Tomahawk (18 page)

Early January, and she was looking for a room. Things were getting too heavy at the house. Too many people, squirrels in the attic, noise at all hours. She didn't say so, but he figured it was Haneghen, too.

Late one night, she'd told him the whole story of her involvement with the priest. She'd only gradually realized his vision excluded a lover, a family. “He was committed to the Church. Now he's committed to nonviolence, and everything it means. There just isn't room in his life for anything else.”

Dan had said, “Have you talked to him about it? About us?”

And she'd whispered, lying in his arms, “Yes. He understands.”

“Thanks for helping me look,” she said later as they inched through uncleared snow toward a Quaker-sponsored rooming house that might or might not have a room available later that week. “I don't know how I could do this without you. But you just can't do much on what I make baby-sitting.”

He glanced at her profile and took a fresh grip on the wheel.

He was thinking of asking her if she wanted to stay with him. But once the words were said, it wouldn't be easy to unsay them. A movie, dinner, sleeping over was one thing. Having her move in—that was a new ball game.

But he wasn't seeing anybody else now. He'd even stopped reading the personals.

“Would you mind if I asked you to go back to the first place we saw? The one out by the Medical Center?”

“That was a dump, Kerry. You aren't seriously thinking of living there, are you?”

“Well… I thought so, too. Okay, we'll keep looking.”

He cleared his throat. Staring through the windshield, he murmured, “Or you could move in with me.”

She didn't answer. He was about to repeat himself when she said, “I heard you.”

“It was just a thought.”

“It doesn't sound like it's exactly what you want most.”

“Sorry. But it might be fun. At least till you found a place you like.”

It floated there while he concentrated on not skidding into the truck in front of them. Finally, she said, “I seem to be spending my weekends with you anyway.”

“I didn't mean to sound unenthusiastic. If you want to come, I'd like to have you. And it's close to the subway.”

“You don't have to give me a sales pitch.”

“Sorry.”

“If I did, I'd pay what I'd pay for a room. A hundred a month.”

“If you want to.”

“And you'd take it.”

“All right. I'll take it.”

“Maybe we could try Are you getting hungry?”

“There's an Indian place,” he said. “Help me look for a parking space.”

That was how it went, as if neither of them wanted to make it too dramatic. That evening he went by the house and helped carry her things down. There wasn't much.
Two armfuls of clothes. Three pairs of shoes. She left the mattress and linens and towels for the next guest. “You move light,” he told her on the narrow, worn stairs. Somewhere a child was crying, a mother crooning in Spanish. The murmur of talk came from downstairs, around the big table.

“I try to live light. Whatever you have beyond what you need, that's something less for someone else.”

He pondered that sobering thought on the way downstairs. In the military, success was measured in other terms than money—rank, command, awards. And compared with how he'd grown up, an officer's pay seemed generous. Now he was paying child support, there weren't many luxuries. But he'd never thought of making more than you needed for used clothes and a bare room as an actual evil.

If he left the service, he wouldn't have that paycheck every month. He wouldn't have that guaranteed retirement.

After he locked the trunk, he went back in, to find her in the kitchen, having tea with Haneghen. Carl glanced up as Dan came in. Was that anger in those light eyes? “Dan. Understand Kerry's going to stay with you?”

“Hi. Yeah, till she finds a place she likes.”

“That'll free you up a room,” she said, looking into the tea mug, and not at either of them. “How about that veteran who wanted out of the city shelter? You said he knew something about plumbing.”

Haneghen reached out across the table. “Take good care of her,” he said. Kerry took his hand. His knuckles whitened for a moment. Then he let go and sat back. “Will we still see you down at the kitchen?”

“Every morning.”

“Okay, then. Yeah, I'll call the shelter, tell them to send the sarge over. Dan, you free Tuesday night? We need to beg a ride.”

“Tuesday? Oh, sure.” He felt expansive; it felt like victory; as if he'd won Kerry from the other man. “No problem.”

That night, he carried her things up in the elevator and gave her a key. They heated up pot pies for dinner. But then she made up a bed on the couch, in the front room.
He thought she was going to sleep there, but he woke later and found her next to him. He didn't move or say anything, just lay there pretending he was asleep until her breathing slowed, too, and a faint snore came from next to him. Then he turned over, carefully, cautiously, and looked for a long time at her face, at her closed eyes, by the blood-colored radiance that came through the window. The light of the city, reflected from the clouds.

At NC-1, he worked nights revising budget estimates. He flew to St. Louis for Unidynamics' demonstration of their first complete ABL, and to Titusville to check on McDonnell Douglas's progress on the airframe second-source. He put in more hours polishing Niles's statement and role-playing the upcoming hearings.

Usually, he didn't think much about what he was doing. But once in awhile, deep in analysis of allocation strategies of runway-kill munitions, he saw himself suddenly as a gear in a machine whose end product was death. To be able to put explosive anywhere on earth, with a little cartographic work and the press of a button—at first it had sounded exciting.

He went downtown with Kerry and stood in line serving out potatoes and bread and a savory bean soup. The storefront smelled like cabbage and sour milk, but it was warm, and when the doors opened, the people thronged in, pushing and elbowing. A lot of the “clients” acted drunk, drugged, or deranged. Loud women in tight clothes dragged expressionless children, threatening and slapping them. They didn't look at or talk to the people who stood in line to serve them. They just grabbed their food and headed for the eating area, and when they left, paper plates and spilled chow littered the tables and the floor.

“They don't seem very grateful,” he said to Haneghen in the back room.

“Why should they?”

“Why should … Because they're getting free food?”

“Which is the least of what they need. They despise one another, just as they're despised. Why should we expect the poor to act any different from anyone else? Ken was attacked last year, on the line. You know his injured
leg? He was talking to a man about pacifism. The man attacked him with a knife.”

“Why? Because he wouldn't fight him?”

“I guess to see if he was serious.”

“I can't buy it, either,” Dan told him. “Not total nonviolence. I mean, how about when somebody's killing innocent people? Like what's happening now in Cambodia, Pol Pot's killing everybody who can read. What do we do, just stand back and let it happen?”

“How will killing more help?”

“Well, how about the Nixon doctrine? Can't we arm them, so they can defend themselves?”

“So twice as many will die, you mean?”

“What if somebody's about to kill you, or your family?”

“You reason with them. You don't meet force with force. Can you take the other end of this?”

He helped carry the tureen out, then went back to replenish the bread stack. When he came out, the ex-priest was stacking cans of infant formula in a shopping bag. Dan asked him, “No matter what, you turn the other cheek, huh?”

“Ask yourself this. If you can persuade, by your example, one or two people to act with love, and they each convince others to do so, then how soon will it be before the whole earth is free of war and violence?” The woman waiting for the Enfamil blinked slowly, as if they were speaking a foreign language.

“That depends on what's called the ‘doubling time.' Like a nuclear chain reaction.” Dan looked back at the line. “But it doesn't look like you're making much progress here.”

Haneghen handed over the sack, and the woman left. “I don't judge them. We're sowing seeds of love, and the harvest isn't going to come in for a long time. I try to remember what St. Vincent de Paul said: ‘It is only by feeling your love that the poor will forgive you your gifts of bread.' “

“What's that supposed to mean?”

Haneghen just shrugged and smiled. “Let's get the rest,
of the juice up front. Bring that drum of peanut butter, too.”

Tuesday night, he had the Volvo at the house at six. The members came down the steps carrying sticks with rolled-up cloth. They stacked them in the trunk. Kerry got in the passenger seat. Deborah, Carl, and Ken squeezed into the back. Dan started up. “Where to?”

“Sheraton.”

“What's going down?”

Haneghen said, “It's better if you don't know. Then you're not an accessory.”

He shut up and concentrated on driving.

When they got there, Kerry stuffed a banner under her sweater. The others looked grim, like troops before an assault. “You don't have to come in,” she told him.

“I can watch, can't I?”

“I don't want you to do anything you don't want to do.”

He didn't feel great about this, but he'd volunteered his ass already. It was a matter of following through. He locked up and followed them into the hotel. At least he was in mufti this time: jeans, flannel shirt, a civilian-style parka.

Signs in the lobby said the MilTech International Show was in the main display area. Letting them go on ahead, he followed a trickle of attendees down to a display floor. A hum and rustle echoed beneath the vaulted ceiling.

This was the American section. Over the booths hung logos for Northrop, General Motors, EG&G, Kaman, Singer, Rockwell, Bendix, Texas Instruments. He passed Arabs, Chinese, Latin Americans, and Africans examining displays, reading brochures, quizzing the salespeople, who stood beside mock-ups of grenade launcher/turret combinations, dynamic armor, electromagnetic pulse-resistant cabling, tactical missile targeting systems.

Past that was the international aisle. Blond Norse maidens beamed smiles for Mauser and Rheinmetall and Nobel and Oerlikon. There were booths for Aerospatiale and Saab, Philips, and British Aerospace. A Kärcher mobile kitchen was serving hot finger food. He lingered in front
of a South African display marketing advanced restraint systems, electronic shock wands, the latest “crowd control technology.” Italian antipersonnel mines promised “area denial through psychological shock.” There were no photos of burns, wounds, or bloody bodies. He felt more comfortable in front of the naval displays. No matter what, he still couldn't believe being able to take out a Soviet sub that was trying to sink you was anything to be ashamed of.

He was at the Unidynamics booth, examining a model of the ABL and talking with one of the engineers, when he heard shouting. Security guards trotted past. Walkie-talkies crackled.

They'd found an open mike, set up for welcoming remarks. Haneghen's voice echoed under the vaulted roof. Behind him, Deborah and Kerry held the two ends of a blue banner. It was lettered in a hand-scissored alphabet of yellow felt, crude, as if cut out by children. Then he remembered seeing the kids at work, at the house; they
had
been made by children.

BUT I SAY TO YOU * LOVE YOUR ENEMIES * BLESS
THOSE WHO PERSECUTE YOU

“What the hell?” said the engineer, coming out to stand beside Dan. “Where did those nuts come from?”

Haneghen didn't speak for more than a few seconds, though, before the mike went dead. Then the guards reached them, unsheathing billy clubs. The protestors lifted their arms, locking their fists behind their heads, as if they'd done it many times before.

The security force came down Dan's aisle, leading them out. Their captives were spattered with blood, and he tensed before getting the picture; they must have thrown it on one of the displays and gotten the back spatter on their clothing. Haneghen was in cuffs, but he looked relaxed, joking with an extremely fat guard. Kerry caught Dan's eye. He waved at her.

The engineer looked at him strangely. “You know those assholes?”

He started to say no, then caught himself. “Sort of. I mean, some of them.”

“You better get your head straight, buddy.” He gave him a quizzical, hostile look. Dan wheeled and jogged off after the disappearing backs.

The trouble was, he wasn't sure what he was feeling.

As he spent more time around them, he discovered they were neither saints nor nutcases. Deborah had a bad temper. Haneghen was single-minded to the point of fanaticism; he didn't seem to understand not everyone could be dedicated twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes they were intolerant. Occasionally, their attitudes of moral superiority got irritating. But when it came down to what they valued, they were ready to sacrifice for what they believed in.

In other words, they weren't all that different from professional military people.

He had more trouble accepting what they called “per-sonalism”—the idea that to do any good, charity had to be extended in the form of one hand to another, not through bureaucracies and government checks. He liked their politics even less. It seemed whenever force was used by the United States, or anyone supported by America, it was wrong. But when leftists or revolutionaries were doing the killing, it was justified outrage, and we were even more to blame. He had arguments with Ken about that.

What he couldn't argue with was their idea of voluntary poverty: that keeping for themselves anything in excess of their immediate needs—a spare pair of shoes, a second coat, a spare room—was a kind of sin, and that their first priority was helping those in need. It sounded crazy, but watching them do it, not talk about it or listen to sermons about it but just
do
it, had more impact than anything they said. The house was a noisy, messy, happy place. At night, others came by, Quakers, Unitarians, and they shared. One old fellow had spent World War II in a mental hospital for being a conscientious objector. A couple from California told chilling stories about their work in Central America. Not many held what the IRS would
consider a job, though they all worked, most at shelters or with the retarded or at hospices, and most had some manual skill: carpentry, bricklaying, sheet-metal repair.