Time to Hunt (13 page)

Donny looked: it was a drawing on a creamy page trimmed from that sketchbook Trig was always carrying, incredibly delicate and in a spiderweb of ink, that depicted himself and Julie as they stood and talked in the trees at West Potomac Park.

There was something special about it: he got them both, maybe not exactly as a photograph, but somehow their love too, the way they looked at each other, the faith they had in each other.

“Wow,” said Donny.

“Wow, yourself. I dashed it off that night in my book. It was neat, the two of you. Gives me hope for the world. Now, go on, get the hell out of here, go back to your duty.”

Trig drew him close, and Donny felt the warmth, the musculature, and maybe something else, too: passion, somehow, oddly misplaced but genuine and impressive. Trig was actually crying.

O
ver the shoulders of the two FBI agents, Peter saw Donny and Trig embrace, and then Donny stepped out of the light and was gone. He’d head to his car, which Peter now saw was but fifty or so yards away. He was screwed. Donny would see him here with the two feds, who showed no sign at all of moving, and he would have made an ass out of himself.

He felt despair rising in his gorge.

“I have to go,” he said to the larger of the two plainclothes officers.

“No,” the man said back, and the other moved to embrace Peter, as if to wrestle him to the ground. Peter squirmed out of the man’s grip, but he was grabbed and thrust to the ground.

The two men loomed over him.

“This is ridiculous,” he said.

They seemed to agree. They looked at each other foolishly, not quite sure what to do, but suddenly one of them pointed.

Then the engine of Donny’s car came to life and its lights flashed on.

The man with the camera pulled away from Peter, leaving the other, the bigger, to lean on him, and ran toward the gate.

“W
ell, did he help?” said Julie as they walked through the dark.

“Yeah,” said Donny. “Yes, he did. He really did. I’ve got it figured out now.”

“Should I go meet him?”

“No, he’s in a very strange mood. I’m not sure what’s going on. Let’s just get out of here. I’ve got some things to do.”

“What did he give you?”

“It’s a picture. It’s very nice. I’ll show you later.”

They walked through the dark, up the hill. Donny could see the car ahead. He had an odd tremor suddenly, a sense of not being alone. It was a freakish thing, sometimes useful in Indian country: that sensation of being watched. He scanned the darkness for sign of threat but saw nothing, only farmland under moon, no movement or anything.

“Who was that blond guy?” she asked.

“His pal Fitzpatrick. Big Irish guy. They were loading up to spread fertilizer.”

“That’s strange.”

“He said they decided to do the hard part of the job in the cool of the night. Hell, it was only fertilizer. Who knows?”

“What was going on with Trig?”

“I don’t know. He was, uh,
strange
is all I can call it. He had the same look on his face that the
Time
photographer got, when he was carrying that bleeding kid in from the cops in Chicago and his own head was bleeding too. He was very set, very determined, but somehow, underneath it all, very emotional. He seemed like he was facing death or something. I don’t know why or what. It spooked me a little.”

“Poor Trig. Maybe even the rich boys have demons.”

“He wanted to hug. He was crying. Maybe there was something weirdo in it or something. I felt his fingers in my muscles and I felt how happy he was to be hugging me. I don’t know. Very weird stuff. I don’t know.”

They reached the car, and Donny started it, turning on the lights. He backed into the grass, turned around and headed down the road to the gate.

“Jesus,” he said. “Duck!” For at that moment a figure suddenly rose from a gulch. A man in a suit, but too far away to do anything. A camera came up. Donny winced at the bright beam of flash as it exploded his night vision. Fireballs danced in his head, reminding him of nighttime incoming Hotel Echo, but he stepped on the gas, gunned up the road and turned right, then really floored it.

“Jesus, they got our picture,” he said. “A fed. That guy had to be FBI! Holy Christ!”

“My face was turned,” said Julie.

“Then you’re okay. I don’t think he got a license number, because my rear plate illumination bulb is broken. He just got my picture. A lot of good that’ll do them. A fed! Man, this whole thing is strange.”

“I wonder what’s going on?” she said.

“What’s going on is that Trig’s about to get busted.
Trig and that Fitzpatrick guy. We were lucky we weren’t rounded up. I’d be on my way to the brig.”

“Poor Trig,” said Julie.

“Yes,” said Donny. “Poor Trig.”

T
he man let him up. He brushed himself off.

“I haven’t
done
anything,” Peter explained. “I’ve come to see my friends. You have no right to detain me, do you understand? I haven’t
done
anything.”

The man stared at him sullenly.

“I’m going now. This is none of your business,” he said.

He turned and walked away. The agent had seemed genuinely cowed. He stepped away, awaiting a call, but none came. Another step filled him with confidence, but he didn’t see or hardly feel the judo chop that broke his spine and, in the fullness of his tender youth and in the ardor of his love for his generation and its pure idea of peace, killed him before he hit the ground.

D
onny reached DC around four in the morning, and he and Julie checked into a motel on New York Avenue, in the tourist strip approaching downtown. They were too tired for sex or love or talk.

He set the cheap alarm for 0800, and slept deeply until its ungentle signal pulled him awake.

“Donny?” she said, stirring herself.

“Sweetie, I’ve got some things to do now. You just stay here, get some more sleep. I paid for two nights. I’ll call you sometime today and we’ll decide what to do next.”

“Oh, Donny.” She blinked awake. Even out of sleep, with a slightly puffy face and her hair a rat’s nest, she seemed to him quite uniquely beautiful. He leaned over and kissed her.

“Don’t do anything stupid and noble,” she said. “They’ll kill you.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

He dressed and drove the mile or so through the section of city called SE, passing Union Station, then left up the hill until he was in the shadow of the great Capitol dome, turning down Pennsylvania, then down Eighth. He arrived, found parking on a street just off the shops across from the barracks, locked the car and headed to the main gate.

From across Eighth Street, the little outpost of Marine elegance seemed serene. The officers’ houses along the street were stately and magnificent; between them, Donny could see men on the parade deck in their modified blues, at parade practice, endlessly trying to master the arcane requirements of duty and ritual. The imprecations of the NCOs rose in the air, harsh, precise, demanding. The grass on which the young men toiled was deep green, intense
and pure, like no other green in Washington in that hot, bleak spring.

Finally, he walked across the street to the main gate, where a PFC watched him come.

“Corporal Fenn, you’ve been reported UA,” the PFC said.

“I know. I’ll take care of it.”

“I’ve been ordered to notify your company commander of your arrival.”

“Do your duty, then, Private. Do you call Shore Patrol?”

“They didn’t say anything about that. But I have to call Captain Dogwood.”

“Go ahead, then. I’m changing into my duty uniform.”

“Yes, Corporal.”

Donny walked through the main gate, across the cobblestone parking lot and turned left down Troop Walk to the barracks.

As he went, he was aware of a strange phenomenon: the world seemed to stop, or at least the Marine Corps world. It seemed that whole marching platoons halted to follow his progress. He felt hundreds of eyes on him, and the air suddenly emptied of its usual fill of barked commands.

Donny went in, climbed the ladder well as he had done so many hundreds of times, turned left on the second deck landing and into the squad bay, at the end of which was his little room.

He unlocked his locker, stripped, slipped into flipflops and a towel and marched to the showers, where he scalded himself in water and disinfectant soap. He washed, dried, and headed back to his room, where he slipped on a new pair of boxers and pulled out his oxfords.

They could be better. For the next ten minutes he applied the full weight of his attention to the shoes, in regulation old Marine Corps fashion, until he had burnished the leather to a high gleam. As he finished the shoes, the
tough professional figure of Platoon Sergeant Case came to hover in the door.

“I had to put you on UA, Fenn,” he said, in that old Corps voice that sounded like sandpaper on brass. “Do you want me to Article Fifteen your young ass?”

“I was late. I had personal business. I apologize.”

“You’re not on the duty roster. They say you’ve got some legal obligations at ten hundred.”

“Yes, Sergeant. In the Navy Yard.”

“Well, I’ll get you off report. You do the right thing today, Marine. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Case left him alone after that.

Though he hadn’t been so ordered, and in fact didn’t even know the uniform of the day, he decided to put on his blue dress A uniform. He pulled on socks and taped them to his shins so that they’d never fall, selected a pair of blue dress trousers from the hanger and pulled them on. He tied his shiny oxfords. He pulled on a T-shirt, and over it, finally, the blue dress tunic with its bright brass buttons and red piping. He pulled tight the immaculately tailored tunic, and buttoned up to that little cleric’s collar, where the eagle, globe and anchor stood out in brass bas-relief. He pulled on a white summer belt, drawing it tight, giving him the torso of a young Achilles on a stroll outside Troy. His white summer gloves and white summer cover completed the transformation into total Marine.

The medals, reduced to ribbons, stood out on his chest—nothing spectacular, for the Marines are a dour bunch, not into show: only a smear of red denoting the very hot day when he’d slithered through rice water and buffalo shit with half the world shooting at him to pull a wounded PFC back into the world, to life, to possibility. The blur of purple was for the bullet that had passed through his chest a few weeks later. The rest was basically crap: a National Defense Ribbon, the in-service RSVN award, the Presidential Unit Citation for the overall III Marine Amphibious Force presence in the Land of Bad
Things, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry and expert marksman in rifle and pistol with second awards. It was no chest of fruit salad, but it did say, This man is a Marine, who’s been in the field, who was shot at, who tried to do his duty.

He adjusted the white summer cover until it came low over his blue eyes, then turned and went to face Commander Bonson.

H
e left the barracks and headed toward the captain’s office, where he was to be picked up. The XO wandered by and he snapped off a quick salute.

“Fenn, is that the uniform of the day?”

“For what I have to do, sir, yes, sir.”

“Fenn—Never mind. Go ahead.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Two NCOs, including Case, watched him go. By the time he reached Troop Walk, by some strange vibration in the air, everyone knew he was in his full dress blues. The men, in their modifieds, watched him with suspicion, maybe a little hostility, but above all, curiosity. The uniform, of course, was not the uniform of the day, and for a Marine to strut out in so flagrant a gesture of rebellion was extremely odd; he could have been naked and caused less of a ruckus.

Donny strode down Troop Walk, aware of the growing number of eyes upon him. He had a fleeting impression of men running to catch a glimpse of him going; even, across the way, when he passed by Center House, the base’s BOQ, a couple of off-duty first lieutenants came out onto the porch in Bermudas and T’s to watch him pass by.

He turned into the parking lot, where a tan government Ford, with a squid driving, waited by the steps; he then turned left, climbed and walked across the porch and into the first sergeant’s office, which led to Captain Dogwood’s office. The first sergeant, holding a cup of coffee with
Semper Fi
emblazoned on the porcelain, nodded at him, as orderlies and clerks scurried to make way.

“They’re waiting on you, Fenn.”

“Yes, First Sergeant,” said Donny.

He stepped into the office.

Captain Dogwood sat behind his desk, and Bonson and Weber, in their summer khakis, sat across from him.

“Sir, Corporal Fenn, reporting as ordered,
sir,”
Donny said.

“Ah, very good, Fenn,” said Dogwood. “Did you misunderstand the uniform of the day? I—”

“Sir, no,
sir!”
Donny said. “Sir, permission to speak,
sir?”

Another moment of silence.

“Fenn,” said the captain, “I’d consider carefully before—”

“Let him speak,” said Bonson, eyeing Donny without love.

Donny turned to face the man fully.

“Sir, the corporal wishes to state categorically that he will not testify against a fellow Marine on charges of which he has no personal knowledge. He will not perjure himself; he will not take part in any proceedings involving the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Sir!”

“Fenn, what are you pulling?” asked Weber. “We had an agreement.”

“Sir
, we never had an agreement. You gave me orders to investigate, which I did, against my better instincts and in contravention to every moral belief I have. I did my duty. My investigation was negative. Sir, that is all I have to say,
sir!”

“Fenn,” said Bonson, fixing him with a mean glare, “you have no idea what forces you’re playing with and what can happen to you. This is no game; this is the serious business of defending the security of our nation.”