The Falcon and the Snowman (3 page)

Charles Boyce was a tall, rugged man whom some people called cold but who could warm up to a new acquaintance after a while. He loved cigars, tended to have strong convictions on most things and was wont to advance his convictions with what a longtime friend called “a very strong personality.” Although he was not a Catholic, his bride had asked him for a promise to raise their children as Catholics, and he had agreed. They would have nine children—four boys and five girls: what some neighbors would refer to as “an old-fashioned Catholic family.”

Chris was the first of their children, and he plunged into his mother's faith with as much zeal as she had herself. He devoured his catechism and, long after many of his classmates had resigned as altar boys, pulled himself out of bed before dawn to serve Mass. Father Glenn, a St. John Fisher priest, became one of his best friends. He was a middle-aged Irishman with a brogue as thick as porridge who could be merciless with Chris in the confessional and then go out and kick a football with him, still wearing his black cassock. Amid Chris's emerging piety there was a measure of the troublemaker, but Father Glenn was tolerant and, most of the time, put up with this facet of his personality. Sometimes while Chris was serving for Father Glenn, he inconspicuously dragged his feet at the communion rail to charge himself with static electricity; then, with calculated glee, gave a shock on the chin to friends with the communion plate. Father Glenn was suspicious about the sparks but never figured out their origin.

Chris fell deeply under the priest's spell, and the seeds of Catholicism that his mother had planted in him were fertilized and nurtured by Father Glenn.

It was faith rooted not only in the doctrines and traditions of the Roman Catholic Church but in an especially severe moral code. Like the Church itself, Chris began to view moral questions in black and white, and without much tolerance for deviation. One day, a priest from St. John Fisher told his father, “You know, I think Chris is more conservative than Cardinal McIntyre.”

It was a reference to Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, who for years ruled the Archdiocese of Los Angeles with a medieval style of orthodoxy that, for a long time, froze out many of the reforms that swept the church elsewhere during the 1960s.

As was expected of Chris by his church, he treated authority figures—his parents, the priests and sisters at St. John Fisher, other adults he met—with deference and respect. He wholeheartedly embraced the doctrine that God had delegated to the Pope infallible authority over His flock, that the Pope had delegated some of his authority to the bishops, priests and nuns and that members of the flock obeyed the decisions of the Church hierarchy because they were
right
decisions.

Chris's acceptance of authority was reinforced by his father. Like many men attracted to law enforcement, Charles Boyce was conservative politically. And, like the Church, he tended to view things in black and white. He believed in obedience to constituted authority, loved his country and tried to pass on this loyalty and love to his eldest son. For the father, it was love guided by the America-right-or-wrong ethos that galvanized his country during World War II; his son eventually would judge America by a different kind of standard.

As the eldest of nine, Chris became the leader of the Boyce clan and was idolized by his brothers and sisters. During his grade-school years, the Boyce family continued to grow while his father was climbing as a security executive in the defense industry. But while he took on more responsibility at work, he wasn't an absentee father: Charles Boyce taught his son how to tie fishing flies, coached the baseball team at St. John Fisher, tutored him in football and helped mold a will to compete and win on the playing field. He also passed on to his son a love of history, especially military history. When he was a child, they spent hours together talking of ancient wars and battlefields; when Chris was thirteen his favorite book was
Lee's Lieutenants
, and he dreamed of fighting himself in the expanding war in Vietnam as soon as he was old enough. His father was an ardent supporter of the war and could not understand why anyone opposed it. Once, when his father got into a bitter argument over the war with another coach of a Little League team, Chris passionately rooted for his father from the sidelines, sure that he was right.

While Chris was still in grade school, friends began to notice that he had an unusual trait: he liked to take risks. When he carried a football, for example, they noticed he ran head-on into waiting tacklers and kept squirming to get away when other runners would have given up; when he climbed trees, he could usually be counted on to climb higher than other kids and go out on the farthest, weakest limb.

Test scores confirmed his teachers' suspicions that Chris had a brilliant mind. He scored 142 on an I.Q. test, and he seldom got anything but an A on his school exams. His academic passion was history, especially ancient political and military history. Outdoors, his passion became bird watching and hiking in the wilderness. He was particularly interested in birds; his father, noticing the interest, gave him a book on falconry, the sport of hunting game with birds, and he began to read more about the subject. Years later, his eighth-grade teacher, Sister Jean-Marie Bartunek, looked back on her year with Christopher Boyce and described him as the kind of pupil every teacher lived for—smart, curious, hardworking, compassionate and articulate: “He was interested in everything! Science, debating, journalism, music, art; he liked to write poetry and talk on any subject, and he was a natural leader. He was a wonderful, sensitive, happy and intelligent boy who came from a perfect family.”

In his last year at St. John Fisher, Chris was elected student-body president and delivered the graduation address. The previous year he had discovered a second passion besides history—debating and public speaking—and he had harbored hopes of attending Loyola High School, a Catholic school operated by the Jesuits in Los Angeles that frequently turned out champion debating teams. But the family decided that Loyola was too far from The Hill, and he went to Palos Verdes High School instead. Monsignor McCarthy, who had watched Chris mature from a slightly shy altar boy to the brightest star in the school, would, years later, think back on the young student he knew: “He was one of the finest boys I'd ever met or taught,” he said. “I don't think I've ever known a boy with such idealism.”

4

Christopher John Boyce arrived at Palos Verdes High School in the autumn of 1967. It was an era of assassinations, an unpopular war, flower children, LSD, festering disenchantment with old standards and challenges from the young to parental assumptions. It was a time when the privileged kids who drove home from Palos Verdes High in sports cars and Cadillacs learned to watch, with everyone else, nightly TV reports of body counts and napalming in Vietnam, race riots and political dissenters beaten back by police clubs. The Vietnam War had been a fact of American life since the early sixties, but until now Chris had been only a spectator of the war on the nightly news. As a high school freshman, he responded to his instinctive interest in history and public affairs and began to follow the war more closely and form his own judgments about it. He also began to think—and form judgments—about other things, too.

It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when Chris began to rebel against the assumptions of his father's generation and to shape his own view of the world, the human condition, nationalism and the future of his planet.

Perhaps a trip he made to Mexico with his classmates from the sixth grade at St. John Fisher had been first to cause something to stir. The class left The Hill before dawn in a caravan of station wagons led by Sister Jean to deliver food, medical supplies and Christmas packages to a rural village in Mexico; it was a routine Saturday charity mission for parochial schools in Southern California those days. It was a one-way drive of less than four hours from his doorstep in Palos Verdes. But the economic chasm that separated his town and the village stunned Chris and moved him to tears. The caravan rolled into the village and he saw unpaved streets, shacks made of sticks and cardboard, open sewers; he looked into the faces of some of the children and then looked away quickly—their faces were disfigured and glazed by ugly red scar tissue, the result of fires ignited by fallen candles in their paper hovels. Years later, Chris would recollect:

“There were thousands of them, their flimsy shacks bending in the wind. They were lining the highway and in the ravines and on the hillsides. The children stood by the side of the road wearing only filthy underclothes. Here and there a dozen or so crouched around cooking fires. Their dreams were empty, but they were still people, just forgotten have-nots. I promised myself then that I would never forget—if nothing else, I would never forget.

“I had been taught that Mexico was a democratic nation, but what spirit of liberty existed in the cardboard hovels? They had had nothing—no hope, no future—and they had stood wan and emaciated. They had not even retained the bruised dignity of peasants. I wondered: Were we in no way responsible for what existed ten miles beyond our borders? Will no authority take responsibility for all of mankind; will the Third World always just be an abscess? Most frightening, I wondered, wasn't it in America's best self-interest to perpetuate its disproportionate consumption? Had we based our system on permanent inequity?”

Perhaps something else stirred in Chris one night during the summer of 1965 when his father took him to St. John Fisher, which sat atop one of the highest points on the Peninsula, and, together, they looked out toward Los Angeles. It was a rare night: wind had pushed aside the layer of smog that usually blanketed the city, and every light below was like a star; it was as if they were examining a diorama from behind a sheet of glass. They had come to St. John Fisher to watch the black ghetto of Watts burn.

As they looked down from the shelter of Chris's classroom at the orange glow and columns of billowing smoke rising from the riot-torn ghetto, a jeep sped by. He imagined an army of blacks and their flames advancing on The Hill toward his own home. But he was reassured later when his father bought a shotgun in case the family had to deal with the threat from below.

Other events also may have stirred Chris's doubts, but if there was anyone who had first ignited them, it was Robin.

Robin arrived at Chris's home in Palos Verdes on a Saturday morning in 1967 with hair to his waist, beads, a windowless Volkswagen van, “roaches” in the ashtray and a hooded falcon named Mohammed on his wrist.

Like Daulton, Robin was the son of a wealthy doctor from The Hill. He had heard from a mutual friend who lived up the street from Chris that there was a teen-ager in the neighborhood who had an interest in birds. He knocked at the Boyce front door and asked, “Is Chris here?”

Chris took one look at his falcon and was never the same.

To Chris's dad, Robin was an alien: “the original weirdo,” he would call him later. But his father cooked the stranger scrambled eggs, and Chris probably would always remember the meal: a member of the subculture sitting down to breakfast with the rock-hard conservative, the former FBI agent who still wore a gun under his arm to work. They're like people from different planets who speak different languages, he thought. Chris, as best he could, tried to interpret for them. The square kid of fifteen with a flattop haircut who wanted to become a priest looked first at the happy, nonconforming twenty-one-year-old and then at his forty-three-year-old father and wondered at the dichotomy: Who was right? he asked himself.

If there was ever a moment when Chris discovered the curious, horrible ambiguity that would haunt his life, this was it. Other people, he thought, may have a single identity, but not me. Chris from then on could not—or would not—make a choice.

Robin asked Chris if he wanted to see Mohammed fly.

As they drove away in the van to fly Mohammed that first morning, Chris looked out the window back at his home. Years later, he would still recall the silhouette of his father in an upstairs window and the intensity of the feelings he felt stirring inside him that day.

They flew Mohammed under an overcast sky on one of the terraced Palos Verdes hills that swept gently down toward the Pacific and then plunged, with a final steep dive, to a cauldron of turbulent white surf. It was wild and beautiful there then, before the subdividers came with their bulldozers. The string beans had just been harvested, and there was a smell of damp soil in the air.

Hooded, Mohammed sat on Robin's wrist listening for the sounds of the field, the brass bells on his feet tinkling softly as he waited.

Robin whispered in his ear and stroked his wings and clenched fist to calm the bird. A lark called from across the field, and Mohammed shuddered. Gently, Robin removed the leash and swivel from the jesses strapped around the bird's feet and, with his teeth and free hand, slid off the hood. The bird waited no more than an instant. Mohammed sprang off his fist and pumped his wings rapidly to gain altitude, climbing higher and higher as Robin and Chris scrambled across the field noisily to flush the larks. Then Mohammed selected one of the fleeing larks; he suddenly plunged in the power dive that falconers call a “stoop.” Contact seemed imminent. But then the lark lurched and it escaped the diving talons of the falcon. Mohammed quickly regained altitude and came down for a second attack; this time he slammed into the lark with a clanging of bells. There was an explosion of feathers, and the lark fell like a stone.

Mohammed was back on Robin's gauntlet a few minutes later, savoring breast of lark. Resting in the field after the hunt, smoking his first joint in the company of a friendly stranger and his bird, it occurred to Chris: They are one; this strange young hippie has his own peace.

Robin died in a freak accident nearly two years later—fatally burned by blazing hashish oil he was preparing for sale. He lingered for three days in the hospital before dying; he left behind a wife and children—and Chris's respect.