Trinity Fields (39 page)

The first time Kip met Wagner, he said, his expression brittle and serious, without so much as a twinkle in his eye, —Hey, Calder, were you there the day they crucified the Lord our God?

—Weren't we all? Kip answered, affable and in stride. He was crouched over his map pack before taking off on a mission and this man ranged over him, casting him in shadow.

Wagner said, —I thought you looked familiar, and walked away.

Kip had made it a practice to stay off on his own for the most part, but this Wagner intrigued him. Like many of the Ravens, he was outgoing in a quirky way. He was known for non sequiturs and off-the-wall commentary. He also had been on more missions than just about anybody here, and above all seemed to have an unusual rapport with the Hmong. He'd mastered the language better than any of the others, a language whose meanings were often carried by intonations of words rather than the vocabulary.

Lao was tonal, and its grammar seemed flexible as gum. The tones were high or low, and they might rise and fall from a midrange, or they might start deep and in the same syllable arc upward. The Hmong were called Meo by their American comrades and other foreigners—an unintentional derogatory, means “barbarian” in Chinese—and indeed it sometimes sounded, when a group of them were talking together, like a meowing of articulate cats. Wagner was also said to have embraced the animist beliefs of the Meo, whom he called Hmong, while at the same time not abandoning his Baptist background or the Buddhism he picked up while serving his first tour over in Vietnam.

Kip asked him once, regarding this animist belief of his, —So you think there's a god in every bush?

—If a devil didn't get there first.

Another time, when Kip asked him about how he could reconcile one creed that held there were guardian spirits in most every object with another that quite clearly disavowed such things, Wagner said, —If I could reconcile everything, I'd lose my faith, wouldn't I now. And when Kip asked him what religion he was, saying, —Like a pantheist of some sort? Wagner looked at him and answered, —I'm not anything but if I was something, I'd be a devout potpourrist is what I'd be, and potpourrism would be my religion. You've heard the phrase, Spread the wealth? Well, I believe that it's also a pretty good idea to sample the wealth. Sample and spread, spread and savor. I've never met a religion yet that I couldn't learn something from, and when I believe in a cause I do something about it, you know?

Kip observed this Wagner from a distance at first, watched where he went and when. None of the other Anglos stationed at Long Tieng ate with the Hmong as did Wagner, none seemed as well connected to Vang Pao, the Hmong general who ran operations here. In a community of eccentrics, Wagner became, in Kip's eyes, a kind of guru. But a quasi guru, given he refused to accept any such role. —Places animate people, people animate places, he told Kip once.

—So?

—So you're from Los Alamos, right?

—Who told you that?

—Pajarito Plateau. I've flown over there once, very beautiful the way the tuff has flowed out in fingers away from the rim of the volcano skull itself.

—Who told you I was from Los Alamos?

—But what I was saying about places and people, I'll bet you didn't know about old man Pond and flying, did you?

—Old man Pond?

—You know, the man who founded that boy's ranch there for frail kids, boys with respiratory problems and flat chests, Ashley Pond? Don't you know about where you grew up?

—I know who Ashley Pond is—

—And there's a pond there named after him, Ashley Pond. I think that's rich, don't you? Strictly speaking, it should be called Ashley Pond Pond, shouldn't it?

—What about him?

—He was a dreamer, was Pond—not at all unlike Robert Oppenheimer in that respect. The place draws dreamers in. But you've got a little of Pond in you, too. Did you know that more than anything in the world Pond wanted to be a combat pilot in World War One?

—You're making that up, said Kip.

—It's true: 1918, he left Los Alamos and wanted to go to war, but he was told he was too old to get his wings. So he worked for the Red Cross in France, instead.

—Then he never did become a pilot?

—He was almost sixty, but he finally got his license. You see what I mean about places animating people? —No, said Kip. Wagner said, —That's too bad.

My love of law is almost equal to my aversion to lawyers. Even now, despite what good I have managed to accomplish over the years through my practice, whenever I read the words
Attorney-at-Law
beneath my name, a part of me withdraws—recoils, even. There are lawyers who are proud of their craft, and get defensive at the mere mention of lawyer-bashing. The joke that asks how do you tell the difference between a dead skunk in the road and a dead lawyer (there are skid marks in front of the skunk) will irritate many of them, and though I maintain a distance from most of my colleagues, I can respect their sentiments.

But still.

Benders of the truth, sculptors of sorts, was how I first began to think of attorneys. Cajolers, shaders, subtracters, adders—adders as in those who augment and those that slither and bite. A breed of men to whom truth was open not just to minor revisions and nice distinctions, but to management. Truth management. And though such assessments were not altogether wrong, they were cynical maybe, precocious perhaps too. Children of scientists learn early on just how relative everything in the universe really is.

Yet the law itself, like any law of physics, is as beautiful as the workings of a clock, immutable and always in motion. And practicing law—I like it that one
practices
the law, and thus never fully
masters
it, as such—has given me the chance to witness its balances and intricacies, to come to appreciate it, especially when it functions just as it should. It is flawed, of course, as are most beautiful artifacts, but is often so precious, it seems a crime that law is the province of lawyers.

My practice started small, after I graduated from Columbia Law School, and has remained as small as I could manage to keep it. My success as an attorney I chose early on in my career not to measure in fees. I still care most about getting an acquittal for my client, especially when I'm defending idealists—people who range from saints to the scurrilous (never think that the spirit of an idealist doesn't sometimes live in the body of a scoundrel, it happens all the time).

Flower children and insurrectionists never had money to compensate lawyers, and more often than not, no matter that public opinion about the conflict in Vietnam had swung from pro to contra in the early seventies, conscientious objectors were still being jailed with regularity, and boys were in exile in Canada and Sweden and elsewhere even though the lottery had come into being and the unwinnable war was grinding down. So these were my clients, and because I worked for barter or a pittance or often pro bono, Jessica supported us through those years—a special-education teacher, a halfway-house worker, an English-as-second-language tutor; the jobs were various and many—and only sometimes doubted her sanity. When I stopped to contemplate her sacrifices, her towing Ariel from place to place, I never doubted Jess's sanity—she loved me and believed in what we were doing—but I did doubt, from time to time, whether my activities were entirely responsible. There is nothing worse than a self-doubting ideologue. Guilt and virtue make for uneasy partners—and so for a while it was, with me. The virtuous defender of the rights of all oppressed but myself and my foursquare wife.

More than once, more than a dozen times I have been tempted to try my hand at another profession. As late as age forty I'd toyed with the idea of going back to school, getting a degree in history, becoming a teacher. There was a time when I thought of opening a bookstore. Few city dwellers haven't considered giving it all up and moving away to a farm with a big red barn and a trout pond at the margin of a fresh-mowed field, with an apple orchard, with warblers in the treetops and deer grazing beneath the boughs heavy with tart reddening fruit. There are few who haven't dreamed of a pristine desert island and days of endless repose on white sand beaches against whose edge an indigo sea laps. I dreamed of country or island sometimes, but I stayed with law, stayed with New York. I can remember how revolted Kip was when I told him where I'd decided to go to graduate school, and to what I wanted to devote my career life. —The anarchist turns a legal leaf, he laughed.

I confess that I laughed along with him, from habit as much as anything, before coming to the awareness that his comment wasn't all that witty.

—Anarchy's just another field of law, I said.

It gave him pause, but soon enough he had his own retort.

—Yeah, right. Like the fourth branch of government.

I liked that. I said, —Yes, that's right. Like the fourth branch of government.

—Hey, Calder? said Wagner one evening. Monsoon rains had them pinned down all day and the night darkness was little different from the day darkness except the generator came on and there was electric light in some of the windows, and your watch told you it was nineteen hundred hours instead of seven hundred hours, and people were drinking beer rather than coffee.

—Yeah, said Kip.

Wagner was the only person who ever called Kip by his last name, and once when Kip had asked him why he used Calder instead of Kip, Wagner had a ready answer, —Because here in Laos the money's kip and I have enough respect for you not to refer to you in those terms. Kip had said, —If you say so, Wagner, and Wagner had said, —I say so, Calder.

—Listen, Calder, you remember once when I told you that when I found me a cause that was a good cause I got to work and tried to help that cause?

—Yeah okay, so? he said.

—You don't remember when I said that?

—What do you want, Wagner?

Wagner smiled across at him from where they sat together out of the thick rain on barrels in a sandbag bunker.

—We're kind of friends, aren't we, Calder?

—Sure, isn't everybody?

—Well, you know what I'm doing here. I'm here because I'm against the war, and I don't want these innocent people slaughtered.

Kip had heard him rehearse the grounds of this argument on three or four occasions and still felt that he hadn't understood what Wagner meant. It seemed contradictory to him, and if he didn't in fact like this guy Wagner as much as he did, he'd long since have written Wagner's Paradox off as a bit of absurd denial—denial of a variety he had seen before here in the war, not to mention the other war he knew so well. He let it drift; Wagner accepted into his heart religions whose gospels were all but mutually exclusive. If Wagner could reconcile his fighting in the war with his belief in pacifism, then more power to him, Kip figured.

—What's your cause here, Calder? That's what I want to know.

—I don't have a cause, said Kip.

Wagner demurred. —Oh, but you do. I'm just not sure what it is. And I'd like to know.

—What makes you think I'd tell you even if I did? Which I don't.

—Because we're friends. And you do.

—I'm telling you, I don't.

—Who's Jessica Rankin?

Kip stood up suddenly and took a couple of steps forward and then turned around and gave Wagner a burning look. —What are you talking about?

—Nothing, said Wagner, a light smile playing at his lips in the murky cool.

—You been going through my stuff, Wagner?

—What's your cause?

—Fuck you, Wagner.

Wagner said, —Is it because you're afraid of something that you wind up going to a place like this where the only thing that could possibly count is your courage?

—There you go again, man, with your nonsense. I don't have anything more to say to you, Wagner.

—I didn't go through your stuff, Calder. What d'you think I am, some kind of creepy motherfucker?

—I couldn't have put it better myself.

—Well, you're wrong. And you know it. You know old Wagner wouldn't do that.

The wind changed direction, as it often did up in the mountains, catching Kip at the back, and he stepped into the shelter again. —How do you know about Jessica Rankin?

Wagner reached into his flight jacket and pulled out a letter—
the
letter, in fact—and handed it to Kip.

—Where'd you get this?

The letter was unopened. Kip could see that Jessica had written her name with return address on the back of the envelope.

—Guy gave it to me in Vientiane the other day, knew we was both up here, asked me to pass it along. I guess it's been following you around through three countries.

—How come you didn't give it to me before now?

—What am I, a postman? You've got the letter, don't you? Give me a break, Calder.

Kip tucked the letter inside his shirt. —I got to go. I'm sorry, Wagner. I hate this rain, all right?

—She your lady?

—See you later, Wagner, said Kip, who walked out of the shelter into the hard monsoon downpour.

—I want to know, Wagner shouted after him.

Kip waved his arm down, without looking back.

—I want to know what your cause is, man. What's your cause, Calder?

Givings and misgivings. And then when it happened it was so abrupt, I hadn't enough time to scold myself for having drifted into such profound spiritual slumber. I was so content as to be completely unprepared for the obvious eventuality of his return. Denial is what a psychiatrist would designate my selfish armor. Wishful thinking, purblindness, blissful ignorance, the dumbness of a doorknob. Given just how far from any real center of gravity I had allowed myself to lean, enjoying the foreign perfumes and breezes at my furthest reach, it is a myope's miracle that when the time came I didn't fall even harder than I did.