Trinity Fields (35 page)

Together we buckled backwards onto the ground, there was an audible snap. Others were on me before I knew it and the handcuffs were in place. I made no resistance whatever to my arrest. Only later, at my arraignment downtown, when the charges were read to me, did I find out that he had broken his collarbone.

What marginal satisfaction I had felt upon hearing that the plainclothesman had hurt himself when he slammed into me was erased when I was made to understand that the charges included resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.

—Your Honor, I said. —I did not resist arrest and I did not assault the officer in question.

—That's fine, said the judge.

—But sir?

He raised his eyebrows, waited.

—Sir, he assaulted me. I was standing, as any student ought to be able to stand, on the South Lawn of the campus at Columbia University.

—Minding your own business.

—I was minding my business.

—And would you care to tell the court just what was your business there?

Go forward, I thought, unleash it. I spoke up clearly, —I was there to protest the war in Vietnam, the illegal war in Vietnam, the unjust and idiotic war in Vietnam, sir. But, for what it may be worth, I did not assault the policeman in question. He assaulted me, in fact. I did not commit any crime.

—You're a law student, I see here.

—That's correct, Your Honor.

—I assume you understood that a crime of the nature you are accused of would make it difficult for you to be admitted to the bar.

—I was minding my own business, sir.

—Answer my question, young man.

—I am aware of what you're saying, and that's why, although as I say I strongly oppose our involvement in the war in Vietnam, I removed myself from the protest.

Painful admission. The judge eyed me, then studied the brief before him, commenting on the fact that it seemed to him I hadn't always been quite so becomingly circumspect, given my record of arrests over the past several years. No sir, I told him, but it was hard for me to harbor such strong convictions about the mistake I felt our nation was making while at the same time studying the law and developing my knowledge of its importance and intricacies.

—Catch it and see what it eats, said the judge.

This is what I thought I heard, at any rate.

—I'm sorry? I said.

The charges were eventually dismissed for lack of evidence. Catch it and see what it eats. Ketchup and see what meats. Catch up and seize the meet. To this day I've not been able to figure out what he really said. If he were still alive, I suppose that after all these years I could look him up and ask him. He seemed a decent-enough sort of man, had seen a lot, had cultivated some sense of balance and distance. He retired a few years after my small episode before his bench, and I read in the paper that he died soon thereafter. No voice, no remembrance. Which brought me back to Kip.

We knew where he was, Jess and I. We tried to know. We knew where Ca Mau and Can Thó were, down toward the very bottom of the country, and we knew the famous sites like Bien Hoa and Khe Sanh. She had hung a map of Vietnam on a wall in the apartment, a vast operational navigation chart with many markings that meant little to us but to a pilot would show where were aerodromes and vertical obstructions, floating villages and pagodas, rice fields. I complained that a map of Vietnam on the living room wall was morbid, and while we could refer to it I didn't see the need for its display.

—Morbid? display?

—Look, can't we just keep it in a drawer? I asked, to which she rejoined, —Listen, Brice, my map is nowhere near as morbid as your burning Buddhist monk, the one I've had to walk past each and every day for how long now?

—That monk is, was, principled and noble.

—And Kip's not.

—Not in the same way.

—I tell you what. You put the monk away, I'll put the map away.

They both would stay up for a while yet.

We were, Jess and I, still hanging in with each other despite the clear difficulties. She shared with me the several letters from Kip that followed that curious first he'd mailed, and what he wrote me I shared with her. Although it is possible he hadn't intended I see hers or she mine, Kip divulged nothing in either correspondence that was so private as to be exclusionary, nor so uninnocent as not to be potentially manipulative. A statement like “I assume Brice is still throwing time and energy into protesting the war, what he needs is love from what I can tell, that would be time and energy better spent, when
will
he find his own woman?” was sufferable because—to my credit or shame?—I had kept my hands to myself, but it would also serve as advice, if not caution, to me, were the letter to be seen by me, which, as I say, it was. I read it as advice to stay away from Jess. Similarly, when I sensed Kip was making inquiry about Jessica's fidelity, he tried to manage it in such a way as to make it more endearing than provocative. Jessie deserves better than an absent fiancé, he might write. Or else, I don't know why any of you has anything to do with me. Rather than interpret these observations as something that might indicate Kip was beginning to lose what center he had, I saw them as quaint rhetoric meant to prod from me some report about her doings, her state of mind. I took it all for false naivete. And again, astute enough to know Jessica might wind up reading my letters, I sensed that he guessed right in thinking her response would be sympathetic.

—Forgotten him? Sometimes I don't understand him. Brice, do me a favor and make sure you let him know—

—I know what to let him know, I said.

When she received his final letter, the letter that came before the telegram that announced he was going to be incommunicado for the length of a tour, she came to her senses about Kip's precariousness. It would come to be called the Last Letter, as if a miserable holy document.

“Dear Jessie,” he wrote, “I'm going insane in this place. What I described in my last letter is basically what is going on now. Boredom incarnate, that's me. Nothing doesn't bore me about where I'm at. Same beat-up old hotel, same bored comrades, not that they're comrades since how can they be when we don't do anything together. It's like a morgue but no dead bodies. Maybe I should be grateful but I'm not. Most of these guys are happy not to be up north where by all accounts the world is coming to an end (for the thousandth time, right). There have been moments I even thought about getting up in the air and going straight toward Da Nang and just forcing myself into action. From what I hear, things are out of control there enough I almost think I could get away with it. But not quite. My other infatuation is the Gulf of Siam. Swear to god if the plane had the range I'd be tempted by Malaysia. It won't, so point moot. This is just ravings. I have to do something soon, though. I'm here and don't let Brice see this or know, but I'm for the first time not so sure why I'm here. You can get out of doing this if you want out badly enough and are willing to sell part of your soul to do so. Look at Brice with his artificial pardon from service. I don't know. And another thing is these South Vietnamese don't seem worth all this effort, they don't seem really to give a fuck one way or the other out in the villages. Just those in power want to keep their hands on the reins and in the tills. The whole exercise seems futile from down in the toilet where I'm positioned. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it, but something—and soon. Sorry to be pissing and moaning. Most letters written from the battlefield are brave boys addressing beautiful worried girls back home, right? Harrowing dignified documents of courage. Like, My darling, we beat back the enemy today and took many casualties but the cause has advanced and Victory shall soon be Ours! I shouldn't even send this bit of drivel, but the frustrations are closing down on me. Or that is, closing me down. And your work? It's all right? And Brice—he's okay? If he's in jail tell him I'm proud of him, and if he thinks I'm being facetious tell him I am being serious. I'm sorry for everything. Love you, Kip.”

Jessica and I happened to be at the apartment when she received the letter and she read it aloud—there was no hiding it from me. It wasn't all that strange to hear. High, low: Kip. He was low—
way
low. No mention of her pregnancy was my first response, but kept to myself. “My other infatuation is the Gulf of Siam” prompted my second: onward Kip, and away? If his airplane could fly over the moon like the cow in the nursery rhyme, would the moon be regarded as beckoning him? Kip, I thought. God, man. What are you doing and who are you?

Jessica was saying that it was clear he hadn't received her letter. Couldn't be that selfish. That wouldn't be Kip, would it? She took a pushpin and stuck it in Da Nang. Red marked places he mentioned, blue places he'd been. And what color would mark where he died? There were plenty of black pins in her little canister. I asked her if she wanted to talk but she said what about? There wasn't anything to talk about.

Then, the telegram.

Jessica had been aware the chances were about one in ten he'd not come home alive, those were the official probabilities. That Kip might be killed or injured she and I had understood. But neither of us was prepared for this. I read the few sentences printed in purple on the leaf of pale yellow paper. The message was remarkable for its marriage of curt precision and inexplicitness.

Capt. William Calder, it disclosed, had volunteered for special operations from a position which was secret. She should not expect to hear from him for at least six months. She should not ask questions. She was respectfully requested to keep the fact he is on special assignment to herself and her immediate family. The captain was in good health and would be back in touch with her when circumstances allowed.

That was all. After the telegram, the few pushpins she'd used to mark Kip's locations in Vietnam seemed sad and vain, and the map was transformed into worthless colored paper. His trail was no longer traceable. I don't think it was a week before the map came down. Jessica, in a rare moment of crooking her thoughts, explained that for some reason she considered it bad luck to leave it up. Maybe so, maybe not. It wasn't my place to agree or dispute. I didn't miss it, though, nor did it occur to me to reciprocate by removing my monk from the door to my room.

Obviously she had not, in the end, gone overseas. Nor had I withdrawn from the apartment again. We persisted. Our lives as individuals and as mates (loaded word, but this is how we began to think of ourselves) began to deepen. How could they not? Jessica Rankin was pregnant, and I was her best friend. Morning sickness, maternity dresses (—Tents is more like it, she said, —tutu tents), what pediatrician and what hospital—these problems and questions we attended to as a team. She refused to rely on anyone but me and above all refused to let her parents in on the pregnancy until the last possible moment. Our world became circumscribed. We were alone with the glorious adversity of it all. We couldn't and didn't allow for any direct comment about what was going on between us, but our discrete intimacy—not to mention our
discreet
intimacy—we allowed to grow. It was treated like some plant in the garden that is not watered by the perverse gardener, but from a biological stubbornness of its own refuses to wilt and perish. Like a tenacious weed with a deepening taproot. And lots of succulent spiny leaves.

What stands out most about that summer is the heat. An
Old Farmer's Almanac
would show just what the weather was truly like, measured by more objective instruments than myself. For all I know there may have been cool showers, unusual chilly nights and days. But I doubt it, because heat, ungodly heat, heat sweltering and heavy with humidity, is all I can conceive when remembering those months.

There was no flowering between us, just the unstated promise of responsibility between one friend and another. None of this was difficult, there was no work involved. We did not
work
on our relationship any more than we tried to discuss or define it—or, for that matter, any more than we called it a relationship. It became understood, in the purest sense became a tacit agreement, that I would help her through the pregnancy and the birth of the child. It was Jessica's idea that if it turned out to be a boy, it would be named William, and mine that were it a girl, she'd be called Ariel.

I never asked why she changed her mind about going to find him, assuming that if she wanted to discuss it with me, she would, given Jessica's penchant for discourse rather than strength through silence, but the morning after she had packed and I had slept so well, she went about her business as if nothing out of the ordinary had taken place just eight or ten hours before. Her eyes were clouded and dark crescents impressed the skin beneath them; otherwise she seemed surreally self-possessed. Sometimes over the years, when I allowed myself thoughts about her slow arc away from Kip, I have wondered whether this wasn't one of the crucial moments in his career of losing Jessica. She left for work—she'd taken a job at a halfway house for troubled children (they call them “at-risk children” now, shifting blame from the runaways and child-vagrants to the society that bred them)—and I indulged myself in a look around her room. The suitcase was back in the closet, as were her clothes. Nothing need be said. She had made her decision. Life went on despite the languorous heat and the silence from abroad.

That September I began my final year of law school.

The first time Kip flew over the Plaine des Jarres, back in his fledgling week as a Raven, so much came back to him from that other part of his life. There was a karst, a tower of limestone that rose from the lush flat, and this reminded him of the volcanic tuff cliffs and great tent rocks that stood like giants in canyons back home. There was an old French colonial road cutting straight as a horizontal plumb line through the bush that put him in mind of Route 502 leading from the Pajarito Plateau down across the unpopulous desert, across a similar beautiful if barren stretch from one place to another—the very road I traveled last night to get from Los Alamos to Chimayó. The Plain of Jars itself was much like the Valle Grande near Redondo Peak, the verdant flat valle caldera, an earthen pan, the remains of a collapsed volcano. Then there were famous and mysterious ancient stone jars, scattered everywhere, broken and overgrown with wild vegetation, which made him think of the equally mysterious ruins of the Anasazi, still charged with potency, and reminded him of the ruined cliffside houses in the dry valleys back in New Mexico, of the Tyuonyi circle with its ratlin of stones in Frijoles Canyon, pueblo fragments now fallen into disarray, but which once meant everything to the Indians who piled them into place. Laos, Kip could see at once, was another land of enchantment.