With his own case now dropped and having nothing better to do, Jon Kirkwood took up the slack left by Wayne Ebberhardt and spent the day helping his buddy, Terry O’Connor, weed through a multitude of witness statements, and research a long list of legal precedents. Kirkwood also did not bother telling Major Dickinson that the wing support group commander at Chu Lai had dropped the charges against his client.
Shortly after he and O’Connor had returned to their office from lunch, Staff Sergeant Derek Pride came back from a summons by the military justice officer with a worried look on his moon-shaped face, holding a copy of the paper dismissing the charges against Corporal Nathan L. Todd, and a note from Dicky Doo to Jon Kirkwood that simply read, “See me.”
“I’m gone for the day,” Kirkwood told O’Connor and Pride.
“You will see the major first, though,” the staff sergeant asked with a wishful tone.
“On my way now,” Kirkwood beamed happily, picking up his khaki garrison cap and walking out the defense section’s office door.
“Careful, sir,” Pride cautioned. “Major Dickinson has had First Lieutenant McKay on the front burner most of the day. He’s as angry as I have ever seen him.”
An hour later, Kirkwood kicked open the barracks screen doors and walked straight to his bunk, where he threw down his cap and kicked the door of his wall locker.
“I see you’ve talked with the major,” Michael Carter said, spreading a scrambled-egg smile as he peeked around the corner from where the lockers stood.
“Yes, I listened to him,” Kirkwood snapped, wheeling on his toes and eyeballing Carter with a grimace that curled into a snarl. “I only said, ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, sir,’ and ‘three bags full, sir.’ The son of a bitch.”
“Join the club. He keeps me pissed off all the time,” Carter beamed, showing Kirkwood his caked-up, yellow teeth.
“Fuck him, and his horse, too,” Kirkwood said and pulled off his shirt. “Like I give a shit. I’m doing my time and going back to California. My wife owns a nice set of office spaces overlooking the Presidio. I just need to roll with it like the rest of you guys do, Mike.”
“You know,” Carter said, taking an uninvited seat on the corner of Kirkwood’s bunk, “Major Dickinson, with his unabashed bias against any accused, perhaps offers greater justice for these men that we defend than any other mojo might. So while you deal with his gross unfairness and featherbedding of the prosecution, think about it this way. Because he hates the defense section so much that he staffs it with lawyers he despises and leaves them with nothing to lose, the major ignorantly relinquishes his one means of manipulating them: his power over our fitness reports. None of us gives a shit what he does to us careerwise, do we?”
“You have a point, my friend,” Kirkwood said, and now smiled.
“Everyone else is so worried about fitness reports and promotions, they will do whatever it takes to get ahead, including compromising their cases,” Carter explained. “We don’t have that problem. We keep Dicky Doo pissed off, and it entertains us. It’s more his problem than ours.”
“You ought to be a defense lawyer, Michael,” Jon Kirkwood said, stripping off his trousers, underwear, and T-shirt and wrapping a towel around his waist. “Turning the negative to positive is a real talent. Thanks. You made me feel better.”
“So the group commander dropped the charges, I hear,” Carter said, now bubbling from the friendship that Kirkwood had shown him.
“On Corporal Todd? Yeah, he did,” Kirkwood said, and laughed. “Indians can’t be queer. Didn’t you know?”
Carter tilted his head to one side and cocked an eyebrow.
“The group commander,” Kirkwood explained, “has this notion that American Indians cannot be queer. Like calling John Wayne a homosexual, he told me. Todd’s a Cheyenne from Colorado, ipso facto, not homosexually inclined.”
Carter fell back on Kirkwood’s bed and laughed.
“You’re one lucky son of a gun,” Carter said. “Charlie Heyster had his bonnet all set for prosecuting a homo, you know.”
“Oh, I knew it Saturday morning when Dicky Doo took such enjoyment in letting slip that tidbit of news as he handed me the package on Todd,” Kirkwood said, forking his toes through the rubber thongs on his shower shoes. “I thought of Heyster when Colonel Sigenthaler dropped the charges, too. One part of me wanted to sit in that courtroom just to see what kind of evil tricks Charlie the shyster would pull out of his hat. So in a sense, purely from a jurist’s curiosity, I felt a little disappointed. It lasted about a millisecond before the jubilation for my client took hold.”
“Don’t worry,” Carter said, ambling his long, stick-figure body back to his feet, “you’ll have lots more opportunities to see Heyster in action. Don’t feel too disappointed. I’m happy for your client.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Kirkwood said, flip-flopping down the center aisle of the barracks, his shower shoes slapping his heels as he walked.
As he passed the last cubicle before reaching the entrance to the toilet and shower facilities, a figure moved in the corner of his eye, catching his attention. First Lieutenant T. D. McKay sat at a small writing desk beneath an open window. He had his head resting on his arm as he wrote a letter.
“Speaking of the devil,” Kirkwood called to him, “does anyone know you’ve returned from the far north jungles?”
Tommy McKay turned in the straight-back chair, resting his arm over the back, and looked at Jon Kirkwood. His face appeared puffy, and his eyes peeked through slits between swollen red lids.
“Allergy,” McKay said, noticing that the captain had immediately focused on the condition of his face.
“I see,” Kirkwood answered, walking to where the lieutenant sat and pulled over Wayne Ebberhardt’s straight-back chair from across the cubicle and sat down. The captain glanced at the writing paper and the envelope, and McKay quickly laid his arm across it, as though he hid it for shame.
“Letter home?” Kirkwood asked.
“Sort of, I guess,” McKay said, and turned over the page he had written.
“What’s going on with you, Tommy?” the captain finally asked the sullen lieutenant.
“Nothing,” McKay responded defensively. “I’ve got an allergic reaction to some vegetation or pollen from the bush up north. Got my sinus all plugged, my eyes irritated. Just like a cold, that’s all.”
“Staff Sergeant Pride told me that he got word that your buddy Lieutenant Sanchez died in action up there,” Kirkwood said, and locked eyes with the lieutenant. “He added that the scuttlebutt from Ninth Marines and Third Recon puts a laurel wreath on your head for taking charge and saving the platoon.”
McKay looked at Kirkwood and tears trickled from his eyes as he gulped back more of his grief.
“I didn’t do a fucking thing, sir,” McKay said and turned to the window.
“Maybe not, but the enlisted Marines here have a whole other story going around,” Kirkwood offered, and sat still on Ebberhardt’s chair.
“You know how the troops get, anytime someone gets into some shit,” McKay answered.
“Yeah, I know,” Kirkwood agreed, still sitting on the chair, holding his toiletry kit in his lap. The two Marines sat for a full minute, and neither spoke until the captain cleared his throat uncomfortably.
“I lost my best friend when I was seventeen,” Kirkwood began. “He was a boy who lived next door to me in San Luis Obispo, where I grew up. We started first grade together there, and he remained my very best pal in the whole wide world right up until two weeks before our high school graduation, when he killed himself. My dad and his found him hanging from a tree in this grove behind our houses, where we had built a hideout. We played war out there, you know, as ten- and twelve-year-old boys do. Ironically, his name was Jimmy, too. Jimmy Sandoval.
“My dad carried his body home. My dad and Mister Sandoval cut him down off that tree where he had hanged himself. They took him home, and then called the police. They didn’t want Jimmy left hanging out there while all the cops mulled around, drank their coffee, and investigated.
“Dad came home crying. That’s how I found out about it. I had never seen my father cry until that day.
“He and Jimmy’s dad were buddies, too. They took us fishing, up at Big Sur, and hunting out west near Paso Robles, where Jimmy’s uncle ran a sheep ranch. They use these majestic, white Great Pyrenees dogs to shepherd the flocks out there.
“Jimmy’s father never has gotten past his son’s suicide. Destroyed both him and Jimmy’s mom. They barely muddle through, still, mourning their poor son. I saw Mister Sandoval just before I shipped out, a few weeks ago, and he still talked about what if Jimmy hadn’t hanged himself.
“I damned near didn’t graduate high school because of my best friend committing suicide. You know, I blamed myself for it. I should have known. I should have seen his unhappiness. I even thought of killing myself, too.
“My dad never left me alone after that. I think he was scared I’d hang myself. I didn’t go to school, and he didn’t go to work. He stuck to me like glue until I finally broke down one day and let it all go with him. That’s the second time I saw my father cry. He cried for me.
“Tommy, I know what you’re feeling.”
“I’m sorry about your friend, Jon,” McKay said, snuffing his nose and now looking at Kirkwood.
“I’m sorry about yours, too,” the captain said, and put his hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder.
“You know, growing up in the Texas Panhandle, coming from a respected family, playing football at Dumas High School, and getting a full-ride scholarship at the University of Texas, I had it pretty good,” McKay said, turning a black ballpoint pen in his fingers and looking at it as he spoke. “Like most boys from out there in that High Plains ranch country, I had my ample share of prejudices, even though I had not taken account of them.
“We didn’t have a lot of black folks living up there: a few, but not many. However, we did have a whole shitload of Mexicans. Mostly they worked on the ranches, or did the really dirty jobs out in the oil fields. To us white boys, they were all worthless wetbacks. We called them taco benders and bean balers. Greasy spics. Right to their faces. And we’d laugh about it.
“I look back, and I feel ashamed of myself. Those folks lived as poor as people can ever imagine. They heated their shacks with wood stoves, if they were lucky enough to have a stove or wood. Some had to cook on grass twists and dried cow flops. Most of them didn’t have running water or a toilet. They worked like dogs, and we treated them worse. And we thought ourselves better for it. While those people starved and survived a wretched life, we went to church on Sunday and sang praises to Jesus as though they didn’t exist.
“I met Jimmy Sanchez the day I checked in the dormitory in Austin. They had the gall to put him in my room!
“When I walked through the door and saw this Mexican sitting in there, I had a fit. My dad and I marched down to the housing office, and told them what they could do with this fart blossom they put in my room. Hell, the idea of a white boy sharing space with a wetback insulted the white right out of us.
“The lady who made the assignment, a sweet old blue-haired gal I later came to adore named Isabelle Brown, very politely told me and my dad that we could kiss her bright, rosy pink, Tyler, Texas, ass, and she used those very words. She said that I would take the room assigned, or that my dad could pay tuition, room, and board for me elsewhere. We went to the athletic director after that, and made an even a bigger mistake showing our prejudices to him. I damned near lost my scholarship over it.
“So I stomped back to the dormitory and took up residence with this brown kid from South Texas with dead koodies dripping off his hair and the smell of DDT fresh in his clothes. My tilted perspective at that moment.
“I hated life, the University of Texas, and especially him. After about a month of suffocating in silence, I finally spoke up and told him that since I had to share space with his stinking ass, I might as well get to know him. That’s when he put out his hand, and I swallowed my pride and shook it.
“Of course, living in Austin, training with the freshmen team, and coming in contact with all sorts of different types of people, pretty soon Jimmy Sanchez seemed to develop lighter skin. He didn’t talk like a Mexican. He showered daily, kept his hair cut short and clean, too.
“By the time that first semester had ended, and we went our separate ways for Christmas holidays, we had become friends. I got home and told my dad it wasn’t so bad sharing a room with a Mexican. In no time, during the spring semester, Jimmy and I started going to movies together, eating out, even double dating.
“The next fall, I looked forward to seeing him. We voluntarily roomed together from then on. He quit being a Mexican to me and became human. My best friend. That’s when we told each other all our secrets, and confessed our families’ shames to each other.
“Jimmy Sanchez’s mother and father both came across the Rio Grande one night, back during World War II, and took up residence in Texas, working for half the wages that white cowboys made, something like fifteen dollars a month. All with the hope of a better life.
“Still kids themselves, they wanted their yet to be born children to enter this world in America, to live free and have opportunity. The two of them had left behind the most abject poverty anyone can imagine. People died of starvation. Kids walked around in the dead of winter with no shoes and no coats, and it snows and gets cold in northern Mexico, where they grew up.
“About the time Jimmy turned twelve years old, his father got busted up really bad by this renegade paint stallion they called Big Baldy. He worked breaking horses and gathering range cattle for this rancher, who let the Sanchez family live in one of his dilapidated fence-line shacks. Right off, the old gringo took a liking to Jimmy’s dad. You see, his father was quite a good horse wrangler and vaquero, and the rancher admired those skills. Mister Sanchez could spin that sixty-foot Mexican lariat full circle around both him and his horse at a full run, and catch a calf on the fly thirty feet away with it.