Beach Music (98 page)

On this voyage, our friendship, our unspoken love for one another, formed a mansion without pillars or supports. Drifting, we knew we were heading for a time when Jordan would disappear from our lives as precipitously as he had entered it on a skateboard, wild hair flying, so many years before. Shyla could feel the silence of glades healing Jordan of his most immediate agony. Wolves started to call to each other across the vast wilderness and we once heard a pack in full flight during a hunt. When we talked about God, we found it was easy to believe in him while moving through the medallionlike waters of these sun-swelled lakes. On pebbled beaches where we camped, Jordan would pull agates and fire opals from streambeds and present them to us as wedding gifts.

For ten days we drifted; and only when we came to a small lakeside town and saw a Canadian Mountie walking down a dock did we realize our journey was over. For three days, we had been in Canadian waters without knowing it. In Canada, Jordan could make his way among an entire people tolerant of war resisters.

When we ate dinner on our last night together, Shyla and I toasted Jordan, and drank to his future. We were sure we would never see him again and he told us that he would only put us in danger if he tried to communicate with us in any way.

“What you did for me goes beyond friendship,” Jordan said, “because I know that you’re both horrified by what I did. I’ll try to make up for my actions. I’ll try to find meaning in all this. I promise.”

“We love you, Jordan,” Shyla said. “That’s meaning enough for anybody.”

When we woke the next day, Jordan had slipped out into the Canadian countryside to begin his life on the run. Shyla and I started back, where the memory of Jordan was imprinted on every lake we crossed. We made love for the first time in Canada and found we liked it. It took us twice as long to retrace our steps back to Grand Marais. We told ourselves we had raised the art of a honeymoon to new plateaus. One night, we made love listening to a wolf pack gathering for the hunt. We both agreed we had started our married life off right. So we were married the next day by a justice of the peace in Grand Marais, Minnesota. It took us three weeks of
camping before we finally made it back to South Carolina and the lives we were meant to lead.

T
he silence was passionate yet abstract in the theater when I stopped speaking and returned to my seat. We all needed to compose ourselves in the late Charleston afternoon. Like figures in a painting we looked as though we had lost ourselves in some barely glimpsed, stolen landscape where no one spoke our native tongue. Jordan had awakened a part of all of us that had long ago fallen prey to easy associations of misremembrance. The theater felt like a confessional underground. In the airlessness that followed my account, I swallowed the dust of time itself. I tried to consider the part I had played in this excruciating drama of my college years and realized I did not recognize the description of the boy I once was. Somewhere in this story I found myself missing in action in a tale of my own life. I waited for a summing up, a gathering of all the disparate and contradicting parts, a voice from the past to grant benediction for a life I did not even realize I was leading. In those heady days, I had let instinct rule my every move and thought nothing through completely. The young man who spirited Jordan through the wolf-haunted country of the Boundary Waters was dead and unmourned. I had lost the fiery, irreconcilable boy I once was on a Charleston bridge, yet realized that was the boy that everyone on this stage remembered as me. It was the same boy I feared had sent Shyla to her death, signed the marching orders that directed her to the railing overlooking Charleston and the home we shared together. Looking at Ledare, I saw her studying me and I knew that Ledare had bided her time throughout this year and had made the error of falling in love with me. She wore this love in her eyes, all over her face, and made no effort to hide it. I wanted to warn her, to tell her that my love was all fury and sharp edges. I made a sport of killing the women I loved and I did it with a guile and a softness that had all the markings of a true vocation. But everywhere I looked on that stage, I found love peeling off from a dark squadron, making strafing runs against me. I had failed to live fully because I had not come to terms with the alliances and fates of this imbalanced gathering of souls.
Our pain bound us in a terrible love knot. I wanted to speak, but so did everyone else.

We waited—wordless—and the cameras rolled unnoted all around us.

Something was keeping us from talking to one another. A presence had come onto that stage unbidden and invisible. As long as it lay there undetected there would be no armistice among us. I had not felt the presence of this ghost for so long it took me a while to recognize its demoralizing ascension. Then I saw it, and could recognize it as an old friend that had trailed us to this stage.

“Hello, Vietnam,” I said to myself. “Long time no see.” Yet it inked its shape in the tissues of the silence that held us in its tense concentric folds. As a country, Vietnam was not important; but as a wound, it was unbearable. We could not run far enough away from it; it followed us on stumps and crutches, prided itself on being omnipresent and inescapable. Though I had hated that war with my body and soul, I realized sitting there that Vietnam was still
my
war. I had blamed it for the great unraveling it had brought to America, the self-doubt, the breakdown of courtesy, the death of form, and the falling apart of all the old truths and the integrity of both law and institutions. Everything came up for grabs. Nothing survived the cut. The facile and the cheap became celebrated and the speech of idiots took on a benighted, kingly quality. Solidity was a concept found only in physics textbooks. Indifference took center stage and it was hard to believe anything. God pulled back. I had searched the whole world for something to believe in and I had come up empty-handed every time. “Hello, Vietnam,” I said again to myself. “Time for us to make friends,” as I waited for one of us to find our voice.

Finally, someone spoke and I was surprised to hear Capers Middleton’s voice. “What was all this really about? I’ve heard everything and I still don’t understand it. I need help with this. I truly do.”

“That’s how life goes,” General Elliott said. “There are no guarantees.”

“How convenient for you to say that,” his wife, Celestine, said. “Avoid responsibility. Spread the blame. Like you’ve always done.”

“What I’d like you to know …” Capers began.

“You’re too hard on yourself …” Betsy said, taking her husband’s arm.

“No, let me say this,” Capers said and he looked as troubled as I have ever seen a man look. “I had no idea how this would turn out. I’d’ve done it all differently. I had no idea it could lead to all this. It hurt people I thought the world of. It won’t let go of me. It’s always there.”

“I’m a lot easier on myself,” Radical Bob Merrill said with an easy grin. Unlike the rest of us, Jordan’s recitation had no emotional impact on him at all. “I did what I thought was right back then. Hindsight’s groovy, but a total waste of time.”

Mike Hess, the producer again, snapped his finger and said, “Bye-bye, Radical Bob. Go back to the hotel. Enjoy dinner and fly back into your life. You’re dismissed.”

Bob Merrill rose up and walked off, stage right, and out of our lives, forever. No one watched him go or even said good-bye.

“Okay,” Mike said, facing the rest of us. “We need an ending to all this. Got to find an ending. Let’s help each other out now.”

“It got away from me, Dad,” Jordan said to his father. “Nothing was clear to me.”

“The times were folded wrong, odd. You couldn’t hold them up and look at them. Things happened too fast,” Ledare said.

“You weren’t even alive then, Ledare,” Mike said. “That was one spaceship you didn’t ride.”

“I was watching,” Ledare said. “I inherited Capers, pulled him out of the wreckage. I think he suffered from all we’ve just listened to. I didn’t think Capers could ever forgive me for loving him after what he did to his friends.”

“I don’t think you know the real Capers,” Betsy said, rushing to her husband’s defense.

“I’m guilty of a little insider trading there,” Ledare said. “I’ve got more than a passing acquaintance of your boy there.”

“That wasn’t the real Capers,” Betsy insisted. “Not the one I know.”

“No, honey,” Capers said. “They knew that was the real me. I’m asking them to accept that part of me. It was there all the time
and all of them knew it. What I didn’t know is that it had the power to hurt my friends. I ruined Jordan Elliott’s life. Look what I did to his parents.”

Betsy let the words settle, then said, “You’ve always been your own harshest critic.”

“Shut up, Betsy,” Mike Hess said. “Pretty please, but shut up.”

“Can there be forgiveness?” Capers asked. “That’s what I have to know.”

“You? Asking forgiveness of them?” General Elliott said, in disbelief. “You’re the only one on this stage who conducted yourself with honor in this whole affair.”

“What would you know about honor?” Celestine asked her husband. “Tell us all you know about the subject, darling. Tell it to the wife and son you betrayed.”

“Dad was true to his code, Mom,” Jordan said. “He betrayed no one.”

“Harsh code,” I said.

“I didn’t understand it either,” Jordan admitted, “until I met a couple of Jesuits in Rome.”

Father Jude and the abbott laughed, but the joke was too ecclesiastical for the rest of us.

“Jordan,” Ledare said, “did you become a priest because it was the best place to hide from the past?”

“No,” he said. “It was the best place to hide from the present. And from myself. But I grew into my vocation, Ledare. I was born to be a priest, but I had to kill two innocent people to find that out.”

“Why didn’t you just say an extra rosary, son?” the general asked sarcastically. “It would’ve saved two lives and the Marine Corps a plane.”

“I wish it happened that way, Dad,” said Jordan, his hands folded across his lap.

“What a shame you lacked character,” General Elliott said to his son.

“It wasn’t character I lacked,” Jordan said. “It was moderation.”

“Leave my son alone,” Celestine said.

“He’s my son too,” the general said.

I said, “Then act like it. Look at him when he speaks, General.”

“I can’t help who I am,” General Elliott said directly to me.

“Nor can I, Dad,” Jordan said quietly.

Celestine rose to her feet and approached her husband fiercely. “Don’t you see it, Rembert? It’s so obvious now. No one could’ve acted in a different manner than they did. Fate’s a maidservant of character. Hired help and nothing else. You haven’t changed one degree since I met you. Look at you. Pure of spirit. Holier than thou. Watch your rigidity. I know what you’re after today. I don’t have to ask you. You don’t have thoughts, only patterns. You’d charge an enemy’s foxhole to save the lives of all of us here. But you’d charge it harder if you knew our son was hiding there. You want our boy in prison. You want him to rot in jail.”

Jordan said, “I’m a monk, Mom. Cells hold no fear for me. It’s another place to pray in.”

“You were stolen out of my life, Jordan,” she said. “I can never forgive him for doing that. And I never can forgive myself for letting it happen. I’m divorcing your father out of pure shame and exhaustion.”

“You’re wrong to do that, Celestine,” the general said. “It’s not that you loved Jordan more than I did. It’s that you appeared to. That’s all. The appearances of things formed you. I admit that …”

“Go on, General,” said Mike Hess, and it came out as an order, not a request.

The general appeared surprised, then he went on. “I submit that I loved Jordan as much as my wife did. But within the restraints and limits of a man of my time. I was good at leading men into battle. Few men possess that gift. I could always connect with fighting men. A better father couldn’t have been as good a soldier.”

There was a rap on the gavel and I heard my father speak. “You’re no longer a Marine, Rembert. That’s all over. What are you going to do about Jordan now?”

“I’m going to hold him accountable,” the general answered.

“I’ve seen something today that’s surprised me,” my father said, and suddenly I saw him look at me. “Jordan holds you in much
higher regard than Jack holds me. Anyone can see that. Yet it seems to mean nothing to you.”

“Jordan was raised to know right from wrong,” the general began, “but when his country called, he was absent.”

“You mean the Vietnam thing?” Capers asked.

“Yeh, the Vietnam thing,” the general answered. “You can’t help the generation you were born in. I’m grateful I wasn’t born in yours.”

“Yeh, you came from great folks,” I said, nearly exploding. “Thanks for presenting my generation with that fabulous little war. We’ll die grateful that we tore into each other because you guys were stupid.”

“It was too much war for you, Jack,” General Elliott said.

I replied, “It was too
little
war for me, General. That’s what you don’t get.”

“I was expecting more from you, Rembert,” my father said to the general.

“You were expecting more of me?” the general asked, his voice stony.

“Jordan came here because he wanted to tell you his story,” the judge said. “All the rest of us are superfluous.”

“You fought the Germans in Europe, Judge. You were a decorated infantryman. What do you think about Jack and the others and how they responded when our nation needed them?”

“I wouldn’t have done it their way,” my father admitted.

“Indeed,” the general said.

“But let’s be truthful. We’re holding them up to standards that no longer apply,” the judge said. “My son Jack stood up for what he believed in. That’s how he was raised.”

I nodded my appreciation to my father and he returned it in kind. The general watched the acknowledgments pass between us.

“Let’s be brutally honest,” the general said. “He was raised by the town drunk, Judge. Standards, you say? I doubt if you were sober long enough to know if Jack was in the house.”