Time to Hunt (12 page)

“No, you haven’t,” she said. “I can tell when you’re lying. You’re not lying to me; you never have. But you’re lying to yourself.”

“I should talk to someone. I need help on this one.”

“And I’m not good enough?”

“If you love me, and I hope and pray you do, then your judgment is clouded.”

“All right, who, then?”

Who, indeed?

There was only one answer, really. Not the chaplain or a JAG lawyer, not Platoon Sergeant Case or the first sergeant or the sergeant major or the colonel or even the Commandant, USMC.

“Trig. Trig will know. We’ll go see Trig.”

B
itterly, from afar, Peter watched them. They embraced, they talked, they appeared to fight. She broke away. He went after her. It killed him to sense the intimacy they shared. It was everything he hated in the world—the
strong, the handsome, the blond, the confident, just taking what was theirs and leaving nothing behind.

He watched them, finally, go toward Donny’s old car and climb in, his mind raging with anger and counterplots, his energy unbearably high.

Without willing it, he raced to the VW Larry Frankel had lent him. He turned the key, jacked the car into gear and sped after them. He didn’t know why, he didn’t think it would matter, but he also knew he could not help but follow them.

P
eter almost missed them. He had just cleared a crest when he saw the lights of the other car illuminate a hill and a dirt road beyond a gate, then flash off. His own lights were off, but there was enough moonlight to make out the road ahead. He pulled up to the gate and saw nothing that bore any signal of meaning, except a mailbox, painted white with the name
WILSON
scribbled on it in black. He was on Route 35, about five miles north of Germantown.

What the hell were they up to? What did they know? What was going on?

He decided to pull back a hundred yards, and just wait for a while. Suppose they ran in there, and turned around and collided with him on the road? That would be a total humiliation.

Instead, he decided just to watch and wait.

A
t the top of the hill, they turned the engine off. Below lay a farm of no particular distinction, a nondescript house, a yard, a barn. Propane tanks and old tractors, rusted out, lay in the yard; there was no sound of animals. The farm, in fact, looked like a Dust Bowl relic.

Yet something was going on.

Twin beams illuminated the yard, and Donny, with his unusually good eyesight, could make out a van with its lights on, a shroud of dust, and two men who were in the process of moving heavy packages of some sort out from the barn into the van by the light of the headlamps.

“I think that’s Trig,” Donny said. “I don’t know who the other guy is.”

“Shall we go down?”

Donny was suddenly unsure.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t figure out what the hell is going on.”

“He’s helping his friend load up.”

“At this hour?”

“Well, he’s an irregular guy. The clock doesn’t mean much to him.”

That was true; Trig wasn’t your nine-to-fiver by any interpretation.

“All right,” said Donny. “We’ll walk down there. But you hang back. Let me check this out. Don’t let them see you until we figure what’s happening. I’ll call you in, okay? I’m just not feeling good about this, okay?”

“You sound a little paranoid.”

He did. Some hint of danger filled the air, but he wasn’t sure what it was, what it meant, where it came from. Possibly, it was the mere strangeness of everything, the way nothing really made any sense. Possibly it was his own fatigue, raw after the many hours on alert.

They headed down the hill, and Donny detoured them around the house, until at last they came upon the two men from the rear. Donny could see them better now, both working in jeans and denim shirts. They were loading by wheelbarrow immensely awkward sacks of fertilizer into the van, packing it very full,
AMMONIUM NITRATE
, the sacks said. Dust that the wheelbarrow tires ripped up from the ground filled the air, floating in large, shimmering clouds, which shifted through the beams of the truck lights and in the yellower light that blazed from the barn door. It lit wherever it could, coating the truck, the men, everything. Both Trig and the other man wore red bandannas around their faces.

Pushing Julie back into the dark, Donny stepped out and approached, coughing at the stuff in the air as it filled his mouth and throat with grit. He stepped farther; nobody noticed him.

“Trig?” he called.

Trig turned instantly at his name, but it was the other man who reacted much faster, turning exactly to Donny,
his dark eyes devouring him. He had a full, tangled web of blond hair, much thicker than Trig’s, and was large and powerful next to Trig’s delicacy. They looked like a poet and a stevedore standing next to each other.

“Trig, it’s me, Donny. Donny Fenn.” He stepped forward a little hesitantly.

“Donny, Jesus Christ, I didn’t expect you.”

“Well, you said to come on out.”

“I did, yeah. Come on in. Donny, meet Robert Fitzpatrick, my old friend at Oxford.”

“Halloo,” said Robert, pulling off his own bandanna to show a smile that itself showed a mouthful of porcelain spades, a movie star’s gleam of a smile. “So you’re the war hero, eh? We’ve hopes for you, that we do! Need boyos like you for the movement. We’ll stop this bloody thing
and
get the west field covered in horseshit and ammonium nitrate, if I’m a judge of things. Roll up your sleeves, boy, and get to work. We could use some back. Me goddamned pickup broke down and I’m stuck with this piece of shit to git the stuff out to the spreader. We’re doing it at night to beat the heat.”

“Robert, he’s been on some kind of alert for seventy-two hours. He can’t do manual labor,” Trig said.

“No, I—”

“No, we’re almost done. It doesn’t matter.”

“You left so suddenly.”

“Ah, one more demonstration. I was worn out. What did it prove? I’ve lost my will for the movement.”

“You’ll get your will back, boyo,” said the giant Fitzpatrick heartily. “I’ll go get us a beer for the recharge. You wait here, Donny Fenn.”

“No, no, I just had a thing I wanted to talk over with Trig.”

“Oh, Trig’ll steer you right, no doubt about it,” he said, his voice light with laughter. “It’s a drink I’ll be gittin’, Trig. You lads talk.”

With that he turned to the house and headed in.

“So what is it, Donny?”

“It’s Crowe … they arrested him. Violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I’m supposed to testify against him in”—he looked at his watch—“about seven hours.”

“I see.”

“Maybe you don’t. I was asked to spy on him. That was my job. That’s why I got close to him. I was supposed to report to them on his off-base activities and try and put him with known members of the peace groups. That’s why I was with him at the party that night; that’s why I came to your party. I was ordered to spy.”

Trig stared at him for a while, then his face broke into the oddest thing: a smile.

“Oh, that’s your big secret? Man, that’s it?” He laughed now, really hard. “Donny, wise up. You work for them. They can ask you to do that. If they say so, that’s your duty. That’s the game in Washington these days. Everybody’s watching everybody. Everybody’s got an agenda, a plan, an idea they’re trying to push or sell. I don’t give a damn.”

“It’s worse. They have some idea you were Weather Underground and you planned the whole thing. I mean, can you imagine anything so stupid? He was feeding you deployment intelligence so the May Tribe could humiliate the Corps.”

“Boy, their imagination never fails to amaze me!”

“So what should I do, Trig? That’s what I’m here to ask. About Crowe. Should I testify?”

“What happens if you don’t?”

“They’ve got some pictures of me smoking dope. Funny, I don’t smoke dope anymore, but I did to get in with him. They could send me to Portsmouth. Or, more likely, the ’Nam. They could ship me back for a last go-round, even though I’m short.”

“They’re really assholes, aren’t they?”

“Yeah.”

“But that’s neither here nor there, is it? This isn’t
about them. We know who
they
are. This is about you. Well, then it’s easy.”

“Easy?”

“Easy. Testify. For one reason, you can’t let them get you killed. What would that prove? Who benefits from the death of Lochinvar? Who wins when Lancelot is slain?”

“I’m just a guy, Trig.”

“You can’t give yourself up to it. Somebody’s got to come out on the other side and say how it was.”

“I’m just … I’m just a guy.”

People were always insisting to Donny that he was somehow more than he really was, that he represented something. He’d never gotten it. It was just because he happened to be good-looking, but underneath he was just as scared, just as ineffective, just as simple as anyone else, no matter what Trig said.

“I don’t know,” said Donny. “Is he guilty? That would matter.”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is: you or him? That’s the world you have to deal with. You or him? I vote him. Any day of the week, I vote him.”

“But is he guilty?”

“I’m no longer in the inner circle. I’m sort of a roaming ambassador. So I really don’t know.”

“Oh, you’d know. You’d know. Is he guilty?”

Trig paused.

Finally he said, “Well, I wish I could lie to you. But, goddammit, no, no, he’s not guilty. There is some weird kind of intelligence they have at the top; I just get glimmerings of it. But I don’t think it’s Crowe. But I’m telling you the truth: that doesn’t matter. You should dump him and get on with your life. If he’s not guilty of that, he’s guilty of lots of other stuff.”

Donny looked at Trig for a bit. Trig was leaning against the fender of the van. He lifted a milk carton and poured it over his head, and water gushed out, scraping rivulets in the dust that adhered to his handsome face. Trig shook his
wet hair, and the droplets flew away. Then he turned back.

“Donny, for Christ’s sake. Save your own life!”

P
eter was no good at waiting. He got out of the car and walked along the shoulder of the road. It was completely dark and silent, unfamiliar sensations to a young man who’d spent so much time OCS—on city streets. Now and then he heard the chirp of a cricket; up above, the stars towered and pinwheeled, but he was not into stars or insects, so he noticed neither of these realities. Instead, he reached the gate, paused a moment, and climbed over. He saw before him a faint rise in the land, almost a small hill, and the dirt road that climbed it. He knew if a car came over the hill and he were standing on that road, he’d be dead-cold caught in the lights. So he walked a distance from the road, then turned to head up the hill, figuring he could then drop to the ground if Donny and Julie returned.

Gently, he walked up the hill, feeling as alone as that guy who had walked on the surface of the moon. He reached the top of the hill and saw the farmhouse below him. No sight of Julie but he saw Trig and Donny slouched on the fender of a van in the yard between the house and the barn, and they were chatting animatedly, relaxed and intimate. There was no sign of danger, no sign of weirdness: just two new friends bullshiting in the night.

But then small things began to seem off. What was Trig doing way out here? What was this place? What was going on? It connected with nothing in Peter’s memory of Trig.

Puzzled, he stepped forward and almost tripped as he bumbled into something.

Two figures rose before him.

Oh, shit, he thought, for they wore suits and one of them carried a camera with a long lens.

Clearly they were feds, spying on Trig.

They had the pug look of FBI agents, with blunt faces
and crew cuts; one wore a hat. They did not look happy to be discovered.

“W-who are you?” Peter asked in a quavering voice. “What are you doing?”

“I
don’t think I can sell him out,” said Donny.

“Donny, this isn’t a Western. There are no good guys. Do you hear me? This is real life, hardball style. If it’s you or Crowe, do not give yourself up for Crowe.”

“I suppose that’s the smart move,” said Donny.

“So, there,” said Trig. “I made your decision easy for you. All you have to do is cooperate with them. Come on, when the war is over, they’ll reduce his sentence. He may never even serve a day. They’ll work some deal, he’ll get out and go on with the rest of his life. He won’t even be upset.”

Donny remembered that once upon a time, even Crowe had given him the same advice.
Roll over on me in a second, Donny, if it ever comes to that
. Somehow Crowe had known it would.

“Okay,” he finally said.

“Do your duty, Donny. But think about what it costs you. Okay. Think about how you feel now. Then when you get out, do me one favor, okay? No matter what happens to me, promise me one thing.”

Trig winced as if in pain in the hot light of the headlights, though perhaps something had just gotten in his eye. There was an immense familiarity to that look, the strain on his face, the set of it, the clearness of vision. And … And what?

“Sure,” Donny said.

“Open your mind. Open your mind to the possibility that the power to define
duty
is the power of life and death. And if people impose duty on you, maybe they’re not doing it for your best interests or the country’s best interests but for their own best interests. Okay, Donny? Force yourself to think about a world in which each man got to set his own duty and no one could tell anyone what
to do, what was right, what was wrong; the only rules were the Ten Commandments.”

“I—” stammered Donny.

“Here,” said Trig. “I have something for you. I was going to mail it to you from Baltimore, but this’ll save me the postage and the fuss. It’s no big deal.”

He went over to some kind of knapsack on the ground, fished around, and came out with a folder, which he opened to reveal a piece of heavy paper.

“Sometimes,” he said, “when the spirit moves me, I’m even pretty good. I’m much better at birds, but I did okay on this one. It’s nothing.”