Half World: A Novel (15 page)

PART TWO

American Berserk

1

Summer 1972

It was the takeoffs he didn’t like, the plane struggling into the air, the last gravitational grasp pulling him down into his seat, the whine of the landing gear folding into the belly of the machine, leaving the plane without lower limbs, an insane, crippling action Dickie saw as tantamount to jumping off a flight of stairs and tying your legs behind your back in midair.

He wasn’t crazy about the flight itself either, but at least he could open his eyes after takeoff, loosen his fingers from the armrest, light a cigarette, have a drink if he was still drinking, which he wasn’t, so there was that added to the equation. The old bird sitting next to him ordered a gin and tonic about thirty seconds after they’d reached cruising altitude, and Dickie had to make a conscious effort not to throttle her for her glass, or lick her denuded fingers for the precious liquid she spilled while positioning the drink on her tray. Instead, he picked an Antabuse out of his little plastic bottle, set the tablet on his tongue, and motioned to the stewardess for a glass of water.

One takeoff down, Moline to Vegas, with one to go, Vegas to L.A. He hadn’t been on a plane since he’d started on the MAELSTROM operation, more than four years ago. An enviable period, it now seemed. Over that time he had traveled by train, or more often by bus, or most often in someone’s car, almost always at night, on back roads if possible, driving just below the speed limit so as not to attract attention. Flying was
for aboveground travelers, honest citizens, businessmen and vacationing families with legitimate identification they’d be willing to show at ticket counters and security checkpoints. The groups Dickie had been with had traveled earthbound, changing modes every few hundred miles, consulting Greyhound and Amtrak timetables like holy writs,
Paul’s Letter to the I-5 Bus Rider.
The methods and peculiarities of fugitive movement. Time was different underground. It was slower, older, closer to the skin, an element to live in rather than an enemy to defeat.

OPERATION MAELSTROM. That was what Father Bill had called it, its official designation, though it was only now, four years later, after everything had fallen apart, that Dickie started to think of how fitting the name really was.

Father Bill was Dickie’s man back east. His real name was Bill Collins, but Dickie had started calling him Father after their first couple of meetings. It was a good way to get a rise out of the man, a reference to the fact that Bill had spent six months in seminary after Yale and seriously considered the priesthood before realizing that his talents lay in other directions. So he’d married his college sweetheart and had four kids and gone to work for a government agency he refused to mention by name. The priest thing was a surprisingly personal disclosure, and Dickie had jumped on it and refused to let go, whether it bothered Bill because it was an embarrassingly candid biographical fact or a bullshit cover story being pretty much beside the point.

Bill had brought Dickie into MAELSTROM to infiltrate some of the student and antiwar groups, to get names and connections and compromising information, to work his way deeper as the groups got more serious, closer to actions other than marches and sit-ins. Eventually he would find the tiny nerve centers of the most radical groups, the planning cells, the boys and girls who crouched over workbenches packing formaldehyde bricks, hot-wiring fuses and alarm-clock detonators. He was to gain their trust, their respect, and then nudge them toward setting one of those timers, which would lead, ideally, to explosions and arrests, and the tipping of public opinion back to the side of the authorities.

During the years on MAELSTROM, Father Bill had been his only link aboveground. Dickie would call at whatever day and time they’d
agreed on, once a month, once every other month, squeezed into a phone booth, vibrating from too many bennies, trying to keep his cigarette steady, the smoke from his eyes, relaying information to Bill or asking for instructions, advice. Hearing sometimes, on Bill’s end of the line, the sounds of normalcy, laughter at a cocktail party in the background or the delighted after-school squeals of Bill’s kids. Dickie finding himself looking forward to these five-minute conversations with an embarrassing overeagerness, the opportunity to lift his head above water for a few minutes, and then, afterward, always feeling chagrined by the disdain in Bill’s voice, Bill’s response to what Dickie must have sounded like on his end of the line: strung out, insomniac, very far into the weeds.

The old bird in the next seat was looking at Dickie, his hair and mustache and beard, the white octagon still on his tongue as he waited, openmouthed, for the stewardess to return with his water. Clearly not the traveling companion she’d hoped for. He hadn’t done much personal grooming during the months in Iowa. His hair was still down to his shoulders, his mustache still touching his chin. He’d lost his sunglasses somewhere back in the airport at Moline, possibly while he was throwing up in the restroom stall, and he was sure that his eyes were cracked and bloodshot and betrayed his current tenuous emotional state: smack-dab in early-stage withdrawal from drinking, sure, but also from the months in his father’s apartment, the day-to-day monotony at the end of life, watching the old man breaking down to nothing.

The stewardess came by with a glass and Dickie swallowed his pill. His seatmate was snoring loudly now, out just like that, some kind of narcoleptic, maybe, her mouth agape, G&T glass empty, a paperback potboiler spread-eagled on her lap. Dickie’s rear end was asleep, too, so he pulled his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans, trying to free up some space. He still had some of the cash Father Bill had given him in Iowa, along with the false driver’s license and press credential, and the small collection of insane quasi-religious pamphlets that were the reason he was heading to L.A. All sorts of good things in those: half- or maybe quarter-baked accounts of government mind-control experiments, brainwashing, surreptitious drug testing, other fun stuff which Dickie
wasn’t really in the mood for with his stomach still doing backflips. Then there was the last little thing, Dickie’s personal contraband, stashed away behind the thin sheaf of bills: his legitimate driver’s license, his real ID, still a strange thing to see after years of forgeries and boosted cards. A colossal security breach to be sure, having this on him, but it wasn’t his first colossal breach, probably wouldn’t be his last, and he felt it was owed to him in some way, this one small reminder.

He’d found the license deep in the chaos of his father’s apartment, had kept it with him during those months in Iowa, as if proximity to the information might make it true again.
Richard John Ashby,
2
/
19
/1947, 6ˇ1ˇˇ, 200 lbs., the name and DOB correct, the height and weight close enough, though he was heavier now, pounds added at his father’s place from too many take-out burgers and Hostess Fruit Pies.

Twenty-five. Jesus. He felt a couple of decades older. Depression era, at least, in more ways than one.

He flipped the card over. His signature was on the back. His real signature. It looked like it belonged to someone else. He hadn’t signed that name in years. It was strange to live another life, then to be reminded of the life you had before. Whatever that life was. It was hard for Dickie to remember. His mother was dead; now his father was dead. His sister lived in Boston with her family. He had seen her exactly once in the last five years, and that only last week, at the funeral in Iowa. She hadn’t recognized him until he’d walked over and introduced himself.

He looked at his real ID, his fake ID. The real ID looked fake; the fake ID looked real. They didn’t tell him that this would happen. Father Bill had never explained that once he pretended to be someone else he could never really go back.

Of course, this was how they kept you. Dickie realized this. His life was with them now. He had no one else. He had nothing but Father Bill. So when Bill showed up a year after MAELSTROM collapsed, days after Dickie had buried his father and was in some kind of numb zombie zone, with no clue what he was going to do next, and Bill improbably offered another assignment, a second chance, a plane ticket to Los Angeles, well, then, it turned out that he would do whatever Bill asked.

*   *   *

He hadn’t been close with his parents or Sylvie since he’d hit puberty and discovered girls and pills. Mostly pills, to be honest, which had distanced him from his father, who lived life by the Air Force Code of Conduct, and who expected everyone else to follow the same immutable rules. His mother had tried to get through to him, Dickie could see that now, but the last thing a teenager with an amphetamine habit and a desperate need to break free wanted to hear was his mother’s nagging, well-intentioned or otherwise.

So it was a surprise when he started receiving letters from his sister while he was in Vietnam. At that point they hadn’t spoken in he couldn’t remember how long. But it was nice to get mail, missives from a home front he couldn’t really imagine, a suburban idyll of Little League games and PTA meetings and Christmas caroling door-to-door in the snow. It was like she was trying to remind him of something he’d never known and therefore never forgotten but still, somehow, missed. When he returned to the States and headed underground she kept writing. Sylvie didn’t know what he was involved in, of course, didn’t even know specifically where he was. In his first letter, Dickie had told her that he was bumming around the country, picking up odd jobs, and she seemed to accept that, stopped asking anything further after one or two tries. Whenever he settled in a place for any length of time he’d send her a PO box number, and a few weeks later a letter would arrive. News about Frank and the kids, the weather on the East Coast. The correspondence was heavily one-sided, as Dickie’s letters back consisted of only a line or two, one of which was the new PO box number and the other a plea to keep writing. He never divulged anything. Father Bill would have appreciated that, after he’d recovered from the massive stroke caused by finding out Dickie was corresponding with a family member aboveground.

The last letter arrived right after MAELSTROM came apart. Dickie was hurriedly sweeping the area for anything he’d left behind, getting ready to disappear again, closing out the PO box, when he found the familiar monogrammed envelope. Their father was not well, Sylvie wrote. He was living alone in Davenport, in the final stages of the dementia that
had been decimating him for the last couple of years. He had rejected any of Sylvie’s help, had told her that he wanted to die alone. Sylvie refused to accept this, though, and thought that Dickie should find a way to finish out whatever he was doing and get himself to Iowa to help their father pass. That being her exact phrase,
Help Dad pass,
Sylvie imagining Dickie as a crossing guard, maybe, holding Jack’s elbow, leading him over to that opposite sidewalk in the afterlife.

Under other circumstances he would have disregarded the letter, failing at one more thing in Sylvie’s eyes, but who was really keeping count at this point. In that moment, though, in the post office, getting ready to blow out of town, the letter arrived like a Get Out of Jail Free card, maybe literally. It was the escape route he’d been looking for.

*   *   *

He had arrived in Davenport on a muggy, overcast afternoon, walking out of the Greyhound station, duffel slung over his shoulder, hair unbrushed, teeth fuzzy, getting sideways looks from businessmen and stroller-pushing moms, getting clutched purses, wallet checks. A visiting envoy from what his father had called the bum-world, back before Dickie left for Vietnam, when they saw the yowling, hirsute protesters on the nightly news.

He took side streets as soon as he could, headed down along the river as the sun began to drop behind the humpback arches of the Centennial Bridge. There were a couple of vagrant encampments on the edges of the water, homeless vets still in their combat boots, squatting around Sterno cans, passing bottles, fishing with string tied to sticks, Tom Sawyer–style. Dickie kept his distance, didn’t feel like getting rolled during his first hour in town. He wasn’t carrying much, but he did have a handful of pills wrapped in a ball of aluminum foil, the last of his Portland stash, and he had no interest in pushing what might be left of his luck.

His father had lived in Davenport for the better part of the last decade. Dickie had no idea why Jack had chosen this place, if it held any meaning for him. It was possible that he’d picked it simply for its lack of personal history. It wasn’t Boston, where Sylvie and her family had settled. It wasn’t the air base in Oklahoma, where Dickie and Sylvie
grew up, where their mother had stayed after the divorce, right to her final days.

Jack’s apartment was in one of the bleaker sections of town, a few blocks from the river. Liquor stores and pawnshops and the musicians’ union hall, a small park with more broken glass than grass on the ground. At the end of the street was a squat brick housing project surrounded by various styles of fencing, most displaying human-size rips and holes. Jack’s building was on the far side of the projects, a walk-up above a used bookstore that Dickie had never seen open for business.

The last time Dickie had been there, his mother had just died. He was eighteen and alone, suddenly, for real. Jack had been gone for a few years and Sylvie was at college in New England. Dickie didn’t seem to have much in the way of prospects, as a few of his teachers had helpfully reminded him when he was in class, which wasn’t often. Most of his friends were either in jail or starting to get drafted, so he figured he might as well beat Uncle Sam to the punch and enlist.

A week before deploying to Vietnam, he’d gone up to Davenport to stay with Jack, sleeping on the daybed in the living room, drinking a lot, watching the news on TV. They hadn’t spoken much during that time, mostly just shared the space, trying not to rub each other the wrong way. On the day Dickie left, Jack drove him to the Greyhound station in the same white Ford Fairlane they’d had when they were all living together a decade earlier on the air base, Dickie finding chips in the dashboard plastic that he remembered from front-seat rides when he was eleven. Outside the bus station Jack had handed Dickie forty bucks and a carton of cigarettes, a gesture of such surprising thoughtfulness that Dickie had been left speechless, standing silent on the curb while Jack pulled the station wagon back out on the street.