Kinflicks (71 page)

Hawk sighed and nodded sadly and said, “Yes, I know what you mean. Order achieved by exclusion, rather than order achieved through combating and subduing the chaos.'

I nodded, pleased to have the issue spelled out so succinctly for me by this stranger.

‘It's too bad, though.'

‘Yes, it makes me very sad.'

‘And you're thinking about splitting?'

‘I think he'll probably put a bullet through my head first.'

‘These pleasant orderly types are the ones who do that sort of thing, you know,' he cautioned me. ‘One day the chaos we've so resolutely lopped off unexpectedly rears its ugly head, and we're done for. We've developed no defenses against it.'

I noted with interest his use of the collective ‘we' and wondered if it was a gesture of generosity or if he was speaking from personal experience. ‘We?'

He closed his eyes and shook his head to indicate that I wasn't to question further. There was an awkward silence.

‘Actually, I
have
thought about leaving, off and on,' I said, to gloss over the tense moment. ‘But where would I go? I've lived with different kinds of people. I've lived in a city, in the country, in a small town.'

‘How about a suburb?'

‘Well, I suppose that's a possibility. But I'm beginning to suspect that the problem isn't the place or my partners — but me. I apparently haven't been able to achieve a balance between my need for stability and order and my need for variety and excitement. “Flexible strength,” it was called in Introductory Psychology in college — like a used Kleenex.'

‘You're aware,' he intoned, ‘that that's a politically reprehensible attitude, that any personal problems are the fault of a corrupt society, and that that society must be altered — or preferably destroyed?'

‘Yes, I'm aware that I'm being reactionary.'

‘Good. Then we can still be friends,' he said, his teeth white through his tangled beard. ‘Because you've just painted yourself into my corner. We can huddle together and hold hands while waiting for the New Left lynch mob to arrive.' Then he added in a voice tinged with desperation, ‘But there
has to
be a way to change.'

‘Do you really think so?'

‘Yes. There
has to
be.'

Just then a car horn tooted, and a booming male voice called out, ‘Anybody home?'

Hawk leapt up and crouched against the fence. He hissed at me, his eyes wide with alarm, ‘No one must know I'm here!'

I thought his reaction excessive for the crime of sunning nude next to a married woman while her husband was away. But I nodded to him as I headed for the gate.
‘No one!'
he whispered urgently.

Ira's Uncle Dean, a short man with a huge pot belly, was in the garage looking around. ‘Hello, Uncle Dean!'

‘Whybygod, Ginny! Decided nobody was around, so I was going to borrow Ira's chain saw and leave him a note.'

‘Ira's not here, but help yourself to his saw.'

‘Where is he?'

‘At Camp Drum with the National Guard.'

‘Jesum Crow, I'd forgotten. Don't get too lonely now, will you?'

I promised him that I'd try not to.

‘Pretty day, huh?' I pointed out.

‘Beautiful. Just beautiful. Going to be a beautiful week.'

‘Is that what they say?'

‘A-yup. But these weather men, they're never right.'

‘It's only their life's work.'

‘What? Oh yes, life's work. Right.' He put his arm around me as I walked him to his car. He carried Ira's yellow chain saw in his other hand. He leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘You got any exciting news for us yet?'

I looked at him indignantly. ‘What do you mean?' I asked, knowing perfectly well what he meant.

‘Hang, you don't want to wait too long now to start on your second.'

Feeling ornery, I said, ‘Uncle Dean, people don't always get what they want.'

‘Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't
know.
Forgive me, Ginny.'

‘It's all right,' I assured him with sad dignity.

When I got back to the pool, Hawk was still crouched against the fence like a cornered animal. ‘He's gone,' I notified him.

He collapsed in a heap. ‘Did you tell them you'd never heard of me?'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘The FBI.'

‘That was my husband's uncle. Now what's this all about? What horrible thing have you done, that you should be such a nervous wreck?'

He stood up slowly, his face haggard; he walked back to the pool and lay face down in the grass. ‘I should have told you right from the start,' he said miserably. “Now I've implicated you, and you can get in a lot of trouble.'

‘For what?'

‘For harboring an army deserter.'

It was my turn to look at him with alarm. The term ‘deserter' resounded with such sinister associations in my mind. A deserter: a coward who had abandoned his post at a battlefront to roam through the surrounding countryside raping and looting and murdering. Men without consciences who would flee to save their own necks, leaving their braver comrades weakened and more vulnerable to attack. I glanced at him uneasily.

He was studying my reaction. Finding what he expected, he shut his eyes and nodded his head knowingly and said softly, ‘Yes, but it wasn't like that at all.'

And, in fact, I still trusted him, my flash of conditioned panic notwithstanding. After all, although to the Stark's Boggers Hawk was all the heinous things I had already thought of, to Eddie he would have been a war hero. I had an obligation at least to hear him out before kicking him into the road.

‘Well, as long as I'm already implicated, why don't you tell me exactly what I'm implicated in?' I suggested.

He sighed wearily. ‘It's a vast saga of grief and misery.'

‘We've got several days before my husband gets back from the National Guard.'

‘Your husband's off with the
National Guard?'

Indignantly, feeling penitent for having talked so candidly with this deserter about the failings of my kind and loyal Ira, I said, ‘He views his obligation to his country differently from you. I don't see why that's any reason to ridicule him.'

He stopped laughing. ‘I'm sorry if it sounded as though I were, because I wasn't. I was just struck by the irony of it all — him off serving his nation, and his wife back home entertaining a deserter.'

I flinched. I too had been struck by the irony, which I felt cast me in a not altogether flattering light. In short, I felt guilty. It was marital infidelity at its most pure. ‘Go on,' I commanded unpleasantly.

Hawk's father, a retired army colonel and an American Legion Post Commander, had been in Belgium in World War II and in Korea — silver star, bronze star, purple heart. Dinner table conversation frequently included his story about being shot down over occupied France and having to parachute out and find his way to the border without food or a compass. Hawk's grandfather, a general in World War I, had fought at the Somme. His great-great-grandfather, a Confederate officer, was killed in a charge at Lookout Mountain. And so Hawk had grown up surrounded by plastic howitzers and model armored support vehicles. He had jumped out of trees with a parachute of silk scarves tied to his shoulders.

After military academy in Atlanta, he was turned down by West Point. In a funk, he went to Alabama Tech and studied electrical engineering, the first Hawk male in three generations not to be a career officer. One morning after graduation he found himself standing with a raised hand under a touched-up photo of President Nixon. And the next thing he knew, he was marching back and forth at Fort Maynard chanting, ‘I wanna go to Vietnam! I wanna kill the Vietcong!' A huge billboard of a handsome GI bayoneting a sinister little yellow man in black pajamas towered over him everywhere he went.

‘It was a conditioning thing,' Hawk explained, as I changed Wendy's diapers on the grass and scowled at her for failing to give me a cryptic signal to spirit her into the toilet, as Dr. Spock had assured me babies much younger than she did effortlessly. ‘The point was to get us so scared and so exhausted that we did exactly as we were told. My mind shut down completely, and I became a highly trained instrument that responded instantly to outside commands. Once during a bayonet drill, though, my mind began stirring and yawning and peering out at the activities of this body under its supposed control. It was jabbing at a sandbag and shouting, “Kill, kill, kill!” This four-foot drill sergeant who'd done two tours in Nam was all purple in the face from yelling, “Stab low and pull up, you mother fuckers! Rip those gook guts right out!” My brain freaked out! I started giggling, then guffawing. Soon I was doubled over in paroxysms of glee. And here came this Napoleon bellowing about how he was gonna bust my ass and knock the shit outa me and kick my fucking teeth in. But I couldn't stop. He stood over me and growled, “Well, you ain't gonna be laughin' where you're goin', boy I You lie round laughin' over at
Nam
and you get your fuckin' head blown off!”

‘To show us how the semiautomatic on the M-16 worked, this guy blew the head off an alley cat in a garbage can. And one afternoon he invited me to his quarters and showed me the skull of a Vietcong, which he'd scooped out and dried like a Halloween pumpkin. Then he hauled out this album of photos of mutilated bodies. I said, “Hey man, I don't wanna look at these. This little hobby of yours is weird.” And he said, “Well, son, you'd better get used to lookin' at them, ‘cause where you're goin' you're gonna see plenty.”'

Hawk went to Vietnam in the grip of the basic male thing: Here was this rite that would either make a man of you or destroy you. If you returned alive, you'd somehow conquered Death. Naturally he assumed that he would be one of those to return — loaded down with medals just like his father. But once there, his only concerns became enduring the incredible boredom and staying alive and getting home, which required doing as he was told. Out on a patrol he and four others abducted a Vietnamese girl from a field near a village. Hawk protested faintly and was told to shut up. He speculated on pulling a John Wayne and rescuing her. Then he pictured himself in a jungle grave with a bullet through his head. Or returned to Atlanta in a body bag — a war hero. It was one of those jarring moments when a person realizes that he's stepped out of the familiar everyday world into a realm of primal lawlessness in which anything goes. The girl panicked and started kicking and scratching. The others slapped her around. Finally Hawk joined them in raping her.

I looked at him with alarm: I was alone and defenseless with a rapist. What should I do?

‘You have to understand that I was almost a virgin,' Hawk explained grimly, as I stared at him with horror. ‘I'd done the usual back-seat grapplings when I was at military school. At Tech I went once to a black whore — and came all over her before we were even undressed. Once I wrangled a date with a townie who'd reportedly “do it for anyone.” I got her drunk so that she wouldn't notice my ineptitude, and she passed out. So I screwed her anyway, and then cleaned her up. She never knew. Junior year I fell hopelessly in love. But my girl's education was very important to her, and we didn't want to risk wrecking it by getting her pregnant. So we had this beautiful chaste relationship for over a year. I went off to war knowing that she'd be through school when I got back and all would be well. I'd have saved myself for her, and she for me, and we could spend the rest of our lives making up for lost time.

‘While I was raping the girl, I looked down at her face. She was staring at the sky with resigned hatred. One eye was swollen shut, and she'd bit through her lower lip. I lost my erection. I pretended to come. One of the guys dragged her to her feet. She spat in his face. He started shouting things about “gooks and yellow cunts and slant-eyed sluts,” and then threw her down and shoved a grenade up her. We heaved what was left of her body off a cliff.' He was talking mechanically, gazing off into space. ‘I had thought I was hero material. That day I learned I wasn't.'

Wendy toddled over and squatted down and tried to fondle his penis. He pushed her away gently. I continued to stare at him, alarm and disgust vying with compassion.

What he mostly felt, he said, was relief. Poof! She was blown away, and he didn't have to think about her anymore. After all, if it hadn't been for all those scrawny pathetic gooks who couldn't take care of themselves, he wouldn't have had to be stranded in some God-forsaken rain forest in the first place.

By the time they got back to camp, the relief had worn off. He expected a bolt of lightning with their names engraved on it to arrive from Uncle Sam. But nothing happened. To his dismay. He expected to be punished, he
wanted
to be punished — to be dismembered with the assembled troops looking on and jeering. But no punishment arrived.

So he punished himself. He stopped eating and sleeping. He lay in his tent crying and reviewing obsessively the various points at which he could have taken a stand and saved the girl. When he did sleep, he dreamed that his cock was being chopped off in wafer-thin slices. He fought with his friends. In the field it was all he could do not to turn his rifle on himself. The post psychiatrist gave him some pills and suggested that he relax. The chaplain recommended that he sit in the chapel and lay his sorrows on Jesus. His lieutenant said, ‘This is
war,
soldier, not a Sunday picnic.' When Hawk wept all over him, he got upset and counseled him to fake a physical ailment.

Hawk was past faking anything, so he reenlisted to get leave. He went to Atlanta and told his family he was deserting, that the beaches of Los Angeles weren't in immediate danger but that his mortal soul was. His father nearly had a coronary. He went to his girl's college and asked her to come with him. She said she never wanted to see him again if he was such a coward.