The Trinity (21 page)

Rodgers is characterized as a misfit and a loner on the Scottish radio, and Chris has heard as much about him that way as he has on the base. There were countless phone calls during a phone-in show on Radio Tayside about Rodgers, and then the conversations led to Americans in general. Some of the callers’ brogue was so thick that Chris could barely understand them, but their point was clear: the Americans should leave. Especially now. 

Chris overhears a typical conversation about Rodgers. A cluster of young men is congregated at the opposite end of the long table he is seated at. The group is almost done eating. They sit and talk idly, glancing at their watches to see if they have enough time to continue their chatter before their own mid-watches start.

“He hung out with that fat kid in supply—you know, that goofy one with the buzz-cut that wears Nebraska shirts all the time.” One of the young men says this knowingly, working a toothpick between his teeth.

Chris feels his heart stop. He recognizes the description instantly, and knows the fat goofy kid is his roommate.

He now remembers Rodgers. On the few times Chris would return to the room unexpectedly, there his roommate would be with Rodgers, as if they were getting ready to go somewhere. Chris could hear them talking quietly through the closed door, but as soon as he opened it, their conversation would cease and they would leave. That was okay with Chris; he never felt comfortable with his roommate in the room. He felt tense, as if every move he made was irritating, and as if he were being watched with disdain. Hinckley’s stature and almost constant sneer make him intimidating to Chris, as he is much slighter and shorter, and with a personality more curious than confronting. He has always hated confrontation, even as a child. Chris spent hours hiding under his bed with his hands over his ears during the weeks and months when his parents’ marriage became unraveled. He was maybe ten or eleven and didn’t want to be in the middle of the skirmish. He is not necessarily a coward, but he prefers people to get along in his presence.

Several days after hearing that conversation, Chris has finished his string of watches and he is entering his period of three days off. It is now mid-February. The days are slowly starting to lengthen; a hint of sun is visible in the sky during the afternoon shift change.

His first full night off is Saturday, and he knows he will be up all night; he slept most of the day, having worked the previous night. His roommate is absent throughout the day, occasionally popping in to quietly grab duffle bags of laundry. Chris barely hears his roommate; he is surprised at the consideration Brad is showing him. He refused to accommodate Chris’s schedule prior to this, making an equal amount of noise whether Chris was asleep or awake.

He goes to the galley for supper shortly after waking up. It is five in the afternoon and the sun is nearly faded; only a gray light breaks through the dark and cloudy sky. It is a typical meal: spaghetti, garlic bread and glasses of milk with cake for dessert taken from the revolving glass dessert carousel next to the milk dispenser.

He is quite full and content and looks forward to a cigarette and an evening of reading and laundry as he returns to what is usually an empty room, especially on a Saturday night. Chris sees light coming from the bottom of the door leading into his room and is surprised that he left the light on. He didn’t. He finds his roommate sitting at the desk they share, the chair tilted back on its two rear legs and Brad’s feet on top of the desk sporting dirty and unlaced high-top sneakers with the tongues pulled out and folded over.

“I thought you might be off tonight,” Brad greets Chris. “Whatcha doin’?”

Chris is taken aback. His roommate has never asked him a question, never treated him any differently than a piece of furniture.

Confused, Chris shakes his head. “Nothing.”

“Cool.” Hinckley reaches into the small refrigerator that came with their room and retrieves a six-pack of canned and stale American beer that he bought in the base commissary. “I figure we’ll have a couple of cans of the good stuff, and then we’ll hit a pub somewhere, and then we’ll have to drink the bloke beer. It won’t taste so bad, though, after we have a couple of these in our guts.”

Chris is thrilled at the sight of beer; he hasn’t really had any since Pensacola, as there has been no one for him to drink with. The thought of drinking alone somewhat disgusts him, and the prospect of drinking is a pleasant one. Even if it is with someone he is afraid of.

Chris takes the beer and is indifferent to the poor taste. He drinks the can hurriedly and the warmth from the alcohol works rapidly, spreading across his body. He feels as much at ease as he has in the longest time.

“Well, look at the thirsty one.” Hinckley laughs and tears another can from a plastic ring and hands it to Chris. This beer, too, he empties quickly, and he now feels lighter than air, an intense joy. The joy comes from the sudden show of friendship from his roommate as much as it does the alcohol.

“Ya got bloke money?” Hinckley asks Chris. Chris checks his wallet and pulls out his entire paycheck. He has hardly spent any of it except on magazines and newspapers and cigarettes and soda, nor has he thought to save it. He has never had a bank account and he has stared thoughtfully at the branch of the Bank of Scotland on base while walking by.

“Yeah, I got like twenty-five pounds.”

“Well, I got about fifteen, so that should be plenty. Where do you want to go?”

Chris shrugs his shoulders. “I don’t know,” he says. “I haven’t been anywhere yet.”

“I noticed that. You’ve always been the stay-at-home type. I want to go where we won’t see none of these idiots from the base. I like to go where the blokes go—you know, somewhere off the beaten path.” His reasons for this are twofold: he wants privacy while talking to Chris, and he feels like a bit of a pariah. He is stared at constantly across the base, and he knows people whisper as he walks by. “There goes that friend of that one guy—you know, the racist killer. He was probably in on it, too.”

They leave their room after the six-pack is a memory and walk across the courtyard to the main gate of the base, their breath visible underneath the floodlights that shine on all the sidewalks and roads of the base. It is perhaps seven in the evening, and there is a queue of cabs outside the base.

“Brechin,” Hinckley says to the cab driver with the veteran air of someone who has directed many cab drivers.

The cab driver recognizes Hinckley; he has taken him to the priest’s house in the past. “Aye, where’s your mate? Where is the lad you usually run with?” The driver is referring to Rodgers in a friendly manner, not knowing what Rodgers did. Hinckley gets nervous and looks at Chris, to see his reaction to the cab driver’s question. Chris is too drunk to notice, too drunk for the words to resonate any more than the sound of the radio.

“He’s gone,” Hinckley says.

“Aye, back to the States?”

“Yeah.”

The conversation ceases as the cab drives the six or seven miles into the village of Brechin, a pretty town with maybe five thousand souls, providing shopping for the farmers and smaller villages—such as Lutherkirk—that lie in this northeast corner of Scotland’s Tayside region.

Though it is a small town, it supports perhaps thirty pubs of varied size and pleasantness. The more modern and larger ones are favored by the Americans, as they more resemble bars back in the States.

Hinckley found some of the off-beaten-path pubs with his friend Lee in their jaunts they took together before they met Father Crowley. They would sit and drink and stare at the girls and look down upon the Scottish people that they saw, complain about the beer and poor choice of food. Hinckley would somehow manage to talk about Nebraska football, and Lee would talk about Waylon Jennings or Johnny Cash or Hank, Jr. and how the South would rise again.

The cab deposits them in the center of town, per Brad’s instructions. He is not quite sure which pub he wants to go to, so they walk through the windy and damp night air along Brechin’s High Street, which winds in several curves and goes up and down three low hills over several blocks before it reaches either end of the village center. The center contains simple shops: an ironmonger, a chemist, a small appliance store, a bakery, a butcher, a small supermarket, a storefront department store selling everything from records to tennis shoes, and there are a few more specialty shops, all surrounded by pubs.

As they walk, Chris constantly circles around looking at the faces of the stores and the faces behind the wheels of the cars that drive by. He has never been off base, and he feels silly for not having ventured off sooner.

They veer off High Street to a small street that lasts only half a block before dead-ending into the wall of what is an auto repair shop. They find a pub that Brad has been into once in the past. It is small, perhaps four tables and a bar large enough to accommodate only six stools.

It is dark when they enter, and smoke from many exhaled cigarettes hangs in the air like so many low flying clouds or an early morning fog. Each face in the pub shines in the light of two bulbs hanging in solitude from the ceiling, which is fairly high for such a small room. The rest of the room is dark, the walls covered in artificial wood paneling, the floor carpeted in a low and dark gray rug decorated with various stains and burns. The crowd of mostly men grows quiet as the two walk in, as it is obvious that they are American and don’t belong in their intimate circle. They are ignored, however, and the scattered conversations resume. The sight of Americans in Brechin is an everyday occurrence, and one or two even occasionally wander into this simple pub.

They sit at a rickety table that is bare save a half-full ashtray sporting the Tenants Lager logo and some empty pint glasses left by a previous patron. Brad and Chris quickly light cigarettes, and Brad goes to the bar and brings back two pints. It is Chris’s first sample of a beer that isn’t American, and the aesthetic thrill of drinking out of a pint glass inside a dark and gloomy British pub brings back that feeling of worldly conquest that he lost upon his arrival at the base in Scotland. He realizes now while sitting in the pub with beer flowing through his blood that the previous six months were emotionally draining and he probably holed up in his room because he was too depressed from his loneliness and because of his all but lost family. He figured he had two years in this country, plenty of time to explore, as two years is still a big chunk of life for someone his age.

Additionally, his division is small, the smallest on the base, and most people work with several other sailors and make friends through work. He works with a shy and secretive woman. She is pleasant, but she has made no overtures of friendship. She lives in Brechin somewhere, and he thinks momentarily about finding her.

He and Brad remain silent as their first pints disappear. They have little to talk about, as they don’t know each other. Brad is thinking about Crowley, wishing he were spending time with him instead of his quiet roommate, who so far is quite boring.

Chris studies the women. There are perhaps half a dozen or so in the pub, all with their husbands or boyfriends, covering the spectrum of adulthood. They are sort of homogenous looking, short and heavyset, all smoking and drinking. They don’t drink pints like the men; they choose cider or beer in half-pint glasses or mixed drinks. The women are almost identical; the clothes are similar, the style of overly-treated hair is similar and the only distinction is the advance of years. This is his first impression of Scottish women, and though it is a false one, it is also a permanent one. He is disappointed; he expected to find a sort of purity in the Scottish women. He expected them to be small and thin with dark hair and skin like ivory. He thinks about his wife. Maybe he won’t find her here after all.

Chris breaks the silence between him and his roommate abruptly with a question that has been burning in his mind for the entire evening but he has been too timid to ask. The alcohol has eliminated any trepidation. Brad has gone back to the bar to retrieve two more pints.

“Were you really friends with Lee Rodgers?”

Brad receives this question as he comes back to the table, gingerly carrying the two pint glasses that are filled to capacity with lager, taking care not to spill any.

“Yeah,” he says, while sliding his chair back into the table. He offers no more information.

“Well,” Chris says almost cautiously, “did you, you know, know he was a racist?”