The Trinity (22 page)

Hinckley’s face changes from the affable drunk that Chris has been spending the evening with to the same face that Chris has known for the past couple of months: an unfriendly, stern face with the constant ghost of a sneer.

Hinckley nods at his pint glass and then turns to face Chris. His expression causes a return of Chris’s inner trembling that occurred every time Brad was in their room. Uncomfortably, Chris drinks his beer and lights a cigarette.

“I didn’t know he wasn’t.” Hinckley takes a cigarette and lights it. He inhales deeply. He makes a face upon tasting the cigarette.

“You like these menthol things?” he asks Chris. “Me, gimme a Marlboro red anytime or give me shit.” He violently stomps out the cigarette in the ashtray at the center of the table. This angers Chris. A whole cigarette wasted, and on base, a pack now costs just over a dollar.

This time, Chris goes to the bar and orders two beers. “Two pints of lager,” he says with a veteran air, as if he has ordered several pints in several pubs over several years. The bartender snickers at him. He thanks Chris but is otherwise unfriendly and doesn’t appear to be too happy, as if life itself is a burden. Chris wonders about the man. How can someone not be happy working in a pub with all the beer and people?

Chris returns to the table, unsuccessful in his attempt to carry the beer without spilling it. His hands are soaked by the time he sets the glasses down, and Brad laughs at him, as his glass is half an inch short of beer.

They sit in silence, smoking cigarettes and staring at the other people in the pub. Everyone else seems to know each other. Although they are spread across several stools and tables and their bodies are facing a variety of ways, the conversations appear to be part of the same one, as though they all arrived together. They talk over and around Brad and Chris, and Chris is envious. He is here with Brad, but he feels the same loneliness. He is not part of the larger group. He doesn’t fit in.

“I suppose you think I’m a racist, too, dontcha?” Hinckley asks.

Chris shrugs. He is too afraid to answer truthfully, despite the pleasant effects of the lager. He assumes and somehow knows without being told that Hinckley is a racist, sharing his late friend’s sentiments.

The subject of race is one that Chris has never dwelt on, except on his travels to the city of Detroit from his blue-collar suburb just north of the city. Detroit was always a different world to Chris, like crossing a border into another country. Even though it was less than five miles away, every journey into Detroit consisted of locking the doors and rolling up the windows as he drove down streets with names he didn’t know past stores with iron bars in front of the windows. There was genuine fear in the vehicle, whether he was riding with his mother or father or a sober version of his brother. He and his friends would infrequently drive into the city early on Friday evenings to buy beer. No one was ever carded, and they assumed the Detroit Police wouldn’t care. They were probably too busy bagging dead bodies and chasing drug dealers down boulevards of broken glass. Kids from the suburbs buying beer would be of no consequence. They were always successful in their beer purchases, sometimes frightened and harassed by drunks hanging out in front of the various liquor stores trying to bum cigarettes, money, or a can of beer. They would always quickly oblige the requests and then run away and hop behind the wheel of a parent’s car that was borrowed for the evening. They would drive home, to one of their houses if their parents were gone, or to a park (no matter the weather) and sit on the darkest park bench, as far away from the street as possible.

“Well, I’m gonna tell you something,” Hinckley continues. “Everybody is a racist, even you.”

Chris shakes his head.

“Where did you say you were from?”

“Just outside of Detroit.”

“Perfect. Detroit, that’s a big city, ain’t it?”

Chris nods and softly says, “Yes.”

“Probably a lot of black people, ain’t there?”

Chris nods again.

“And I bet there’s parts of Detroit a little white fellow like yourself don’t feel safe in, parts where you don’t stop the car for nothin’, parts where you keep the doors locked and windows up even in August and the air conditionin’ don’t work.”

Chris recognizes those scenarios, and they do ring true.

“Now,” says Brad, “do you drive that way because the people are black or because of the way the area looks? And I bet it looks like hell, too.”

Chris shrugs his shoulders. “Probably because the neighborhood is poor—you know, a lot of boarded up buildings.”

“Really?” asks Brad with a hint of skepticism. “I want you to think about this next question and answer me honestly. If Detroit was all white, and still looked the way it does, would you be as afraid? Would you still roll up the windows and lock the doors?”

Chris shrugs. The pleasant effects of the alcohol are fading away, being replaced by a subtle headache.

Chris thinks about the question and his mind travels back to drives down Woodward Avenue, that vein that runs from the northern suburbs all the way to downtown Detroit, ending at the Detroit River, the sight of Canada beckoning beyond. The avenue changes considerably as one heads into the city. In the suburbs, Woodward Avenue is lined with restaurants and shopping centers and every kind of business establishment imaginable. In the city, it is quite different; the broad avenue is the home of adult movie theaters, of many boarded up storefronts and houses and apartment buildings, an infinite number of party stores (stores that sell beer and wine and a few groceries at an extremely high markup) and quite a few churches of the fundamental kind. The scenery remains bleak until the Downtown, the skyscrapers and stadiums that project the image of the city. Chris only took a few such journeys in his life, trips to Tiger Stadium with his father in his pre-adolescence years and more recently, the trips to party stores that he made with his friends.    “No,” he says, staring at one of the lights hanging from the ceiling, slightly swaying from the breeze of human commotion on the floor below. “I wouldn’t be as afraid. I never thought about it that way.” His thoughts turn to his two friends; he wonders what their lives are like, at college, making new friends, maybe even meeting girls like they talked about over beer on Friday nights. Girls and the future and the places they would go and the things they would do was all they ever talked about, more fluidly after the beer took effect. He misses his friends now that the alcohol is flowing in his blood. His present company is too challenging and not drunk in a happy sort of way at all.

Hinckley breaks Chris’s brief reverie. He slaps his open palm loudly on the table, loud enough for the entire pub to turn and briefly stare. “Exactly!” he says. “Ya see, I knew it. Everyone is a racist. Most won’t admit it, but everyone is. People like to be with their own kind. Black, white, yellow or red, they stick together. It ain’t natural any other way.”

Chris had never thought in those terms before, and in this subdued level of consciousness, Hinckley makes a little bit of sense. He hasn’t the mental resources or the education to intellectually think of any challenges to Hinckley’s generalizations. He assumes what Brad says is true: the races aren’t supposed to meet.

“If you look back in time, all the wars and that, they were all fought because of differences in religion or color. Look at Israel. You got those damn Jews who think they run the place and you got the stupid Arabs living among them trying to get rid of them but they’re too damn stupid to do any damage to the Jews. They all live together in a small country, and it don’t work.” Brad searches his memory for more of Crowley’s proselytizing remarks. “Try to think of parts of the world where the people live well, where all the streets are clean and there ain’t hardly any crime.

“Here,” Chris says. “As near as I can tell, they live okay here.”

“Yeah,” Hinckley says. “These blokes are stupid, but there are hardly any niggers here to mess things up, so yeah, hardly any crime, just ugly women and bad beer. Most of Europe is the same way; the Germans live among Germans, the Scandinavians among the Scandinavians, and they all live well and all live among the white.”

“Canada, too,” says Chris, recalling the trips through the tunnel under the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario on the other side. Windsor seemed like a different world compared to Detroit. An urban setting with many pedestrians walking fearlessly, clean streets and buildings standing without abandonment.

“You’re god-damn right, Canada, too,” agrees Brad, “Canada is too damn cold for anyone but whites to live up there. They don’t have the murder the U.S. does, or the ghettoes, or any of that stuff.”

Their beers are empty, and Chris can tolerate no more. He gives Brad a one-pound note and Brad goes to the bar and fetches a pint for himself. Hinckley barely seems drunk, Chris thinks. He has a full-blown headache and is feeling queasy. The room tends to spin.

“The only country that works with a mixture of race is South Africa, and that’s because there’s no question of who is in charge. The whites take no crap from the blacks. There’s none of that equal rights bullshit, no Jesse Jackson running around causing trouble. If a black gets out of line in South Africa and doesn’t stay in his appointed place, then bam, he either goes to jail or he gets shot, and that’s it.” Hinckley takes another cigarette from Chris, this time not complaining about the flavor. His own cigarettes are gone.

“I bet if you asked a nigger—or anyone who isn’t white—I bet they would rather live amongst themselves, not with whites. You don’t have to be white to be a racist. You just have to be human.”

Another question burns in Chris’s mind, one that he fears he now knows the answer to, in light of Hinckley’s current sermonizing.

“But killing, like Rodgers did. Did you know he was killing, shooting people like that just because? That isn’t right, is it?”

Brad is silent. He turns his stare back to the table after Chris’s last question. He isn’t ready to reveal that information just yet, and his conscience is still somewhat troubled by his duplicity in murder, despite his outward callousness.

Hinckley considers his answer carefully. “Hey,” he says, “he did what he felt he had to do. I can’t judge him for it. I don’t know what was in his heart. I know people on base look at me funny, but I’m not responsible for what Lee did. He made his own choices.”

Chris is satisfied with his answer. The conversation exhausted, they find a taxi along High Street and go back to base. Chris vows to himself that he will get off base more often now and see what exists outside the fences, beyond the rolling hills.

He collapses onto his rack back in the barracks, as does Hinckley. The room spins for Chris, in part because of the beer, and also because of what the evening has introduced into his mind. He is confused. All he has been told about black and white throughout his childhood has now been tampered with, and he isn’t sure what to believe. He has never thought of himself as a racist, but now he is not sure where his heart lies.

The days of inactivity turn to weeks, and the monotony becomes gradually irritating for Father Crowley. He tempers the boredom by drinking wine while sitting next to his turntable enjoying the evenings with the operas of Wagner and Verdi, and when his mood is livelier, the music of Schumann or Beethoven. He averages a bottle of wine a night—South African, no matter what. He saves the empty bottles in cluttered rows on top of his kitchen cabinets, as if they are trophies of conquest. Despite the boredom from a lack of battle, a lack of plotting with his young friend Hinckley, he enjoys the loneliness and the freedom found only in solitude to conduct himself as he wishes. He often sits with his bathrobe open. He looks prayerfully out the window, admiring the leafless elm and oak trees hovering high above the uneven ground still strewn with fallen leaves. He feels the leaves are resting on holy ground, ground defended by Celtic blood, blood once pagan and pure, not diluted by the myth of Christianity. Blood not too different from Nordic blood. White blood. On occasions of inebriated reverence, he will wander outside his front door and kiss the ground through the brown and decaying leaves, the odd passing set of headlights from the main road just catching the faintest glimpse of a portly bath-robed man kneeling in his garden.

Besides Mass and other chapel activities, the weekends offer a return to his old habit of driving around the country, mainly through that swath of coastal land stretching from Edinburgh in the south to Aberdeen in the north.