Fields of Fire (46 page)

Mark declined, obviously upset. Goodrich shrugged, putting the pills back into his pocket. “Are you still waiting tables?”

“The best waiter in Toronto. Can you imagine it? Seven-seventies on my College Boards and I'm a waiter.” Mark allowed himself a smile. “It's been good for me, in a way. I always had this—arrogance—toward waiters until I became one. I see it in others, too. The ones I wait on. Everyone feels superior to a waiter, until they've been one.”

Mrs. Goodrich knocked and entered carrying a tray with a teapot, two cups, sugar and cream. She looked nervously at both of them, her eyes flitting over Mark as if a close stare would burn out the retinas.

Mark was gracious. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Goodrich. You're so kind.”

She still avoided his eyes. “Why, you're welcome. Now—” She looked at her son and then down to his artificial leg, which lay brazenly between him and Mark—“let me know if you want more tea.” She exited quickly.

Mark had shed his coat. Goodrich poked his midsection with a crutch. “You've put on weight.”

“I work in a restaurant. What do you expect?”

“Do you miss it?”

“What?”

“Everything. School, friends, family. You must miss it.”

“You know what makes me the maddest?” Mark seemed confused and somewhat sullen. He took out his pipe and began to pack it from a leather pouch. “That I have to act like a criminal. Like a MURDERER, for God's sake! I have to sneak around and hide and always fear I'll be discovered, every time I cross the magic boundary line between sanctity and rabidity. I have to act like a MURDERER just because I refused to participate in MURDER. You tell me the sense in that!” He lit his pipe. It seemed to calm him. “But, yes. I do get lonely. I miss my family. I'd like to be able to come over to your house like this and visit you every day, without having to sneak back and bang on your window.”

“You should surrender, Mark.” Goodrich said it absently, without rancor or evangelism. “If you'd just gone to jail before, you'd be out right now. You'd be free to do those things. It would be over for you.” He shrugged. “No one would resent you if you did that.”

Mark had obviously contemplated it and rejected it. He was livid. “And why should I go to jail? Am I a criminal? Have I hurt anyone? Am I bad?” He puffed angrily on his pipe. “Why does the law create such absurdities?” He snorted. “The law. The law is an ass. Someone famous said that, once. Dickens, I think.” He looked up to Goodrich. “And it is. It doesn't respond anymore. It's a straitjacket. What kind of coercion is it when your alternatives are to kill or to go to jail?”

Faint memories of arguments with Snake crept steadily through Goodrich's blanket of numbness and he found himself smiling ironically, as if he had just discovered a deep secret. He listened to his voice as it spoke, an echo from another room. “You might not believe this, Mark, but you sound a lot like some of the Marines I served with. On the opposite ends, but on the same wavelength. They used to ask, what kind of law is it that allows a person who doesn't understand your motivations to say you're right or wrong? They never said it that way, but it was the same. And they came out the same. When the rules didn't fit, they ignored them. Only they were pissed off because the law harnessed them, while you're complaining it coerces you.”

Mark puffed his pipe, studying Goodrich. “What about you, Will? Has it affected you?” He nodded toward the empty trouser leg. “Other than physically? I guess that's a dumb question, really. But you were always such a give-a-shit.”

Goodrich smiled resignedly. “I don't know, Mark. I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know how it's affected me.” He eyed Mark mischievously. “I guess it's made me a more dedicated give-a-shit.” He leaned back on his bed. “But I suppose I can say that because I've already lost. I don't know. It can't coerce me any more, and I never had the kind of animal in me that needed to be held back. I guess it's all just become irrelevant.”

“Big Brother is never irrelevant.”

“You've gone paranoid, Mark.”

“That which you call paranoia should be the natural state of man.”

Goodrich sat back up and eyed Mark seriously. “Is there anything I can ever do to make you believe again?”

Mark ran a hand through wild red locks and contemplated Goodrich's artificial leg. “After what it's done to you, how can you still believe? For what did you give your leg eight thousand miles away? Because if you didn't let them line you up like a duck in a shooting gallery they would throw you into jail? What kind of belief is that?”

For the first time, Goodrich felt the itches of unreasoned anger. “Now what the hell do you know about it? What standing do you have to tell me how or why I lost a leg? How many—”

Goodrich's father entered the bedroom without knocking. He stood solemnly, slightly disheveled after his habit of absently massaging his scalp when in deep or troubled thought, and nodded to Mark. “Hello, Mark. How are you?” His voice had the low warblings of an aging man, the troubled flatness of an unsure judge.

Mark rose, mildly startled, and extended his delicate hand toward him.

“Mister Goodrich. How are you, sir?”

“I'm fine, Mark.” Mr. Goodrich gestured toward the door. “I want to talk with you. Would you come with me into the living room?”

Mark glanced at Goodrich, then back to his father. “Sure, Mister Goodrich. Sure.”

Goodrich peered curiously at his father. “Come on in, Dad. Have a seat. Talk as long as you like.”

“No.” His father avoided his eyes. “I have something to say to Mark that can't be said in front of you, Will. Now.” Mr. Goodrich gestured to the door. “Would you come to the living room with me, Mark?”

“The living room. All right, Mister Goodrich.” As Mark left the room he raised his eyebrows and shrugged to Goodrich.

Goodrich lit a cigarette, lying across his bed. He sensed that his father wanted to berate Mark for evading the draft, and to question his right to come into their home so blatantly when he was a fugitive. His father, he mused, was like that: the last of the old-time moral-purist lawyers. But it irritated him that his father thought he should confront Mark in private. What the hell does he think I've become—a hunk of Jell-O that can't take part in a debate like that? Who the hell got burnt in Vietnam? That's my debate.

There were no voices from the living room that would indicate a debate. A few low-toned exchanges had reached the isolation of his bedroom, but that was all. Goodrich became impatient, and climbed onto his crutches.

I'm not going to sit back here like a schoolboy.

Outside, a car door slammed. Its engine started, racing angrily, then faded with the car's departure. The noise of the car, just in front of their house, caused Goodrich's blood to pulse in anticipation. Something was happening.

In the living room Goodrich's father sat in a large chair across from the sofa, motionless. He appeared very tired. His mother stood nervously behind the chair, obviously dreading his entrance into the room. She had clothed herself, even at near-midnight, and brushed her platinum hair.

“Where's Mark?”

His father eyed him tiredly. “He's gone.”

His mother kneaded the fabric of the chair in both her hands. “Oh, you have to tell him, Peter. You can't just say that.”

“All right.” His father stared straight ahead for another long moment, precisely into nothing with his opaque, aged eyes. “The police took him away.”

“The police?” Goodrich leaned forward on his crutches. “In here?” He remembered the car that had raced off a moment before. “They came inside to get him?” His father nodded. “I didn't hear a thing. Not even a shout.”

“He didn't fight it. What could he do?” His father's voice took on just the slightest acerbic edge. “He isn't a fighter anyway. He's a runner.”

Goodrich eyed his parents with growing awareness. “How did the police find him?”

“I called them.”

They peered into each other's faces for a long, mute moment, Goodrich pondering absently that he was looking into a mirror that reflected how he himself would appear in another forty years, if he somehow managed to survive the insanity that Vietnam had brought him and live that long.

His father continued. “He should have known I would do it. In a way, I think he did know. He acted almost as if he expected it when he saw them. The only thing he said was—”

“What did he say?”

His father smiled faintly, almost daring to be amused. “He said, ‘So it's time to come and lock the savage up.’ How about that? ‘The savage.’ ”

“How could you do something like that, Dad?” Goodrich dropped heavily to the sofa, his crutches crashing to the floor. “He came here trusting me. And you, too!”

“I'm not sure he did. Maybe so. He looked awful relieved when he left here. And he knows me. He must have known I would do it. Maybe he didn't expect it. I don't know. But it doesn't matter, anyway. He asked for it and he got it.”

“You're not that much of a martinet, Dad! You've never been that way.”

His father peered solemnly at him. “It doesn't take a martinet. You act like the boy did nothing more than steal a stick of bubble gum from some department store. To my mind, he committed the ultimate crime, Son. He rejected the society that nourished him.” He softened a bit, eyeing his son. “It wasn't an easy thing for me to do, Will. I like Mark. But I can't forget what he's done and I can't ignore it. He did it willingly, with his eyes open, and he has flaunted the law by coming here from Canada.”

“I can't believe this.” Goodrich was nearing tears. “He hasn't harmed anyone, Dad. He was only following his conscience. You have to respect him for that. It isn't easy.”

“Then respect me, too. I'm only following mine. And you're wrong about the harm, Son. He's harming a whole nation. Those people have no sense of country. They don't look beyond themselves. That's as far as their obligation goes. Well, so be it. But if they're willing to accept the benefits of this society—like a Harvard education—they should also accept the burdens.” His father looked up at him. “I'm not happy you went into the Marines, Will. But I accepted it. I wouldn't have been very happy if you'd refused the draft and gone to jail, but I could have accepted that. But I'd have buried my face in mortal shame if you'd done what Mark did. He ignored the law. He turned his back on the whole structure that binds our society.”

Goodrich held his buzzing head in both hands. The world had just succeeded in finding the final little nudge that sent it topsy-turvy. “He didn't do anything really wrong, Dad. I think I have the standing to say that.”

“You were arguing with him when I came in—”

“I don't want him to tell me about Vietnam. But he isn't wrong.”

“You know what we've lost, William? We've lost a sense of responsibility, at least on the individual level. We have too many people like Mark who believe that the government owes them total, undisciplined freedom. If everyone thought that way, there would be no society. We're so big, so strong now, that people seem to have forgotten that a part of our strength comes from each person surrendering a portion of his individual urges to the common good. And the common good is defined by who wins at the polls, and the policies they make. Like it or lump it.”

“For a lawyer you're being pretty idealistic, Dad. And—”

“The legal end of this can only work in Mark's favor. He may very well get off on a technicality.”

“What about the duty to protest? What Mark was doing is as old as Thoreau. Civil disobedience is as American as—killing Indians!”

His father smiled, just the smallest curving of his mouth. “That answers itself, Son. Thoreau went to jail, not to Canada. That's civil disobedience. The other is self-interest, cloaked with morality.”

He held his head again. It was going to explode, blow him mindless. “How can I face Mark after this?”

His father pointed to his leg. “How can he face you after that?”

“That's not important. I did it to myself. He didn't do it to me.”

“That's called accepting responsibility for your acts, Son. If Mark does the same, you'll have no trouble continuing your friendship. He did it to himself, too. At least in the larger sense.”

“It's not that simple.”

“Self-discipline is never simple.”

Goodrich rose, with great effort, and inched his way back toward his room. “I need to go to bed. I need to get some sleep. I need to take a pill.”

II

The buildings were the same. Trees still sprawled thick and old. The students were only mildly different: hair a bit longer, clothing more casual, the ardent issues war and ecology rather than civil rights and Red China. But in the core they were the same: idealistic, inexperienced, waiting to be molded by some event, to react gallantly to cleanse the social order of its dark spots.

It was all the same, and yet he could no longer identify with it. He had grown beyond it, or perhaps merely away from it. His intimate rubbings in the dirt and bake of Vietnam, his exposure to minds unfogged by academic posturings, his months of near-total dependence on the strengths and skills of persons who would have been no more than laughable pariahs, or a moment of chic elbow-rub, to the students who now surrounded him, joined to make him question all his earlier premises.

It took the school experience to make him realize how much he had changed. He became something of an instant curiosity on campus, a Real Live Wounded Vet, as rare at Harvard as a miner at a tea party. He remained silent in his classes, and was alternately cynical and sardonic when called on to recite. Between classes he was recognizable on the long stone walks, a solitary, limping figure whose head was often down, who worked his artificial leg with effort and seldom looked or spoke to the ones he passed.

He would play a game with himself, walking through the hallways and the crowded cafeterias. Conversations would drift toward him from the groups of people nearby—all the subtleties and nuances of Vietnam: Moral Obligation Dominoes Containment Nuremberg Geneva Intervention Hearts and Minds …

And he would wonder if any of them saw him limp. He tried to walk correctly, exerted much effort in his attempts. But it doesn't matter, he would muse sarcastically. I'm invisible. I'm on the ground. They can't see me, I'm too fucking real.

But it cut him deeply. He would often return to his small apartment rather than attend class, and sit in the dark for hours, under the wail of acid rock that belched from his stereo. He would pop a full quota of pills (the body no longer needing them but the mind craving them desperately) and once again, for the millionth time, explore the reaches of his nerve ends, searching out emotions that might help him face the empty words, and the stares that followed his limp. The stares were the worst part. And their insinuations.

No one knows what it's like to be the Bad Man
To be the Sad Man
Behind blue eyes.
No one knows what it's like to be hated
To be fated
To telling only lies.
But my dreams they aren't as empty
As my conscience seems to be
I have hours, only lonely
My love is vengeance that's never free.

I try, he would mourn. I really do. Not as hard as I could, I guess, but I'm not one-way about this. And I can't try any harder. I've lost respect for these people. They're so—ethereal. In fact, they're downright spacy.

He continued to contrast them with the members of his squad in Vietnam, and slowly he came to realize that his deep exposure to each group had spoiled him, detached him from the other. It had not been in him to accept the primitive viciousness that came naturally to Snake and some of the others. He was equally uncomfortable with the fog-headed intellectualisms of his schoolmates. His classmates and professors reminded him of Tocqueville's descriptions of the stratified, vaporous intellectuals who brought about the French Revolution in the name of unattainable ideals. Someone needs to clue them in, he would muse, about what's really happening down there where the spears fly.

Then one day the thought knifed through his pillbuzz that he was the only one who could do it. If he could ever gain the energy to confront the stares.

UNEXPECTEDLY, they came to him.

Cambodia. He had seen the President's address on television, and remembered all the silly, irritating restrictions of Vietnam combat, and actually felt pleased about the announcement, in a detached sort of way. It was all irrelevant anymore, none of it mattered, but if it had to continue, at least it should be rational. And Cambodia seemed rational.

He was asleep when the door buzzer rang. It blasted flatly through his slumber, again and again. He found his trousers and crutches and made his way through the apartment to the door. He opened it and faced two men he had never seen before. One was short and stocky, with dull blond hair and a wide, placid face. He wore a Pendleton shirt and frayed Levis. The other was frail and hook-nosed, with lit, angry eyes and an impatient posture. He wore a jeans jacket, with a clenched fist and a Viet Cong flag on the back. Both had shoulder-length hair.

The short man spoke. His voice was deep and modulated, almost sad. “Are you Will Goodrich?” He nodded toward the empty trouser leg. “I assume you are.”

Goodrich leaned forward on his crutches, wiping his face in an attempt to shake the drowsiness. “Yeah. What do you need?”

“Can we speak with you for a moment?”

Goodrich checked his watch. It was past midnight.

The short man caught his gesture. “I'm sorry about the time. We've been working steadily for a couple hours now, and we have to be ready to go tomorrow first thing. So it had to be now. We'll be up all night.”

“Doing what?” Goodrich gestured for them to come inside, and made his way to the couch. They followed, the short man still talking.

“Getting ready. It's going to be big tomorrow. It will be the biggest one we've had. I'm sorry. You probably don't know us.”

The frail, impatient companion finally spoke. “But you saw Tricky Dick's speech tonight, didn't you? The fucking fascist. The bastard's sick, man.”

The short man continued, obviously tolerating his companion's outbursts with some discomfort. “I'm Paul Kerrigan. This is Sid Braverman. We're part of the Student Coalition To End The War. You probably aren't aware of what's going on at the campus. People are pretty upset about this Cambodia thing.”

Goodrich was mildly surprised. “Really?”

Braverman nodded quickly, inspecting Goodrich's stereo. “That's right. They're tearing that place apart, man.”

Kerrigan corrected him. “Well, not really. Not yet, anyway. But it's pretty active. And tomorrow we're having a full-fledged rally. We're setting up a platform, down where they used to hold the football rallies. You know the place.”

Goodrich smiled vaguely through a lingering drowsiness. “Oh, yeah. I used to be in the band. We were at all the rallies.”

Kerrigan and Braverman exchanged tentative glances. Kerrigan spoke. “Well, we're lining up speakers for tomorrow. And as near as I can determine, you're the only person who's really been in it, you know what I mean?” Goodrich nodded. Kerrigan continued, encouraged by the nod. “We think you could really give the rally some credibility if you would speak at it.”

Braverman joined in. “Yeah, man. You could really lay it on everybody about how bad the Nam stinks. You know, like what did you see that was worth giving a leg for—” Kerrigan cut him off and he shrugged as if preoccupied.

They both seemed slightly embarrassed, as if they had unwittingly tipped their hands. Goodrich absently rubbed his stump and managed to smile to them. “Look. You don't have to try and buffalo me. I know why you want me to speak, and it doesn't have a hell of a lot to do with what my opinion might be.” Goodrich mimicked the announcer at the rally, gesturing like a circus master of ceremonies. “Here, folks, on our very stage, is graphic evidence of experiment gone afoul. Specimen reports unfavorable reactions to terror and misery. Examine left trouser leg, which now is empty. Specimen is entirely credible to make observations on experiment. Now specimen will say, in his very own words, that it was shitty. Take it awayyyyy, Goodrich.”

Goodrich lit a cigarette. “Does that embarrass you? It shouldn't. But let's start with honest premises, all right? Now. If I did this—and to be honest, I'm not terribly worked up about it—what would you expect me to say?”

Kerrigan folded his arms, studying Goodrich. “Well, within reason, you could say whatever you wish. I mean, we don't expect you to come out and ask for more troops to the war zone, or anything like that.”

“No. That's not what I had in mind.”

“And what we really need is somebody who is able to talk about how shitty it was in the Nam. How senseless the killings were. How it felt to see your buddies get wasted. The whole immorality bit. You know, the desecrations, the tortures, the atrocities. I'll bet in the Marines you saw a lot of that.”

“That's all a bunch of shit.”

“What?” Both stared incredulously at Goodrich.

“It's all a bunch of shit. I have more standing to say that than any person in this school. And I say it's a bunch of shit.”

Braverman peered at Goodrich with unmuted hostility. “With My Lai in the paper every day you tell me it's a bunch of shit?”

“I didn't say things don't happen. And I don't know anything about My Lai. But it's a bunch of shit to say it's regular or even condoned. Look, man. I fought with myself about this for months. I even turned a guy in for murder. I thought it was my duty. But I just don't know anymore. What you guys are missing is the confrontation. It loses its simplicity when you have to deal with it.”

Braverman and Kerrigan appeared confused and hostile. Goodrich continued. “Look at the people. Are they murderers? You don't know. You haven't dealt with them, and you haven't been through what they've been through. It's easy to sit here and say that. But you haven't had it eat away at you. It gets you. It gets everybody, man. It took five months, but it got me, even, and good Christ if it got me it gets everybody. You drop someone in hell and give him a gun and tell him to kill for some goddamned amorphous reason he can't even articulate. Then suddenly he feels an emotion that makes utter sense and he has a gun in his hand and he's seen dead people for months and the reasons are irrelevant anyway, so pow. And it's utterly logical, because the emotion was right. That isn't murder. It isn't even atrocious. It's just a sad fact of life.”

He pondered the two. “You know why I'm all fucked up?” He waved his stump, forcing them to look at it. “Because of a little girl. That's right. A little babysan sucked me right out into the open so the NVA could start an ambush.” They did not seem particularly surprised: The People's War Against Imperialism. Right in the books, Will. He continued. “I was a team leader. I had a kid who was going to shoot her. I knocked his rifle down. Just in time to see him shot in the face.” Still no reaction from them. Also in the books: The Goo That Was Your Best Friend's Face. Already been done once. Sorry, Will. Be original, will you?

“Do you know how it feels to know you caused that? I'll see his face staring at that babysan for the rest of my life. And I'll tell you what. If I hadn't had the shit blown out of me, it would have given me great pleasure to hunt that little girl down and blow her away.”

He eyed them with a shrewd grin. “And I'll bet a month's pay that you two would have been the first to join me in the hunt. It's like role-playing. Activists will always be activists, and you'd be the first to get uptight.”

Braverman seethed with anger. “I've had enough. Take your artificial leg and shove it.” He rose from his chair and began to walk to the door.

Kerrigan still pondered Goodrich. “I'm sorry you feel that way.” He folded his arms again. “You said something about your own statement. Do you have a statement you'd like to make?”

“I don't know. Like I said, the idea doesn't exactly move me. But they—you—should know what you're doing to a lot of people. It isn't this simple, man. You're hurting a lot of people.”

“Do you want it to end?”

“The war? Sure I want it to end.”

“Can you start your speech with that? That you want it to end? As long as you make that clear, you'll serve our purposes.” Kerrigan shrugged. “You said you appreciated honesty. We need your statement. After that, I'll give you a couple minutes.” He smiled, then turned to leave. “But I'd appreciate it if you'd hold back on your theories.”

HE drove to the wide, flat field, scene of so many innocent events in years gone by, pep rallies and rock concerts. There was a good crowd on it, scattered here, close together there, some sitting on its outskirts in little groups as if it were indeed a picnic. There was an air of merriment among the gathered students. They were camouflaged in jeans and khaki, masked with unkemptness, almost as if they were secretly ashamed of the largeness of their own futures, or felt constrained to deny the certainties of their own lives.

Kerrigan and Braverman had arranged for him to park near the speaker's platform, along the road. He stopped the car and undid his artificial leg, as they had asked, leaving it in the car. Then he made his way up the platform, on his crutches.

The crowd had begun to chant. “HO. HO. HO CHI MINH. THE N.L.F. IS GONNA WIN.”

He stood uneasily on the platform, agonizingly self-conscious of his legless state. Just below him a girl in cutoff jeans sat comfortably on someone's shoulders. Her arms were outstretched, fists clenched, moving up and down in rhythm to the chants. Her face smiled excitedly. Her shirt was tied in a knot above the belly button, and unbuttoned except for the bottom two buttons. Her breasts were huge. They also bounced with the rhythm. Goodrich watched the breasts bounce merrily and tried to remember if he had ever experienced such lovelies. He hadn't.

Across the field the flag came down. A new one rose. It was red and blue, with a bright gold star in its center. Goodrich's insides churned mightily. He told himself that he was able to intellectualize such frivolity, that although it would have enraged those like Snake and Bagger, he himself understood it. But soon he stopped pretending: He was shaking with a deep rage. If he had been stronger, he would have crossed the field and lowered the flag himself. Or so he consoled himself as he peered at waiting eyes, isolated on the stage.

“HO! HO! HO CHI MINH!”

And a thousand corpses rotted in Arizona.