physical during the summer after graduation, and he was sworn in and sent to boot camp late in September of 1984.

And at that moment, all the discomfort of being ignored by his peers because of his weight or color vanished. His life was presented with opportunities he thought would never come. Better still, his life was presented with a plane ticket from Omaha to Chicago, and boot camp in Great Lakes. He flew away from an existence he knew was pathetic.

He had hoped to find some sort of acceptance in the Navy. He thought everyone would form a sort of clique of the type he had observed as an outsider all through his childhood days. He thought a common uniform and a common occupation would cause all his fellow sailors—in boot camp and beyond—to be a sort of fraternity. A family.

He found this to be untrue, as he has never really developed any sort of friendships. He didn’t know how friends should act. He became obnoxious, almost a bully. He made fun of the more inept and smaller recruits in boot camp. (He did well. He was able to follow the directions of the company commanders, and he managed fairly well with the physical training, despite his girth.)

He remained friendless throughout basic training and throughout the storekeeper school conducted on the other side of the base at Great Lakes. He remained obnoxious, loud mouthed and opinionated in the classroom. His friendlessness caused an emptiness in his heart that he was not able to identify. He didn’t know that his loneliness bothered him, as he had grown callous from the years of watching endless television programs wrought with violence and betrayal and casual relationships. He thinks that’s how the world is. Every man for himself.

He was equally miserable when he arrived in Scotland fresh out of storekeeper school, and he found another outcast in Lee Rodgers. He found the first real friend he had ever had in his life. When sober, they talked little. While drinking, they talked a great deal.

Then Father Crowley comes along and he feels as a part of a family; he feels the camaraderie he hoped for and subconsciously expected the Navy to provide. He finds himself a member of an exclusive club. He is a member of the white race. He is descended from supermen from the north, descended from the gods of fire and ice.

He is comfortable in the priest’s house, in front of the fireplace, drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, comfortable talking about the inadequacies of the races, and how the white man should and shall reign supreme.

He feels vindication for those Omaha days, those days of fearing his classmates and the passage along crooked sidewalks through the crumbling neighborhood going to and from school.

To be bonded by blood and courage.

These words continue to ring in his ear, drowning out the noises of the small pub, the noise of conversation, the din of drunken humanity that resonates through the establishment.

He lets the priest’s words resonate inside his cluttered mind. He stares at the barely perceptible veins traversing his wrist and the back of his hand.

Blood. White blood. It is holy blood—chosen blood—that is traveling throughout his body. He decides that the misery he felt in Omaha wasn’t his fault. He is an Aryan, a supreme being, never meant to mix with the lower races. Anyone else growing up in his situation would be miserable and destined for failure.

But not Brad Hinckley. The world owes him too much. He is a warrior, and he will continue to fight.

“We can’t stop,” he says to Crowley after the fish and chips are exhausted and the pint glasses reappear full of lager. “Two or three of us, we can’t stop.”

“I agree, I agree,” the priest says, “but we shall lay low for a while, maybe avert our attention towards another sphere. There is a small Jewish population in this country, one that hasn’t been dealt with yet. They are too comfortable here. We can change that.”

Brad has never thought about Jewish people before. As far as he knows, he has never met one, nor has a Jewish person ever done him any harm.

He only knows Judaism as the religion that doesn’t believe in Jesus, the religion of Israel, that faraway nation from the evening news that is fighting Palestinians in southern Lebanon, which is now a nation of scarred and bombed out buildings. He has never given any thought to the Jewish people. The blacks were an enemy he could identify, could summon up the sufficient anger to fight.

“I think that the bloke police suspect me of something. They came around after Lee’s suicide. They have nothing on me. I never fired a gun, and, unfortunately for you, I never wrote a letter. If I’m to direct any operation, I have to do it cleanly. The head of the Trinity, as the head of an army or a state, must never fall. With no evidence against me, I will never fall.”

Brad suddenly feels betrayed by this information. He hadn’t noticed before that the priest’s hand never did get involved in any of their activities.

The priest senses Brad’s sullenness. He places his hand on Brad’s shoulder. “Look,” he says, with an intonation of tenderness, “I never had you fire a gun, did I? You are special. You will always be my lieutenant, my right hand man. I won’t let you fall, either.”

He returns his hand to his pint glass, drains it halfway, and continues.

“I want no attention drawn to me right now. If anything occurs in this country, any sort of violent behavior against minorities, the bloke police will pay me a visit. There are some indoor projects we can work on, and these we can do with just the two of us. No one will know.”

“What’s that?” Brad asks, his third pint glass now empty. Alcohol-induced joviality streams through his body, and his face and stomach and heart feel warm.

“In due time, in due time,” the priest says. “Meanwhile, stay away from my house for a few weeks, or even a month. Make some friends, meet some girls—but don’t get too involved with girls. They will weaken your will. We need a third member, and I want you to find one. Once you find one, let me know. Bring him over, and we shall see. We have to have someone to do the dirty work.”

Chris learns of his roommate’s association with Lee Rodgers by doing what he’s always done best: he listens to the conversations of others.

He sits in the galley for dinner before a mid-watch in the days after the word of Lee’s suicide has fanned across the base, along with the news that he was the one who murdered the sailor in Dundee for purely racial reasons.

Across the base, Rodgers is recalled with disgust and loathing by all who claimed to have known him. His co-workers, those who frequent the club and the barracks lounge, all speak of him lowly, all saying they knew something wasn’t right. But they didn’t know he was racist, not until his remarks after Hughes was shot. They thought of him as dim and crude, but not a racist with a propensity for the most severe form of violence.