Memorial Bridge (65 page)

When it was clear to all that the general was not going to reply to his son, the agent-in-charge nodded at his men. They firmly pulled the woman up, and then her son. As they led him off, he looked away from his father, a show of resolution, as if this had not been a moment of absolute, obliterating rejection.

When Sean faced Cass, her sore eyes were pinned on him, and for the first time since their beginning, the word for what he saw in an expression of hers was hatred.

Their beginning.

He refused at first to look away. The hatred in her eyes drew his eyes like a flame, and he knew it was hatred for him.

There were the slams of the Bureau car doors, and the sooty noise of their engines as they drove away.

Then that silence again.

No "Taps" now, no roaring flyover, no triple volley of guns. No muffled weeping either. The silence of pure aftermath.

Their beginning: Was this end implicit in it? That was the question he wanted to ask her. He turned to stare out at noble, spare Washington across Memorial Bridge, but saw instead all those door-shaped marble stones at his feet, ten thousand doors, which began to open slowly on the one long corridor of all the choices they had made.

He shook himself, and looked back at the other powerful men of Washington who had drifted down from the knoll, witnesses. The various expressions on their starched faces all said the same thing: You're lucky, General, this damned war being what it is, that all you've lost is your son.

By afternoon, since the cellblocks deep inside the courthouse were essentially unventilated, heat had replaced noise as the thing to hate most. It seemed that the sultry Washington air had infiltrated the double-lock doors in order to have the moisture baked out of it. There were perhaps four dozen cells on two levels, and each one, he assumed, was like his, a windowless cubicle not much wider or longer than the bunk,
into the corner of which he had curled himself. A second bunk—unoccupied, thank God—crowded him from above. The two bunks, except for the jammed, overflowing metal toilet, were the only furniture, and even the narrow steel slabs, lacking mattresses, were more like shelves than beds. In fact, every surface in the closed space was cement or metal, which was why each sound bounced and bounced again, a cacophony of clanging doors, curses, barked commands, an endless series of outraged, self-canceling echoes. Several times an hour agitated men had been brought into the lockup from holding cells elsewhere in the building, or from jails, or, freshly arrested, from the street. Every such arrival, like every appearance of guards in the narrow aisle on the first level, had set off the noise.

He had sat for a long time with his arms around his head, trying to shut the din out. Because the heat seemed to drain the space around him of air, he had begun holding his mouth open until his jaw hurt, as if that would make it easier to breathe. The excruciating pain in his chest was perhaps a sign of mere suffocating and not, as he'd thought, of anxiety-induced heart attack. He brought his hands down from his head and unclenched them. They were gray. He used his hands to hoist himself off the shelf of his bunk into the two-yard-wide space beside it. He unfolded his lanky body and stood up, averting his eyes from the disgusting toilet, although the stink of the brimming foul liquid hit him again. He began to pace between the bars of the cell door and the wall to which the toilet was fixed, turning briskly every few steps, all in an effort to get the air moving across his face. Soon he found he could walk the few steps to and fro with his eyes closed, and he resolved on impulse to pretend he was a free man strolling outside in a garden. But the image that came at once to mind was the hemmed-in stretch of grassy park at the end of Generals' Row where he had always dreamed of playing football with his father.

He stopped his pacing and opened his eyes. The stark vertical bars of the cell door were a foot in front of his face, and all at once the pain in his chest intensified, the panic of claustrophobia. He felt sure he was about to explode like a pus-swollen beetle on the scalding summer sidewalk. He had to move with energy or burst, and in that small space only one move was possible. He turned and, stepping on the edge of the lower bunk, hefted himself neatly up onto the upper. He settled on his back. The stained ceiling was a mere three feet above his face. Until now
he had shunned the upper bunk because it was mercilessly exposed to the naked light bulb hanging on frayed wire from the ceiling just outside the cell. The bars were harder to ignore from that bunk, and the light itself was infinitely more aggressive than the grotto-like shadow below. He stared up at the light bulb feeling dizzy, thinking of Camus' Meursault, who blamed the relentless Algerian sun not only for his indifference to the man he'd killed, but for his real crime, indifference to the fact of Maman's death. Heat and glare, the absurd, individual moral action against hopeless odds, exile, mad revolt and genuine rebellion—he loved Camus. Camus was his Moses. He pictured Dr. Rieux, who always appeared in his mind as a version of the French actor Yves Montand. He conjured the deep, curling voice in which his careful imagination rendered all French epigrams: To resist the pestilence is not heroic but a matter of common decency. Common decency, he repeated to himself as he shrank into the corner, where the steel shelf met the cinder block wall.

He closed his eyes and saw the face of his own mother, to whom he was in no way indifferent. He pictured her as she had been at the cemetery that morning, how she had turned on his father, demanding that he intervene. How she had held him; for a moment he had felt at peace in the old cradle of her arms. Yet once again, in the rough way the FBI agents had yanked her away from him, his mother had been the one whom he had caused to be hurt. Here was where the excruciating pain in his chest came from, an agony of guilt—how he had hurt his mother, hurt her and hurt her and hurt her again, when it was his father with whom he had his quarrel. But his father, as in the cemetery and as everywhere his whole life long, was too stolid to hurt.

From the main cellblock entrance at the far end of the narrow aisle came the clang, and its echo, of the huge steel door banging open. He could picture it, like the door of a bank vault, and he remembered how the first sight of its thickness had panicked him in ways the jolt of his arrest had not, not the handcuffs nor the booking procedure nor even the humiliation of being fingerprinted. The door had terrorized him because the door was going to close, as he thought of it, on his body, as if he were dead already. It was going to close on his future, and on his membership in every collective that mattered to him, when what he wanted, even more than such a door closing on, say, the war, was for a stout, transcendent door like that to close on the feeling he had of being so alone.

From Randall Crocker's funeral in Arlington Richard Dillon had been brought to the lockup in the bunker-like federal courthouse across from the clay tennis courts on which he had played several matches for St. Anselm's School, near the intersection of Pennsylvania and Constitution avenues. The Capitol itself was only two blocks up the hill from there.

By June of 1968 it was not unusual, of course, for young men like him to be hauled into such places, but not in the way that he was. Richard had attended his first peace march only months before, yet now here he was in jail!

The trauma of arrest in civil rights and peace demonstrations was supposedly mitigated by the fellow feeling of protesters, their bonds with each other and the rituals that preserved them—the singing and the linking of arms and the flashing of peace signs and, at climactic or fearsome moments, the hugging and the weeping. But Richard Dillon had gone to jail alone. Nothing had mitigated his trauma and now, hours after his arrest, with no clear sense of what he was charged with or when he would, if ever, get out, he was sinking deeper and deeper into a chasm of despair where only one thing was clear, that he had made a terrible mistake, because he could not do this.

The cellblock door banged shut, and prisoners in their cells began to hoot at the guards as they escorted a newcomer into the lockup. Richard listened as the footsteps grew louder, and he abruptly twisted around in his bunk and sat up as far as he could under that ceiling as he realized they were coming toward his cell.

A huge black man with his hands cuffed behind his back appeared on the other side of the bars. A pair of guards, both white, were on either side of him, each holding one of the man's arms. They were dwarfed by his size and they lacked utterly the mean cockiness that had so cowed Richard when they'd brought him in. The prisoner's forehead was freshly bandaged. His eyes flashed with hostility as he glared into the cell, right at Richard.

"Hate to do this to you, Quaker," one guard said as he applied a key to the cell door.

The black man only stared at Richard. Though Richard was perched on the bunk high off the ground, his and the new prisoner's eyes were on the same level. The man was nearly seven feet tall.

Richard did not blame black people for their rage, especially after the murder of Dr. King, but it was a nightmare now to be the object of it. He
understood that to this new prisoner he, Richard Dillon, was no better than George Wallace or Lester Maddox or the man, for that matter, who had shot Dr. King.

One guard pulled the door open while the other removed the man's handcuffs. As soon as the man's hands were free, though, his arms shot out to grab hold of the door posts, and his huge body went rigid. "I'm not going in there!"

Because of me, Richard thought, and then he realized he was on the man's bunk. But that was crazy. The man had no claim to the upper bunk. But Richard didn't want the upper bunk, was the point. The lower bunk, with its soothing, concealing shadow, was his. But would he want this behemoth on top of him?

"I'm not going in there, motherfucker! Give me one with a head that works!" The man's stare was fixed on the brimming toilet, the foul urine on the floor around it.

"Get in there, you nigger fuck!" one guard said while pulling the nightstick out of its holster on his hip. In one quick movement he slammed the end of the stick into the prisoner's lower back. The prisoner cried out in pain, releasing one hand to press it against his spine. The second guard quickly slammed the door, which closed on the prisoner's other hand. The man shrieked.

"Hey," Richard cried out despite himself, "you've got his hand!" Richard sat completely up, hitting his head on the ceiling. "You've got his hand! Open the door! Open the door!"

The black man curled around the left side of the door where his hand was being mangled.

"Say 'sir'!" the guard ordered, vising the door shut even further, squeezing the fingers in steel.

The prisoner didn't hesitate. "Sir!" he cried. "Sir! Sir!"

The guard opened the door enough for the man to take his hand in, and collapse on the floor, groaning. Then the guard slammed the door shut, locking it. The guard with the stick poked it between the bars at Richard. "What's your problem, Quaker?"

Richard scurried back into the corner like a gerbil. "No problem," he said. "No problem."

The guard laughed. "That's what you think."

The second guard chimed in, "Enjoy your new roommate, Quaker."

They went off laughing.

Richard threw himself back across the bunk to the bars, grabbing one in each fist, as he'd seen a hundred cattle rustlers do in the movies. "When am I getting out of here? I'm supposed to have a lawyer coming!"

His cry was the cue for a fresh outbreak of obscenities and complaints from the other prisoners, who had until then, Richard now realized, fallen completely silent. "When am I getting out of here?" one voice cried, and another, "Where's my lawyer?"

"Balling your old lady, that's where!"

"Fuck you, pizza face!"

Richard pulled back away from the bars to his corner again, hugging himself, aware suddenly that his T-shirt was soaked through with perspiration.

His bunk shook a few minutes later when his cellmate lifted himself into the lower bunk. The man became absolutely still so quickly it alarmed Richard. He listened carefully for some moments but couldn't even hear the man's breathing. He crossed over the edge of his bunk to ask, "Are you all right?"

The man had his face to the wall, and made no reply.

"If you prefer this bunk up here, I'll switch."

Still the man said nothing. His body rose and fell in the easy rhythm of sleep. Sleep? It was inconceivable to Richard that the man could have gone to sleep.

Richard rolled back to his own wall, pressing the length of his body against it. He tried the not-moving too, the rhythmic breathing, but if anything the pitch of his anxiety rose. At one point he imagined that the man below him was his father, and to cauterize that fresh panic, he quite deliberately recalled a pleasant moment, the time he'd brought a new girlfriend home from Georgetown and his father had surprised them all by going out to the terraced garden after dinner and returning with a daffodil for her.

For a long time, like the man below him, Richard did not budge, on the animal theory that perhaps bad things happen only to those who move. Eventually the guards came back. "You, Quaker," one said. "Your name Dillon?"

"That's right."

"Surf's up." Both guards had their nightsticks out, ready for trouble; hoping for it, Richard sensed. One unlocked and opened the door, eyeing the motionless hulk on the lower bunk. "Let's go."

Richard hopped down to the floor with a jolt that shot right to his teeth. He quickly went through the door, ashamed of the stealth in his movement, an implicit throwing-in with the guards against the sleeping black giant.

But there was nothing conspiratorial in the way the guard handcuffed him. The two shoved him along. Out of the lockup there were stairs and a maze of corridors, progressively wider and more recently painted, more populated. Finally the guards led him into a large paneled waiting room and turned him over to a man behind a desk, a marshal. Richard became aware of his own filth. A door off the room was marked "Men" and Richard gestured toward it with his cuffed hands; only then did he allow himself to feel an acute need to urinate. "Can I go in here?"