Memorial Bridge (72 page)

"One of us."

He shook his head. "I'm not getting my hair cut, Jeannie. I just decided."

"It wasn't your hair that bothered me, it was your suit."

"Why? Why is that so important to you?"

"Because I made you a shirt."

"What?"

"For your trial."

"A shirt?"

"Yes. A cotton shirt, embroidered around the collar." She looked away from him. "Now I feel foolish."

"Where is it?"

"In my pack. I was going to give it to you today."

"Can I see it?"

She hesitated, then went to the card table, pulled the chair aside and stooped for her knapsack. She took a package out. It was wrapped in tissue. She brought it to him timidly.

"I can still have it?"

"I made it for you."

He carefully unwrapped the package, put the paper aside, then held up an undyed muslin shirt with blousy sleeves and a high, plain collar edged in blue thread by a careful border of tiny crosses.

"It's beautiful. Really beautiful. You made it?"

"Yes. I made it for you because I love you."

Richard pulled her shirt on over his head, then fastened the three buttons at his chest. The buttons, too, were homemade, wooden disks. "Jesus Christ, Jeannie, I love it."

There was a cracked mirror on the near wall, and Richard turned toward it. "Holy shit," he said, "I look like Thomas Jefferson!"

She laughed, throwing her hands back. "God, you do!"

"Maybe now they'll listen to me." He struck a pose. " 'Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.'"

He turned back to her, full of happiness and hope. He put his hands on Jeannie again, and drew her close.

The joke of his resemblance to Jefferson—a particular statue of the young farmer in the rotunda at Charlottesville, the sleeves loose like his own, the hair tied back—changed into something else, a charged, and charging, gravity. After a moment's silence in which their two bodies settled against each other, he said quietly, " 'And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.'" He pulled back to look at her. "Or should we just fuck?"

"The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!"

That night in Grant Park, across the street from the hotel where the McCarthy and Humphrey campaigns were headquartered, ten thousand
demonstrators had gathered. Thousands of others milled about outside the convention hall across vast parking lots that had once been a corner of the stockyards, Chicago's Pride. After World War II the meat-packing industry had been transformed by frozen foods, and the stockyards had been closed now for more than a decade. Still, on warm, humid nights like that one, the old stench of the slaughterhouses rose from the pavement. Delegates and demonstrators from outside Chicago did not know why the air, even inside the hall—it had been built mainly for showing livestock—seemed rotten.

The peace plank, a direct challenge to Johnson's war, had been roundly defeated that afternoon after not only Humphrey but even McCarthy declined to speak in favor of it. The terrible contest that had begun in New Hampshire half a year before was over, and the opponents of the war had lost. Now they were in the parks and streets of Chicago. The police, who'd been invited by Mayor Daley in April to shoot to kill, were in those parks and streets too, twelve thousand of them, together with another twelve thousand hastily deployed and heavily armed GIs.

The clash was inevitable and had now come.

"The whole world is watching!" The demonstrators chanted, desperately pointing at TV cameras and lights while helmeted policemen ran through the crowd swinging clubs and firing off canisters of Mace and tear gas.

Prague. This was Prague again.

Policemen with bullhorns could be heard replying with curses to the taunts of the hysterical kids. The throng kept falling away and circling back each time knots of policemen charged.

Bloodied students were hauled toward police wagons. At intersections along Michigan Avenue combat troops had mounted machine guns, and sinister-looking army vehicles blocked the movement of fleeing, dazed demonstrators. Smoke and tear gas wafted above them, and many had covered their faces with their shirts. Cries and popping noises, sirens and chanting crowds—"Join us! Join us!"—filled the air.

Policemen could be seen clubbing the inert forms of people who'd fallen to the ground.

The whole world was—or was not—watching, but Sean Dillon was, sitting alone before the television in his quarters on Generals' Row at Boiling Air Base.

Cass had found it unbearable and had gone upstairs.

Dillon's mind was half taken up by the flashes on the television screen, the jumping images, the screams and curses, the melee; and half by the flashes of his own memory, the stockyards, with swarms of sparrows picking at the dung; the amphitheater and the Stockyards Inn outside which—on that pavement there!—Raymond Buckley had been arrested; blood overflowing the gutters of a slaughterhouse, the animals stampeding inside their corrals, the shriek of terror rising above the city as thousands of cattle, sheep and hogs gouge each other to death.

Chicago's Pride.

What he had built an entire life thinking he had left behind. He sat dead-still in the chair of his television room in the grip of a nausea he had not felt in years. The eerie blue light from the screen flickered over him mercilessly. He would have turned it off and gone upstairs too, but the images of a human stampede, the ungodly shriek, brought back what he had so fiercely shut out. There was no shutting it out now.

Not any newfound sympathy for the hateful nihilism of the protesters, but something older, almost forgotten about the forces of control, those policemen, those men in uniform, the same old hatred and violence. Chicago policemen.

Chicago politicians.

Now he was a policeman.

The television images switched from the streets to go inside the convention hall where a nearly equivalent chaos had apparently taken hold. The galleries high above the floor were filled with screaming demonstrators, but instead of "The whole world is watching," they were chanting "We love Daley!" and bouncing placards that read, "Daley Forever."

Richard J. Daley.

The camera went to him, sitting imperiously by the huge "Illinois" sign not far below the podium. Daley's face was twisted with rage. The men around him were standing shoulder to shoulder, sealing the mayor off from the wild arguments in other delegations. One Daley henchman in particular caught Dillon's eye, a stocky man whose head was bald but for his temples where the gray hair stuck out like handles. Dillon's memoiy tossed his name up, Geoige Delahunt, the former congressman, the one who'd sent a tickle past Dillon when he'd testified against the navy twenty years before. Even from the dais Delahunt had mentioned Raymond Buckley, acknowledging a debt to him. Now Delahunt was
sneering up at the speaker on the podium a mere twenty feet away.

The speaker was tall, gray-browed Abraham Ribicoff, looking more like a general than a politician, but a general in the heat of battle. His voice fairly cracked with emotion as he brought his fist down, bouncing the microphone at the climax of denunciation:"...Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago!"

The camera caught Daley half out of his chair. "Fuck you, kike!" The mayor's lips moved with precision around the awful words.

Whether the whole world was watching, Sean Dillon was.

Richard J. Daley in a free fall of hatred.

But Dillon saw something entirely other in the flickering blue light of his short-circuiting mind: Edward Kelly, Daley's long-dead predecessor, the gangster mayor who had embodied, for the young Dillon, a demonic corruption of his city.

"Out, demons! Out!"

Dillon could not watch Chicago that night, the war come home, and recognize himself on either side of it. But to his great surprise he realized, nevertheless, that if he were born thirty years later, he would certainly have been in those very streets defying Daley and Lyndon Johnson, denouncing the callous arrogance by which they claimed the right to rain clubs and bombs upon the heads of those they disapproved. Dillon thought of Eddie Kane, who had changed the meaning for him of the word "policeman."

But now he, Sean Dillon, was a policeman.

When he went upstairs at last, Cass was asleep. He nearly woke her. Carefully, instead, he lay down beside her, knowing he would never sleep. He lay there trembling for his country and for himself.

In the morning, after washing, he went to his closet, intending to dress in his lawyerly pin-striped suit, but his hands went automatically to his uniform. He took it out of the closet on its hanger and dropped the hook over the doorknob. Without having thought of doing so before, he removed one set of three silver stars from the left epaulet, and then the other from the right.

Six silver stars, a set in each hand, which he then closed, squeezing the sharp points until they hurt.

To turn them in, at last, far too late, a resignation not out of any standing-in-judgment above what had been done—twenty-five thousand Americans dead, ten times that many Vietnamese, America herself
morally napalmed, and for what?—but out of a judgment from below of his own essential contribution to the massive self-deception. There was nothing of which he could accuse the President, Rusk, Westmoreland—or even Daley?—that he could not accuse himself. And his refusal until now to resign? An act of cowardice after all? Was he just like the others in that too? He had no idea. Virtue or cowardice? He had no idea.

He opened his hands and saw blood. Blood. He had helped build an Asian slaughterhouse. And he should leave now because it stinks? He could not walk away from the war until it was over; that was all he knew.

Dillon wiped the blood from his palms with a handkerchief, and then pinned the silver stars back on the shoulders of his uniform jacket.

Then he had a fresh impulse, another response to Mayor Fuck You Daley. Instead of dressing in his lawyer's suit, as he'd told his son he would, he donned his uniform, taking more care with it than ever. If the President and his men, including Daley and Hoover, found him insubordinate now, that was their problem.

And three hours later, looking like what he was, resplendent in his blue creases, his stars and his ribbons—the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the National Defense Medal—he entered the United States Courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue where his wife and son were waiting.

In a hallway like this—high, ornately molded ceilings, mahogany benches lining the walls, polished terrazzo floors, frosted glass double doors, court functionaries idling by huge windows—a young Sean Dillon had pronounced a first vow: "I owe Doc Riley." His first Richard. "I owe him you."

Dillon walked quickly, sharp-eyed, aware of the faces turning toward him as he passed, aware also that none of the faces were the ones he wanted.

Until he came to the rotunda, the domed, open center of the building, where benches were backed against the railing of a high balcony. On one of those Cass was sitting, and so was his second Richard, his only son. They both stood as Sean approached, and he saw surprise sweep into their faces like a cloud.

Sean, with a twist of his palm, indicated Richard's blue jeans, his
hippie shirt and long hair. He had to stifle a burst of impatience at his son's getup. "No one will take you for the lawyer," he said.

Richard grinned, hugely pleased to be able to rebut his father. "You either, General."

Cass put a hand on each of their arms. "You both look fine to me."

Sean snapped his wrist out of his sleeve, to check his watch. "It's time. Let's go."

With Cass between them Sean and Richard walked, in step, into the courtroom. There were two men at the prosecutor's table, the stenographer was at her machine in front of the bench, a bailiff waited by the judge's door in the far corner. No one else was present. The jury box, three long elevated benches behind an elaborate balustrade, was vacant. Cass took her seat on one of the spectators' benches. Sean ushered Richard through the rail to the defendant's table. When they sat there together, the two prosecutors stared openly, then leaned to each other to confer.

At an order from the bailiff, all rose, and the judge entered, a thin, bald man with a wizened face dominated by rimless eyeglasses. Sitting, he too registered the sight of a general officer forward of the rail. The bailiff recited the "hear ye's" and announced the case, and as soon as he was finished the judge, with an impatient curl of his hand, barked, "Approach."

Richard sat. Sean and the two prosecutors went forward to the right side of the bench where the judge, glaring at Sean, asked in a low voice, "What's the meaning of your uniform?"

"I am an active-duty regular officer of the United States Air Force, your honor. I am also a member of the Illinois and District of Columbia bars. I am representing Richard Dillon in this matter, as a private citizen."

"Are you with JAG, or what's the military connection here?"

"Richard Dillon, my son."

The senior prosecutor shook his head, "Your honor, this is impossible. We can't have this uniform before the jury."

Dillon answered sharply, "This is a case involving questions of national service, patriotism and loyalty. The defendant's background as having been raised in the American military is relevant."

"He's in rebellion against it," the prosecutor said.

Now Dillon looked at him. "That's the point, Mr. Repucci. If the
defendant's actions could be dismissed as mere rebellion, I would not be here. You're going to have to make a better case than that."

"All right, gentlemen. All right," the judge said, then fixed Dillon with a glinting stare. "General, I do not want it ever said that a serviceman's uniform was unwelcome in my courtroom. Nevertheless there is a problem here, and before we begin to seat the jury I am going to have to rule on it."

"My uniform before the jury may not be an issue, your honor. I have a preliminary motion I'd like you to hear."