Memorial Bridge (44 page)

"I can see, General, that the air force has a bulldog in you."

"No, sir." Now Dillon did look across at Macauley, meeting his eyes for the first time that morning. It was to the stunned Macauley and those other general-heroes who would hear from him that Dillon said simply, "Not a bulldog, just a cop."

***

All Dillon saw when he came out of the Old House Office Building was the dome of the U.S. Capitol across Independence Avenue. It shimmered brightly in the late morning light, and the backdrop of dull clouds moving against the gray-blue November sky made the dome itself seem to be falling toward him.

Spread before the Capitol was the formal park, bordered by a languid, curving drive, that ran across the hilltop plateau to the Library of Congress, which had
its
dome, shaped like a huge green lantern. A flock of pigeons swooped, like a single creature, from one dome toward the other, infiltrating the leafless branches of the huge old elms that an aging Thomas Jefferson was said to have planted.

Dillon watched the birds. The damn birds, he thought, as if he'd never left the stockyards. Birds were messengers of an independence he would never have.

He saw what he was looking for then, figures in the distant park of a woman and a child.

Cass saw Sean, waved and began to run toward him.

Richard, dressed in a blue cap, a blue coat and flashing saddle shoes, stayed behind, playing in the grass. He was chasing the pigeons. Sean imagined scooping him up in the crook of his arm, bulling through the line, a touchdown. The thought of Rickie's laughter cheered him.

Cass. His eyes went back to her as he started to move, that lithe woman the very sight of whom released him. That she had come to him the night before meant they had done this together. What happiness it was to want, at last, to go not just to their son, but to her.

But then Dillon heard the sound of Randall Crocker's wooden leg. The secretary came out of the building behind and took Dillon's arm. "Sean, Sean." Crocker steadied himself on Dillon to flourish his stick. "Patterson just told me we have the votes. For the first time ever, the air force has the votes. And you did it, Sean! You put us over! You're launched now, Sean! You're launched!"

Once Dillon would have been only grateful for such an affirmation from this man, but now ... now things were far more complicated. Crocker's delight inspired an entirely new thought, an upsetting one. Dillon was instantly cautious. "I appreciate your saying so, Mr. Crocker, but I still have a problem."

"What?"

"I meant what I said in there. We have to bring charges under the National Security Act against those responsible."

"We might do better to drop the thing, Sean."

"Then I have a question to ask you, sir."

"What?"

"Are
you
responsible?"

"What are you asking me?" Crocker let go of Dillon's arm.

"Were you behind that letter? The letter that I just exposed as coming from the navy? I had an uneasy feeling while I was testifying, but only now do I see what it was. I saw the expressions on the congressmen's faces as they realized they'd been set up, but now I wonder. Was I set up too? Exactly to finish off the navy. Set up by you."

"By me?" he said quietly, offended. "Sean, what can you be thinking?" Crocker pushed down on his stick with both hands. "You just
proved
where that letter came from."

"I established what machine it came from, not who typed it. I went into the navy offices in the middle of the night. You could have done the same thing, knowing I would go in on my own afterwards."

"What, burglarize Pentagon offices? Christ, I never thought you'd do that. It never occurred to me."

"Just answer the question. Did you write that letter or not?"

"No."

"Did you have it written?"

"No."

"The navy did it, as I just testified?"

"Yes."

"Then why would you drop it? Why wouldn't you prosecute?"

"Because someone has to stop this nonsense. We're not at war with the navy, whether they are with us or not. Don't start thinking like these people, Sean."

"You say I'm launched, but I ask into what? Have I already become one of them? Delahunt had his reasons for asking me about a warrant, but he also had a point. If it had been against the law, what I did last night, I wouldn't have cared. I was going to do it anyway. I was going to do whatever was required. And why? To save Macauley's reputation? Or to save the B-36? Or to save the air force? Why?"

"You were going to do what was required because I asked you to."

Dillon stared at Crocker, shocked to realize that what he'd said was
exactly true. He saw what a huge investment the older man had made in him, and now it shamed him that he repaid it with—

Crocker finished Dillon's thought. "Yet now you're suspicious of me."

"I said once in front of you and the whole Air Staff that I believe in original sin. I believe we are all capable of a corrupting self-interest. That's what makes me suspicious. You hired me because of it."

"No, Sean, I hired you because you know the difference between lies and the truth. That is a rare knack around here. I'm telling you the truth now, and I expect you to see it."

"I do see it."

"I'll tell you one last thing, and I am only going to tell you this once. Maybe in some mad circumstance I would set up Macauley or others like him, but I would never do that to you."

Now it was Dillon who took the older man's arm, wanting to say he was sorry, but knowing not to.

"You were about to go to Cass. I see her there, across the avenue. You should go."

"Yes."

"Tell her what I said, that you are launched here, Sean. Tell her that bottomless faith she's had in you is finally justified."

Dillon smiled. "I couldn't tell her that."

"Then I will. Tell Cass this lonely old man wants an invitation to Sunday dinner. I want to get to know that boy of yours."

Dillon was startled at what he saw in Crocker then, the simple, open expression of a father's feeling for his son. How Sean wanted to be worthy of it.

"Now go."

Dillon turned toward Cass. It was true, she
would
understand the full meaning of his triumph, because it was her triumph too. But Dillon realized she would not understand the qualm it left him with, any more than Crocker did. That deep buried feeling—What have I done?—was his alone.

His eye went to his son. How gleefully he played, dashing after one pigeon, then another, sending them aloft, then leaping with laughter, which seemed to carry all the way across to him.

Launched! Dillon's eager son was launching birds, carriers of his innocence, his absolute assumption that the world is, and always will be, only a delight.

Dillon saw that Cass was waiting for him on the far curb. An ache of love exploded in Dillon's chest as he left Crocker with an acknowledging wave and began to skip down the long staircase of the Old House Office Building. He ran toward her, crossing the street carelessly, flinging himself into her arms. She received him with a jolt of her own strength, halting the stampede of his feelings, stopping him absolutely—all but his eyes, which ran on wildly to Richard, as if the boy were in danger.

Historians would focus on 1963 and 1968 as years of the great American reversals, but the first half of 1965 was a turning point too. On the thirteenth of February of that year, the President launched the air war against North Vietnam, justifying it as an alternative to sending in GIs. Hardly more than a month later, because of guerrilla threats to the air base at Da Nang, from which Thunderchiefs, Phantoms and Skyhawks blazed into the air, he sent in the GIs anyway. By April there were eighty thousand American soldiers in Vietnam. Announcement going one way, policy going another; inept improvisation shading toward deception—that quickly, the patterns of the entire war were set. Though the air force claimed its bombers "expended ordnance" only on roads, bridges, warehouses, trench lines, gun sites, river barges, trains and odd "hooches," all they succeeded in permanently obliterating was the other future that young men of Richard Dillon's generation might have had.

That spring those young men had other things on their minds, of course, and had little reason to notice what was happening on the other side of the world. For Richard Dillon the first half of 1965 was nothing more than the second semester of his junior year at Georgetown. Not that he or his classmates were indifferent to large public events. Politics was a preoccupation among students, and so, after Kennedy, was the drama of government. As a Washington school tied in a particular way
to the late Catholic President, a neighbor, Georgetown understood itself as a center of national consciousness. But a war in Indochina? Hadn't Laos been solved? And weren't things better in Vietnam too, once Diem was gone?

A fear of war had been a lively feature of student concern since the missile crisis two years before, and that fear had been hammered into bone-melting terror by Kennedy's assassination. But exactly that dread—war, chaos, rampant enemies—had been soothed only the previous fall by Lyndon Johnson's victory over Barry Goldwater and then by the stunning promise of the Great Society. Now, in May, Dillon's class considered itself on the verge not only of an enchanted senior year but of a new hopeful era. After the world traumas of their first years at GU they felt frankly entitled to mark the boundaries of their concern for a while with the tidy walls of the college itself.

Dillon's feelings were somewhat less upbeat, perhaps, for after the inhibition of growing up a general's son in the literally guarded world of Boiling Air Base, life at the Jesuit college, with its strictures, had felt like more of the same. His father was a hero, of course, and throughout his boyhood Richard had reveled in his status. He had cruised around the base on his bicycle as if it were an old southern plantation and he were the owner's son. The pilots at Base Operations had bought him Cokes. The mechanics in the hangars had let him ride their dollies. The orderlies up and down Generals' Row had kept him in cookies, and in high school he'd made senior lifeguard at the Officers' Club pool. That Boiling had been his father's world had seemed no failing until he realized one day at Georgetown that he wanted a world of his own. Since by junior year he still felt like an interloper at the lively college, it had begun to seem to him that perhaps there would be no such place. At Boiling, as a general's son, he'd been regarded as a young lord; at Georgetown he carried himself like one of the guys, but in both places he felt like an outsider. Still, he wanted to believe that if he tried hard enough, in his studies, in some kind of school activity, and, of course, with girls, it was a feeling he could shake. He could belong.

So Richard Dillon was not obsessed with the fate of Vietnamese peasants that May. He was obsessed with the calculus course that jeopardized his three-point-oh; about refining his technique as a photographer for
The Hoya,
the campus weekly, to the senior staff of which he desperately hoped to get elected; and, above all, about his heartthrob,
Rita Pinon, a Brazilian girl who was a sophomore in the School of Nursing and who, after putting the cold disk of her stethoscope against each of his nipples, had shrugged off her shirt and bra to let him do the same to her.

"Jesus, Cooney," he said, "if I told you what happened to me last night you wouldn't believe a fucking word of it."

"Fucking?" Cooney's eyebrows shot up, and he diddled his fingers at an imaginary cigar. They were two gangling kids loping across the brick quadrangle toward Healy Hall on a warm, sweet-smelling afternoon. They were dressed alike in chinos, blazers and flying ties. Cooney was a reporter for
The Hoya.
Richard had his camera and light meter around his neck. They'd been dispatched by the godlike editor to cover some event at Gaston.

"Who says you can't tell me?"

Richard snorted. "If I tell you, you won't believe it."

"You mean I only believe what I don't know?"

"Via
negativa,
" Richard said, and he began to laugh so hard that Cooney slapped his shoulder.

"Give me a hint," Cooney said, flashing his tongue.

"I'll give you one word."

Cooney stopped and faced his friend, forcing him to do likewise. Dahlgren Chapel loomed behind them.

"Stethoscope."

"Stethoscope?" A sly smile spread across Cooney's face. "Stethoscope?"

"Yeah."

"Where?"

Richard shook his head and started walking again.

"You shithead! You've got to tell me."

"Get yourself a nurse, Jerry. That's all I'll say."

"A nurse! You took the colored nurse out again?"

Now it was Dillon who stopped. "She's not colored," he said sharply. "Who the fuck says she's colored?"

"Well, spic then."

"She's Brazilian, you asshole. That's Portuguese, not Spanish."

"She's a piece, whatever she is. What'd you do with the stethoscope? Does her heartbeat have an accent?"

"You're an asshole, Cooney." Richard turned away and swung through
the heavy arched door of Healy. This was the unornamented back entrance of the oldest building on campus; its soot-darkened Gothic spire punctured the Washington skyline as the Georgetown landmark. The door led directly to the main staircase, and Richard, feeling pissed and confused—Was she colored? Was that an issue?—began to take the stairs two at a time.

Cooney panted after him. "What is this meeting we're going to anyway?"

"You're the reporter, Cooney. I'm just snapping pix. Didn't you listen to Leo?"

" 'Teach-in,'" he said. "What the fuck is that?"

"Like a sit-in."

"So it's civil rights?"

"Yeah."

At the second-floor landing Dillon and Cooney wheeled out of the stairwell like a couple of firemen. They moved fast, not out of any real sense of urgency, but because that was how Georgetown men who mattered moved; they had appointments to make and checks to cash and speeches to give.