Word of Honor (6 page)

She replied, "I hope you're right," then added, "But you know, Ben, even if it doesn't lead to anything in a legal sense ... in other ways, here in this house, in this town, and on your job . . . "

"Yes, I know. Thank you."

She seemed to be lost in thought, and instinctively he knew her mind had returned to those pages of gory detail.

She looked up at him. "How did they kill the children? I mean how . . .

?"

There was a knock on the door, and it opened a crack. David peeked in.

"The Chinese delicacies are congealing. "

Tyson said, "Give it a shot of microwave. We'll be right there. "

David closed the door.

Marcy and Ben Tyson looked at each other for some WORD OF HONOR 9 43

seconds, both wondering how much David had heard. They turned and walked silently toward the door. She said, "Do you want wine?" He held the door open for her. "Beer goes better with Chinese delicacies. How was your day?" "Hectic. And I have a trip this week." "Where?" "Chicago. One night." He didn't respond.

Tyson awakened. He threw he bedclothes back and

turned his

CHAPTER head toward Marcy.

She slept in the nude,

in all seasons, as he

did. He regarded her

naked body, dark

against the plain, white

cotton sheets. He

watched her full, firm

6 breasts rising and fall

ing as she breathed,

then his eyes traveled down to her pubic hair. The miracle of their marriage, he thought, was that after sixteen years the sexual attraction was as strong as the sexual drive.

Tyson knew that nearly everyone found them a classically mismatched couple.

Tyson considered himself a traditional man, a result of growing up in a home that stressed traditional values and in a community that was locally famous as a conservative bastion. Unlike Marcy, he was never personally caught up in the turbulence of the sixties, partly because he went to college in the Deep South, partly because

44

WORD OF HONOR * 45

of his years in the Army, 1966 to 1969. He'd commented on occasion, "I missed the Age of Aquarius, but I saw it on TV."

Marcy Clure Tyson and Benjamin James Tyson had nearly opposite tastes in music, clothing, literature, and art. Politically, he was indifferent, and she was committed. Yet they married and stayed married while a good number of their friends were divorced, about to be divorced, or wished they were divorced. Tyson had often wished he'd never met her but rarely wished to see her gone.

Marcy rolled over on her side and faced him. She mumbled something, then let out a snore.

Tyson swung his legs out of the bed and stood. He walked across the carpet to the dormer windows as he did every morning to personally greet the day.

The eastern sky was brightening, and he could see it was going to be another fine morning. Below in the dark street he saw two very early cornmuters, briefcases swinging in wide arcs, as they stepped out purposefully to catch the next train. Tyson heard the matin bells of a nearby church. Each matin bell, the Baron saith, knells us back to a world of death.

Tyson stepped onto the running trampoline and began to jog in place, his eyes still fixed on the east-facing window. There were lights in bedrooms across the road, and at the larger cross-street at the south end of the block, he saw cars making their way toward the parkways, expressways, and railroad stations. Suburbia was on the move, flowing westward to infuse the great city with its clean, oxygenated blood, to wow Wall Street and Madison Avenue with its tennis tans and tales of weekend bogies and eagles.

Tyson jumped off the trampoline and somersaulted to the middle of the gray carpet. He did a few minutes of calisthenics, then walked briskly into the master bathroom.

The bathroom had been modernized and sported a large Jacuzzi. Tyson turned it on. He shaved and brushed his teeth, then lowered himself into the hot, swirling eucalyptusscented water. Through the rising steam he saw himself in a mirrored wall. He was, by any standards, powerfully built and somewhat on the hairy side. Some women liked that, others didn't. Marcy reveled in the forest on his chest. The Oriental girls, he recalled, found it beastly or amusing, but

46 * NELSON DEMILLE

never sexy. However, they always commented favorably on his size; and it wasn't flaky, prostitute flattery. Westerners were bigger as he'd found out when he'd purchased a non-PX condom at a local pharmacie. He thought he should tell that amusing story to Mr. Kimura over lunch one day.

He put his head and shoulders back on the marble rim of the tub and floated in the turbulent waters. The dream had come again last night: He is back in the Army. There is a war on. It is a nameless war, with few of the elements of Vietnam. The landscape is the cold wintry woods of Fort Benning, Georgia, where he'd taken his infantry officer training.

The combat fatigues he wears remind him of the foreign-looking uniforms worn by the aggressor army in the war games they played at Benning. In the dream these uniforms are filthy and torn. The weapons and equipment he carries are somewhat primitive. He does not interpret this to mean it is an earlier war, but rather a future war of long duration: an interminable, civilization-destroying conflict. Armies sweep back and forth across the scarred earth and the dying cities. That part at least is Vietnam.

In the dream he is no longer an officer, but an ordinary rifleman, and someone always says to him, "Tyson, you have five more years to serve,"

to which he always replies, "That's not fair. I was already in. This time I'll die."

Tyson pushed off the edge of the large tub, and let the waters swirl around his floating body. He had gone briefly to a psychiatrist who specialized in the war neuroses of upper-middle-class and wealthy veterans, preferably ex-officers. That was about as specialized as you could get, Tyson thought, and only on Park Avenue would you find such a shrink. Tyson had rather liked the man, Dr. Stahl, and found his insights revealing and his knowledge of postwar-related stress nothing short of startling.

Stahl and he had talked about the dream, they talked about the guilt of having survived when others didn't and spoke of the special guilt of having killed. They discussed at length the unique problems of having commanded men in battle, of having given orders that led to the deaths of subordinates and the deaths -of civilians. It was in this area that Stahl earned his two hundred dollars an hour, and they were both WORD OF HONOR 0 47

aware of that. Popular literature and conventional wisdom were confined to the depressingly ordinary problems of the grunt. Stahl recognized that analyzing the problems of the ex-officer was more interesting, more complex, and usually more remunerative.

Tyson had been on the verge of telling the man about H6pital Mis6ricorde but knew intuitively that confession becomes a bad habit. After Stahl he would tell Marcy, and after Marcy the Reverend Symes. And thus having squared things away in privileged conversations with his shrink, his wife, and a representative of his God, he would eventually go to the Army Judge Advocate General. Therefore, he did not tell Stahl, and since further psychotherapy was of little value unless Stahl knew the Big Secret, Tyson had terminated the relationship, much to Dr. Stahl's surprise and regret.

Stahl found Tyson interesting. Tyson found Stahl too perceptive.

The last thing Stahl had said to him, in a letter actually, written in Stahl's somewhat stilted middle-European style, was this: There is something else on your mind which is a great and terrible secret, Mr.

Tyson. I cannot see it, but I can see its shadow and feel its presence in everything you say.

It would be idle to speculate on what it is, but please feel assured that in war everything is the norm. I have spoken to brave men who have had hysterics on the battlefield, who have runfrom the enemy, who have left theirfiriends to die, and who have soiled their pants in the heat of battle. I have had revealed to me things of which you cannot even begin to dream. I tell you, my friend, war is hell, but take heart: When a soldier goes to war everything is pre-forgiven.

Tyson had never forgotten that cryptic last line: Everything is pre-forgiven. But by whom? How? When was it pre-forgiven? That line was meant to pique his curiosity; to entice him back onto the couch of Dr.

Stahl. And it almost had. But in the end he did not answer the letter, because it was unanswerable.

Some time after that, Dr. Stahl, like a statistically significant percentage of his colleagues, had killed himself. The Times reported that the overdose of Quaaludes may have been accidental, but Tyson did not think so. Tyson

48 0 NELSON DEMILLE

thought that Vietnam killed by contact, association, and proxy.

Tyson floated to the edge of the tub and spread his arms out over the rim to steady himself. He stared up at the infrared lamp overhead and felt its waves warming his face. He recalled that he was not particularly surprised at Dr. Stahl's suicide. For all Stahl's assurances about not being judgmental, not being shocked, the man was after all human. He had listened to an army of sick men fill his ears with grief until it had filled his heart and soul, and like a slowacting virus, had overcome his immunities.

And one day he discovered he was dead and made it official.

Tyson had been unexpectedly saddened while reading the obituary. But on a practical level, he was concerned about what had happened to Stahl's case files, though he had never made any inquiries.

Stahl had ended most of his sessions with the words "You cannot run from the demons, so you must make friends with them." He had advised Tyson to recall the dream in detail, talk with the characters who peopled the dark landscapes of his mind, until one day they would become familiar, friendly, then perhaps banal and insipid. So, lying there in the Jacuzzi, Tyson went through it again. But this timeand there was no mistaking it--4he characters in the dream had become more malevolent. The dream had taken on a special and prescient significance. In fact, the nightmare was becoming reality. All is pre-forgiven, Dr. Stahl.

Marcy walked naked into the bathroom and lowered herself into the tub. She drew a long breath, inhaling the eucalyptus, smiled, and closed her eyes.

Tyson watched her breasts bob in the water, then turned his attention to her face. Rivulets of sweat ran from her brow down her cheeks. He thought she looked fine without makeup. She extended her legs and floated atop the misty water. Tyson reached out and massaged her toes. She murmured, "Oh, that feels good."

Marcy spread her floating legs, and Tyson knelt, leaning forward, cupping her buttocks in his palms. As he moved his head between her legs, she said,

"You'll drown if you try that."

WORD OF HONOR 0 49

"What a way to go."

"Ben!"

He buried his face deep in her groin, and she brought her thighs together, slipping down farther into the water, taking him down with her. He struggled for a moment, broke free, and surfaced, spluttering. "Bitch."

Shelaughed.

Tyson retreated moodily to his end of the bath.

Marcy lifted herself out of the sunken tub and stood on the tiled edge, her legs parted as she stretched and yawned.

Tyson watched her and was instantly reminded of the photograph. It had originally appeared in Life magazine and had been reproduced a number of times in books dealing with the 1960s. It was a black-and-white photograph showing a group of students in Los Angeles's Griffith Park during the winter recess of 1968. It must have been a mild day because they were all cavorting in the nude at Mulholland Fountain.

The occasion was a rock concert according to the Life caption, though when the picture had been used on a network TV documentary about the 1960s, the occasion had been described as a love-in. A photographic essay book described the event as an antiwar rally. Tyson had also seen the picture captioned as a happening and a be-in. Although the event may not have been clear, the picture of Marcy was. She was the most prominent of all the students, standing on the rim of the fountain much as she was now standing on the rim of the Jacuzzi, a full-frontal nude, one arm around the shoulders of a slender, shaggy-haired young man. The other arm was upraised, fist clenched, and her legs were parted. The expression on her face was a mixture of defiance and uninhibited joy. To the side could be seen two policemen approaching the fountain full of naked young men and women.

Tyson saw the picture again in his mind: Marcy's luxuriant pubic hair like a black bull's-eye, her breasts standing proud and erect. But for all the nakedness in that fountain, there was little that was erotic. The gathering was meant as a political statement, and it was.

Like other famous tableaux-the flag-raising over Iwo Jima or the girl weeping over the body at Kent State-the photograph transcended the particular event and captured

50 * NELSON DEMILLE

the essence of an age. None of the subjects had been identified in print, their names as unimportant as the name of the photographer or the journal where the photograph first appeared. The picture had entered the public domain, the history books, and the public consciousness. No royalties were paid nor permissions asked nor rights protected. Yet for those who knew the subjects by name or who were the subjects, the famous photograph still remained personal and evoked a sense of grief, joy, or violated privacy.

Tyson looked up at his wife, still engaged in her stretching exercises.

Her body and indeed her face had not changed that much in nearly two decades. In the picture, though, her hair hung in long, wet strands down to her breasts. When Tyson had first met her at a party in a friend's Manhattan apartment, her hair was still shoulder-length, and his mental image of her remained that of a young girl with long hair, barefoot, with little makeup, and wearing a peasant dress. He said, "I love you still.

"

She paused in her stretching exercises and smiled at him. "We are still in love. Remember that in the coming weeks and months."